It happened again. This time, an Ohio man, Hassan-James Abbas, is accused of holding his pregnant girlfriend down in the middle of the night by her neck and forcing crushed abortion pills into her mouth. This is just another case of abortion activists’ illegal provision of abortion pills leading to women being forced to take them against their wills. The woman said that she scratched and shoved her boyfriend until she was able to escape to the kitchen, at which point she called 911. The 911 call recorded at the location hung up immediately; that’s when she says he snatched the phone from her hand and ended the call. The woman went to the hospital quickly thereafter, told the story of the assault, and was diagnosed with vaginal bleeding, but it’s unclear if the baby survived. Abbas, who is himself a doctor (though he has just had his medical license suspended), ordered abortion pills over the internet the day after his girlfriend told him she was pregnant. These abortion pill services, which are run by abortion activists, act with no regard for the law or women’s safety. Anyone — boyfriends intent on killing their unborn children included — need only fill out an online form to receive abortion pills at their doorstep within a matter of days. In Abbas’ case, it took just three days for the deadly drugs to arrive at his address. Abbas admits that he ordered the abortion pills, but he claims that his then-girlfriend agreed to let him administer the crushed-up pills to her. The guardrails on these abortion pill mills are so nonexistent that Abbas simply filled out his ex-wife’s name and his own address on a form, and the people running the pill mill were happy to send the pills along. Evidently, the unfettered access to abortion drugs made Abbas feel entitled to end the life of his unborn child even as his girlfriend repeatedly stated that she wanted to care for and love their baby. (READ MORE: The Unspeakable Evil of Christopher Cooprider) The assault allegedly happened on Dec. 18, 2024, yet Abbas’ workplace, the University of Toledo Medical Center, only placed him on “administrative leave” after the State Medical Board of Ohio suspended his medical license on Nov. 5 of this year. Until this month, Abbas had been employed as a surgical resident at the University of Toledo. That’s a problem, says the victim, because the University of Toledo Medical Center has known about the allegations against Abbas since early this year. “I think it’s important for people to know that [the University of Toledo Medical Center] says they hold their employees to the highest standards; however, they have had this information since the beginning of this year and they chose to still employ him and not place him on leave until now,” she told Toledo news service WOTL 11. In suspending Abbas’ medical license, Ohio’s medical board said there was “clear and convincing evidence” that he poses “a danger of immediate and serious harm to the public.” What’s not clear is why his employer let him treat patients for so long after such serious allegations were made, especially as the evidence that he ordered the abortion pills was so readily apparent. Police investigators acted quickly after the alleged assault. They obtained search warrants soon afterward for Abbas’ parents’ house, explaining that they believed the laptop Abbas used to order the abortion pills was located there. The illegal activities said to be under investigation in a search warrant filed Dec. 30, 2024, were “attempted murder, assault, and disruption of public services.” No criminal charges have been filed yet against Abbas. This is just another case of abortion activists’ illegal provision of abortion pills leading to women being forced to take them against their wills. Earlier this year, a woman was charged with using “coercion” to make her daughter take abortion pills to kill her unborn baby. The daughter had been planning a gender reveal party for the baby, but the grandmother evidently did not want to celebrate. New York Gov. Cathy Hochul has refused to extradite the woman charged with providing the abortion pills, Maggie Carpenter. Carpenter allegedly worked through Aid Access, one of the largest abortion-dispensing mills run by activists, to dispense the drugs. Also this year, a Texas man was charged with murder after he allegedly killed his unborn baby by lacing his pregnant girlfriend’s cookies and drink with abortion pills. As long as people can order abortion pills easily online, they’ll keep slipping abortion drugs to pregnant women to kill any babies they don’t want alive. Since a killing can easily look like a miscarriage, we can’t know the extent of this crisis. READ MORE from Ellie Gardey Holmes: ‘Dr. Maggie,’ Notorious Abortionist Gavin Newsom’s New Low WATCH Ellie Gardey Holmes: The Spectator P.M. Ep. 169: Tech Bros Aim to Genetically Modify the ‘Perfect’ Baby

The Marshall Plan to rebuild post-World War II Europe has been acclaimed as the most successful foreign assistance program in U.S. history.  The plan, officially known as the European Recovery Program (ERP), was created under the Economic Cooperation Act of 1948 (also known at the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948) signed into law by President Harry Truman on April 3, 1948. The plan was named after George Marshall, its leading advocate and Truman’s Secretary of State at the time. It provided an aggregate total of $13.3 billion (equivalent to about $200 billion in 2025) in financial assistance to 16 European countries over a period of approximately four years from April 1948 to June 1952.  Both the Truman administration and large majorities in Congress viewed the Marshall Plan as essential in not only helping reconstruct a war-torn Europe and regenerate its economies, but also to prevent the westward expansion of communism across the European continent by the Soviet Union. The Trump administration’s clean-up of the waste, fraud, and abuse in U.S. foreign assistance … should lead to a far more efficient and effective U.S. foreign policy. The impact of the plan on recipient countries show that it achieved its primary objectives.  From 1947 to the end of 1951, trade volume within Europe almost doubled, industrial production increased 55 percent, and average GNP rose by roughly 33 percent.  In addition, the Marshall Plan had geopolitical value for the United States that is not easily quantifiable beyond the economic benefits.  Many observers believe that the plan was critical in preventing the spread of communism in the assisted countries. The Marshall Plan was considered so successful that some members of Congress called for similar financial assistance plans for other regions of the world in subsequent years.  This eventually led to enactment of a comprehensive foreign assistance bill under the urging of President John F. Kennedy on September 4, 1961, the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.  The purpose of the Act was aspirational.  It stated: [A] principal objective of the foreign policy of the United States is the encouragement and sustained support of the people of developing countries in their efforts to acquire the knowledge and resources essential to development and to build the economic, political, and social institutions which will improve the quality of their lives” [and] that development concerns be fully reflected in United States foreign policy and that United States development resources be effectively and efficiently utilized. In order to effectively execute the objectives of the Foreign Assistance Act, President Kennedy created the United States Agency for International Development with Executive Order 10973 on November 3, 1961.  USAID was set up as a single foreign assistance agency within the U.S. State Department to consolidate several existing foreign assistance organizations and programs. Foreign assistance has continued to play a significant role in America’s foreign policy since then. According to the U.S. State Department’s foreign assistance data site, ForeignAssistance.gov, the U.S. Government’s committed payments on non-military foreign assistance since World War II, from 1946 through 2024, amounted to about $2.6 trillion (in equivalent 2025 U.S. Dollars).  This amount averages to about $33 billion per year over that 79-year period.  However, the annual average has increased dramatically over the past 22 years, from 2003 through 2024, to about $46 billion (all dollar amounts referenced are inflation-adjusted to 2025 U.S. Dollars.) This reveals that the U.S. Government spent almost as much on an annual basis over the previous 22 years (2003-2024) on non-military foreign assistance as it did during the approximate four years of the Marshall Plan (1948-1952).  Simply in terms of dollar amounts, the U.S. Government committed to funding the equivalent of five Marshall Plans (about $1.02 trillion) in non-military foreign assistance around the world from 2003 to 2024. During the four years of the Biden administration, non-military foreign assistance spiked even higher. From 2021 to 2024, committed payments amounted to a whopping $242 billion for an annual average of about $61 billion — about 20 percent higher than the four years of the Marshall Plan. U.S. Non-Military Foreign Assistance 1946-2024 (2025 US Dollars)   Time Period Amount (billions $) Annual Average (billions $) 1946-2024 $2,608 $33 1948-1951 (Marshall Plan years) $203 $51 2003-2024 (post 9/11 years) $1,020 $46 2021-2024 (Biden admin years) $242 $61 The above dollar amounts do not include any kind of military assistance, whether it be combat or non-combat related, or the cost of operating military bases in foreign countries. Taking non-combat military foreign assistance alone, the U.S. Government has provided a total of about $1.3 trillion since World War II (1946-2024), or about $16 billion per year.  These amounts include items such as military education and training, peace and stability programs, and various technical assistance programs.  In 2024, non-combat military foreign assistance amounted to about $26 billion and non-military foreign assistance about $54 billion for total foreign assistance of about $80 billion, which was provided to about 175 foreign countries. Regarding foreign U.S. military bases, the Overseas Base Realignment and Closure Coalition estimated in August 2025 that the U.S. military operates 750 to 800 bases in 80 foreign countries at an annual cost of about $65 billion. U.S. Foreign Assistance Turns Wasteful and Unaccountable The Marshall Plan and U.S. foreign assistance in the decades following World War II generally had a positive effect on America’s national interest around the world, particularly during the Cold War years.  It was an effective use of soft power, i.e. American influence through economic, humanitarian, and other non-military assistance.  Every presidential administration since President Kennedy’s have valued and utilized foreign assistance as a means of soft power in the conduct of foreign policy. Dean Rusk, Secretary of State under presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson (1961-1969), wrote the following in a memo to President Johnson on January 31, 1966: [A] properly directed foreign assistance program is a vital instrument of United States foreign policy. Economic and military aid remain far and away the most powerful means at our command to influence the massive forces at work in the less developed nations. They are our primary source of influence on the economic and military evolution of most of the countries of the non-Communist world. George Shultz, President Reagan’s Secretary of State (1982-1989), was a strong proponent of foreign assistance as part of a broader soft power that complemented Reagan’s emphasis on hard power, such as military buildups, in advancing American interests globally. Shultz believed foreign assistance should be strategic and integrated with diplomacy and military strength.  He consistently advocated for increased budget appropriations for foreign assistance programs.  In his testimony before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations on March 10, 1988, Shultz stated, “Foreign assistance is an essential tool of American foreign policy … It helps build a world safer for democracy and more open to American trade.” Despite the achievements of U.S. foreign assistance since the Marshall Plan, however, the integrity and the mission of U.S. foreign assistance gradually deteriorated over time as it grew into another lucrative government contracting gravy train with diminishing transparency and accountability. President Dwight Eisenhower warned of a military-industrial complex in his farewell address to the nation on January 17, 1961.  A similar warning could have been issued about a growing foreign assistance-industrial complex after the collapse of the Soviet eastern-bloc empire in 1991, especially in the two decades after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, when American foreign assistance expenditures rose sharply. Just as the American military-industrial complex has its dedicated “go-to” contractors (Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics, Raytheon, etc.), so does the foreign assistance sector (albeit on a much smaller financial scale).  Private firms such as Chemonics, DAI, and Abt Global — practically unknown outside of the foreign assistance world — have been dedicated U.S. Government foreign assistance contractors for decades and have prospered along with the growth in U.S. foreign assistance activities. There are dozens of small private firms that make their living exclusively from U.S. foreign assistance contracts and sub-contracts. In the 1990s, a growing movement in Congress sought to scale back foreign assistance spending and even abolish USAID due to concerns over wasteful spending, mismanagement, and the questionable effectiveness of foreign assistance programs. Moreover, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, some members of Congress argued that a focus on foreign assistance was outdated and that resources should be redirected to domestic issues.  This movement led to Congress passing the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998 that provided for the reorganization of all U.S. foreign policy agencies and the consolidation of their functions within the U.S. State Department. President Bill Clinton vetoed the bill on October 21, 1998, but agreed to some of its reforms by issuing Executive Order 13118 on March 31, 1999 as a response. The executive order basically made amendments to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to implement some of the reforms in the 1998 bill passed by Congress. One of the provisions in Clinton’s executive order was to establish USAID as an independent agency separate from the U.S. State Department.  This proved to be contrary to Congress’s intent for implementing reforms in U.S. foreign assistance. After USAID became its own stand-alone agency with reduced oversight, it led to a lack of coordination with the U.S. State Department and conflicting foreign policy views. It also created opportunities for waste, fraud, and abuse. When President Donald Trump began his second term on January 20, 2025, his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Elon Musk immediately took aim at USAID.  Musk and his DOGE team quickly found a shocking level of waste, fraud, and abuse at the agency. During a live X Spaces discussion on February 3, 2025, Musk made the following comments about the DOGE team’s review of USAID: As we dug into USAID, it became apparent that what we have here is not an apple with a worm in it, but we have actually just a ball of worms. If you have an apple with a worm in it, you can take the worm out. If you have a whole ball of worms, it’s hopeless. USAID is a ball of worms. There is no apple. And when there is no apple, you just need to get rid of the whole thing. Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) authored a scathing opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal on February 9, 2025, describing USAID as a “rogue agency” that has a history of stonewalling congressional requests for information about its activities. Excerpts from Senator Ernst’s piece: After keeping its spending records hidden from Congress and taxpayers, USAID employees are now protesting the review of the agency’s records by President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. It’s no surprise that Washington insiders are more upset at DOGE for trying to stop wasteful spending than at USAID for misusing tax dollars. The question we should be asking isn’t why USAID’s grants are being scrutinized, but why it took so long. Criticisms of USAID by Musk and Senator Ernst are backed up with detailed lists of waste, fraud, and abuse uncovered by the DOGE team and congressional committees. On February 4, 2025, the House Foreign Affairs Committee issued a press release listing numerous egregious examples of wasteful USAID spending, such as millions of dollars spent promoting DEI and LGBT activism in multiple countries around the world. But revelations about USAID’s wasteful and fraudulent spending on foreign aid activities is only part of the story.  Even more disturbing are its activities beyond foreign aid into radical leftwing cultural and political activism.  According to Mike Benz, a former U.S. State Department official and the founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, this has been exacerbated in recent years with USAID’s embrace of disinformation campaigns and censorship efforts in collaboration with the State Department and the CIA. Benz provided a shocking report from USAID’s own internal documents on March 14, 2024 of a USAID censorship operation used domestically against Americans. Excerpts from the report: USAID’s “Disinformation Primer” outlining its censorship promotion strategies is dated February 2021, the first month after the Biden administration took office after the 2020 election. It proposes censorship action items for virtually every governmental, non-governmental and private sector commercial actor across society.  Reforming US Foreign Assistance After DOGE exposed USAID’s extensive waste, fraud, and abuse over many years, the Trump administration closed USAID’s head office in Washington, DC on February 7, 2025 and subsequently terminated most of its approximate 10,000 employees.  Since then, the entire agency has been effectively shut down. Any USAID functions considered to be worth retaining by the Trump administration have been absorbed by the U.S. State Department. Marco Rubio, confirmed as Secretary of State by the U.S. Senate with a 99-0 vote on January 20, 2025, has articulated his vision for an “America First” U.S. foreign assistance agenda on multiple occasions. On May 20, 2025, Secretary Rubio testified before both the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Appropriations Committee. During these hearings, Secretary Rubio made the following points: The mission of U.S. foreign assistance should be based upon making the United States stronger, safer, and more prosperous. The U.S. foreign assistance function at the State Department should be rebuilt and should serve as an integral part of U.S. foreign policy. The best foreign assistance program is one that ultimately comes to an end, because it will mean that it has achieved its purpose. Robert Gates, who served in senior national security positions under four presidents (Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama), including as Secretary of Defense (2006-2011) and CIA Director (2002-2006), authored an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal on June 13, 2025, ”The U.S. Can Rise to the Chinese Challenge,” calling for a revival of U.S. non-military soft power. In his article, Gates writes: We usually fail when we publicly nag other governments about their internal policies. Yet for most of our history, and especially during the Cold War, America’s national interest and reputation have been enhanced by consistent advocacy for liberty, human rights, and individual dignity. America’s ideology matters in the contest with China. America First must not mean abandoning American values … To neglect our values as part of our foreign policy would make us just another transactional great power without the unique appeal we have enjoyed for nearly 250 years. The Trump administration’s disruption of outdated institutions provides a great opportunity to strengthen America’s nonmilitary arsenal. Failing to do so would mean abandoning the field to the Chinese, who already are running rings around us. Above all, there must be an overarching national strategy developed by the president and secretary of state — in collaboration with Congress — for applying nonmilitary instruments of power to the contest with China. Gates’ call for a restructured and refocused U.S. foreign assistance program is fundamentally in line with Secretary of State Rubio’s views.  The Trump administration’s clean-up of the waste, fraud, and abuse in U.S. foreign assistance — along with a fresh focus on foreign assistance as a means of soft power and less reliance on military hard power — should lead to a far more efficient and effective U.S. foreign policy. READ MORE from Steve Dewey: A Flat Income Tax Removes the Need for the IRS Overhaul the Financial Regulatory System Mail-in Ballots Wreak Havoc in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania Senate Races Steve Dewey is a fellow at the Ben Franklin Fellowship, founder of GeoFinancial Trends, LLC (www.geofinancialtrends.org) and writes on Substack (stevedewey.substack.com).  He can be reached at steve@geofinancialtrends.org       

Last Tuesday’s elections were a wake-up call for the Republican Party that conservative leaders need to be doing more to address the affordability crisis decimating the American Dream — or else we risk falling victim to the seductive lies of Marxism and socialism. The scale of the problem is enormous, and our country needs an equally bold and transformative solution. The benefits would be tangible: new small businesses, revitalized downtown storefronts, higher employment, and fewer young people forced to leave home. What America faces today is not merely an economic crisis. It is a crisis of opportunity. When people believe that the deck is stacked against them, society begins to fray at the seams — which is precisely why we are seeing near record low business optimism, deepening political polarization, and collapsing birth rates. But there is a flip side to this coin. When Americans believe that hard work will be rewarded, they can and will do anything. They are the most hard-working nation of people anywhere. This has always been the root of the American Dream. The Homestead Act of 1862 embodied that spirit. For a small filing fee, settlers received 160 acres if they promised to live on the land, build a home, and farm it for five years. Every U.S. citizen — including women, freed slaves, and naturalized immigrants — was eligible. Carving a home on the frontier was backbreaking labor through blizzards, droughts, floods, and the constant threat of Indian attack. Many settlers returned back East. Many others perished in the brutal conditions. Despite these hardships, more than 250 million acres of land were parceled out through the Homestead Act. That simple promise — the promise of ownership — forged the greatest nation in history from a vast wilderness. It gave ordinary people a stake in their own future. The same dynamic revived the country during the Reagan Revolution. The 1980s are remembered as a time of restored national pride after the anger and chaos of the prior two decades. But the real engine of that recovery was economic opportunity. Reagan understood that growth, freedom, and optimism are inseparable. His policies unleashed a new wave of entrepreneurship, innovation, and investment that not only won the Cold War but paved the way for American dominance in the 1990s. That spirit has faded. Across Appalachia and small-town America, you don’t need a pollster to explain what’s wrong. People are working harder and falling further behind. Groceries, gas, housing, and healthcare cost more every month. Young families can’t afford to buy the homes their parents built a generation ago. Jobs that once anchored Main Street are gone, and the only thing moving fast in too many towns are the fentanyl dealers. I see this every day as a District Attorney in rural Georgia. When parents are juggling multiple jobs and still can’t pay for childcare or insulin, that strain shows up in my courtroom. Economic despair is the petri dish of crime. It tears families apart, fuels addiction, and breeds violence. To reverse this decline, we must rebuild Main Street America. That starts with leadership willing to think big. What we need is a “Manhattan Project for Main Street” — a free-market, pro-growth initiative to inject entrepreneurial energy and capital directly into the places political and societal elites have left behind. President Trump and Congressional Republicans should work together to create a Main Street Project Fund that would accomplish this goal. Here’s how it could work: Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who invest in certified Main Street projects would receive a capital gains exclusion, full loss deductibility, and streamlined regulatory treatment in exchange for transparency and reporting. Local business owners in qualifying areas would gain expedited access to capital and a 10 percent corporate tax rate for five years following certification. The approval process would move faster than an SBA loan, ensuring Main Street isn’t buried under Wall Street’s paperwork. This is not a new bureaucracy. It is a reform rooted in tax incentives and deregulation, not subsidies or entitlements. It empowers builders, innovators, and risk-takers to do what government cannot — revive America’s small towns from the bottom up. The benefits would be tangible: new small businesses, revitalized downtown storefronts, higher employment, and fewer young people forced to leave home in search of opportunity. For communities battling the twin crises of addiction and generational poverty, that kind of investment can save lives and restore dignity. Healthcare reform must also be part of the conversation. For families and small businesses alike, medical costs are crushing budgets and choking off growth. Expanding access to affordable plans, telemedicine, and competition across state lines would amplify the effects of Main Street investment and make it possible for more Americans to work, build, and stay healthy. Conservatives cannot surrender this ground to the Marxist left. Figures like Zohran Mamdani peddle the fantasy that government spending is the only cure for inequality. They are wrong. Freedom, entrepreneurship, and disciplined policy can do more to fight poverty than any socialist program ever devised. The Main Street Project Fund is not charity — it’s strategy. It rebuilds faith in capitalism where it’s most doubted. It takes a pro-growth message and directs it to the communities that need it most. America was never meant to be a nation ruled by coastal elites or a technocratic class that turns working men and women into serfs with smart phones. Our founders envisioned a republic of small farmers, business owners, and craftsmen — a country where independence and ownership were within reach for anyone willing to work. That vision built the most prosperous society in human history. We can do it again. Appalachia, rural Georgia, and thousands of towns like them don’t need pity. They need partners. With the right policies, private investment, and leadership that understands the link between economics and public safety, we can write a new chapter in America’s story — one where Main Street thrives, families can stay, and opportunity comes home once more. The future of Main Street America — and of our country itself — depends on it. READ MORE: The Answer to Republicans’ ‘Affordability Problem’? Unleash Supply. When Government Competes, America Loses The Forces Fueling America’s 45-Year Debt Addiction Clayton Fuller currently serves as the District Attorney for the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit in Northwest Georgia. Follow him on Twitter @Clay4MainStreet and on Facebook at Clay Fuller: Main Street Patriot.

David Brooks has always fancied himself a kind of moral chiropractor for middle-class souls: Half preacher, half therapist, all smug.. His latest column, “How to Replace Christian Nationalism,” is another exercise in half-hidden disdain — a sermon for readers who think the average American is a barbarian with a Bible. The only people terrified of faith in public life are the atheists who’d rather live in a nation where everything is tolerated and nothing is sacred. Brooks begins with a borrowed profundity: “a person’s way of being human reveals their belief.” The quote, from Czech priest Tomas Halík, sounds like revelation until you realize it’s relativism in robes. It shifts faith from what is true to how one feels — perfect for those who prefer their Christianity soft, shapeless, and devoid of substance. The Christianity Brooks praises is so sanitized that even the Devil could subscribe to it without breaking a sweat. He paints “Christian nationalists” as feral fanatics praying for Armageddon, then bows before a globalist gospel so thin it couldn’t save a soul from sunburn. Defending your country and your culture is obedience in action, not idolatry. The same Bible Brooks claims to revere commands nations to uphold order, protect the innocent, and honor their inheritance. When Christ said, “Render unto Caesar,” He didn’t say, “Render Caesar meaningless.” Yet Brooks’s Christianity knows no borders — geographical, ethical, or doctrinal. He derides “Christian nationalism” as “particular rather than universal,” as though affection for one’s homeland were the mark of the unwashed. But Christ Himself wept for Jerusalem, not for some abstract human family. Brooks confuses universal love with global indifference. His “pilgrim” metaphor — everyone stumbling together toward some vague horizon — is poetic nonsense. Without truth, pilgrimage is just wandering. The columnist claims that MAGA Christians have made the nation “stagnant, callous, and backward.” They are, he suggests, a people trapped in “trenches.” Yet it was these same Americans — plumbers, truckers, mothers of five — who filled churches during COVID while coastal elites locked theirs. It is these “deplorables” who still say grace before dinner, still fly the flag, still believe humans are born male or female. Of course, Brooks doesn’t care. Why would he? These are the very people he and his cocktail-circuit friends ridicule between brunch and dinner parties, where “understanding America” is a parlor game. He writes as if Christianity must choose between mercy and might, as though a believer cannot both love his neighbor and defend his nation. That is a false dichotomy — a spiritual safe space for those who can’t face reality. The early church was both humble and defiant; the apostles prayed, but they also preached in public squares knowing it could cost them their lives. Brooks’s Christianity would have told them to sit down and “dialogue.” What he calls a “culture war,” others call resistance. For decades, the Left has worked to remove faith from every corner of public life — rebranding prayer as propaganda and conviction as hate. It captured the schools, rewrote the movies, politicized medicine, and called the result “progress.” And now Brooks, ever the apologist for not-so-polite society, blames those who refuse to bow. His solution? Less Scripture, more sentiment. In short, a Christianity that offends no one and saves no one. There’s a dark humor in Brooks quoting St. Augustine to defend pluralism. The City of God wasn’t a love letter to diversity, but a warning that when faith loses its backbone, civilization follows. Augustine wrote in an age when Rome, drowning in vice, mistook decay for enlightenment. The “delight of pluralism,” as Brooks calls it, is the same indulgence that consumed empires before ours. A nation cannot be both everything and something. When a country tries to please all gods, it forgets the one that really matters. His parting jab — that MAGA has made America “frightened” — is pure projection. The only people terrified of faith in public life are the atheists who’d rather live in a nation where everything is tolerated and nothing is sacred. Christian conservatives are awake. They’ve seen what happens when both faith and nation forget who they are. Chaos follows, confusion reigns, and churches become “cozy” cafes. Brooks’s “better Christianity” asks believers to trade their armor for a yoga mat and a few scented candles. He preaches humility as passivity, and self-forgetting as civic amnesia. But this is nonsense dressed as nuance. The prophets Brooks name-drops — Halík, Williams, Havel — spoke truth to tyrants, not in the safety of faculty lounges but under regimes that jailed and silenced dissenters. They embodied defiance. The courage that once carried them through communism wouldn’t last a week in the coliseum of modern progressivism. Today, they’d be canceled before finishing their first sentence — accused of intolerance, privilege, or worse. The saints Brooks invokes would have been silenced by the very society he flatters. Real Christianity doesn’t need to be “replaced.” It needs to be revived. Not by chasing pluralistic delight but by returning to biblical discipline. Not by melting into moral relativism but by standing firm, unashamed and unapologetic. The problem isn’t too much faith in politics, but too little faith in public. So let Brooks have his spineless syncretism, his pilgrim’s path paved with platitudes. The rest of us will keep our armor on. While he’s busy redefining belief, real Christians are still feeding the poor, raising families, and fighting for a country built on Christian values. America doesn’t need a new Christianity; it needs to rekindle the one that made it the greatest nation ever built. Brooks calls that “nationalism.” But most Americans call it belief in something greater than themselves. And they don’t mind being unfashionable for it. READ MORE from John Mac Ghlionn: Church Attendance Is No Longer Optional How Scott Galloway Dumbed Down Jordan Peterson — and Cashed In How the BBC Tried to Burn Trump — and Barbecued Itself Instead

As the Trump administration contemplates high risk land operations against Latin America’s drug cartels , it’s calling on Bolivia’s newly elected government to reveal its “secrets” of Iran’s “penetration of the Western Hemisphere” through military agreements forged with Bolivia and Venezuela that made them hubs of Iranian influence. Hundreds or possibly thousands of Hezbollah fighters directed and supported by a robust Iranian regional network could pose a significant threat to U.S. forces in Venezuela. In pointed remarks to the media while attending the swearing in of Bolivia’s new president Rodrigo Paz last week, U.S. deputy secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere Cristopher Landau spoke of the “grave threat” presented by the “alarming” alignment between Bolivia and Iran over the past twenty years, in a marked departure from previous U.S. administrations, which tended to ignore the threats.  I don’t yet know if the new government of Bolivia understands exactly the situation its inherited concerning relations between the past governments with Iran. But I suppose that this will be a matter of great mutual interest not only for the U.S. and Bolivia but for Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and other neighboring countries concerned about, let’s say, military equipment that may be getting made or distributed in Bolivia. In the course of covering Latin America for various news organizations during the past twenty years, I’ve closely followed Iran’s growing encroachments in the region and can provide some previews as to what Bolivia’s secret Iranian files may contain. Leftist narco president Evo Morales followed Venezuela’s lead in opening relations with Iran soon after taking office in 2005. There were a series of coordinated high level visits and official exchanges between the three governments in subsequent years, when agreements involving defense and security cooperation were negotiated through secret talks at the highest levels. According to Venezuelan ex spy chief, General Cristopher Figueres, who accompanied Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez on a trip to Teheran, discussions with the ayatollahs were so sensitive that they were held in the most insulated lower floors of underground command bunkers. The former head of Venezuela’s intelligence service SEBIN says that they discussed the appointment of Tarek El Aissami, a Venezuelan far left militant designated by the U.S. Treasury Dept as an operative for Hezbollah to the top post of security minister as well as the deployment of IRGC Qods officers to advise Venezuela’s armed forces. Joint military industrial projects between the IRGC and Venezuela’s defense contractor CAVIM include production of a version of Iran’s Mohajer-6 strike drone; the Mariscal Don Jose De Sucre-100 armed with missiles and operating ranges extending well into the Caribbean. Venezuelan air force chief, general Pedro Juliac, became de facto “head of Iranian operations” in Venezuela and ambassador to Teheran, acquiring more advanced Shahed kamikaze drones which concern U.S. war officials drawing up plans for land operations in Venezuela. U.S. and Argentinian intelligence agencies believe that Iran is also building drones in Bolivia, as part of secret military agreements negotiated under former presidents Evo Morales and Luis Arce. A “cell” of senior Bolivian generals and IRGC officers manage projects supervised from Iran’s embassy which has become the largest diplomatic mission in Bolivia, occupying a six floor building in a walled in compound that takes up an entire city block of the capital, La Paz. Argentine intelligence officials have told The American Spectator that Qods also operates a clandestine base at an Iranian built hospital in the city of El Alto close to Bolivia’s main airport. Hundreds of Bolivian identity documents have been distributed to Iranian agents to facilitate their movement throughout the hemisphere, according to these sources. Senior U.S. intelligence officials testifying at a Senate hearing last month estimate that Venezuelan passports handed out to arrivals from the Middle East, many of them Lebanese, could number 10,000. I reported on Iran’s growing South American presence back in 2011, in a full page article for The Wall Street Journal, leading off on a visit to Bolivia by Iranian Defense minister Ahmad Vahidi, accused of masterminding the 1992 Hezbollah truck bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires which killed 85 people. Vahidi presided together with Morales over the inauguration of a special military staff college for officers from leftist aligned Latin American countries financed by the IRGC. According to U.S. diplomatic officials, a group of Iranians ran electronic surveillance and eavesdropping operations for Morales from his presidential offices, alternating with a Cuban intelligence team. At a time when little official attention was paid to Iran’s growing intimacy with Latin American regimes which even then Senator Marco Rubio dismissed as “PR,” I reported that Iran was recruiting local engineers to work computer security for its nuclear program while trying to acquire high grade uranium from Venezuela and Bolivia. The CIA was keenly aware of Iran’s activities but the Bush administration wanted countermeasures to remain low key. The State Department created a special unit to monitor Iran’s moves in the hemisphere but Obama shut it down when it got in the way of his appeasement policies towards Teheran and Havana. Iranian encroachments have grown virtually unchecked due as much to willing collaboration from leftist Latin governments as the neglect of successive U.S. administrations. Venezuelan national guard general Marco Ferreira who tried warning the Pentagon about Iran’s growing influence during the early 2000s, tells The American Spectator that he got a cold reception from the Defense Intelligence Agency, whose officers expressed little interest in the matter and questioned his credibility. An Iranian Boeing 707 cargo jet chartered under a Venezuelan airline company crisscrossed Latin America for years, until its gun running antecedents in the Middle East were reported and it was grounded in Argentina under a U.S. court order in 2022. The pilot and other personnel on board were identified as Qods officers but Argentina’s leftist president Fernandez at the time released them back to Venezuela before they could be questioned by the FBI which was blocked from inspecting the aircraft until conservative president Javier Milei took office a year later. Opening Bolivia’s top secret files on Iran, as proposed by Mr Landau, could seriously expose Iran’s network in Latin America, revealing its corrupt inner workings that may allow the U.S. and its allies to catch undercover Qods officers , Hezbollah operatives and their local agents red handed. Counter-terrorism experts from several U.S. security agencies recently told the U.S. Senate that Hezbollah increasingly relies on revenues from its Latin American drug operations integrated with Venezuela’s Cartel de Soles for “badly needed cash infusions” following recent setbacks in Lebanon and Syria. “Hezbollah’s presence in Venezuela has expanded dramatically,” according to former Pentagon official Marshall Billingslea. Gen. Figueres told the British newspaper The Sun that there are about 1000 members of Hezbollah on Margarita island, which has become a center of Islamic activism, about 400 around the Venezuelan army base in Maracay outside Caracas and some 200 at the port of Valencia, a harbor for drug boats. Hundreds or possibly thousands of Hezbollah fighters directed and supported by a robust Iranian regional network could pose a significant threat to U.S. forces in Venezuela, destabilize a democratic government replacing Maduro, and possibly conduct terrorist attacks in third countries including the U.S. Bolivia may be the first domino to fall in Latin America’s Iranian aligned block of narco states and the U.S. will be “in very close touch with the country’s new authorities,” according to Mr Landau. “I think that we are going to see some very surprising things regarding Iranian penetration in the region,” he said. READ MORE from Martin Arostegui: The Soros Footprint in Latin America Election in Bolivia Might Give US an Important Ally On the Frontlines of the War That Will Change Europe

It’s another milestone in the onward march of the bots — country music’s top song in the U.S. last week was Walk My Walk. Billboard’s number one song on its “Country Digital Song Sales” chart is by a band called Breaking Rust, and, according to Billboard, Breaking Rust, itself, was created by artificial intelligence (AI). [R]ecent technological advances in music … have gotten us ready for that moment when you genuinely can’t discern whether a piece has been generated by a human or a machine. The future has arrived — and this is only the beginning. “In just the past few months, at least six AI or AI-assisted artists have debuted on various Billboard rankings,” wrote Billboard just last week. “That figure could be higher, as it’s become increasingly difficult to tell who or what is powered by AI — and to what extent.” Many of these charting projects, whose music spans every genre from gospel to rock to country, also arrive with anonymous or mysterious origins. Look at Breaking Rust’s social media pages and you’ll find nothing to indicate there’s a human being even involved in the music-making portion of the band’s songs. What is present though is an AI-generated chisel-jawed cowboy and video clips featuring “plain folk” moseying away from the camera. To say the various songs are similar would deny reality. They are essentially the same — right down to the bland, rather vacuous lyrics. “Breaking Rust, an AI-powered country act, debuted at No. 9 on the Emerging Artists chart (dated Nov. 1),” the music publication said. “The project, credited to songwriter Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, has generated 1.6 million official U.S. streams.” Being a country music fan (and from Texas), the song sounds like a lot of country songs. It’s certainly catchy and one can “visualize” people singing along while line-dancing to its rhythm. But that’s not really the point, is it? The significance is that there are thousands of country-western performers and composers out there, some famous, many obscure, that are losing to AI in the free market, which is causing some pain. The Moment Matters for Music This is the first time an AI-created country track has topped a Billboard country sales chart, a symbolic turning point for genre purists and AI policy watchers alike. Critics argue the songs feel formulaic and create blurred authorship, while others see lower barriers for new creators using Agentic-AI tools. Both views now collide in the charts. Streaming services are still crafting AI policies to prevent feeds from being overwhelmed and to manage disclosure. Industry groups are pushing for “guardrails” around “training data” and likeness. Country outlets note that the Country Digital Song Sales crown can be reached with a few thousand purchases in a given week, but the symbolic impact of a No. 1 still matters. The story here is what the story has been since AI first peeked over the horizon to announce its intent to storm popular culture, and that’s this: There’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. Nothing. AI is coming, and it’s coming for all of us. But I also believe it is neither as serious a threat as James Cameron made it out to be in Terminator, nor do I think it can replace the soul (or whatever that indefinable spark is) that makes us quintessentially human. Computers do nothing but reproduce in varying arrangements the data that has been uploaded into its memory, and there is something about the human spirit that can never be taught — inspiration, the muse, the heart — that comes from within. Much of our popular culture today is soulless, generic, corporatized, and lacking in inspiration — perhaps that is why AI is such a real threat – it perpetuates these qualities. Several country-western stars and corporate executives within the music industry have spoken out against AI, fearing the tech could replace songwriters and wreck the middle-class of the music industry. “I would struggle to think something that couldn’t feel could really write a song, to make somebody else feel,” musician Riley Green told Fox News Digital of the threat of AI in music at the ACM Awards. Mitch Glazier, chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), said they are prioritizing removing artificially created music that infringes on an artist’s name or likeness. “When you’re an artist, you spend your whole life grappling with what you want to put out to the world, how you want to express your ideas, what is your art,” he said of artists’ fears. “And a lot of times it’s very personal, and it reflects your lived experience. He continued, “It’s your genius.… It’s the essence of who you are. So, to have that taken from you is a very personal and objectionable act … that is not the art that the artist is … agreeing to make and that reflects who they are.” As Congress debates legislation aimed at protecting creators’ image and visual likeness, last year hundreds of the world’s biggest musicians signed a letter asking tech firms to not develop AI tools to replace human creators. Obviously, a product like “Walk My Walk” is clearly attainable. Still, could AI ever come up with “Stand by Your Man” by Tammy Wynette or “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash? These melodies are celebrated for their storytelling and emotional depth, interpreted and delivered in the way only these artists could — so as to capture the ethos of the American psyche. In a Newsweek article about Breaking Rust, Jason Palamara, an assistant professor of Music Technology at Indiana University seems distinctly unimpressed. “Despite the ‘stomp, clap, hey’ rhythms and acoustic-y sound, this song is heavily laden with some very techy production techniques. It was pretty obviously the product of AI.” Still, significant proportions of U.S. music consumers don’t seem to mind. Breaking Rust already has 2 million monthly Spotify listeners. Arguably, one could say that recent technological advances in music — the widespread use of AutoTune on vocals, the domination of the algorithm in deciding what music we even get to listen to — have gotten us ready for that moment when you genuinely can’t discern whether a piece has been generated by a human or a machine, a point which, I suspect, we are not far from now, if it isn’t upon us already. It seems that the time has come for artists to lean into the things that genuinely make them human: original voices, unexpected chord variations, unusual rhythm structures — in other words — the things which caused us to fall in love with music to begin with. READ MORE from F. Andrew Wolf Jr.: From Orwell to Brussels: The EU’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ Arrives America’s Trade Deficits Are Not Innocuous The Fabric of America… ‘Liberty and Justice for All’  

from ZeeeMedia: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by Nick Gilbertson, Breitbart: President Donald Trump said Friday he will ask Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate ties between disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and former President Bill Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, Democrat megadonor Reid Hoffman, and major financial institutions. Trump announced his forthcoming action in a Truth Social post on Friday morning, […]

A 5-year-old girl's father tragically drowned Friday