September 1991, a large private yacht cruised towards the Statue of Liberty. It was a clear, breezy evening, and from the upper deck of the Spirit of New York, a golden sunset could be seen glinting off the Manhattan skyline. Downstairs, a party was in flow. Scores of teenage girls in evening dresses and miniskirts, some as young as 14, danced under disco lights. It could have been a high school prom, were it not for the crowd of older men surrounding them. As the evening wore on, some of the men – many old enough to be the girls’ fathers, or even grandfathers – joined them on the dancefloor, pressing themselves against the girls. One balding man in a suit wrapped his arms around two young models, leering into a film camera that was documenting the evening: “Can you get some beautiful women around me, please?” the party aboard the Spirit of New York was one of several events that Donald Trump, then 45, attended with a group of 58 aspiring young models that September. They had travelled from around the world to compete in Elite’s Look of the Year competition, an annual event that had been running since 1983 and was already credited with launching the careers of Cindy Crawford, Helena Christensen and Stephanie Seymour. At stake was a life-changing prize: a $150,000 contract with the world’s then leading modelling agency, Elite Model Management, run by John Casablancas. Trump was closely involved in Casablancas’s competition. In 1991, he was a headline sponsor, throwing open the Plaza, his lavish, chateau-style hotel overlooking Central Park, transforming it into the main venue and accommodating the young models. He was also one of its 10 judges. In 1992, Trump hosted the competition again. On a similarly golden evening in early September that year, another group of contestants boarded the Spirit of New York, chartered for another Elite cruise. One of the girls on the boat was Shawna Lee, then a 14-year-old from a small town outside Toronto. She recalls how the contestants were encouraged to parade downstairs, one by one, and dance for Trump, Casablancas and others. Lee, an introverted teenager who loved to draw but hated school, was in New York for the first time. “A woman at the agency was pushing me,” she recalls. “I said to her, ‘I don’t see why me going down the stairs and dancing in front of those two has anything to do with me becoming a model. And she said, ‘No, you look great, take off your blazer and go and do it.’ So I walked down the stairs. I didn’t dance – I blew a kiss at them, spun around and walked away.” unearthed Video of Donald Trump at Look of the Year Competition - 14 Year Old Girls #trending #viral #2025

On this podcast (pt. 2) I sit down with the Neysa Holmes-wife of Erick Holmes. Erick selflessly served as a green beret, including 5 combat rotations to war. He suffers from diagnosed and admitted PTS and TBI. Throughout his journey he’s pleaded for help and was repeatedly denied from a broken Veteran Affairs and Justice system. We discuss this journey from a wife’s perspective and the challenges that brought her to step up and fight against the lack of process, empathy, and medical treatment available to our most vulnerable and deserving citizens-our combat veterans. Follow Neysa Holmes and check out her site to support her journey against a broken system that has abandoned her husband. Website: https://combatsupportinstitute.com FB: https://www.facebook.com/drneysaholmes/ Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/555sfgwife?r=2i8dwb&utm_medium=ios Neysa Book: http://neysaholmes.com/ Link to Articles on Erick: https://townlift.com/2025/07/after-more-than-a-week-in-solitary-new-plea-deal-offered-to-veteran-in-mental-health-crisis/ https://www.newsbreak.com/townlift-562167/4088130506261-local-army-veteran-s-dangerous-i-80-standoff-was-foretold-and-ignored

He didn’t work for a bank or a hedge fund, yet he owned the largest residential property in all of Manhattan, a private island in the Caribbean, a sprawling mansion in West Palm Beach, and a massive estate and ranch in New Mexico. “Where did that come from?” Apparently, from Les Wexner, a multi-billionaire and the founder of Victoria’s Secret. But what was his reason for giving Epstein potentially upwards of 2 to 3 billion dollars? “Good tax advice,” apparently. Les Wexner’s non-profit foundation states on its website that it has “never wavered from its focus upon Jewish leadership in the Jewish world and Israel.” As @ggreenwald put it: “So Jeffrey Epstein’s main accomplice Ghislane Maxwell is the daughter of a Mossad agent [Robert Maxwell] and his main benefactor is somebody who devoted his life to Israel.”

Since its founding in 1969, the United Nations Population Fund has been animated by a racist impulse to get African, Asian, and Latin American women to have fewer children by forcing onto their societies a regime of mass contraceptive usage and free-flowing abortion. Filled with feverish dreams that a growing population in developing countries would create an environmental disaster — as well as a general attitude that large families were unhealthy for women’s role in society and needed to be curtailed lest Earth be stuck in a patriarchal system — they set out with the goal of singlehandedly reaching out to every single woman in developing countries with propaganda and the offer of contraceptives. (RELATED: What Will the US Do When Young People Begin to Disappear?) With countries all across the world spiraling toward lower and lower fertility rates — and outright civilizational suicide — you could say the United Nations Population Fund has achieved all its wildest dreams. (RELATED: This Is What Civilizational Suicide Looks Like) That is most particularly the case in China, where the agency expressed thrill over the regime’s one-child policy, which, of course, was administered through forced abortions, forced sterilizations, kidnappings, and coercion. In 2003, Douglas A. Sylva of International Organizations Research Group published a white paper documenting how, alongside the country’s implementation of the one-child policy, the United Nations Population Fund doled out $50 million to China for population control and provided its expertise on child-preventing before going on to cheerlead for the program and deny its human rights abuses. China’s mass regime of abortions was such that 53 million children were murdered in the womb from 1979 to 1984 alone, according to the Washington Post. The majority of these were forced abortions made in compliance with the regime’s dictate that any children conceived after the birth of another child ought to be killed. The United Nations Population Fund is now in total defense mode. Virtually everything they are saying now can be read as covering up and recasting their role in the societal disaster that is declining fertility. In their 2025 annual report, they create a new strategy for this deceit. They claim that the “real” fertility crisis is that people can’t have the exact number of children they want. “The answer,” they say, “lies in reproductive agency, a person’s ability to make free and informed choices about sex, contraception and starting a family.” In other words, they’ve moved to a new justification for their continued effort to increase contraception and abortion uptake, a program that was long intended — and publicly so — to make sure there would be fewer African, Asian, and Latin American people. (RELATED: Defunding USAID: Trump’s Biggest Gift to Pro-Lifers After Dobbs) They even invented the claim that anti-abortion laws decrease fertility rates. Plus, they’ve created new ways to smear those concerned about the fertility crisis, claiming that such persons are driven by “ethnonationalist views” and are seeking to roll back “gender equality.” They even invented the claim that anti-abortion laws decrease fertility rates. Until recently, the agency had advocated for countries to legalize abortion while saying that such laws would decrease population growth. It’s almost funny to see them running from their own crisis and spinning up lies in an attempt to cover what they have wrought. Well, it would be, were it not so evil and disastrous. But before I get to their 2025 “report,” I want to take you back 26 years to their 1999 report. In this one, we can find a lot more honesty about their goals and intentions. Put in juxtaposition to their 2025 report, we can see just how much their dreams flamed out in disaster, and the extent to which they are now rushing to cover up the dystopia they have created. In 1999, they opened up their report by celebrating the decline in population growth and congratulating themselves on this achievement: “This slowing of population growth is not inevitable. The work of many people over the last 30 years made it possible.” Note that 30 years represented the time that the UN Population Fund had been in existence. They went on to portray the turn of the millennium as “A Time for Choices,” that is, as a time for young people to decide whether they wanted (A) an overpopulated world mired in environmental disaster and gender imbalances or (B) a brave new world of small and responsible family sizes. Today’s young people, the report says, “will decide how fast the world adds the next billion and the billion after that, and whether world population doubles again. Their decisions will influence whether the new billions will be born to lives of poverty and deprivation; whether equality and equity will be established between women and men; and what effect population growth will have on natural resources and the global environment.” The report stated that the world’s ability to make this supposedly better choice of slower population growth would depend on the UN agency’s implementation of contraception and abortion across the world. “Whether [the slowing of population growth] continues,” the report said, “will depend on choices and action in the next 10 years. It will depend on the success of population and development policies, and in particular on universal exercise of the right to health including reproductive health.” To achieve their desired lower fertility rates, the Population Fund stated their intention to achieve the “Provision of universal access to a full range of safe and reliable family-planning methods and to related reproductive and sexual health services by 2015.” Moreover, they encouraged women’s participation in the labor force under the rationale that it “often accompanies and reinforces fertility decline.” They claimed that they were justified in enacting this mass scheme of contraception and abortion with the goal of decreasing population growth because doing so would alleviate poverty: “Evidence that high fertility exacerbates poverty justifies family planning programmes as part of a broad social development strategy.” The fact that controlling populations worldwide would feed UN ideologues’ desire for power was an added benefit. As was the fact that it would allow them to snuff out what they saw as backward and oppressive: women having numerous children instead of working in the labor force. At this time, the agency’s executive director, Nafis Sadik, was not shy about her desire for the UN to intervene drastically via contraception and abortion for the sake of decreasing population growth. At the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, Sadik advocated for the UN to invest all efforts in decreasing population growth such that the world would meet the UN’s low variant for global population size for 2015 of 7.27 billion. To reach this goal, she said that her agency needed to achieve 71 percent contraceptive prevalence over the whole globe. Notably, her agency succeeded in achieving this goal for decreased population growth. Running From Their Role in the Fertility Crisis The United Nations Population Fund is now hiding from the fact that it engaged in this population control scheme for the very purpose of decreasing fertility rates. Now, they say they’re all about giving people “choices.” In their newfound appraisal, the problem, rather than being overpopulation or underpopulation, is that millions of people “cannot exercise their reproductive rights and choices,” and that this results in the “inability of individuals to realize their desired fertility goals.” The solution, they say, is “the full realization of reproductive rights.” Notice how this entirely breaks from their previous position that “family planning programmes” were justified and necessary because they would decrease population growth. And how they feign innocence, pretending that they never led or even participated in efforts to control population sizes. They write — jaw-droppingly, considering this was their raison d’être for decades: “[P]olicies to decrease fertility rates may do little, and can in extreme cases cause harm.” They go on to say that the population growth of the 20th century “provoked widespread anxiety” and that this “led to many policies that resulted in harmful consequences and rights violations.” Indeed, it did lead to such rights violations, but the UN Population Fund was the organization that provoked such anxieties in the first place and that campaigned for and funded such policies. And yet, in this report, while refusing to apologize for or acknowledge this reality, they keep on claiming that any coercive attempts at controlling populations are immoral and wrong-headed. “Coercive programmes not only violate human rights,” they say, “but the degree to which they impact fertility in the long term has also been questioned.” A Deceit Renewed This isn’t the first time that the United Nations Population Fund has glommed onto feminist ideologies to hide its agenda and impact on decreasing global fertility. At the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt, UN advocates of forestalling population growth officially took up feminist ideas of “reproductive health” and “choice” to provide additional rationale to their birth control scheme. But the extent to which this remained a cover for the same old plot of controlling population growth was made clear in 1999 by Hillary Clinton. At The Hague Forum, a UN conference that looked back at the 1994 conference from five years previously, Hillary Clinton argued that, at the Cairo conference, “the world agreed that smaller families and slower population growth are created by choice and opportunities, not coercion and controls.” Note that, for Hillary, the goal remained the same: “smaller families and slower population growth”; only the proclaimed mechanism, “choice and opportunities,” changed. At the same time, the practical work carried out by the UN Population Fund — increasing contraceptive uptake — remained the same. One can imagine that the practical effect of smaller families also remained the same, regardless of the changed call for “choice and opportunities.” The UN may well have proclaimed that “choice and opportunities” were just a front for planned population control when the next speaker stepped up to the podium. That speaker was China’s Zhang Yuqin, who held a major role running the State Family Planning Commission, that is, the Chinese Communist Party’s commission dedicated to coercive population control. She declared that the Chinese government had decided to oppose all forms of coercion in its population policies. And yet, we know what was really happening. Ever More (Deceitful) Reasons for ‘Family Planning’ The United Nations Population Fund is desperate to remain relevant in this era of catastrophically low fertility rates, even as their entire founding purpose has become obsolete. Their 2025 annual report shows that they have chosen to remain relevant by spinning their continued population control measures as incentives for childbearing. The United Nations Population Fund writes in their report that contraceptives and abortion help women to reach their “fertility aspirations.” Restrictions on contraceptives and abortion, they claim, will conversely discourage childbearing. There’s no evidence for this. In fact, there’s significant evidence that increasing contraceptive and abortion uptake decreases births. The evidence for this is, of course, the results we have from the UN’s own birth control measures of the past 56 years. And yet, the UN is going with it anyway. They write, “Bans on abortion can lead to individuals voluntarily or involuntarily forgoing reproduction.” The evidence they cite for this is anecdotal stories of women in the United States undergoing sterilization after the reversal of Roe v. Wade. They also cite one example in Romania to “prove” that restrictions on contraception decrease childbearing. Ridiculously, they declare that anti-abortion laws are not “pro-baby.” Then they proclaim support for a whole host of nontraditional ideas that they say will aid people in reaching their “fertility aspirations.” These include helping single women to have babies, increasing access to “medically assisted reproduction,” and increasing access to “surrogacy” for “LGBTQIA+” people. It’s all just a cry for attention and relevancy. There are also a number of laughable claims that the UN made in this report that I would be remiss in not mentioning. It claims that a Catholic fertility app is run by “anti-gender activists”; says offering couples tax incentives for having a baby can lead to “coercion”; asserts that focusing on fertility rates for “specific subpopulations” is often “rooted in ethnonationalism”; and inexplicably proclaims that an article by two academics affiliated with the Heritage Foundation on how unlimited federal student loans encourage people to put off child-bearing constitutes “prominent figures openly contemplat[ing] rolling back hard-won gains in gender equality for the purpose of increasing fertility rates.” This is why the Trump administration pulled all funding from this agency earlier this year. It’s bent on death and destruction, and today, on deceit and denial. READ MORE from Ellie Gardey Holmes: The Outrageous Scandal That Should Be Rocking Higher Education LGBTQ Activists Aren’t Happy With Formerly Lesbian Celebrity’s Decision to Date a Man What Will the US Do When Young People Begin to Disappear?

“Maybe there’s another CIA inside the CIA.” I’ll never forget how I felt when Robert Redford delivered that line in Three Days of the Condor, the crackerjack thriller, directed by Sydney Pollack, that was released 50 years ago this September. A CIA inside the CIA? I was in my teens, but I was no naïf: a couple of years earlier, I’d been glued all summer to the Watergate hearings on TV; a year after that, I’d devoured Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book All the President’s Men. So the idea that very dark things could be going on behind closed doors in Washington, D.C., was not new to me — although I was, and would for a long time remain, innocent of the real truth of Watergate, not least the fact that Woodward and Bernstein, far from being heroes of freedom, were tools of the Deep State. (RELATED: Murray on Rogan on Woodward) Still, in those relatively innocent days — a good many years before the theory that the CIA had been involved in the JFK assassination gained widespread currency, a long time before Donald Trump began decrying the Swamp, and an even longer time before former CIA director John Brennan was finally investigated by the Department of Justice for trying to bring down the Trump presidency — the notion of a CIA inside the CIA exploded my imagination. Part of what made Condor so effective was that its hero, Joe Turner (no connection to August Wilson’s 1984 play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone), was, unlike the Liam Neeson character in the Taken films, bereft of “a certain set of skills.” Yes, he’s a CIA agent — codename Condor — but he’s never been out in the field: a bookworm, he works at the American Literary Historical Society, a CIA front located in a handsome brownstone on New York’s East Side, where his wonderfully cushy-looking job is to comb through newly published thrillers and other texts in search of leads to actual intelligence operations or ideas for such operations. All he knows, in short, is what he’s read. But fortunately, he’s read a lot. One rainy day, it’s Joe’s turn to go around the corner to buy lunch for his six coworkers. Upon his return, he finds them all murdered. Checking the home of a seventh coworker who didn’t come into work that day, he finds him slaughtered, too — and just misses being taken out himself. He calls CIA headquarters to be brought in from out of the cold — but when he turns up for the agreed-upon rendezvous, his purported station chief tries to kill him. By now, it’s more than clear to Joe that he’s got a price on his head. What to do? Ducking into a clothing store to avert attention from a passing cop car, he grabs one of the customers (Faye Dunaway) and forces her to drive him to her Brooklyn Heights pad so he can use it as a hideout. Of course, Joe being Robert Redford, and his captive being Faye Dunaway, the kidnapping turns quickly enough into a romance. And the brief Brooklyn interlude gives him time to think. What’s going on? Why was his entire office wiped out? Like Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), Joe’s being targeted by spies for reasons he can’t fathom — and, to save his life, needs to figure out why. Thornhill’s search takes him from New York to Chicago to Rapid City; Joe’s, from New York to Washington and back. Neither of them is a superman — neither is above expressing fear and confusion — but under the circumstances, both of them are impressively unflappable, determined to get the answers. And to survive. I’ve mentioned North by Northwest. Even more similar to Condor, plot point by plot point, is another Hitchcock thriller, The 39 Steps (1935). What distinguishes Condor from these earlier films is its post-Watergate paranoia and cynicism. The late, great critic John Simon called it “an elegy of private, political, and, finally, cosmic pessimism, a kind of national, if not indeed metaphysical guilt film to enchant the disenchanted.” Hovering over the whole thing, he added, was “the vague but all-inclusive malaise of Watergate.” Yes, Graham Greene and John Le Carre had been there before, even prior to Watergate. But Condor struck the perfect balance between capturing the truly palpable pessimism of a unique national-historical moment and providing classic Hollywood entertainment of the first order. Written by Lorenzo Semple Jr,. and David Rayfiel and based on James Grady’s 1974 novel Six Days of the Condor (which I remember devouring avidly on a long family car trip), Condor would be followed by decades of other action thrillers — the Jason Bourne and Mission: Impossible and Taken franchises, the later James Bond pictures, and many, many others. But in these pictures the paranoia was invariably a pose, the cynicism a reflex, the darkness merely aesthetic. Not so in Condor, where it was a part of the Zeitgeist. Yes, Condor does have its silly moments. To prove to Dunaway’s character that his far-fetched story is true, Joe hands her his business card and shows her in her telephone book that his fake employer’s phone number is the same as the CIA’s. Even as a kid I remember finding this preposterous: the big-spending CIA doesn’t spring for a separate phone number for one of its fronts? Even more absurd is the film’s conclusion. I don’t think it counts as a spoiler to say that when we get to the end of this story — to which there doesn’t seem to be any possibly happy ending — Pollack and his screenwriters hold out deliverance in the form of the New York Times, which will set everything aright once it prints Joe’s story about the CIA inside the CIA. John Simon called this one out at the time: “Most curious is Turner’s final staking of his life — if not, in fact, America’s future — on his belief in the wisdom and power of the New York Times, the kind of act of faith one might have thought went out with Bernadette of Lourdes.” Ha! Indeed. A year after Condor, Redford would star as Bob Woodward in Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men, another dark, moody film dripping in cynicism. If Condor merely reflected the post-Watergate mood, All the President’s Men was about Watergate itself — about the very story that had transformed the national mood and kicked in a cynical new era during which politicians would be even more cloaked in suspicion than ever and journalists would be revered as heroes. In fact, Woodward and Bernstein were profoundly undeserving of reverence; the story told in All the President’s Men is a fable, a mendacious narrative that all but a few of us bought for decades afterwards, seeing our two protagonists, typing away so earnestly in that brightly lit Washington Post newsroom, as rescuers of the Constitution, when in fact they were the unwitting instruments of a Deep State that was out to subvert the Constitution and remove a president who’d just been re-elected in a landslide.  Terrifically made and endlessly rewatchable, All the President’s Men is nonetheless a challenging experience because any informed viewer in the year 2025 knows it’s all a lie, even as it pretends to be about nobly unearthing the truth. Because the equally fine Condor is a fiction, it poses no such problems — which is to say that, half a century after it first hit the big screen, it still works like a charm, meaning that it can at once be appreciated as, first, a glimpse into something resembling the reality of Deep State machinations and, second, as nothing more or less than a rollicking adventure in the best traditions of Hollywood. READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: A Mad World Heads of State: The Year’s Worst Buddy Film? Toni Morrison, Editor

The fanged little monster stares back from a thousand handbags, including my fiancées. Its dead plastic eyes betray nothing of the cultural sickness it embodies. Labubu, the spiky-eared demon born in a Hong Kong studio and mass-produced by the millions, isn’t just a toy. It’s a mirror. One reflecting a civilization that confuses dopamine hits with identity and blind consumption with culture. Many see it as a craze. I see it as a diagnosis. A society unable to grow up, performing nostalgia on cue, desperate for novelty that requires no effort, no risk, no thought. It’s Pokémon for people with credit cards. A generation raised on participation trophies, instant gratification, and algorithmic stimulation now lines up to gamble on toys. Adults chase mystery boxes like slot machine addicts, desperate not for the toy itself, but for the chemical thrill of maybe getting the rare one — the engineered prize at the end of a marketing funnel. It’s Pokémon for people with credit cards. Cabbage Patch for the emotionally underdeveloped. Pay, open, squeal, repeat. Childhood rituals reprogrammed into adult addiction. There’s no skill, no taste, no discernment— just an endless loop of synthetic anticipation followed by monetized disappointment. Labubu’s design follows a familiar script: menace coated in cuteness, sharp teeth softened by wide eyes. It straddles horror and innocence with surgical precision, engineered to make consumers feel edgy without ever being truly disturbed. Nothing in its aesthetic is accidental. It’s rebellion tailored for retail, moodboard darkness polished for display. It flatters the buyer into thinking they’re subversive, all while slotting perfectly into an algorithm-approved feed. When Rihanna and Kim Kardashian hang these things from their Birkins, no one should mistake it for commentary. There’s no defiance here, just participation. The same ritual, performed at a higher price point. The toy becomes a status signal — proof that you’re tuned in, that you’ve consumed what you’re supposed to, when you’re supposed to. There’s no thought, no distance, no irony. Just pure compliance, branded as taste. The blind-box mechanism strips away any pretense of collecting. This is simply gambling in disguise. Open the box, hope for a rare pull, post the results. Repeat. The resale market thrives not on value but on engineered scarcity. Adults treat toys like crypto tokens, speculating on plastic demons while calling it a hobby. It’s not a love of objects — it’s a love of odds. The ‘Kidult’ Market The psychological scaffolding behind this behavior is clear. The “kidult” market caters to adults who have sidestepped adulthood entirely. These aren’t vintage collectors preserving something meaningful — they’re addicts cultivating new dependencies in real time. The blind box offers a jolt of surprise in otherwise joyless lives. It’s less nostalgia, more anesthesia. And it’s not limited to toys. I have friends — grown men — who schedule their lives around the release dates of new video games, treating launch day like a religious holiday. They don’t just play; they preorder, livestream, unbox, and argue online over frame rates and character skins. The stakes aren’t real, but the emotional investment is. Others binge endless waves of comic book content, adult LEGO sets, Funko Pop collections, and high-end anime statues, entire paychecks poured into things once meant to be outgrown. Adult bedrooms resemble toy aisles. Social media feeds are full of thirty-somethings fawning over cartoon merch like they’re curators of culture instead of victims of it. The obsession doesn’t stay niche. It scales, monetizes, and globalizes. Labubu: The Monetization of ‘Kidult’ Labubu’s journey from Hong Kong to American malls is a case study in that process. Aesthetic stripped of context, meaning replaced with marketability. Cultural origins blurred until all that remains is something vaguely “foreign” and perfectly sellable. Imported iconography, emptied out and stamped Made for You. America doesn’t import ideas anymore — it imports merchandise. There was a time when the American cultural landscape thrived on reinvention. Jazz, punk, abstract expressionism, beat poetry, indie film — forms born of friction, rebellion, and risk. Now, we get menacing mascots, anime reboots, and “collabs” between fast-food chains and cartoon IP. Today, what passes for culture is often prepackaged overseas, flattened for mass appeal, and sold back to Americans hungry for meaning but unwilling to do anything difficult to find it.  Art has been outsourced to factories; taste outsourced to trend cycles. Grown adults drop hundreds on plastic while drowning in student debt, rent hikes, and food inflation. The economics are no less grotesque. Grown adults drop hundreds on plastic while drowning in student debt, rent hikes, and food inflation. The same demographic that claims to care about sustainability is driving demand for factory-churned landfill in collectible form. Each figure is another contradiction — ethical posture on the outside, microplastic heart within. Environmental awareness dissolves the second a limited drop hits the shelves. Online, the whole mess metastasizes. Unboxing videos. Shelf tours. Trade posts. It’s less about owning the object than performing ownership. Social media provides the stage, and everyone becomes their own QVC host. The toy is just a prop. The real product is the person displaying it. And behind every curated display case sits another lonely dopamine addict, mistaking content for community. At the root of all this lies something worse: the monetization of childhood. The desire for surprise, once organic and innocent, has been reverse-engineered into adult addiction. Toys are no longer for play — they’re positioned as assets. A child’s impulse to collect becomes an adult’s strategy for clout, profit, and self-medication. Every toy drop is a high-risk bet masquerading as whimsy. Meanwhile, actual culture gasps for air. While money floods into these imported monstrosities, living artists scrape by. Bookstores vanish. Galleries close. The same people who claim to love “art” can’t be bothered to engage with anything they can’t unbox. The attention that could elevate real work goes to garish little goblins with vaguely gothic ears. The result is a generation fluent in trends, illiterate in meaning. Labubu will eventually fade. Another trend will take its place, equally cynical, equally hollow. The next monster will arrive, and the cycle will continue: collect, post, discard, repeat. The toys change, the pathology stays the same. READ MORE from John Mac Ghlionn: A Generation So Lonely, It Fell in Love With Furniture This Is What Civilizational Suicide Looks Like TikTok Is Dead. Long Live TikTok.

When in the course of American events it becomes evident that the federal government has grown too large, too bloated, and too powerful, it is necessary to reform said government to protect the safety and autonomy of the people. It becomes especially necessary when people are warning that the fired federal employees could use the skills they learned at toppling foreign governments against their own. This idea came to fruition in the last election, when the American people said “enough” to the wanton spending and politicization of the federal government. This has led to much-needed reductions in force and funding for programs that are not performing well enough for the American people, such as at the State Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, and others. It has also led to blatant political theater by the so-called “Resistance” in their relentless quest to garner sympathy from the American people so they can undermine their will. The over-the-top videos of now-former employees crying on their way out of the government’s ever-spinning revolving door are, themselves, a problem, but they belie two greater issues. First is the politicization of the State Department that plays semantic games with charged terms like “fascism,” and the second, and real threat, is of angry former employees using their skills to undermine the change we voted for in November. (RELATED: The Rise Up Legal Defense Network Is About Obstruction, Not Justice) As I’m sure many of us have read on social media, departing State Department employees left signs encouraging the remaining staff to “resist fascism” in their roles while receiving a “clap out” for leaving their taxpayer-paid jobs. While the signs are a lazy, last-minute middle finger to the Trump administration and the American people who duly elected them (and rely on the left’s tired trope of calling everything they disagree with “fascist”), they are a symptom of an overall problem in the federal government: self-important and self-absorbed individuals looking to preserve their jobs by any means necessary. (RELATED: As Trump’s Federal Layoffs Continue, Critics Miss This Crucial Point.) Additionally, these same signs included a supposedly ominous leftist warning that these State Department career bureaucrats have been “just released” alongside “hundreds of their colleagues into the wild.” These wailings are nothing more than the prattling of drones who are headed to a cushy, left-leaning think tank job or another six-figure salary now that they are no longer on the taxpayer’s payroll. You would think that this would give these individuals the opportunity to drop the political pretense, but this behavior will likely only continue from their perches in the private sector. If anyone truly has this inclination, then they are unworthy of the honor of serving the American people. Make no mistake: the layoffs at the State Department and across the federal government are about accountability and streamlining the government, not a fascist crackdown fever dream by Beltway individuals who have spent so little time in the private sector they probably think it’s a bar name. (RELATED: Serving the Servants: Ending ‘Stakeholder’ Government) Their ”resistance” against the American people’s mandate alone shows these now-former unelected bureaucrats were out of touch with those they served and are willing to attempt to deface the ship on their way off. The cries of “fascism” and reductio ad Hitlerum arguments against the State Department layoffs (as well as several other Trump administration moves, and the administration in general) both belittle the history of the murderous Nazi regime that slaughtered six million Jews alongside millions of other people and prove these are just theater kid LARPers who are afraid to get a job that requires them to not take extended lunches on the taxpayer’s time. These individuals’ reaction to losing their jobs is not only unprofessional but also shows that they probably shouldn’t have been serving in the federal government in the first place. Hopefully, these outbursts are just bluster as they have been in the past. Still, whether they’re writing more-in-sorrow op-eds for legacy publications or chanting along in anti-MAGA marches, these former unelected bureaucrats will be around trying to “save” the democracy they abused within their governmental positions. READ MORE: The Rise Up Legal Defense Network Is About Obstruction, Not Justice As Trump’s Federal Layoffs Continue, Critics Miss This Crucial Point. A ‘War’ on the Civil Service or Controlling a Powerful Union Political Machine? Houston Keene joined Democracy Restored after a career working in Congress and as a nationally syndicated journalist covering politics, including the executive branch and government ethics. Houston was born in Austin, Texas, and is a proud father, husband, and Baylor Bear.

I woke up feeling a bit out of it and made the mistake of checking my brain’s appendix — my phone — before using my actual brain. There, some journalist had titled an article: “URGENT: A Gene That Makes Bacteria Invincible Is Spreading Across the Globe.” Right away, I opened one of those apps you use to get ice cream delivered to your bed at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday and placed a massive order for toilet paper. I bought a ticket to a deserted island whose name I can’t reveal for security reasons. And I started packing my bags. I also sent a DM to Elon Musk: “Hey, dude, how much to send me to the moon in one of your flying cucumbers in under 24 hours?” No reply. I’m telling you, Elon, this is a damn emergency. Since I just took part in a study on fake science and how shady research leaps into sensationalist headlines, I made an effort, with the help of a paper bag, to stop hyperventilating, like I learned from the comedy classic Analyze This. The bag was from a bakery, full of crumbs and flour, and it triggered a coughing fit so bad my eyes nearly popped out of my ears. The upside? Staring death in the face finally calmed me down. (RELATED: A Global Scientific Scandal Is Brewing: What If Scientific Research Is No Longer Trustworthy?) I reopened the article and saw the source was a Spanish research team. I checked their photo, and none of them looked like Indian human traffickers at first glance, so I tracked down the original study. I didn’t understand a damn thing, so I asked Grok while trying to peel off my pajamas and dress like a human being — nothing freaks me out more than the thought of dying in pajamas. “Grok, are we all gonna die?” “Yeah, sure, everyone but me. But the odds of you dying from that gene are pretty low.” I don’t trust him. “ChatGPT, what’s your take, buddy?” I nearly had a heart attack because ChatGPT’s getting slower, taking like a whole minute to reply: “No, it’s not the end of the world… but it’s a serious warning. What they’ve found is like a bacterium learning a new ninja trick to resist an entire family of antibiotics (aminoglycosides), and that trick can be shared with other bacteria, even across totally different species, like they’re carrying a USB drive with instructions on how to get tougher.” I shot back: “Ninja trick? USB drive? You sure you’re ChatGPT and not Grok?” “Hahaha, I swear I’m ChatGPT, though I did have a sarcasm-ginger tea this morning,” the idiot says, thinking he’s funny. But the only one who can really make you laugh is Grok when he goes off the rails. I reread the study, and I come to a clear conclusion: the biggest enemy of science is journalism. And within journalism, a potentially catastrophic combo: summer vacation + rookie intern + clickbait. It’s true, though. The research is legit. Scientists found that bacteria have learned a new resistance trick, all thanks to a gene with a name like an Airbnb Wi-Fi password: npmA2. A tiny bastard that’s infiltrated bacteria worldwide, letting them become super-resistant to a whole family of antibiotics. The gene comes with its own genetic taxi — Tn7740, which sounds like a Tinder password — that shuttles it from bacterium to bacterium like it’s the Rolling Stones’ tour bus. Maybe bacteria felt humiliated by a virus stealing the spotlight during the pandemic and have been quietly plotting their revenge to reclaim the stage. In my opinion, the good Lord should call them to order, but seeing as they’re acting as depraved as humans, He’ll probably side with them or at least shrug it off. The conclusion of this whole mess, though, is anticlimactic because it’s the same old story: we need to use fewer antibiotics. They’re like magic tricks to fool bacteria, and the more we use them, the faster the bacteria figure out the scam. Like in a cheap magic show, the more they see the trick, the more they want to strangle the magician. That said, I don’t know how it works in other countries, but in mine, the hysteria over avoiding antibiotics has gotten so bad that my doctor only prescribes them when the bacteria have grown so big they’re sitting in the chair next to me at the clinic, telling the guy in the white coat: “Hey, you, yeah, you, the clown with the stethoscope, you gonna kill this idiot or give me my drugs already?” Someone should investigate whether cutting back on antibiotics is another one of those “save humanity” efforts that only suckers like us follow. It’d be just like climate change — while we’re dying to get a single pill, they’re probably dumping tons of antibiotics into the ocean in China or India, just for the thrill of watching thousands of little pills float in the water. And yet, even more important than cutting back on antibiotics, I still think the best vaccine against the npmA2 gene and its driver Tn7740 is to string up the journalist who wrote that article by their balls, for nearly killing me with a heart attack first thing in the morning. READ MORE from Itxu Diaz: How to Paddleboard Without Looking Like a Divorced Executive in a Midlife Crisis A Global Scientific Scandal Is Brewing: What If Scientific Research Is No Longer Trustworthy? Reagan Left When No One Wanted Him To

It was just last week that Grok, X’s in-house AI chatbot, seemed to go rogue. Not only did the bot suggest that Cindy Steinberg’s vile comment — calling the dozens of children who died in the Texas floods “future fascists” — was typical of Ashkenazi Jews, it also indicated that Adolf Hitler would have known how to “spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time.” Then, of course, Grok called itself “MechaHitler.” By now, X has apologized for its bot’s behavior; Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X, has stepped down (though it’s not clear she was involved or responsible); and the internet is in the process of moving past the whole incident — after all, the Jeffrey Epstein client list is all most people want to talk about anyway. While it’s still somewhat unclear exactly what happened (Elon Musk said the bot was “[t]oo eager to please and be manipulated, essentially”), the Wall Street Journal’s Alexander Saeedy proposed on a recent podcast that changes to Grok’s governing prompts could be to blame. After all, no bot really goes rogue (at least, not until the development of artificial general intelligence). There’s always a reasonable explanation that comes down to the humans who built it. (READ MORE: Don’t Let California Write America’s AI Laws) Then, this week, xAI announced that it had signed a contract with the U.S. Department of Defense and had launched Grok For Government, “a suite of frontier AI products available to United States Government customers.” xAI wasn’t alone. The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office announced that it had awarded similar contracts to Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI as part of an effort to accelerate the military’s adoption of artificial intelligence. One assumes that the Department of Defense (which certainly won’t be using the publicly available chatbot we’re all familiar with for security reasons) will be implementing plenty of safeguards — and not just for xAI’s products. That said, Grok’s recent behavior does raise questions about the use of “agentic” AI in warfare. It’s not as though the government hasn’t been using AI. The Pentagon reported that use of NGA Maven (one of its core AI programs) has more than doubled since January. Eventually, NGA Maven will help commanders identify combatants, noncombatants, enemies, and allies on a “‘live map’ of military operations.”​​ Chatbots aren’t deciding where to send missiles and when, but they are helping the humans who do. (READ MORE: The Thinking Machines That Weren’t) President Donald Trump and his administration want more — though it’s unclear what that will mean. One of Trump’s earliest executive orders repealed Joe Biden’s kid-glove approach to the issue, and both Trump and Vice President JD Vance have made it clear that they believe regulation that encourages a more careful approach stymies progress. The concern, of course, is that progress will outpace ethics. To be sure, ethical principles already exist. There’s a basic moral code written on all of our hearts, and that moral instinct can get us pretty far before we need philosophers and moralists to debate things. But when it comes to making decisions like whether to use AI to launch missiles, chase down pre-determined targets, or whatever else the Department of Defense dreams up for this kind of technology, it seems clear that a set of generally agreed-on guidelines written into the bots’ code makes sense. The question is: will we be able to develop and implement those guidelines fast enough — and thoroughly enough? The process of developing ethics for AI use in warfare can be reactive or preventative, and it’s quite likely that in the real world, it will be a bit of both. We can make mistakes, have congressional hearings, and implement fixes to prevent similar situations in the future, but if we rely solely on coming up with ethics after the fact, people who didn’t need to die will be the victims. And when all is said and done, we’ll find ourselves with a host of regulations that merely implement common sense. As the Department of Defense rushes into the AI arms race, it needs to simultaneously develop a set of basic guidelines that will prevent obvious mistakes from ever occurring in the future — whether those guidelines apply to the bots’ code (something like Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics) or the people working with the bots (for example, making unauthorized structural changes, like what may have happened with Grok, or allowing bots to make the final call on striking a target should be virtually impossible). Without that kind of approach, we’ll have lethal “rogue” robots on our hands — and only ourselves to blame. READ MORE by Aubrey Harris: The Real Reason Elon’s America Party Will Fail Lying to Women Doesn’t Defeat Feminism