Stembridge News Digest

  • ‘Don’t be evil’ may be dead, but ‘don’t be Frankenstein’ is alive Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:30:00 +0000


    Some still remember when Google defined itself by a simple motto: “Don’t be evil.” When Google reorganized under Alphabet in 2015, the new parent company adopted the somehow less confidence-inspiring, “Do the right thing.” Another phrase with a lower bar also made the rounds — “to organize the world’s information” — but rest assured, that was never the motto. It was simply ... uh ... the mission statement.

    Anyway ...

    The AI doomers’ strange brand of apocalypticism is: Let’s create an evil god so we can save the world from it.

    It took until this week for some of the most powerful voices in tech policy to circle back explicitly to a prime directive: Avoid hellacious acts. For that, thank the AI doomers, whose strange brand of apocalypticism — let’s create an evil god so we can save the world from it — finally breached technology insider-dom and splashed across the political timeline.

    The high-stakes soap opera has, as usual, deeper currents than the news feed can convey. But the key development is that the White House and its allies moved at warp speed to establish a few basic touchstones that take us back to the good old days of not being evil.

    Trump has received most of the attention for memeing his stern-looking self above the caption “Americanism, Not Effective Altruism!” But his vice president captured the matter in a single line that’s tough to beat. “If you’re building Frankenstein,” he said, “stop!"

    Note the emphasis. Trying to build an evil god — for instance, one with a statistically nonzero chance of wiping out the human race — is fortunately still considered axiomatically evil. But JD Vance’s reference underscores that trying to build a "new man," even with the best of intentions, is also evil.

    According to the doomers, the best way to save the world from evils they might create is for the rest of us to give them some form of planetary governing control. Vance endorsed a more commonsense approach: The best way to spare the world from evils you’re responsible for is to ... not do them in the first place.

    RELATED: Silicon Valley is building a god in its own image

    Gremlin/Getty Images

    The vice president may, like every one of his predecessors in living memory, carry a pronounced partisan identity. But his folksy-clever line echoes in anti-doomer rhetoric now blaring from the industry’s rooftops. Microsoft, of all places, recently published its own rulebook for what not to build. On X, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman promoted the new “Humanist AI Code of Conduct,” which insists AI “is not conscious and should not be designed to imitate consciousness. It should,” Microsoft avows, “be engineered to avoid representing as though it has feelings, subjective preferences, or intrinsic motivation.”

    Microsoft also flatly states: “We reject the pursuit of legal personhood, or the idea that models might deserve welfare, or be entitled to rights.” No Frankensteins here!

    Or rather, no Frankenstein’s monsters — which means no Dr. Frankensteins running amok in the lab.

    At Palantir, outspoken CTO Shyam Sankar made a similar point in a 2025 interview. “I think the secularists in Silicon Valley are filling the God-shaped hole in their heart with AGI,” Sankar said.

    “The people who have religion are the most skeptical” of the doomers’ build-a-god-and-save-the-world-from-it thesis — which, yes, does itself resemble an inverted religion. For “the people who are kind of transhumanists,” Sankar concluded, “it becomes what they wish were true.”

    Even Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, not known for Bible-thumping, recently struck an economic note with more than a whiff of spirituality.

    “If we’re not confident about the safety of the products, like all companies ... if you build a product or a service and you’re not confident in its functionality, capability, or safety, then don’t release it,” he said. "And so that’s a very obvious thing to do. You pace yourself until you are confident you’re releasing something that the market would appreciate. The market forces are already there. We don’t need any new laws. We don’t need new regulations.”

    RELATED: Poll: Most think AI could do this to humanity — but don't agree on what to do about it

    da-kuk/Getty Images

    Translation: Hear a little voice in your head, or more likely, your heart? Whispering, “No, this product is bad”? Don’t take it to market.

    Turns out, you can just not do things!

    Of course, Huang’s logic is a bit deceptive. We would like to believe the market will punish bad people for taking bad things to market, but that is not always how it works. As we speak, present-day Dr. Frankensteins are transplanting human brain organoids into mice engineered to lack most of their cerebral cortex, allowing the human tissue to occupy much of the vacant space and wire into the animals’ nervous systems.

    No, doctors! Bad! Evil! Don’t!

    Except they are. In the end, it matters that people examine their own hearts for evil before looking elsewhere and pointing fingers. But spiritual insistence alone will not keep society on the rails. It is not enough to scowl at our mad doctors, however good their intentions, as their creations erode the boundaries around our sacred human bodies and being — supercomputers or no.

  • What Montana taught this Southern storyteller about shutting up Sun, 20 Sep 2026 10:30:00 +0000


    Every place has its own language. I don’t mean accents or vocabulary. I mean the unwritten rules that tell you how people see the world. I grew up in the South, where sarcasm is practically a sacrament and no good story should suffer from a shortage of embellishment.

    Montana speaks differently.

    Even the humor has a Montana accent: direct and to the point.

    People here don’t waste words. They tell you what they know and leave the rest alone. We’ve been coming to this valley since the 1980s and have lived here full-time for more than seven years, long enough to know I’ll never stop learning Montana.

    One of the first pieces of advice I received was, “Drive at the speed you’re comfortable slamming into the ditch at.” Direct and to the point, particularly in winter.

    Our tiny town used to consist of a post office and a combination bar and restaurant. Then the bar burned down. That left the post office as our social center, where neighbors catch up on the news, solve the world’s problems, and occasionally create new ones.

    On my way to Bozeman, I stopped in. After chatting with friends by the postal counter, I said, “I’d better get going. I need to pick up Gracie’s prescriptions.” Without missing a beat, our postmaster asked, “Would you mind picking up some Imodium for me?” The group chuckled as I said, “Sure.” Even the humor has a Montana accent: direct and to the point.

    A few days later, Montana spoke again. Our cabin can be seen from the county road, nearly 10 miles from pavement. My father-in-law’s house lies above us, hidden among the pines. People don’t end up there by accident.

    Our son Gray was cleaning his grandfather’s garage when an older pickup came winding through the trees. It stopped when the occupants spotted him. The older passenger leaned out the window. He was missing enough teeth that you noticed before he finished his first sentence.

    “I’m looking for Don,” he said.

    “There isn’t a Don here,” Gray replied.

    RELATED: The myth of the ‘good person’

    Calvindexter/Getty Images

    The man muttered that it had been a long time since he had been up this way and figured he had gotten turned around.

    Then both men got out of the truck. The younger man was every bit of six-foot-four. Gray felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. His pistol was nearby. With bears and mountain lions plentiful around us, that was nothing unusual. But Gray never reached for it. He simply eased back a step and watched. The older man seemed perturbed. The younger man said nothing.

    Without another word, they swapped places in the truck and eased back down the driveway toward the national forest. Gray immediately called and said, “Dad, I think they may have been casing the place.” I called the sheriff’s office to see if they had heard about these fellows. After dispatch took the message, I watched the truck come down from the forest and idle on the road in front of our cabin. Then it headed down the mountain. Soon afterward, the deputy called. I repeated the story.

    The line went quiet. Finally, he said, “Well ... we’ve got a fellow who goes around looking for Don ...”

    I waited. “But he’s usually over in the Pony area.” Pony sits on the other side of the mountain. Same county. Different side of the range.

    Another pause. “I wonder if it could be the same guy.”

    Every Southern instinct in me wanted to go full Bob Newhart. “Y-you ... you think?”

    Inwardly, my Southern commentary was still running. How many “looking for Don” fellows do you have around here? Is this some kind of franchise, and has this guy wandered out of his territory?

    Instead, I held my tongue and answered in my best broken Montanan. “You know ... it might be.”

    The deputy happened to be driving up our road and offered to intercept them. Since they were already heading down the mountain, I declined. “We’ll handle it if they come back,” I said.

    No lecture about escalation. No reminder to stay inside. No warning to leave everything to trained professionals.

    RELATED: Why I played ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’ at a funeral

    Pressmaster/Getty Images

    Just one word. “OK.” Direct and to the point.

    After 35 years in Nashville, I never imagined telling a deputy, “We’ll handle it,” or hearing him agree. He assumed I could exercise good judgment. If I needed help, he’d come. Until then, he trusted me to handle my own place.

    That economy of words defines the humor, the advice, and the lifestyle. As another election season pulls us into its riptide, we could use a little more of that.

    I’ve watched people move here because they wanted to live in Montana, only to try to make it more like the place they left. I’ve found it’s better to let Montana change me. Out here, help isn’t just around the corner. You prepare, pay attention, fix what you can, and exercise good judgment because the nearest help may be 30 miles away. You also help your neighbor, especially if Imodium is involved.

    And if those two fellows ever wander back up to our place? Well, after 35 years in Music City, I’ll know exactly what to tell them.

    They’re looking for Don in all the wrong places.

  • They broke young men — then sold them toxic escapes Sun, 20 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000


    When Nick Freitas engages with young men, they often have the same complaint: The culture made them the scapegoat for its ills — and now they feel lost and don’t know what to do about it.

    While he doesn’t deny young men’s predicament or blame them for it, Freitas does put the responsibility to do something about it on their shoulders.

    The truth, he says, is that the institutions that shape the culture deliberately broke young men’s spirits by convincing society that masculinity was “bad, evil, toxic, horrible, and [needs] to be repressed” and then turned around and sold the young men they villainized toxic escapes, like social media, gaming, and pornography.

    The path to a fulfilling life is still there, though — but it’s theirs to find and take.

    On this episode of “Rufo & Lomez,” Freitas and fellow BlazeTV hosts Chris Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman talk through why so many young men have checked out — and why reclaiming faith, family, and responsibility is the way back.

    It’s both “confusing and horrific” for young men, he adds, to try to make it in a world where they’re “emasculated” in order to be more acceptable to a culture that will reject them regardless.

    The message so many young men receive today, says Freitas, is: “By the way, even after you've been emasculated, nobody's going to want to sleep with you … corporations don't want to hire you either.”

    “So once you understand that they have legitimate grievances that are truly unique to their experience, well, now we can start to talk about, OK, how do we deal with this?” he continues.

    Dealing with it, however, begins with rejecting the “escapes” offered by the same institutions that villainized men in the first place. Doomscrolling social media, pornography, and video gaming, for example, may offer temporary relief, but they ultimately prevent men from finding the fulfilling path they desire.

    “One of the big things that I tell men is that look, I get my identity first and foremost through my Christianity. Why? Because it's eternal. … I always have identity, meaning, and purpose. I never lose it, and it cannot be taken away from me,” says Freitas.

    When the culture inevitably condemns a Christ-centered identity, it’s men’s job to say “screw the culture” and continue to “pursue” what is godly, he continues.

    “Ultimately, if young men choose to do that en masse, the culture will follow,” Freitas says. “The reason why there's been such a push not just to diminish men but to elevate women is because it’s the only way you can’t get self-correction.”

    Choosing the righteous path, however, is no easy thing.

    “There's pain involved in doing that,” Freitas acknowledges.

    “You will be punished in society for doing that, but the more people who do it and the more critical mass you reach, the more things shift.”

    Already, the tides have begun to turn.

    Freitas cites an NBC News Decision Desk Poll of 18- to 29-year-olds that compared Trump and Harris voters on what they consider a successful life.

    “The number-one thing for young men that voted for Trump was having a family; it was number six for women,” says Freitas.

    Male Harris voters, however, placed family in 10th place, while female Harris voters put it in second-to-last place.

    “That really gives me encouragement,” says Freitas.

    To hear more, watch the episode above.

    Want more from Rufo & Lomez?

    To enjoy more of the news through the anthropological lens of Christopher Rufo and Lomez, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

  • Visit the historic Maryland town that fooled the British more than 200 years ago ... or so the story goes Sat, 19 Sep 2026 20:00:00 +0000


    On Aug. 10, 1813, under cover of darkness and fog, 300 British soldiers sailed up the Miles River toward this small Maryland town.

    They landed on the southern end of St. Michaels, where they quickly overran the local militia. They then returned to their boats and began bombarding the town with their ships’ cannons.

    One of the museum’s best features is that this isn’t all history preserved behind glass. You can watch shipwrights at work restoring and building wooden boats.

    That much is history. What supposedly happened next is the stuff of legend.

    As the story goes, townsfolk hung lanterns high in trees farther inland, creating the illusion that St. Michaels was farther from the shore and sat on higher ground. The British aimed their cannons toward the lights — and overshot the town.

    The same darkness and fog that allowed the British to approach St. Michaels also helped shield the town from destruction.

    The British eventually withdrew, while St. Michaels suffered no casualties. One house did take a direct hit from a cannonball, which left a dent in its brickwork. Appropriately enough, it is known today as the Cannonball House.

    There is just one problem with this terrific story: No one can say for certain that the lantern trick actually happened.

    But that hasn’t stopped it from becoming part of the town’s identity. St. Michaels proudly calls itself “The Town That Fooled the British,” a claim displayed on the welcome sign as you enter town.

    And the legend is only one reason this tiny waterfront community makes an unusually good history-filled day trip.

    A river town’s history and industry

    Lynn Topel

    St. Michaels sits on the banks of the Miles River, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. Today, it is a favorite summer destination for vacationers from Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and even New York, as well as a popular draw for boating and sailing enthusiasts.

    Long before it became a tourist town, however, St. Michaels was established as a trading post in the mid-1600s. Trappers and tobacco farmers made up the early community. An Episcopal parish named after St. Michael the Archangel was built here and eventually gave the town its name.

    St. Michaels also developed a thriving shipbuilding industry and became particularly known for building Baltimore clippers. These ships were renowned for their speed and maneuverability — qualities that made them valuable for outrunning other vessels and evading blockades.

    That shipbuilding industry made St. Michaels a British target during the War of 1812. The British attacked the town twice in 1813 as part of their campaign around the Chesapeake Bay. A year later, British forces would move against Baltimore and bombard Fort McHenry, inspiring Francis Scott Key to write the words that became “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

    As the local economy shifted toward oyster harvesting and crabbing, St. Michaels’ shipyards continued to manufacture workboats suited to the Chesapeake. One example is the bugeye, a type of sailboat watermen used for oyster dredging.

    You can still see that maritime history up close.

    An easy day trip

    Lynn Topel

    With a total area of only 1.27 square miles, St. Michaels is easy to navigate if you aren’t planning to spend the night. A day trip from Washington — less than two hours by car — or Baltimore, just over an hour away, is very feasible. Philadelphia is less than two and a half hours away.

    The first stop for any visitor to the area should be the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, located on 18 acres of waterfront property. With Maryland’s identity so closely intertwined with the Bay, it’s fitting that this is the only museum in the country dedicated to America’s largest estuary.

    Step into the welcome center, and you’ll find replicas and authentic examples of watercraft used for racing, fishing, oyster harvesting, and leisure.

    You will also learn how the bay and its boats played a part in American history. One of the most remarkable objects is a 23-foot canoe like the one used by enslaved man Joseph Keene, his pregnant wife, Nellie, and their seven children to escape in 1831. An experienced sailor, Keene navigated his family north up the Chesapeake, likely toward the newly opened Chesapeake & Delaware Canal and Pennsylvania. Against extraordinary odds, the entire family successfully evaded capture and reached freedom.

    The Bay played an integral role in the maritime routes of the Underground Railroad. Enslaved people used the Chesapeake and its network of rivers and creeks to travel north toward free states, sometimes hiding aboard commercial vessels and sometimes escaping in boats themselves. For experienced sailors like Keene, the same waterways on which they had labored could also provide a path to freedom.

    Dotting the museum campus are buildings devoted to different aspects of life on the Chesapeake, from sail making and decoy carving to oyster harvesting and crab picking.

    For younger visitors, don’t miss the water tanks with live blue crabs. Wannabe watermen can explore a life-sized skipjack, a single-mast sailing boat native to the Chesapeake, or climb into the pilot house of the Thor, a 1912 buyboat that purchased catches directly from fishing boats and transported them to market.

    One of the museum’s best features is that this isn’t all history preserved behind glass. You can watch shipwrights at work restoring and building wooden boats — and don’t hold back if you have questions.

    There’s also the Hooper Strait Lighthouse, where kids can dress up as lighthouse keepers before climbing to the top for views over the water.

    Lynn Topel

    But perhaps the biggest surprise at the museum has nothing to do with boats.

    RELATED: The ‘Little House’ books gave me a place to escape. This New York farm took me there for real.

    Josh Slocum

    Frederick Douglass lived here, too

    The home of abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ sister Eliza Mitchell now stands on the museum grounds.

    Eliza married a free man, Peter Mitchell, and lived in St. Michaels for the rest of her life. Their home on Lee Street was slated for demolition until it was saved and moved to the museum in 1981. Restored today, the Mitchell House gives visitors a glimpse of how a family with nine children made do with the space they had.

    Douglass himself spent part of his youth in and around St. Michaels while enslaved during the 1830s. He worked as a house servant, field laborer, and, later, ship caulker.

    His time here became an important part of the story he later told about slavery and his escape from it. Visitors can learn more about his life in an exhibit across from the museum’s welcome center.

    Lynn Topel

    The Douglass connection adds another layer to this fascinating town. St. Michaels has its patriotic War of 1812 legend, but it also preserves the much more complicated history of the people who lived along the Chesapeake.

    Save room for ice cream

    After a few hours at the museum, the best way to finish the day is to find a place to sit, eat, and people-watch on the town’s main street.

    Talbot Street is the major thoroughfare through the historic district, lined with restored colonial and 19th-century buildings housing restaurants, antique and boutique stores, and art galleries.

    For the sweetest possible ending, head to Justine’s Ice Cream Parlour, a St. Michaels fixture since 1987. Check out its “Wall of Shakes,” with more than 90 classic and signature flavors.

    The truly ambitious can attempt the Titanic Sundae Challenge: more than six pounds of ice cream and toppings that must be consumed in under 30 minutes. “Man v. Food” host Casey Webb successfully conquered the challenge in 2019 at Justine’s Ocean City location — and visitors to St. Michaels can attempt the same feat here.

    By then, you will have covered a remarkable amount of American history for a town barely a square mile in size: Chesapeake shipbuilding, the War of 1812, the Underground Railroad, Frederick Douglass, and generations of watermen who made their living from the Bay.

    And you may find yourself wondering whether the residents of St. Michaels really did climb into the trees with lanterns one foggy night in 1813 and trick the Royal Navy into firing over their heads.

    There may never be enough evidence to settle that question, but after more than 200 years, “The Town That Fooled the British” is still telling the story.

  • China’s hackers are hiding in plain sight Sat, 19 Sep 2026 19:00:00 +0000


    Google recently reported that a China-linked hacking group ran artificial intelligence tools inside compromised networks. The technique let the hackers use victims’ computing resources and credentials while reducing the traffic that might expose them. The group also targeted North American academic, medical, military, and technology-research institutions. That is a serious warning.

    The disclosure followed a Justice Department and FBI operation against QScan and QTRouter, two platforms allegedly used by a Chinese state-sponsored group known as QTFY. Prosecutors say the group, employed by Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology, sold hacking services to customers that included China’s Ministry of State Security and People’s Liberation Army.

    Chinese cyberattacks are only going to get more capable. We need a concerted plan to protect our infrastructure and private information before it’s too late.

    Court records identify NASA, the Federal Reserve, the Departments of Energy, Justice, and Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Senate among the targets. They also list hospitals, telecommunications providers, power companies, financial institutions, and defense contractors. The public evidence does not show that every listed network was breached. Still, it’s a major concern.

    The operation illustrates how Beijing can combine government direction, private contractors, compromised devices, and commercial infrastructure in a sustained espionage campaign. Diplomatic engagement with Chinese leaders does not eliminate that threat, and cybersecurity policy must account for it regardless of the state of bilateral relations.

    On Aug. 26, the same day officials announced the QScan and QTRouter seizures, the White House declared a national emergency involving foreign-produced bulk-power equipment. The order lets the government restrict transactions involving equipment that poses an unacceptable security risk as well as identify, isolate, monitor, or replace vulnerable components.

    The risk is substantial. Grid operators increasingly depend on networked sensors, controllers, and other devices associated with the “internet of things.” Connectivity can improve efficiency and monitoring, but it also expands the attack surface. The fear is less that China will shut off the lights tomorrow than that it will slowly gain the ability to cause blackouts and spread panic — a security advantage it can leverage.

    The administration’s Cyber Strategy for America calls for hardening critical infrastructure and its supply chains, including the energy grid, data centers, water utilities, hospitals, and telecommunications systems. The recent cases show why that work must extend beyond power plants to vendors, contractors, and the devices that connect essential services.

    Cyber defense is only part of the problem. Washington must also decide how to evaluate Chinese companies whose technology enters sensitive American systems.

    Nanjing Xinjiuwei is a useful example: The government alleges that the company employed QTFY and received payments from China’s Ministry of State Security. No surprise that plenty of other Chinese companies have also engaged in espionage.

    The Pentagon this summer added Alibaba and BYD to its list of entities it identifies as Chinese military companies operating in the United States, effectively banning them from securing defense contracts. What took so long?

    RELATED: America’s adversaries are using top American tech — without telling their customers

    Smederevac/iStock/Getty Images

    Huawei presents a more dangerous case. The Justice Department has accused Huawei and several subsidiaries of racketeering, trade-secret theft, and concealing business in countries subject to sanctions. Separately, federal law restricts agencies and contractors from using specified Huawei telecommunications equipment, and regulators have designated the company’s equipment a national-security risk.

    The company’s U.S. research affiliate, Futurewei, also drew congressional scrutiny after lawmakers said it shared a California office complex with Nvidia for years. Nvidia has said its operations remained separate. Huawei’s past relationships with American universities likewise prompted several institutions to review or end research funding arrangements.

    The American economic system is open by nature, and this risks allowing easy access to malefactors like Huawei.

    Successive administrations have maintained or expanded restrictions on Huawei while encouraging alternatives in the global telecommunications market. National-security officials also cited competition with Huawei when supporting the Hewlett Packard Enterprise acquisition of Juniper Networks. That case illustrates how industrial policy can overlap with security interests.

    The Center for Strategic and International Studies has catalogued 224 reported instances of Chinese espionage directed at the United States since 2000. Its survey excludes espionage against U.S. allies and more than 1,200 intellectual-property lawsuits brought by American companies against Chinese entities.

    The policy challenge is broader than any single breach or company. The United States must secure critical networks, investigate firms on the evidence, enforce procurement and export-control rules consistently, and work with allies on interoperable alternatives.

    Chinese cyberattacks are only going to get more capable. We need a concerted plan to protect our infrastructure and private information before it’s too late.

  • Moms are working for Moloch — and they don’t even see it Sat, 19 Sep 2026 18:00:00 +0000


    The global fertility rate is crashing. Today, more than half the world’s people live in countries below replacement fertility.

    Many factors are playing into this predicament, but “managerial liberalism” — institutions like HR, academia, NGOs, agencies, and media pushing liberal social rules — is the main culprit according to BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre.

    It’s what rewards women for delaying marriage and motherhood in favor of careers and independence. It’s what treats children as a lifestyle accessory instead of the point of a people. And it’s what sells immigration as the substitute for babies.

    To dive into this subject, MacIntyre speaks with his friend Kevin Dolan, founder of the EXIT Group and host of the Natal Conference.

    MacIntyre begins by highlighting Dolan’s recent article, “Mom Is working for Moloch,” which argues that babies are being sacrificed — not at temples, but to a “Moloch” machine that runs on women’s long years of school and career.

    “The strongest correlation between fertility and any other sort of social science variable is educating and employing women,” says Dolan.

    A lot of people on the political right, he argues, view this problem “unseriously” — throwing shade at girlbosses when the problem isn’t women getting PhDs and being C-suite executives.

    The correlation between declining birth rates and educating/employing women, Dolan says, begins long before higher education or career ladders come into the picture. “This correlation exists at the level of like being taught to read and escaping subsistence agriculture,” he tells MacIntyre.

    But the only countries where this lifestyle of illiteracy and rugged farm life is the reality for women are “places where none of us want to live,” he adds.

    The right often tries quick-fix solutions, like cash incentives for having kids and cheaper day care, but they’re just “polishing-the-brass-on-the-Titanic-type solutions,” Dolan argues.

    “The sacrifice that you're asking of people to have these kids is enormous, and the kind of person who would have a kid for 1,000 bucks is not necessarily the person that you want raising kids,” he adds.

    The reality is people aren’t going to have families, regardless of government incentive, “unless they can do it in this deeply high-trust, relational, contextual frame,” says Dolan, “and if you try to make them do it as a transaction, they will just not do it.”

    The problem, however, is that managerial liberalism is designed to dissolve that world.

    “We've created a world that humans don't want to raise families in. Like, that's just a fundamental, like a spiritual indictment of the world that we live in,” says Dolan. “We got to fix that.”

    To hear Dolan and MacIntyre on what they think has to give if families are going to form again, watch the full episode above.

    Want more from Auron MacIntyre?

    To enjoy more of this YouTuber and recovering journalist's commentary on culture and politics, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

  • In this big Texas city, garbage trucks have joined the surveillance state Sat, 19 Sep 2026 16:30:00 +0000


    Shortly after September 11, the U.S. government passed the ingeniously titled Patriot Act. Are you a decent, self-respecting soul who loves America and hates those who hate you? Most Americans nodded vigorously and responded with a resounding yes. Citizens accepted federal wiretaps and financial monitoring as reasonable trade-offs for national security.

    Over the next two decades, local police departments began using license-plate readers. Private companies cashed in on the madness, covering suburban front porches with internet-connected video doorbells. Flock cameras now turn ordinary commutes into one giant, searchable tracking database. And that guy sitting across from you on the subway? He might be wearing a creepy pair of Meta glasses, filming you without your permission, and preparing to do God-only-knows-what with the footage.

    If it can happen in Texas, it can happen anywhere in America.

    Things are bad, but as my grandmother used to say, when you think you’ve hit rock bottom, always remember that hell has a basement.

    She was right.

    In Dallas, the city government recently partnered with a tech firm called City Detect to put AI cameras on ordinary garbage trucks. As the trucks roll through residential neighborhoods, high-resolution cameras photograph homes, driveways, and front yards. Algorithms then scan the images for potential violations, from overgrown lawns and peeling paint to structural disrepair and discarded junk. China gives citizens a social credit score. Dallas now has something that sounds eerily familiar: a “blight score.” To be clear, Dallasites aren’t being rated on political loyalty or on whether they should be allowed to purchase a plane ticket. But the underlying idea is unsettlingly similar. Technology collects information about ordinary people, then analyzes it and turns what a camera sees into a data point that can trigger authorities' attention.

    And this is where the legal defense of public surveillance comes in. The traditional argument is simple. If something can be seen from a public road, you have little or no expectation of privacy in it. A police officer or code inspector standing on a public sidewalk can look at your front yard for hours without obtaining a warrant. City Detect relies on precisely this principle. The company says its software automatically blurs human faces and vehicle license plates before storing the imagery. In other words, you may not be personally identifiable in the database, but your house, driveway, lawn, and property can still be photographed, analyzed and flagged.

    That distinction may satisfy the lawyers, but it doesn't necessarily satisfy the citizen, nor should it.

    Surveillance creep

    Applying continuous, AI-driven surveillance across an entire city fundamentally changes how local government operates.

    This dynamic flips the traditional relationship between citizens and law enforcement. Throughout American history, government investigation required either initial suspicion or a formal complaint before it resorted to observation. Automated garbage truck cameras reverse that sequence by subjecting every property owner to preemptive, systematic photography. An algorithm evaluates the physical condition of a private residence first, and the city issues a notification second. Dallas residents now receive automated courtesy notices regarding their property conditions without a human inspector ever stepping foot on their pavement.

    The immediate result is the industrialization of minor administrative oversight. Local governments purchase turnkey surveillance systems from private vendors because automated enforcement generates predictable revenue while reducing payroll costs. Cities may introduce these systems as simple administrative tools, but once the technology exists to continuously scan an entire city, its uses can easily expand beyond the original purpose.

    RELATED: These popular Wi-Fi routers can detect motion — inside your home

    Iaremenko/Getty Images

    And if it can happen in Texas, supposedly a conservative state that prides itself on individual liberty, it can happen anywhere in America.

    City Detect insists that its databases remain separate from law enforcement networks and that private companies retain ownership of the operating algorithms. No one of sound mind should be reassured by these promises. Public records requests and corporate partnerships regularly bridge the gap between municipal records and law enforcement access. Once a high-definition image of a private driveway is stored on a cloud server, the legal barriers that restrict access by law enforcement, tax assessors, or civil litigants can quickly disappear.

    Future shock

    The primary danger of localized algorithmic monitoring lies in its future capabilities. Big Brother is a lot like the national debt; it never gets smaller, only bigger.

    The software deployed on garbage trucks today identifies tall weeds, discarded mattresses, and stray trash. Upgraded models could easily detect subtle physical changes over time. The idea that your driveway parking patterns and home additions could be recorded in the not-so-distant future may sound absurd, but it shouldn’t.

    Today, the surveillance state no longer requires specialized federal agents or hidden listening posts to monitor everyday life. You live in a country where every commute and porch delivery feeds an all-knowing database. That is troubling and infuriating. But perhaps the most worrying aspect is how difficult it will be to put the genie back in the bottle. Once those in charge learn they can watch everything, why would they ever choose to watch less?

  • Silicon Valley didn’t birth the transhumanist project. This forgotten Moscow librarian did. Sat, 19 Sep 2026 15:00:00 +0000


    Most people blame the nation’s treacherous climb to AI domination and the dystopian push for human enhancement on Silicon Valley.

    But Glenn Beck says the true genesis of the transhumanist project traces back to a man who lived nearly a century before Silicon Valley was even a concept. Nikolai Fyodorov, a Moscow librarian and nearly forgotten 19th-century thinker, penned his vision for humanity in the 1880s, and it had all the makings of the chilling blueprint we are watching rapidly come to fruition today.

    Fyodorov, Glenn explains, believed and taught anyone who would listen that “every religion and every philosophy had gotten the assignment wrong.”

    “He thought death was not a fact of nature to be made peace with. He said death was the enemy, and the entire human race needed to be united using science. And they had one job: stop death,” he recounts.

    This “common task” of stopping death led Fyodorov to suggest that all the “scattered atoms of every human being who had ever died” be gathered in order to “resurrect all generations.”

    His plan to create space for the risen dead was to “colonize space.”

    While Fyodorov has largely been forgotten in the modern age, he had the ear of many writers we still revere today.

    “Tolstoy sat at this man’s feet. Dostoevsky read him; wrote back that he agreed essentially with everything he said,” says Glenn.

    But perhaps most notably, Fyodorov took in and mentored Konstantin Tsiolkovsky — a deaf, rejected boy who would eventually write the “rocket equation” and become “the father of Soviet rocketry.”

    “Every Soviet cosmonaut, Sputnik, the space race that put us on the moon — all of that traces back through that kid and to the old man in the library whose reason for wanting rockets was that he needed somewhere to put all the resurrected dead,” says Glenn.

    Roughly 40 years after Fyodorov’s 1880s lectures, his dark vision got a scientific vocabulary thanks to a Jesuit paleontologist named Teilhard de Chardin and a Russian geochemist named Vladimir Vernadsky. Together, they coined the term “noosphere” — “a layer of thought that wrapped the planet” that would be “the next stage of human evolution,” Glenn explains.

    “Teilhard took it the furthest. He said all human consciousness needed to converge into one, and he called this the point of omega,” he adds, noting that his book on this subject was published only following his death because the Catholic Church “thought he was out of his mind.”

    About five years later, when the book was translated into English, it was none other than Julian Huxley — brother of “Brave New World" author Aldous Huxley, president of the British Eugenics Society, and first director-general of UNESCO — who wrote the introduction.

    “Julian Huxley gave the movement its name. His phrase was: man remaining man but transcending himself,” says Glenn.

    While UNESCO refused to adopt Huxley’s pamphlet "UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy," forcing him to “publish it under his own name,” it still embraced him as its chief leader.

    “So nobody can say the United Nations was founded as a transhumanist project, but they can't say that the man who wrote it down wasn't running their agency for two years [and] wasn’t the founding guy,” says Glenn.

    Pieced together, this story blows his mind.

    “The chain is a Moscow librarian who said, ‘Nobody should die. We should resurrect everybody. We have to beat death.' And he passed it on to a kid who became the rocket scientist for the Soviet space program. … The whole program was given a scientific vocabulary in Paris by a priest and walked into the permanent architecture of the postwar world by a eugenist who had a famous last name,” Glenn summarizes.

    The lesson here is that today’s tech lords are fighting over a project older than they are.

    “These guys didn't all meet in a smoke-filled room. There's no conspiracy here. It's just books, students, and time,” says Glenn.

    “Why am I telling you this story? Because you can't understand the men currently shaping our life until you understand what they are fighting over as an inheritance.”

    To hear more, watch the video above.

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  • The party of democracy keeps editing the results Sat, 19 Sep 2026 13:30:00 +0000


    Democrats increasingly treat their voters’ choices as provisional because party activists and much of the political press allow it. From Joe Biden’s replacement in 2024 to current attacks on Senator John Fetterman (D-Penn.), the party establishment respects election results only until those results become inconvenient. That habit damages the party’s credibility on election integrity and may eventually damage the establishment itself.

    Two years ago, Democrats already had their presidential nominee. Joe Biden had won every Democratic presidential contest except American Samoa and faced no serious challenge (unlike Jimmy Carter in 1980). He had also won the 2020 nomination and occupied the White House.

    Democratic leaders keep courting the left’s energy while blocking some of its candidates from power. That arrangement cannot last forever.

    After Biden’s disastrous debate performance, however, Democrat officials and donors spent weeks demanding that he withdraw. Their pressure campaign set aside months of primaries in which roughly 14 million Democrats had supported him. No presumptive major-party nominee in the modern primary era had withdrawn so late.

    Democrats did use a formal replacement process. Biden’s withdrawal unbound nearly all of his delegates, Harris qualified for the ballot, and during a virtual roll-call vote, 99% of participating delegates voted for her. But primary voters never chose Harris for president in 2024, and party leaders never held an open convention in which competing candidates could make their case. By the convention, Harris and Tim Walz were already the ticket.

    That was the first do-over: Primary voters chose Biden, and delegates later chose Harris after party leaders drove Biden from the race.

    Maine supplied a clearer example this year. Voters nominated Graham Platner for Senate with more than 156,000 votes. After a woman accused Platner of rape — an allegation he denied — he withdrew on the last day Maine law allowed Democrats to replace him on the ballot.

    Party delegates then selected Troy Jackson, who had not competed in the Senate primary and had finished third in the gubernatorial primary, by a 566-5 vote. The party followed Maine law, but primary voters had no say in their replacement nominee.

    Wisconsin shows another kind of intervention. After the establishment favorite left the governor’s race amid campaign-finance trouble, David Crowley re-entered with Gov. Tony Evers’ backing and narrowly defeated democratic socialist Francesca Hong. Voters made the final choice, so Wisconsin was no do-over. It does show how quickly party leaders mobilize when the left threatens to capture a nomination.

    Pennsylvania now shows another variation of the fix. Democrats nominated Fetterman for Senate in 2022 and stood by him after a serious stroke.

    They called Fetterman a fighter and a maverick, just what the Senate needed. When he won, Senate Democrats rallied around him and even loosened the dress code for him. Then he broke with progressives over Israel, arguing that it had a right to defend itself after Hamas’ terrorist attack.

    A recent Wall Street Journal report said Fetterman had neglected many Senate duties, citing accounts from former staffers. Some Democrat lawmakers and activists immediately attacked him; one Democratic National Committee vice chairman said “2028 can’t come soon enough.” Depart from party orthodoxy, and you’re through.

    RELATED: AOC made socialism cool. Now the socialists want her gone.

    AOC made socialism cool. Now the socialists want her gone. David Dee Delgado/Getty Images

    This pattern succeeds because party voters rarely punish it and much of the political press treats each episode as an isolated event. Voters whose choices party leaders set aside receive little sustained attention. Nothing to see here. Move along.

    Repeatedly overriding primary outcomes also weakens Democrats’ claims to defend election integrity. If they don’t care about their own members’ votes, they don’t care about yours. No wonder they oppose election oversight when they want to overlook their own primaries.

    The establishment’s short-term victories may carry long-term costs. In 2016, DNC officials favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Yet Sanders and his faction now exert more influence over the party than Clinton does.

    The Democratic left has grown stronger even as establishment figures try to contain it. Each intervention deepens resentment among activists who believe party leaders accept their votes only when they approve the result.

    Democrat leaders keep courting the left’s energy while blocking some of its candidates from power. That arrangement cannot last forever.

    Eventually, procedural trickery will no longer protect the Democrat establishment from the faction it has encouraged but repeatedly tried to keep off the ballot.

  • Last year a concealed-carrying garbage truck driver opened fire on 2 robbers, killing 1. The survivor just learned his fate. Sat, 19 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000


    Blaze News reported last year about a concealed-carrying garbage truck driver who turned the tables on a pair of would-be robbers in Chicago, fatally shooting one of them and wounding the other.

    Chicago police told WLS-TV the incident occurred around 5:15 a.m. Jan. 31, 2025, just steps away from a high school in the Homan Square neighborhood on the city's West Side.

    'The garbage collector disposing of more than just regular trash.'

    The station, citing police, said a 28-year-old man garbage truck driver was outside in the 900 block of South Homan Avenue when two males approached him, showed a gun, and announced a robbery.

    CWB Chicago reported that Aaron White and Kenneth Elliott approached the garbage truck driver near the back of his truck in an alley next to DRW College Prep — and the outlet said it obtained surveillance video showing what went down.

    Elliott, 42, confronted the sanitation worker while White approached with a gun, CWB Chicago said, citing prosecutors and the video. The victim in the video appears to push White’s gun away with his forearm while struggling with Elliott, the outlet said.

    The pair most definitely picked the wrong victim.

    Police told WLS the victim had a valid Firearm Owner's Identification card and Concealed Carry License — and put it to use.

    Because when White extended the gun again, the victim fired at least three shots, striking White, who fell to the ground, CWB Chicago reported, adding that Elliott continued fighting the victim and wrapping his arms around him.

    But the victim fired additional shots until Elliott fell to the ground as well, the outlet said, adding that the video ends with the victim leaving the scene.

    RELATED: Armed thug tries to rob victim pumping gas. But perp chooses the wrong victim to violate.

    Chicago police officers found White lying near the school with a gunshot wound to his neck, CWB Chicago said, adding that his arrest report indicated that he was still conscious and told officers he was lying on a gun. An officer rolled White over and secured the gun, the outlet noted.

    WLS said the 42-year-old suspect — whom CWB Chicago identified as Elliott — was shot in the head and pronounced dead at the scene.

    CWB Chicago added that according to court records, White pleaded guilty Monday to attempted armed robbery with a firearm — and Judge Domenica Stephenson sentenced him to eight years in prison.

    "The garbage collector disposing of more than just regular trash," one commenter on the above news video stated. "Helping rid us of the two-legged garbage."

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  • Sanctuary cities’ get-out-of-jail fail Sat, 19 Sep 2026 10:30:00 +0000


    Advocates sell sanctuary policies as a public-safety boon. Keep local police out of immigration enforcement, they argue, and immigrant communities will trust cops, report crime, and make everyone safer. But New York, Fairfax County, Virginia, and Chicago tell a different story.

    When local authorities refuse to transfer removable criminal aliens already in jail, they do not neutralize danger. They return it to the streets, where law-abiding residents become prey.

    Order requires one standard in the jail and courthouse, not a local veto over federal custody. Sanctuary policies reverse those priorities.

    New York is making a strong bid to become America’s leading sanctuary snake pit. In May, Governor Kathy Hochul (D) signed the “Local Cops, Local Crimes Act,” which bans 287(g) agreements and contracts to house civil immigration detainees. These jail partnerships do not authorize “street raids.” They let local officials screen people already booked on local charges and transfer removable offenders to ICE in a secure setting.

    The law also established an Orwellian “Office of Immigrant Trust” in Attorney General Letitia James’ office to enforce compliance. James warned the 12 law enforcement agencies that still had 287(g) agreements and sued the Rensselaer County sheriff after his office refused to terminate its agreement. Fifteen elected sheriffs, represented by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, filed a federal lawsuit, while Hochul dared opponents to “bring it on.”

    The “Local Cops, Local Crimes Act” will not deliver the community safety its backers claim to seek. Ending 287(g) does not keep “local cops focused on local crimes.” If ICE later arrests the same person, agents must find and arrest him at large, using more officers and accepting more uncertainty and danger than a transfer from custody would require. Albany’s law forbids the orderly custody transfers that these agreements facilitate. It has also pushed veteran sheriffs into federal court to defend tools they use to protect their communities.

    Fairfax County, Virginia, shows what happens when the sanctuary slogan becomes operating procedure. Sheriff Stacey Kincaid refuses to hold an inmate past a local release date based solely on an administrative ICE detainer. Her office requires a judicial warrant before it will extend local custody, though ICE issues detainers as administrative requests. Records from the sheriff’s office show that Fairfax declined 615 transfers over 16 months — 448 in 2025 and 167 in the first four months of 2026 — while transferring only 11 people to ICE.

    RELATED: The mass-deportation promise is disappearing

    The mass-deportation promise is disappearing PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP/Getty Images

    The Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation into Commonwealth Attorney Steve Descano’s plea-bargaining, charging, and sentencing policy, which directs prosecutors to consider immigration consequences. The department is investigating whether that policy discriminates against U.S. citizens. It has not reached a conclusion.

    A House subcommittee later questioned Descano and Kincaid under oath. The record includes people whom Fairfax released despite ICE detainers and whom authorities later charged with new crimes, including murder. Fairfax and ICE dispute responsibility for at least one such release.

    Defenders respond that Fairfax is not “harboring” anyone because ICE can still make street arrests. But jail transfers give agents the safest opportunity to assume custody; street arrests expose officers, suspects, and bystanders to more risk. When a county rejects hundreds of detainers, it does not prove illegal aliens commit less crime. It releases people federal officers have identified as removable and leaves ICE to find them elsewhere.

    Prosecutors compound the problem when they shape charging or plea decisions to avoid deportation. A justice system that treats otherwise comparable cases differently based on immigration consequences creates a two-track courthouse. The Justice Department is investigating whether Descano’s office gave noncitizen defendants preferential treatment that citizens did not receive; it has not yet answered that question.

    Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) has used executive orders and litigation to limit police cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

    RELATED: Democrats move to make ICE agents unemployable in California

    Democrats move to make ICE agents unemployable in California PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP/Getty Images

    During the migrant surge that defined his early term, Chicago spent $639.6 million to house and serve 46,282 arrivals; 42%, about $269 million, came from the city’s corporate fund. Chicago now faces an $882.4 million budget gap for 2027, although city officials cite several drivers unrelated to migrant spending.

    Chicago already has plenty of homegrown problems. What did residents gain from spending $639.6 million on a crisis that strained police stations and city services? Johnson offers platitudes and accusations of racism to anyone who asks.

    Communities are safer when jailers transfer a removable offender from local custody instead of releasing him and forcing federal agents to hunt him later. Cities protect their budgets when they put lifelong residents ahead of noncitizens.

    Order requires one standard in the jail and courthouse, not a local veto over federal custody. Sanctuary policies reverse those priorities. Lawmakers and voters must remove this pox from America.

  • VIDEO: Day care sued for alleged 'toddler fight club' Sat, 19 Sep 2026 09:30:00 +0000


    A day-care business is facing a million-dollar lawsuit after surveillance allegedly caught an employee running a toddler fight club.

    Heather and Richard Harris filed the lawsuit in Tarrant County District Court against Arka Risinger Educators LLC in Fort Worth, Texas.

    'Their trust was violated when the safe environment they were promised turned into a child fight club.'

    The Harrises allege that a substitute teacher had children assault their 4-year-old child after other teachers had left at the end of the day in April 2026.

    The child's mother noticed that he was crying uncontrollably and had injuries when she picked him up from the day care.

    The staff told her he had gotten into a fight, but the mother demanded to see the video of the incident.

    The lawsuit said the child suffered bruising and scratches to his arms and post-traumatic headaches. He also suffers from lasting emotional anxiety.

    A state investigation by the Texas Health and Human Services Commission’s Child-Care Licensing Division cited the Arka Montessori day care for multiple violations.

    "Their trust was violated when the safe environment they were promised turned into a child fight club," read the lawsuit.

    The family is suing for $1 million for negligence, gross negligence, and premises liability.

    RELATED: LGBTQIA+ activist called for Trump to be assassinated and for harassment of his attorney

    No criminal charges were filed in the case.

    The substitute teacher is no longer employed at the day care, according to the owners.

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  • The drug you keep seeing at vape shops has a dark side Sat, 19 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000


    Kratom products are advertised everywhere — at gas stations, smoke shops, and vape stores — but comedian and filmmaker Davey Jackson believes the rapidly growing industry deserves far more scrutiny.

    In a new documentary, Jackson examines how concentrated kratom extracts and synthetic derivatives have transformed a once-obscure plant into a multibillion-dollar industry.

    “There’s basically three categories. There’s natural powder leaf kratom, which a lot of people use and have used successfully for, you know, a lot of years. And then there’s a slightly newer product, and it’s an extract,” Jackson tells BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales.

    “So they’re basically extracting and concentrating the kratom into these drinks ... which that’s a whole other story. And then they have these synthetic products like 7-OH or MGM-15 or MGM-16 that the DEA is in the process of banning right now,” he explains.


    Gonzales points out that “there’s big money in the industry,” referencing the company Feel Free.

    “That’s an interesting one. So they got their start giving away their products on college campuses, just handing them out to college students. And again, this is a fairly addictive thing that we’re dealing with here,” Jackson says.

    “These Feel Free shots, you know, they’re not as bad as the 7-OH tablets that are getting banned right now, but they’re certainly habit-forming. Much more potent than the actual kratom product,” he explains, noting that the founder of Feel Free is “an ex-con” who “spent time in federal prison for fraud.”

    “They’re the number one retail kratom product in America. I want to say they’re doing $250 million a year in sales. They’ve been investigated by the DOJ ... and they actually are a big part of the kratom conspiracy that we were investigating,” he continues.

    “It just must all come down to money, right? Whoever is making money wants to keep it alive,” Gonzales says.

    “Yeah,” Jackson agrees. “So you’ve got companies like Feel Free who absolutely want to keep it alive and have lobbied to keep the kratom industry unregulated to a large extent, but they were also a big part of the push behind the ban for 7-OH because 7-OH was, you know, kind of taking up market share.”

    “They’re making $250 million a year already, but obviously they want to make more. And then of course, there’s Big Pharma. You know, people that are taking 7-OH that you can buy at a gas station or a smoke shop,” he continues.

    “Granted,” he adds, “I don’t think it’s safe from a regulatory perspective as far as what they’re actually putting in this stuff because I’ve heard multiple times there’s 7-OH that’s been tested that has [fentanyl] in it. I mean, that’s horribly dangerous, right?”

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  • Is charging your EV really cheaper than buying gas? Sat, 19 Sep 2026 08:30:00 +0000


    If you drive an EV, you have probably heard one argument over and over: Whatever you pay for the car, you'll save money charging it.

    That can certainly be true if you charge at home, particularly if you have access to inexpensive off-peak electricity. But once you depend on public fast chargers, the math can look very different.

    Put $40 or $50 worth of gasoline into an efficient RAV4, and you're buying hundreds of miles of driving range

    On a recent episode of “The Drive,” my co-host Karl Brauer told me about charging a Hyundai Ioniq 5 N at a Level 3 charger. It cost him about $50.

    Within 24 hours, Karl filled up his 2023 Dodge Demon 170 with E85. The bill was $47.

    Yes, you read that correctly. It cost him more to charge the Hyundai than to fill a 1,025-horsepower Dodge Demon.

    Power fail

    That's just one experience, and charging prices vary enormously. But it illustrates something EV buyers need to understand: Electricity isn't free, and public fast charging can be surprisingly expensive.

    One Chevrolet Bolt owner recently learned that lesson in spectacular fashion.

    He plugged into a public charger at a Hyundai dealership and ended up with a bill for $414. The explanation, according to the report Karl and I discussed, was an extraordinary pricing structure for drivers outside the dealership's charging program: $5 per minute and $5 per kilowatt-hour.

    After the driver complained, the charging company intervened and reduced the bill to about $14. So no, $414 isn't a normal price to charge a Chevrolet Bolt. But the episode demonstrates why drivers need to pay attention to what a charger costs before plugging in.

    Buzzkill

    Even at ordinary public fast-charging rates, the comparison with gasoline isn't always what EV advocates would have you believe.

    Karl looked up public fast-charging prices before the show and found rates generally running around 40 to 55 cents per kilowatt-hour. Industry data bears out his informal survey. Paren, which tracks the U.S. fast-charging network, put the average price of public DC fast charging at 53.8 cents per kilowatt-hour in the second quarter of 2026.

    Now compare that with an efficient gasoline vehicle. Karl used the Toyota RAV4 as an example. Put $40 or $50 worth of gasoline into an efficient RAV4 and you're buying hundreds of miles of driving range — while filling the tank takes minutes rather than waiting for a battery to charge.

    A hybrid can make the comparison even more interesting.

    Run the numbers by the mile. An EV getting around three miles per kilowatt-hour would cost roughly $18 to drive 100 miles at that average fast-charging rate. A 2026 RAV4 Hybrid rated at 43 mpg combined would cost about $7 to travel the same distance with gasoline at $3 a gallon — and about $9.30 even at $4 a gallon.

    RELATED: Tesla buyers burned through California's new EV rebates in days

    Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

    Private plug

    This doesn't mean an EV is always more expensive to operate. If you own a home, plug your vehicle in overnight, and have inexpensive electricity, the economics can be very favorable. Some utilities also offer substantially cheaper off-peak rates.

    But that's not everybody's situation.

    Plenty of people live in apartments or condos where they can't simply plug in overnight. Others take long trips and have to use public fast chargers along the way. For those drivers, the price displayed at the charging station matters every bit as much as the price displayed at a gas station.

    And electricity prices aren't uniform. They vary by location, utility, time of day, charging network, and sometimes even the particular charger you're using.

    That's why I don't buy the blanket claim that an EV is automatically cheaper to fuel than a gasoline car. You have to do the math for your car, your electricity rates, and your driving habits.

    Before buying an EV, find out what you actually pay per kilowatt-hour at home. Then look at the public fast-charging networks you're likely to use and check their prices. Compare those costs with the fuel economy of the gasoline or hybrid vehicle you're considering.

    You may discover that charging at home saves you plenty of money.

    But if you're depending on public fast charging, don't assume you're getting a bargain just because there's no gasoline going into the car.

  • CNN says Trump press ban is illegal — then the Trump team THROWS DOWN fiery response Fri, 18 Sep 2026 23:18:55 +0000


    CNN decried the president banning the cable news network from the White House, and the Trump team responded with a crushing reply.

    President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that he was banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House, prompting a defiant response from CNN.

    'The public deserves to hear about its government from independent voices, not just its leader’s loyalists and allies.'

    "CNN stands fully behind our White House team and their fair and accurate reporting," read the statement from CNN.

    "We have a right under the U.S. Constitution to do that reporting without hindrance or interference from the government," the network added. "Should the ban which President Trump threatened go ahead, it would be an illegal assault on that fundamental and constitutionally protected right."

    The official White House rapid response team fired right back with a list of hoaxes perpetrated allegedly by the CNN network.

    Among those were the Jussie Smollett case, the NASCAR noose hoax, and the Russia collusion hoax.

    The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression objected to the ban in an official statement.

    "When the White House opens its doors to the press, it must comply with the First Amendment," read the statement.

    RELATED: LGBTQIA+ activist called for Trump to be assassinated and for harassment of his attorney, feds say

    White House rapid response team X account

    "The president is as free as any other person to criticize media coverage. But he can’t ban outlets from the White House just because he doesn’t like their reporting or commentary," they added.

    "Press credentials aren’t a reward for loyalty to the government. A free, even adversarial, press is a sign of our country’s strength. The public deserves to hear about its government from independent voices, not just its leader’s loyalists and allies."

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