Taryn Thomas was a dedicated Black Lives Matter and pro-Palestine activist in high school and later at Stanford University. But after years of faithful activism, the narrative she once fully embraced began to unravel. Ideological inconsistencies and a visit to an exhibit honoring the Nova Music Festival victims eventually led her to renounce the BLM-Palestine allegiance and begin a new journey as an outspoken critic.

Taryn joined Glenn Beck on a recent episode of “The Glenn Beck Program” to share her journey, the October 7 attacks’ impact, and how the pro-Palestine movement at Stanford evolved into something that could only be described as “anti-Israel and anti-American.”

Taryn explains that at 16-years-old, she was conditioned by BLM leadership to believe that “for [black people] to be free, Palestine has to be free.”

By the time she reached college, she was prepared to lead the coalition. Taryn helped organize and mobilize student protests and the early encampments that sprang up on Stanford’s campus right after the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel.

“By October 20, Stanford already put up its encampment, ‘Sit-In to Stop the Genocide.’ This is before the families had even finished identifying its dead. This is a week before a single [Israeli] soldier had even crossed into Gaza,” she tells Glenn.

The group’s rapid labeling of the conflict as a “genocide” and the immediate ostracism of anyone who mourned the Israeli lives lost made Taryn wary.

“I felt like I wanted a two-state solution, but … I never wanted to talk about it with anyone because everyone was anti-Zionist, and it felt that … the safest position was the most radical one,” she says.

In June 2024, one of the Stanford protests got so out of hand, Taryn started to seriously question her membership.

“They broke into the Stanford University’s president’s office and caused $700,000 in damages, 12 students received felonies, and they spray-painted disgusting things, such as ‘death to Israel,’ ‘death to America,’ ‘kill cops,’ ‘pigs taste best when dead,’” she recounts.

“At some point, our pro-Palestine movement became more of an anti-Israel, anti-American one. And I no longer could recognize what we were doing anymore.”

Shortly after distancing herself from the organization, Taryn was invited to see the Nova Music Festival exhibit.

“I thought I would find Zionist propaganda and Zionist lies, and I wanted to reaffirm my pro-Palestine position more than anything,” she admits.

What she found, however, was the exact opposite.

“I found instead, you know, half-written ‘I love yous’ and last messages sent to parents and loved ones,” she reflects.

“These are kids my age going to a music festival that I would have went to, and it was just not political. Nova Music Festival was not a political thing, and yet we had compressed them and flattened them into this political narrative, and in doing so we killed them a second time,” she confesses.

At the exhibit, Taryn also got to experience the sick celebrations of Hamas soldiers.

“One of the audio recordings that we had heard was a terrorist calling his dad saying that he had killed 10 Jews with his own bare hands and celebrating. And I thought I was going to hear horror, and instead the dad congratulated his son,” she tells Glenn.

“This was who we were calling our martyrs. … I always called myself an anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic, and that completely deconstructed that,” she adds.

Taryn notes that seeing the “ordinary” faces and hearing the life stories of the Nova Music Festival victims made her realize she was rooting not against evil oppressors but against everyday people like herself.

“That could have been your kids; that could have been my friends,” she laments.

Her heart changed, Taryn returned to Stanford “genuinely scared” to share what she had learned. For a while she kept her new beliefs to herself, but once she traveled to Israel and saw what life was like for the people, she knew her silence had to end.

“It made me realize I need to start speaking up about this,” she says.

To hear more of Taryn’s story, watch the video above.

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​Glenn beck, Nova music festival, Stanford university, The glenn beck program, October 7 attacks, Black lives matter 

A proposal called the Scarecrow system says evading automated license plate recognition from unwarranted photography and capture can be done without breaking any laws.

The research predominantly rejects the collection of license plate data by ALPR operators like Flock, a company that controls cameras in thousands of jurisdictions in the United States.

‘They capture and index every plate that passes.’

Flock currently has over 100,000 monitored surveillance cameras across the country, and as the researcher Max Harari states, these cameras exist in “our neighborhoods, parking lots, and police networks.”

“They capture and index every plate that passes, feeding a searchable surveillance database with no warrant, no notification, and in most cases no public oversight,” Harari writes.

Harari’s project uses what he calls adversarial frame pattern optimization that generates a grayscale pattern to be placed on a frame around the license plate. The aim is to “suppress detection” while remaining legible to the naked eye and unobscured to humans in real life.

RELATED: Big Brother on the road: Backlash grows against license plate surveillance

PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images

Using the Scarecrow method, ALPR detection confidence allegedly drops from 0.84 to 0.00, which is described as “full evasion.”

The methods of distortion used include rotation and perspective warp, brightness and contrast shifts, motion blur, “additive noise,” and distance distortion.

All of these tactics allegedly disrupt Flock and “most” ALPR cameras that are mounted between eight and 12 feet.

The custom license plate requires a photo of the owner’s plate and promises to deliver an individualized pattern that completely evades AI camera detection.

The requirement of having a 3D printer means it is likely that the cover has varying depths and tangible patterns.

RELATED: License plate readers or surveillance? The number of AI cameras in the US is shocking

Rich Sugg/The Kansas City Star/Tribune News Service/Getty Images

“A system that can track anyone, anywhere, with no transparency or accountability is fundamentally immoral. This project is my way of exploring what can be done about it, ethically and legally,” the researcher argued.

Harari also said in a post that he has not tested the system on an actual Flock camera, but his research indicates it should work across different hardware and license plate detection models.

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​Alpr, Surveillance, Flock, Ai, Tech 

A teenager was caught on surveillance video pointing a gun in the face of a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and demanding his car keys in Maryland earlier this week, but things didn’t work out so well for the punk — or his three friends.

Jheyco Borda — who was trained in hand-to-hand combat while in the military — told WTTG-TV he was working on his pickup truck near Oxon Hill High School around 4:30 p.m. Wednesday when four teenagers approached him on the sidewalk.

‘Once a Marine, always a Marine.’

Borda told the station the suspects — all of whom were dressed in hooded sweatshirts — approached him and demanded his car keys, phone, and other valuables.

WTTG said surveillance video showed one of the teens — dressed in red, white, and blue — pulling out a handgun and pointing it directly at Borda’s head.

However, the station said the gun-toting suspect became distracted for a split second — and Borda said that was all the time he needed to put his military training into practice and fight back.

Borda told WTTG he quickly disarmed the teen — and then his brother noticed the dust-up and ran over to assist.

Video shows that during the struggle, the suspect’s gun discharged, the station said.

RELATED: Knife-wielding ex-con gets tables turned on him lethally — courtesy of victim he robbed, fought, bit, and stabbed: Report

No one was hit by the gunfire, WTTG said — instead the bullet struck Borda’s truck and left a visible hole.

The station said that as the fight continued, another suspect tried to jump in, but Borda’s brother turned and grabbed him.

The brothers, in the end, managed to pin down the suspects until Prince George’s County Police officers arrived at the scene and took them into custody, Borda told WTTG.

The station said all four suspects were behind bars.

Police are asking anyone with additional information about the incident to contact them immediately, WTTG said.

In the aftermath, Borda told the station: “Once a Marine, always a Marine.”

“I’m feeling grateful,” the veteran added to WTTG. “I’m still here, safe, with my family.”

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When Delano Squires was growing up, he was surrounded by young black men who were not only getting into trouble, but getting into gangs and going to jail — while he kept his hands clean.

“At a certain point in my teenage years, I said, ‘Well, it’s because of the families we were raised in. All our parents were married, … we were going to the same church, same values across households, a community of men who were raising us and keeping us in line. And I realized that family structure was the key,” Squires tells BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock on “Jason Whitlock Harmony.”

“So from there, just one of those things that I’ve always thought about, the importance of family, the importance of marriage, importance of my dad in my day-to-day life, his everyday presence. And at a certain point, I wanted to write about it,” he explains.

And Squires did write about it in his new book, “The Vanishing Black Family,” where he argues that the breakdown of the black family is to blame for lack of education and high crime rates.

“Men and women are continuing to have children, particularly in our community, where 70% of kids are born out of wedlock,” Squires tells Whitlock.

“The other thing that we’ve seen over the course of the last 60 years is that as poverty has decreased in the black community, the non-marital birth rate has increased,” he continues, using NBA players as an example.

“In a league that was 70-plus percent black, you had guys who were fathering four, five, six, seven kids out of wedlock, even though they were making millions of dollars a year,” he explains, noting that economics appear to have very little to do with children being born out of wedlock.

“I think economics is a part of it, but the real reason is because marriage is no longer seen as valuable, desirable, accessible, or indispensable for the purpose of forming a family. And the reason for that goes back much further than current economic trends,” he tells Whitlock.

Whitlock has his own theory as to why the black family has broken down.

“If we had more God, we could have a successful marriage, and we could raise up better kids. That’s the missing ingredient,” Whitlock says.

“The cause of the vanishing black family is because we’re not looking for God to be our provider. We’re looking for money to be our provider. And so, whatever makes us the most money is going to fix the most problems,” he continues.

“And to me it’s, you know, we’ve just lost focus on who our real provider is. It’s not man-made money. It’s God,” he adds.

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​Black men, Community, Crime rates, Delano squires, Jason whitlock, Jason whitlock fearless, Marriage, Values, Jason whitlock harmony 

Scott Bessent may well be the most consequential secretary of the treasury since Alexander Hamilton — not simply because of the policies he advances, but because of the conditions he confronts and the clarity with which he is executing President Trump’s broader economic vision.

Like Hamilton before him, Bessent has stepped into an economy weakened by a long period of policies that, however well intentioned, failed to serve the enduring interests of the American domestic economy.

Before entering public life, Bessent operated at the highest levels of global finance. As a key figure alongside Stanley Druckenmiller, he helped execute one of the defining macro trades of the modern era — the successful challenge to the Bank of England’s currency peg in 1992. The lesson was enduring: Systems that ignore economic reality do not last. Markets force alignment.

What Bessent is executing is a re-centering, not only of economics, but of strategy.

It is precisely that market-grounded realism that now underpins the implementation of the administration’s economic strategy. But Bessent is not simply a market practitioner. His time teaching the history of economic thought at Yale reveals the deeper foundation of his approach.

He sees the economy not as a series of quarterly data points, but as a system shaped over time by production, energy, capital formation, and national power. That synthesis, of theory, history, and practice, places him firmly in the Hamiltonian tradition and makes him a natural architect for translating President Trump’s economic doctrine into operational policy.

After the Revolutionary War, the United States was financially strained under extreme levels of debt, industrially underdeveloped, and newly severed from its economic relationship with the British Empire. Hamilton’s achievement was to turn that fragility into a foundation for strength.

He tied fiscal credibility to growth, fostered domestic industry, and deployed tariffs with precision — high enough to generate revenue and support development, but not so high as to suffocate competition. He was not managing decline; he was reversing it.

Bessent faces a modern analogue, an American economy navigating the aftermath of its own rupture, not from a formal empire, but from the post-World War II Pax Americana and the rules-based system it sustained. The task, again, is not to preserve a fading order, but to build a new foundation, one that reflects the strategic reset articulated by President Trump and now being systematically implemented through the Treasury Department and beyond.

The parallel is difficult to ignore. Decades of globalization prioritized efficiency over resilience and consumption over production. The result is an economy that remains large but is increasingly imbalanced, dependent on external supply chains, tilted toward financial engineering, and less capable of sustaining broad-based growth. Bessent’s significance lies in recognizing this reality and acting on it, not in abstraction, but in execution of a defined national strategy.

Like Hamilton, he is not merely managing the economy he inherited; he is working to re-anchor it, aligning markets with the administration’s emphasis on domestic strength, industrial capacity, and economic sovereignty.

That begins with debt. The United States now carries historically elevated fiscal obligations layered on top of structural weakness. The answer, as in Hamilton’s time, is not austerity alone, but growth — stronger, more durable expansion rooted in production, investment, and rising capacity.

Debt is not ignored; it is made sustainable through expansion, a core pillar of the administration’s supply-side orientation.

RELATED: Grants are a secret weapon for American communities

NicolasMe/Getty Images

This framework was articulated clearly in Bessent’s speech at the Reagan Library. At its core is a simple recognition: An economy hollowed out by flawed globalization cannot sustain either prosperity or fiscal stability.

The answer is not withdrawal, but reordering, a principle that sits at the heart of President Trump’s economic agenda. His formulation — de-risk, not decouple — captures that balance. It preserves the benefits of trade while restoring the primacy of national resilience.

This is not a rejection of globalization but its correction, a distinctly Hamiltonian instinct and one now being operationalized across trade, capital flows, and industrial policy.

Energy is central to this vision. Cheap, secure energy is not a talking point; it is the precondition for winning the next phase of economic competition, particularly in artificial intelligence.

Computing is power. Without abundant energy, neither technological leadership nor sustained growth is possible. This, too, reflects a deliberate alignment between Treasury policy and the administration’s broader push for energy dominance.

So too does the shift back toward productive capital. For years, policy favored financial engineering over real investment. Bessent’s emphasis is different, directing capital toward infrastructure, manufacturing, and technological capacity, translating strategic intent into capital allocation.

Markets have responded not in spite of this shift, but because of it.

His early attention to Federal Reserve mission creep reinforces the broader theme. By insisting that the Fed operate within, not above, the constitutional framework, Bessent is reasserting a principle that has eroded: Economic power must remain accountable. It is a subtle but critical component of restoring coherence between monetary authority and elected economic leadership.

To understand his significance, however, is to see the broader architecture now taking shape. This is not a collection of policies. It is a doctrine, one that reflects both intellectual lineage and political mandate.

At its core is a modernized American system, domestic production, strategic protection, and national development. Layered onto it is a Monroe Doctrine-style approach to economic security, treating the Western Hemisphere as a strategic sphere.

But what distinguishes this strategy is not its articulation but its execution — the translation of President Trump’s strategic instincts into coordinated economic statecraft.

In late 2025, largely under the radar, pressure on Iran’s financial system intensified and key elements of its banking sector began to fail. It generated few headlines, but the signal was unmistakable — a targeted disruption of financial plumbing rather than a blunt sanctions regime.

This is economic statecraft executed with precision — identifying pressure points, applying force selectively, and achieving strategic effect without spectacle. It reflects Bessent’s background in markets, where understanding fragility is everything, and his role in implementing a broader geopolitical-economic strategy set at the presidential level.

RELATED: No more free ride for federal grant hogs

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Within this framework, Bessent is the intellectual anchor and operational executor, aligning fiscal policy, capital markets, and economic structure with national purpose as defined by the administration.

What this represents is a break from the postwar consensus. The Pax Americana was a historic achievement, but over time it evolved into a system that often detached American policy from American strength.

What Bessent is executing is a re-centering, not only of economics, but of strategy.

Just as Hamilton anchored the early United States away from dependence on the British Empire and toward internally generated strength, Bessent is anchoring the modern economy back toward its domestic foundations, while executing a presidential mandate to rebuild American economic sovereignty in a more fragmented world.

But the defining parallel is not philosophical. It is practical. Hamilton did not simply write or speak. He executed, building institutions, implementing policy, and translating theory into durable structure in real time. Bessent is doing the same, not in isolation, but as the principal architect and executor of a broader economic vision set from the top by President Trump.

That is what makes him consequential. Not the speeches, though they matter. Not the framework, though it is clear. But the execution, policy applied in real time, reshaping the trajectory of the American economy.

That is the Hamilton standard. And by that standard, Bessent is the first secretary of the treasury to meet it.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

​Scott bessent, Ecnomy, Economics, American economy, Trump, Alexander hamilton, Markets, Globalization, Domestic products, Federal reserve, Opinion & analysis 

On June 17, Mass NOW in partnership with the MA Trans Political Coalition will put on its third annual “Trans Period Pride” — a “consciousness-raising” event featuring a group discussion on “menstrual equity” and “the experiences of trans menstruators,” a catered dinner, and free period underwear for attendees.

But this isn’t some privately funded event. Democrat Mayor Michelle Wu’s Office of LGBTQ+ Advancement — which receives nearly $1 million annually from the city budget — is officially co-sponsoring the event.

In other words, Boston taxpayers are being forced to bankroll this event while the city faces a nearly $50 million budget deficit.

When BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey saw the advertisement for this Trans Period Pride event, she admits she had to do “a double take.”

Allie says she’s unsure who exactly this event is even catering to.

“[Are we] talking about women who identify as men, still have their uterus and their eggs, and so they’re having periods? … Or are we talking about the men that I’ve seen on social media who claim because of the synthetic hormones that they’re taking to try to look more like women that they have some kind of menstrual cycle, even though you don’t have a uterus or eggs or any ability to menstruate?” she asks, speculating that the attendees will likely be “a mixed bag” of confused individuals.

She calls the entire debacle “funny, but it’s sad.”

But “Trans Period Pride” isn’t the only absurdity Boston taxpayers are being forced to fund.

In April, Mayor Wu’s Office for Immigrant Advancement partnered with the nonprofit OUTnewcomers on the “Belonging Matters” program, which aimed to provide $250-$500 “wellness allowance” vouchers to low-income LGBTQ+ migrants for non-clinical services such as yoga, meditation, massages, hair salon visits, gym memberships, and creative healing. The public backlash was so intense that the program was paused within days of launching.

“The city faces a budget deficit of nearly $50 million, but sorry, the transgender people need their period underwear. The queer asylum-seekers need their yoga classes, okay?” Allie quips.

To hear her full 2026 Pride Month breakdown, watch the episode above.

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