Students head back to classrooms this month. Many will arrive already convinced their future is hopeless.

In a Lancet Planetary Health study of 10,000 young people across 10 countries, 75% said the future is frightening and 56% said they believe humanity is doomed.

We are graduating energy-illiterate students at precisely the moment the country has to build.

A 2025 PNAS study found one in five Americans ages 16 to 24 is afraid to have children because of the climate. That gloom has deepened over time. In Yale’s long-running survey, the share of Americans 18 to 34 who say global warming is already harming this country rose from 40% in 2012 to 64% in 2022.

What’s causing such a dramatic shift? It could be what’s missing in the classroom.

Teenagers name teachers as their leading source on climate and energy. Seventy-one percent say they learned “a lot” or “some” from a teacher, ahead of parents at 67% and social media at 63%. Yet the median high school science teacher spends one or two hours a year on the subject, and three-quarters of teachers say they have never been trained to teach it.

The teaching gap shows. Nearly three-quarters of teens believe ocean plastic is a major contributor to climate change. Energy illiteracy is even worse: Fewer than a third of high schoolers can name the three sources that generate most American electricity. Energy literacy scores among high school seniors fell between 2017 and 2022.

What fills the gap is the phone. Researchers at the University at Buffalo, writing last fall in Climatic Change, found that heavier social media use correlates with what they call “climate doom,” the belief that warming will collapse social and economic order. When other researchers examined 100 climate videos on TikTok, only eight cited a reputable source.

A video feed full of ignorance and despair doesn’t make a good curriculum.

The consequences are economic as well as emotional. After 15 flat years, American electricity demand is climbing again, roughly 2% annually since 2020. Data centers are on pace to double their share of peak demand inside two years. We are graduating energy-illiterate students at precisely the moment the country has to build.

For a teenager trying to figure out what to do with his life, that ignorance could be costly. We hear a lot these days about how artificial intelligence is closing the on-ramps into white-collar work.

The head of one leading AI lab has warned that the technology could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, concentrated in the fields that used to hire new graduates.

RELATED: China is building power. America is still debating it.

Yuan Hongyan/VCG/Getty Images

But that’s not the whole story. Electricians are growing at three times the rate of the average occupation, with roughly 73,500 openings a year. Nuclear technicians earn a median above $104,000, often without a four-year degree. Applied trades have added 2.5 million jobs since 2019, and the average utility worker is past 50 and nearing retirement.

Students need to know the full picture. That goes for job prospects as well as the climate. Natural gas displacing coal drove the largest share of the decline in American power-sector emissions, according to the Energy Information Administration. Technology companies have committed more than $50 billion to nuclear power, more than in any previous decade. Three Mile Island restarts next year. Most new reactors arrive in the 2030s.

For a 16-year-old who wants to work in the nuclear industry, that timeline sounds like job security.

Kids deserve to know that their futures are far from hopeless. A little bit of energy education could work like an SSRI for doomsday depression.

Some groups are trying to fill the energy education gap. Generation Atomic runs a nuclear science program for grades 6 through 12. The American Conservation Coalition organizes young people around nuclear power and permitting reform. And Blue Energy Nation’s BENERGY course launches nationally this fall. It features six modules built for homeschool families but is easily folded into any science, civics, or economics class.

Students shouldn’t be left to form a worldview based on TikTok videos. We should teach them where energy comes from, how it impacts their futures, and what it will need from them. Fear is a lousy career counselor. A generation convinced the future is already finished will not build the grid that future requires.

This article was originally published by RealClearEducation and made available via RealClearWire.

​Artificial intelligence, Energy, Natural gas, Social media, Students, Climate change, Technology, Opinion & analysis 

Jonathan Goodman’s mnemonic words were written down and stored in safes and safety-deposit boxes. The device that generated them had never touched the internet. The cable was never plugged in, the QR code never scanned by anything connected to the wider world. Every visible precaution was observed with great care. Then, on the evening of July 29, 2026, the Canadian investor watched 18.25 Bitcoin leave his wallet over seven minutes. The sum was worth roughly 1.6 million Canadian dollars. He thought he had done everything right, but the money was now gone.

Goodman, like others, had put his trust in Coldcard, a hardware wallet for cryptocurrency. The natural instinct, when confronted with a theft like the Coldcard hack that hit him and many others, is to look for the intrusion: the broken window, the intercepted message, the insider. The Coldcard incident offered no such satisfaction. The secret was never stolen in transit; it was simply never secret enough.

What remains is not the absence of trust but its redistribution.

A hardware wallet is a small device that generates and guards the cryptographic keys controlling a Bitcoin balance. The device does not hold the coins. The coins exist as entries on a distributed ledger maintained by thousands of computers. What the device holds is the authority to move them, encoded as a string of words derived from a number that is supposed to be random. The entire architecture of private ownership rests on the proposition that the number your device chose when you pressed the button could not have been predicted by anyone else on earth. However, the Coldcard’s number could be.

A tale of self-deception

In 2021, Coinkite, the Toronto company that manufactures the Coldcard, migrated its cryptographic library. The migration was routine, and the new library was reputable. However, during integration, a function call that was supposed to reach the device’s hardware random-number generator instead resolved to a software fallback, a deterministic pseudorandom-number generator built into MicroPython. A hardware generator harvests physical noise, the kind of irreducible unpredictability that makes a secret genuinely singular. A software fallback produces numbers that look disordered but are fully determined by their inputs. Feed it the same inputs and it will produce the same outputs, every time, on every machine. The function returned bytes of the correct length in the expected format. The mnemonic phrase looked random, but it was not.

On older Coldcard models, the effective search space collapsed to roughly 40 bits, meaning an attacker had to consider about a trillion candidates rather than the intended hundreds of trillions. On newer devices, secure-element entropy raised the figure, but independent analysis found that only 32 bits of genuinely secret material survived in a critical reseeding operation. A trillion sounds like a large number, but it is not when the adversary has rented a cluster of GPUs and the public blockchain serves as a free answer key against which every guess can be checked in milliseconds.

The thefts were automated. On July 30, roughly 1,083 Bitcoin moved from 1,196 addresses in 41 minutes. Subsequent waves targeted thousands more. By early August, estimates ranged from 1,596 to over 2,000 Bitcoin drained across thousands of addresses, a sum approaching $130 million. The attackers did not need to know who owned the wallets or where the devices were stored. They needed only to regenerate the small universe of secrets those devices could ever have produced, derive the corresponding addresses, compare them against the blockchain, and sign. The protocol saw valid signatures, which is the only authority it recognizes.

RELATED: A shocking storage exploit bankrupts Bitcoiners — with lessons for us all

Velishchuk/Getty Images

The Coldcard had occupied a particular niche in Bitcoin’s self-image. It was the serious person’s wallet, the one recommended on the forums and podcasts that prized operational security, air-gapped signing, open-source firmware, and a philosophy of radical self-reliance. Its marketing vocabulary was a compressed manifesto: sovereignty, verification, trust minimization. Two weeks before the mass thefts, Coinkite published an essay arguing that offline status alone was insufficient and that real security required architectural separation, trusted displays, secure elements, and reproducible builds. The essay ironically enumerated the locks on the doors in a house whose foundation was already fissured.

Hidden is not secure

Bitcoin was designed to eliminate the need to trust institutions. You do not need to trust a bank to honor its ledger because the ledger is maintained by mathematics and distributed consensus. However, the self-custodying individual must trust or personally verify the firmware on the device, the compiler that built the firmware, the library the compiler linked, the symbol the linker resolved, the entropy source the symbol reached, the chip that generated the noise, the build system that packaged the result, the reviewers who examined the code, and the update channel that delivered the fix. One is trusting an entire institutional apparatus compressed into a plastic rectangle the size of a playing card.

“Do not trust; verify” is the community’s canonical imperative, but verification requires a division of labor. The user verifies an address on a screen. An auditor inspects the firmware. A reproducible-build operator compares binaries. A laboratory assesses an entropy source. No single person does all of these things, and almost no one does more than the first. What remains is not the absence of trust but its redistribution, away from a chartered institution with a complaints department and toward a dispersed, informal, largely volunteer apparatus of maintainers, reviewers, and forum participants whose oversight, in this case, missed a five-year-old defect in the most consequential function the device performs.

Jonathan Goodman’s safe was not breached. His backup was not photographed. His mnemonic words were not intercepted. The words themselves were simply a member of a knowable set, a predictable output dressed in the costume of randomness. The distinction between concealment and unpredictability turned out to be critical. While the Coldcard was offline, the institution that made the key never was.

​Tech, Hacking, Savings, Security, Bitcoin 

The Muslim Brotherhood’s influence in America may be far more deeply embedded than most Americans realize according to former CIA targeter Sarah Adams.

Adams tells Christopher Rufo and Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman on “Rufo & Lomez” that the organization has spent decades building relationships and political power from the ground up, financially supporting candidates while embedding itself in universities, religious organizations, chambers of commerce, and local civic groups.

“They back a lot of the political candidates financially as we know. They pump a ton of money into our universities, but they also are very much like the Chinese, and nobody’s really honest about that,” Adams explains.

“They start at the local level,” she continues, “They get involved in community organizations and chambers of commerce, you know, religious organizations, volunteer organizations.”

“So they’re more integrated than I think most people realize,” she adds.

Lomez points out that there are even reports that Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is funded by the Muslim Brotherhood.

“Admittedly these are just headlines, that you know, he may be funded by Muslim Brotherhood,” he says. “This comes as a surprise to me, but it sounds like you’re saying, ‘No, this is something to be expected.’”

While expected, Adams notes that it is “complicated.”

“When it comes to the U.S., though, it’s so complicated because when we say ‘Muslim Brotherhood,’ you’re not going to drive down the street and have a building and it says ‘The Muslim Brotherhood.’ It’s going to be called something like, I don’t know, the Saudi American Friendship Society, right?” she explains.

“And so that’s where it’s complicated because people at the local level don’t even know that they’re interacting,” she says, noting that even local candidates and activists have no idea.

“That awareness does not exist at all in the United States,” she adds.

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.

​Christopher rufo, Cia targeter, Jonathan keeperman, Muslim brotherhood, Sarah adams, Blazetv show, Abdul el-sayed 

Bill Gates spent the 1990s acting like a corporate warlord, threatening any rival startup that dared to exist in the same ecosystem. Then, after nearly being torn apart by antitrust lawsuits, he hired a massive PR team to rebrand himself as the world’s kindly, sweater-wearing grandfather who just wants to eradicate disease.

It was a shameless makeover, and many on the left eagerly bought in to it. Then came the stories about cozy dinners with Jeffrey Epstein long after his conviction for sex offenses. When asked about it, Gates gave answers so limp and evasive that they barely qualified as English.

Gates is innocent until proven guilty, but the evidence raises serious questions.

Now we turn to his daughter, Phoebe Gates. When it comes to deceptive tactics, the apple doesn’t appear to fall far from the tree.

The scandal at her shopping platform, Phia, is far from an isolated accident.

Phia is under scrutiny due to evidence suggesting that the platform allegedly utilized an illegal digital trick called cookie stuffing that sent top tech executives to federal prison over a decade ago. In a previous landmark federal fraud case involving deceptive tactics, eBay’s most lucrative marketing partners, Shawn Hogan and Brian Dunning, were convicted of federal wire fraud and landed behind bars after stealing over $33 million by secretly dropping tracking cookies onto millions of unsuspecting web users. Hogan alone pocketed tens of millions before federal prosecutors and the FBI dismantled the operation.

Phoebe Gates may ultimately face the exact same fate if found guilty in a court of law.

If misdeeds are proven, they may stand as the latest high-profile iteration of a multibillion-dollar digital scam that has preyed upon internet commerce for decades. Cookie stuffing involves sneaky companies secretly planting hidden tracking codes on your web browser to claim undeserved cash. Instead of creating tools that genuinely help consumers save money, these immoral operators hijack web traffic, diverting sales commissions from honest creators and straight into their own corporate bank accounts.

Understanding why this practice is so damaging and diabolical requires going a little deeper.

Stepping on the little guy

Niche bloggers, independent reviewers, and digital workers spend countless hours testing products, writing detailed advice, and guiding consumers to reliable goods. Yes, some are downright deceptive, but my focus here is on the decent ones.

When a reader clicks a link on a small creator’s site and buys a product, that creator earns a modest commission. Digital tracking hijacking destroys that fair, free-market exchange. Software can secretly inject a tracking code into the customer’s browser at checkout, as Phia is alleged to have done, overwriting the original creator’s referral tag and snatching the payout. It functions as an invisible pickpocket standing at the store register, snatching commission payments right out of the hands of hardworking men and women.

The economic damage hits everyday consumers in their wallets. Major retail brands include affiliate commissions in their operating overhead costs. When millions of dollars are skimmed from the retail pipeline by parasitic browser extensions, store profit margins shrink. This forces companies to raise retail prices across the board to offset the losses. Think of a massive siphon system built to extract wealth from independent workers and concentrate it inside the portfolios of Silicon Valley’s privileged class.

That’s hardly a fair marketplace.

RELATED: Mark Zuckerberg: No superintelligence, no liberal democracy

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call Inc./Getty Images

When it comes to Phia, which did not respond to a request for comment, what renders the scenario even more disturbing is evidence that alleges to show there was early corporate awareness. According to a recent Bloomberg report, internal Slack messages seem to show that Phia’s leadership knew for months that its browser tool could claim commissions on sales it had not actually generated. This allowed Phia’s tracking code to attach itself to customer transactions after those shoppers had already been directed to merchant sites by outside sources.

The internal Slack records deal a blow to any hopes of a preemptive public defense strategy. They suggest this wasn’t a minor technical glitch discovered after launch, but a mechanism executives were discussing while aware of its effect on commission payouts.

Working the system

Unfortunately, the alleged strategy mirrors Gates’ formal academic training at Stanford University. While enrolled on campus, she gained entry into “So You Think You Can Rule the World?” an exclusive, invitation-only seminar. According to investigative reports by the Stanford Daily, a select group of students met behind closed doors each week to analyze power structures. They studied institutional influence and how to work the system, lessons Ms. Gates could have learned from her father for free. The course focused on teaching students how to “hack” bureaucracies and navigate them to their own advantage. And people say elite universities don’t teach anything useful.

The contrast between classroom theory and real-world execution would be amusing if the stakes weren’t so serious. On one side was an academic course focused on understanding how power moves through institutions and how to manipulate them to get ahead. On the other side sit corporate chat logs that seem to capture Phia operators exploiting digital retail systems to claim revenue for sales the software never earned. This sort of privilege, merged with absolute arrogance, creates a predatory threat to ordinary Americans. Federal prosecutors must apply the law without bias and ensure that tech royalty faces the exact same justice system as everyone else.

Gates is innocent until proven guilty, but the evidence described above raises serious questions that are difficult to dismiss. If prosecutors ultimately establish knowing participation, real prison time is a serious possibility.

​Technology, Tech 

The Navy has been through a lot over the past several months.

Ships have stayed at sea longer than planned. Sailors have missed more time with their families. Aircraft have flown hard. Weapons have been fired in numbers we have not seen in decades. Maintenance has been pushed to the right because the mission came first.

We cannot keep shrinking the number of ships while expanding the number of missions and pretend the math will somehow work.

Now the bills are going to start coming due.

Ships will return needing repairs. Aircraft will need maintenance. Magazines will need to be refilled. Sailors will need time at home. Families that have carried an enormous burden will want some normalcy back. All of that is understandable. But what happens next will tell us a lot about the future of the United States Navy.

We can spend the next few years talking about how hard the Iran fight was, how tired the force is, and how much everything costs. We can lower expectations, reduce deployments, accept fewer ships at sea, and convince ourselves that this is simply the new reality.

Or we can decide to get better.

That may sound overly simple, but it isn’t. This is the choice facing this generation of Navy leaders, Pentagon officials, members of Congress, and the defense industrial base. Iran did not create the Navy’s problems. It exposed them.

Listen to sailors and learn the right lesson

The extended deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln has become the most visible example of the strain on the force. Sailors and families have expressed frustration about deployment length, uncertainty, limited port calls, and conditions aboard the ship.

When we ask young Americans to spend month after month away from their spouses and children, they have earned the right to tell us when things are not working. Navy leaders should pay attention to quality of life, communications, food, sleep, medical care, and the information families receive back home.

But we should be careful about the conclusion we draw from their frustration. The lesson cannot simply be that deployments should never run long again. Wars don’t care about deployment schedules.

America’s national security commitments don’t disappear because a carrier strike group has been gone for eight or nine months.

Sometimes the mission requires more.

The real lesson is that America needs enough Navy that asking more of our sailors during a crisis does not become the only option available. That means more ships, more aircraft, more weapons, more logistics capacity, and more people.

It also means accepting something we sometimes became uncomfortable saying during the long years of peacetime operations: Serving in the military is supposed to be hard.

We should take care of sailors and their families. We should fix unnecessary problems and hold leaders accountable for poor decisions. But we also need a Navy that expects its people to be tough enough to fight and win a war.

RELATED: China is building power. America is still debating it.

Yuan Hongyan/VCG/Getty Images

The maintenance bill is coming

The bigger problem may be what happens when these ships finally come home.

Engines accumulate hours. Aircraft fly more sorties. Radars and combat systems operate continuously. Parts wear out. Repairs that might normally happen during a deployment get delayed because the ship is needed on station.

Eventually all of that work has to be done. And the Navy was already struggling with maintenance before the war. Public shipyards are overloaded. Private repair yards are stretched. Submarine maintenance has been a problem for years. Surface ships routinely spend longer in maintenance than planned.

Now we are going to add ships returning from combat operations. We should not act surprised when the backlog grows. The question is whether we do something about it.

That means putting real money into ship repair capacity. It means expanding public and private yards. It means training more welders, electricians, pipe fitters, and other skilled workers. It means using predictive maintenance and better data, so we know what is going to fail before it fails.

And it means getting serious about spare parts.

None of this is glamorous. There are no ribbon cuttings for having the right pump sitting on a warehouse shelf. But wars are often won by the side that can keep equipment operating.

Refill the magazines

Iran also reminded us that modern warfare burns through weapons quickly.

Missiles that take years to develop and months or years to produce can disappear from a ship’s magazine in minutes.

That should scare us, not because the Navy performed poorly — it performed extremely well — but because Iran is not China.

Imagine the weapons requirements of a sustained fight across thousands of miles of the Pacific against an adversary with a large navy, advanced aircraft, submarines, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and enormous industrial capacity.

The math gets uncomfortable quickly.

We should treat every weapon fired during the Iran conflict as a data point.

How quickly can we replace it?

If the answer is measured in years, we have a problem.

This is where the Pentagon and Congress need to stop treating munitions like boutique acquisition programs. We need production lines that can surge. We need long-term contracts that give manufacturers confidence to invest. We need second sources for critical components.

And we need deeper magazines.

You cannot surge missile production after the shooting starts.

Don’t become the Royal Navy

There is a historical warning here.

The British Royal Navy did not wake up one morning and suddenly stop being the world’s dominant navy.

The decline happened slowly.

Britain still had excellent ships. It still had talented sailors. It still had proud traditions. What it gradually lost was mass. The commitments remained large while the fleet became smaller. That should sound familiar.

America expects its Navy to deter China, operate in Europe, protect shipping in the Middle East, defend the homeland, reassure allies, and respond whenever something goes wrong anywhere in the world.

We cannot keep shrinking the number of ships while expanding the number of missions and pretend the math will somehow work. Eventually something gives. Iran gave us a warning. We should take it.

RELATED: How to renew American scientific research

BSIP/UIG/Getty Images

Get better

There will be a temptation after this conflict to focus almost entirely on recovery. The Navy absolutely needs to recover. But recovery cannot become retreat. This needs to be a period of brutal institutional learning.

What broke? What ran out? What took too long to repair? Which supply chains failed?

Capture those lessons and move out — don’t spend five years studying them.

Some fixes will require money. Others will require leadership. Many will require getting rid of processes and assumptions that made sense during peacetime but make no sense after experiencing sustained combat.

This should change how the Navy trains, buys weapons, maintains ships, designs the fleet, and supports families.

Most importantly, it should change the Navy’s mindset.

The service should come out of this tougher than it went in.

The choice

Every generation gets a few moments when the direction of an institution can change.

This is one of them.

Iran showed what sustained combat does to a Navy. A war with a peer competitor would ask far more. So we have a choice — slump our shoulders and talk about how difficult this is and how far behind we feel.

Or we can stop talking, learn from the last couple of years, and get better.

Fix the ships. Refill the magazines. Expand the yards.

Take care of Navy families. Demand better leadership. And expect toughness from the force.

The United States Navy is still the most capable navy in the world. The question is whether we intend to keep it that way.

Iran should not be remembered as the fight that wore down the U.S. Navy. It should be remembered as the fight that woke it up.

This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.

​Aircraft, Congress, Iran war, Pentagon, U.s. navy, Modern warfare, China, Supply chains, Maintenance, Leadership, Opinion & analysis 

Hollywood has spent years peppering films and shows with transgender cast members, but Lilly Wachowski — who identifies as transgender — isn’t reaping the benefits.

“The Matrix” co-creator, formerly known as Andy Wachowski, is now struggling to find financing for “The Hunted,” a $10 million dystopian political thriller featuring an entirely transgender cast.

“Well, if you’re excited for a brand-new all-trans movie, I’ve got terrible news for you,” BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere jokes.

“Of course, these are the Wachowski brothers who made ‘The Matrix’ movies and now they’re called, in the article, the Wachowski sisters,” he explains.

“It is ironic that the guys who made ‘The Matrix’ got their lives destroyed because of the computer. It’s really an interesting thing,” co-host Dave Landau says. “Also, the trans thing is the reason why they can’t get financing, I think.”

“So the fact that they want to do the entire cast of that is a bit strange to me,” he adds.

Dave, who’s a twin himself, points out that it’s also strange that they both became women “at the same time.”

“It feels a little forced. I’m not going to lie. A little forced,” he says.

While the all-trans cast element of the film might rub conservatives the wrong way, Stu doesn’t believe that’s why Wachowski can’t get funding.

“I don’t know what their funding levels are looking like. If they’re looking to make a $200 million ‘Matrix’-style extravaganza, probably not going to get that funded,” Stu says.

“I think the real reason why they can’t get funding for the Wachowski brothers from ‘The Matrix’ franchise is because of at least the third and fourth ‘Matrix.’ Like both of them were absolutely horrible,” he continues.

“First one’s a masterpiece. I don’t know what happened,” he adds.

Want more from Stu and Dave?

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​Dave landau, Hollywood, Lilly wachowski, Matrix movies, Stu burguiere, The hunted, Wachowski brothers, Dystopian, Transgender, Blazetv show