Liberals increasingly treat politics as religion. They may have abandoned traditional faith, but they have not abandoned devotion. They possess saints, heretics, rituals, taboos, pilgrimages, and a vision of salvation. That political faith has given progressives the commitment required to capture institutions, build machines, and shape the future.

Conservatives often respond with mockery.

The people you mock are organizing the world your grandchildren will inherit. Build something capable of stopping them.

We’ve all laughed at the childless, blue-haired activists lauding socialism behind their COVID masks. We point at and mock the unemployed polycule, the emotional instability, the theatrical rage, and the childish demands to abolish police, erase borders, and destroy capitalism.

The mockery is usually deserved. The dismissal is not.

Those ridiculous people keep showing up. They organize. They make art. They join committees. They staff bureaucracies. They run nonprofits. They enter classrooms. They write rules. They decide what your children learn, what your employees may say, and what your business must obey.

The joke is on conservatives who laugh while losing.

Conservatives build businesses, raise families, and grow churches. These are real achievements. They are more honorable than spending one’s life screaming slogans outside a courthouse or enforcing ideology from a human resources department.

But honorable work can become an excuse for political and cultural surrender.

Many conservatives tell themselves that activism is merely a symptom of liberal dysfunction. They imagine their own reluctance to organize proves superior health. Politics has become religion for the left, they say, while conservatives seek salvation elsewhere.

All true. None of it excuses the shocking lack of action.

Alexis de Tocqueville identified the American habit that once prevented private life from collapsing into selfish isolation. In “Democracy in America,” he praised Americans for their nearly compulsive desire to form associations.

RELATED: America’s newest jail has no walls

Blaze Media Illustration

They founded churches, schools, hospitals, libraries, fraternities, unions, charities, and local organizations with their own money and labor. These institutions created a dense web of civic life. They restrained individualism, solved local problems, and reduced the need for distant government.

Americans did not retreat from public life because they had families and businesses. They entered public life through their families, businesses, churches, lodges, and communities. That habit has largely fallen by the wayside.

Just a few decades ago, the average right-leaning businessman might also belong to the Elks Lodge, the American Legion, the Rotary Club, or a local church committee. These associations provided mutual aid, mentored young men, supported local institutions, and connected families across generations.

They were also political and cultural centers.

Men decided there to support a friend for city council. Couples organized fundraisers for the orchestra, hospital, or school. Veterans discussed local problems over beer. Business owners pooled money and influence. Neighbors formed habits of trust before a crisis demanded them.

Almost every great political and cultural movement began with passionate, like-minded people bonding over a drink.

The left’s version is uglier because the left is uglier. Progressive organizations often produce coercion, resentment, and ideological fanaticism. Conservatives are right to reject their ends.

But rejecting progressive ends does not justify abandoning organization itself.

If left-wing activists are so absurd, why do they keep winning? Why do they control education, entertainment, philanthropy, corporate bureaucracies, and much of government?

They win because they show up.

Conservative mockery has become a coping mechanism. It allows the right to transform defeat into evidence of superiority. The progressive may control the school board, but at least the conservative has a successful landscaping company and grills excellent barbecue.

The man with the barbecue may be happier and saner. The school board still controls his children’s curriculum.

RELATED: Conservatives can’t barbecue their way through national collapse

Blaze Media Illustration

Birth rates provide another excuse.

Conservatives correctly note that they are having more children than liberals. They assume demography will eventually deliver political victory. But children do not inherit politics like eye color.

Two obstacles destroy the fantasy of automatic triumph.

First, Democrats import loyal new voters faster than Republicans can raise children, and many immigrant populations have higher birth rates than native-born conservatives.

Second, the left controls the institutions that shape those children. Schools, universities, entertainment, music, social media, and corporate culture bombard young people with progressive assumptions all day.

A weekly church service and a few family dinners cannot compete with 16 hours of ideological formation unless parents build stronger institutions around their children.

Conservatives can fill houses with children and still lose every one of them politically.

I know stalwart conservative parents with five children who all became progressives. Their parents provided food, shelter, discipline, and love. The culture supplied the worldview.

Having children is not a political strategy. Raising them inside a durable culture is.

The same principle applies to business. Building a successful dealership, construction company, or restaurant is admirable. Building a fourth company while ignoring the city council, school board, local arts institutions, and state legislature is strategic negligence.

Politics will eventually enter the business whether the owner enters politics or not.

The left understands this. It does not separate cultural production, political organization, and economic power. It coordinates them.

Conservatives must recover the same seriousness without adopting the left’s fanaticism.

That means forming associations, funding artists, supporting schools, mentoring young people, running for local office, attending meetings, building media, and creating networks that survive one election cycle.

Not everyone must become a full-time activist. Everyone with something to conserve must contribute to the work of conservation. The task is difficult, time-consuming, and often thankless. It will interfere with leisure. It may cost money that could have purchased another boat, vacation, or business expansion.

Progressives understand that power shapes the conditions under which private life unfolds. Conservatives keep hoping private success will somehow neutralize public defeat. It will not.

The people you mock are organizing the world your grandchildren will inherit. Build something capable of stopping them.

​Faith, Government, Politics, Religion, Activism, Institutions, Democrats, Opinion & analysis 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) is entertaining the possibility of cash reparations for slavery, calling the city “very complicit” in the institution that was outlawed in the state nearly 200 years ago.

During a sit-down discussion with the Root released Tuesday, journalist Charles Blow questioned Mamdani, a democratic socialist, about the city’s reparations efforts, including the work of NYC CORE, the Commission on Racial Equity, which was established by local law in 2024 to study reparations in the city and develop a “truth, healing, and reconciliation process.”

‘This is also what it looks like to acknowledge what history truly was.’

Blow asked Mamdani about a written statement about reparations the mayor submitted while running for mayor. The statement read in part, “New York City participated actively in the slave trade and furthered its legacy through racist institutions, policies, and laws. The city should reconcile and repair this legacy of slavery, stolen wealth, and discrimination.”

Further noting that Mamdani had said he was proud to support the new reparations commission examining Wall Street’s complicity in the slave trade, Blow then asked, “If a commission studying reparations in this city recommended cash reparations for people impacted in New York City, would you support that recommendation?”

“First, I want to say that I stand by what I submitted,” Mamdani responded.

“Here in New York City, we were very complicit.”

The mayor continued, “I can’t give you an answer in advance of them, but I can tell you that this is critically important because this is also what it looks like to acknowledge what history truly was.”

For reference, New York state fully emancipated all enslaved persons within its borders on July 4, 1827, making it the first state in the country to pass a law for the total abolition of slavery.

NYC CORE is expected to release its final report on reparations in July 2027. The commission’s website states that its work will “offer New Yorkers ways to address the history of enslaved African labor in NYC and the killing of indigenous people, with the testimony of current and past harms suffered by communities due to racism.”

RELATED: Immigrant business owners revolt against Mamdani’s ‘Soviet’-style grocery plan

Linda Tigani, the chair and executive director of NYC CORE, told Fox News Digital in a statement, “We would like to thank the mayor for using his platform to acknowledge New York City’s complicit history in chattel slavery. New York was home to the second-largest slaveholding population in America, after Charleston, South Carolina. The first commodities traded on Wall Street included the buying and selling of enslaved black people, and their brutal forced unpaid labor built one of the most powerful economic engines in the world.”

“We must repay the longstanding debt owed and truly tackle the racial wealth gap in New York City, which is directly correlated to the stain of slavery in New York City,” the statement continued.

However, if New York City decides to move forward with a reparations program, the federal government could stand in its way.

This year, the Department of Justice has attempted to block a Chicago suburb’s local housing reparations program designed for black residents who suffered from housing discrimination between 1919 and 1969 — a first of its kind. The DOJ argues that the program violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and the Fair Housing Act.

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​New york city, Racial equity, Politics, Zohran mamdani, Reparations, Slavery 

Last night my Ford Bronco installed an automatic software update. By the next morning, it had quietly opted me into sharing additional driving data without asking my permission.

Fortunately, I caught the change before heading out and turned it back off. But instead of simply being annoyed by another software update, I found myself asking some much bigger questions: Why does Ford need more information about how I drive? Who benefits from collecting it? And why can a vehicle I already own change my privacy settings without my approval?

Manufacturers can collect your vehicle’s data, transmit it wirelessly, analyze it, and in many cases monetize it.

That update made me realize I’d been covering the same story under different headlines. Right to repair. Connected vehicles. Insurance companies buying driving data. Automatic license plate readers. Government mandates. Each seemed like a separate issue. They’re not. They’re all built on the same foundation: collecting more information about drivers while giving consumers less control over what happens to that information.

Hub cap

Every connected vehicle contains what’s known as a telematics control unit. Most drivers have never heard of it, yet it’s one of the most important pieces of technology in their vehicle. It’s the communications hub that connects your car to apps, manufacturers, dealerships, and cloud services. It also records an enormous amount of information about both the vehicle and the person behind the wheel.

Automakers describe these systems as improving convenience, diagnostics, and customer service. That’s certainly part of the story. But we’ve already seen the other side. General Motors was sued after driving information collected through OnStar was shared with data brokers and ultimately sold to insurance companies, raising serious questions about consumer consent.

Now connect that to the right to repair. Supporters believed the REPAIR Act would finally guarantee consumers and independent repair shops access to the data modern vehicles generate. Instead, the House committee stripped the telematics language before advancing the bill.

Manufacturers can collect your vehicle’s data, transmit it wirelessly, analyze it, and in many cases monetize it. Yet when lawmakers had the opportunity to guarantee vehicle owners access to that same connected data, those protections disappeared. If the information belongs to the companies that build the vehicle — but not to the person who bought it — we should all be asking why.

Cabin fever

Then I started looking at what automakers are developing behind the scenes.

Ford has published patents describing biometric systems capable of reading lips, scanning irises, monitoring heart rate, tracking facial expressions, and using interior cameras to identify occupants. Some filings even describe comparing biometric information with external databases.

Patents don’t guarantee products. Companies patent ideas that never reach production. But patents reveal where research dollars are flowing and what companies believe future regulators or markets may eventually demand. Ford isn’t alone. Nearly every major automaker is pursuing similar technologies.

RELATED: TATTLETALE EXPRESS: School buses may soon become America’s largest mobile surveillance network

VIEW Press/Getty Images

Kill switch

Then there are the laws most Americans never hear about until after they’ve passed.

Illinois recently approved an Intelligent Speed Assistance Program requiring certain repeat speeding offenders to install electronic monitoring devices at their own expense. Drivers would pay roughly $30 per month for three years. Owners of older vehicles that cannot support the required technology could lose their driving privileges because their cars cannot comply.

At the federal level, Section 24220 of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act directs the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to establish standards for advanced impaired-driving prevention technology in future passenger vehicles. Regulators have acknowledged the technology is not yet reliable enough for widespread deployment, but Congress has already set the process in motion, with implementation deadlines approaching.

Birds of a feather …

Outside the vehicle, automated license plate reader networks continue expanding. Flock Safety may be the name most people recognize, but it’s no longer just Flock. Axon and other companies are building similar systems. Each program has its own justification — reducing crime, improving traffic safety, lowering insurance costs, or diagnosing vehicle problems — but they all rely on the same ingredients: more cameras, more connected technology, and more data about ordinary drivers.

That’s why the Bronco update bothered me. It wasn’t one software update. It was the realization that every one of these debates — right to repair, telematics, biometric patents, surveillance cameras, insurance data, and connected vehicle mandates — depends on the same infrastructure: vehicles that continuously gather information about their owners.

Once that infrastructure exists, the debate changes. It is no longer about whether the data can be collected. It becomes about who controls it, who profits from it, and how it may be used in the future.

Every one of these policies can be defended on its own merits. Safer roads are a worthy goal. Better diagnostics benefit consumers. Catching criminals matters. But when nearly every solution depends on more monitoring, more connectivity, and more information flowing away from the driver, it’s time to stop treating these as unrelated stories.

My Bronco didn’t create this trend. It simply made it impossible for me to ignore it.

The question is no longer whether modern vehicles collect more information than ever before. They do.

The question is who ultimately controls that information — and whether drivers are slowly losing control over the very vehicles they thought they owned.

​Biometric systems, Electronic monitoring devices, Ford bronco, License plate reader, Right to repair, Surveillance cameras, Telematics control unit, Vehicle data, Privacy settings, Ev mandate, Automotive 

A 23-year-old was arrested for allegedly shooting and killing his mother, whom he accused of abusing him for many years, according to Florida police.

George Beemer called police on Saturday morning complaining of chest pains, according to the Lee County Sheriff’s Office. After he was transported to a hospital, another 911 call reported that the home had caught fire.

‘I was devastated, absolutely devastated, and I can’t even stop thinking about it.’

Firefighters found the badly burned remains of a woman inside the home.

Police said that Beemer’s friend told them he had admitted to killing his mother and lighting the home on fire.

A medical examiner ruled the woman’s cause of death was a gunshot wound and the manner of death a homicide.

In testimony at court, a detective indicated that relatives had reported frequent arguments between the two and that the son would often break furniture in anger.

Beemer allegedly told police that his mother molested him and that he had had enough the day he killed her.

A friend of the mother told WINK-TV there’s no truth to the allegation.

“There’s absolutely no way,” the friend said. “No, no, absolutely never, never, no. I can’t buy it. I will never buy it. He’s using it as a defense mechanism to think that there’s any remote chance that this was justified.”

The friend said her first reaction to the news was to wonder what kind of drugs the son was on that day.

“I was devastated, absolutely devastated, and I can’t even stop thinking about it,” the friend added. “My oldest put me through hell and back, and I can remember sitting and talking with her. No mother deserves that.”

RELATED: Police find Florida mom’s 5-year-old twins dead at their home after she jumps off bridge to her death

Beemer was charged with second-degree murder, first-degree arson, as well as abuse of a dead human body.

He was held without bond, and his arraignment is scheduled for Aug. 24.

Police also said one cat was found alive inside the home, and one cat was found burned to death.

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​Killing, Mother, Shooting, Florida, Murder, Crime 

Data center boosters routinely accuse local opponents of serving China or obstructing progress. In Coweta, Oklahoma, supporters of a proposed hyperscale project appear to have answered authentic opposition with something less democratic: phony support from real residents.

“Dear Vice Mayor Barnett, Project Atlas would generate millions for city services and schools, and all the needed upgrades are paid for by the developer. This seems like reasonable, low-impact growth. Please support this opportunity for Coweta.”

The data center lobby may have money, consultants, and automated emails. Its opponents have something more durable: actual voters and the truth.

The message appeared to come from a known Coweta resident. When the vice mayor contacted the supposed sender, the resident replied that he had not written it and opposed the project. Fox23 News confirmed the account with the victim.

That was not an isolated irregularity. Local farmer and activist Darren Blanchard obtained public records showing nearly 300 substantially identical messages supporting the data center. Many arrived at strange hours and apparently originated through an advocacy website that automatically generated letters to council members.

Automated advocacy tools aren’t new. But using the personal information of real people to send messages in their names without permission is not grassroots politics. It is political identity theft.

“What we suspect as to what was going on is that local citizens’ data — names, address, phone numbers, emails — was purchased, and probably a script was written and likely inputted into this advocacy website,” Blanchard said in an interview on my podcast. “And then nearly 300 people were impersonated within the community of Coweta, asking the city council to approve the data center. It was completely made up.”

The irony is hard to miss. Companies seeking to build facilities that warehouse and process vast quantities of information allegedly used residents’ personal data to impersonate them and manufacture consent.

The most grotesque message allegedly came from a dead man. Blanchard said a council member received an email supporting the project in the name of a deceased relative — on the second anniversary of that relative’s death.

That message persuaded city officials that the matter required the attention of law enforcement. Yet the city has redacted the names attached to the nearly 300 emails, making it harder for residents to learn whether their identities were used. Blanchard says an appeal to the Oklahoma attorney general has gone nowhere.

The proposed 270-acre hyperscale development from San Francisco-based Beale Infrastructure, backed by Blue Owl Capital, was abandoned at the end of March after intense local opposition and scrutiny of the campaign supporting it.

RELATED: Before you say ‘no’ to a data center, here’s what you’re giving up

Sarah Rice/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Coweta is not an isolated case of public resistance. In Box Elder County, Utah, Kevin O’Leary proposed a data center complex projected to consume enormous amounts of electricity and occupy a footprint larger than thousands of Walmart Supercenters. A public-records review by the Salt Lake Tribune found overwhelming opposition in emails to county commissioners. Just seven messages — about 2% — supported the plan.

The voters delivered an even clearer verdict. Last month, two Box Elder County commissioners who backed the project were crushed in their Republican primaries. Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams, who played a prominent role in the state entity that approved the development, also lost.

In Calvert County, Maryland, Republican voters booted all three commissioners who had signed nondisclosure agreements with data center companies and then opposed a proposed moratorium.

These defeats expose the basic political problem facing Big Tech. Opposition to giant data centers is deep, local, and often bipartisan. Residents worry about electricity demand, water use, tax subsidies, land consumption, secrecy, surveillance, and the transfer of private risk to the public.

Those concerns cannot be erased by labeling opponents agents of China or enemies of innovation. Nor can they be overcome honestly by sending hundreds of nearly identical emails in the names of people who never authorized them.

Astroturfing usually tries to make a small constituency look large. The Coweta campaign went further: It manufactured a constituency from stolen identities, including one voice from beyond the grave.

Republican officials need to decide which side they are on. They can stand with citizens demanding transparency and control over their communities, or with globalists and techno-feudalists willing to fabricate public support.

The data center lobby may have money, consultants, and automated emails. Its opponents have something more durable: actual voters and the truth.

​China, Opinion & analysis, Globalists, Data centers, Oklahoma, Big tech, Artificial intelligence, Fraud, Darren blanchard, Astroturf, Grassroots 

Democrat Senate candidate James Talarico continues giving Texans more and more reasons to vote against him in November. Not only does the progressive seminarian tout Christianity while supporting radical positions on abortion and transgenderism, but it appears he might be coming out in favor of race-based reparations now.

On this episode of “Come and Take It,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales exposes what she believes is Talarico’s radical agenda to bring anti-white policies to Texas.

After Talarico beat out fellow radical Democrat Jasmine Crockett back in March, Sara believes he’s been scheming to win over her voters, who she argues “voted for [Crockett] because she was black.”

But there’s one little problem: Talarico is a white man — the primary target of left-wing grievance politics.

“[Talarico] has checked all of the radical boxes for all of these other crazy things, but he hasn’t simped hard enough for black people specifically, which apparently angers the black community because you’re supposed to … go around telling black Texans how you are going to specifically work for them rather than for the good of all people,” Sara says.

She plays a recent video from Talarico’s July 19 town hall in southwest Houston, during which Black Lives Matter Houston activist Kandice Webber ripped into him, threatening, “You stay here, you answer our questions, or you suffer the consequences!” She then made it clear that she was attending the meeting “for my people, not for you.”

In her own social media video, Webber denounced Talarico as another “white moderate” whom her “people” would “undervote.”

“Black Texas voters, we ain’t f**king playing with you. Yeah, that white boy should have stayed where the f**k he was,” she raged.

“As radical as we know that James Talarico is, she calls him a white moderate. Like, that is insanity,” Sara says, accusing the Democratic Party of creating a “Frankenstein” mob so out of control, no level of radicalism could ever satiate it.

But it appears Talarico may be trying to do just that — satiate Crockett’s disgruntled voters.

The day after Webber’s threat, an audience member at Talarico’s town hall in DeSoto, Texas, asked, “Do you support reparations? And would you legislate for an anti-black crime bill?”

“Restoration, repairing past harms, is part of my faith tradition. It’s part of the values I was raised with, and it’s exactly why we need a lot of the policies we’ve been talking about here to invest in black communities, to invest in black Texans — whether it’s tuition relief, whether it’s homeownership grants, whether it is baby bonds to ensure that we are helping to build that generational wealth,” Talarico responded. “We have to correct the injustices of our past.”

“We are seeing the reverberations of slavery in modern-day Texas all over the place, and until we as a society are committed to righting those past wrongs, of restoring our black communities, we’re never going to be able to get this country back on track,” he added.

Sara translates Talarico’s calculated words: “Yes, I support reparations. Yes, I support legislation that puts black people on a pedestal and treats them better than anyone else because someone’s grandparents’ grandparents’ grandparents were mistreated a long time ago.”

She highlights the objective racism in his propositions.

“Tuition relief, aka free college, but for blacks only. White people, no thank you. Homeownership grants? Blacks only. Whites need not apply. Baby bonds, but only for black babies. Poor white kids? Sorry, you’re out of luck. You got the wrong skin color,” she fumes.

“That is so insanely racist, and yet it is the new policy proposition for James Talarico because he knows it’s his only play for getting the black vote.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

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​Sara gonzales, James talarico, Black lives matter, Texas senate race, Reparations for slavery, Race politics, Blazetv show