“Have you ever been to the U.S.-Mexico border?”

“No.”

One word. That may have been the most revealing moment of New York City Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recent interview with the New York Times.

Sanctuary policies are easy to defend from a podium at New York City Hall. They are much harder to defend before communities that have already paid the price.

Mamdani defended his city’s sanctuary policies, which he reinforced after taking office by signing an executive order reaffirming them.

The problem is not so much that Mamdani has never visited the border. It is that he seems unwilling to understand why communities that lived through the border crisis reached a very different conclusion.

That lesson is visible far beyond the Rio Grande.

Consider Goliad County in South Texas. The rural county has about 7,000 residents and sits roughly 160 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border.

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year, Sheriff Roy Boyd described how the crisis transformed the community he serves.

Boyd’s office averaged 77 arrests a year during the five years before 2021. From 2021 through 2024, that average jumped to 413. Deputies discovered 16 cartel stash houses, and pursuits involving suspected human smugglers became routine.

Residents began hearing voices and movement on remote properties after dark. Many no longer felt safe alone in their own homes.

Those facts expose what Mamdani’s answer overlooks. The border crisis did not remain at the border. Cartel activity and illegal immigration reached inland communities that lacked the personnel and equipment to confront them. Former Border Patrol agent and Texas Public Policy Foundation senior fellow Ammon Blair calls cartels “hybrid threats.”

As Blair puts it, “Cartels don’t just smuggle. They destabilize.” Boyd has described them as “contractors and subcontractors” in a network moving migrants and drugs from the border into Texas’ largest cities.

That reality changed Texas’ response. In 2021, as illegal crossings surged under President Joe Biden, Goliad became one of the first inland counties to declare a local disaster. Boyd suggested giving local law-enforcement agencies flexible grants for overtime, new officers, patrol vehicles, and other equipment.

Those grants became part of Operation Lone Star.

According to Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s office, Operation Lone Star has produced more than 535,700 apprehensions and referrals, 57,400 criminal arrests, and 47,500 felony charges. Texas law enforcement has also intercepted more than 779 million lethal doses of fentanyl.

RELATED: The revolution will not be televised — it will be livestreamed in 4K

Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty Images

Boyd later launched the Operation Lone Star Task Force, which allows local agencies to share deputies, intelligence, and resources across jurisdictional lines while targeting human smuggling, cartel activity, and organized crime.

New York has felt the downstream effects too. Former Mayor Eric Adams warned that the migrant crisis would “destroy New York City.” Mamdani nevertheless continues to defend sanctuary policies that impede cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

Goliad’s experience carries a national lesson. Criminal organizations do not recognize state boundaries. The same networks that move people across the border traffic drugs, weapons, and money into communities nationwide. They exploit ports of entry, the northern border, and weaknesses far from either frontier.

The farther those networks spread, the more Americans discover that border security is not someone else’s problem.

Mamdani may be proud of New York City’s sanctuary stance.

His one-word answer showed more than where he has never been. It revealed what he refuses to see.

Sanctuary policies are easy to defend from a podium at city hall. They are much harder to defend before communities that have already paid the price.

​Illegal immigration, New york city, Texas, Fentanyl, Zohran mamdani, Sanctuary cities, Crime, Opinion & analysis 

Social media’s magicians spent decades perfecting the art of slicing human attention into advertising revenue. Is the next step on the corporate road map farming human tissue for spare parts?

The tech is there, or almost there. The ideas have percolated for decades. All it takes, it seems, is the will.

The concept of individual self-ownership becomes entirely obsolete.

An early pitch deck for R3 Bio, a quiet biotech startup operating out of California, laid out a vision that makes classic horror fiction look rather mild. The company’s leadership, reports suggest, engaged in internal discussions regarding the production of brainless, nonsentient human bodies designed for the explicit purpose of organ harvesting, pharmaceutical testing, and eventual commercial deployment.

They christened these biological monstrosities “organ sacks.”

The terminology speaks volumes to the moral framework seizing imaginations in the contemporary tech executive class. When a team of researchers and engineers looks at the human form and sees an inconveniently conscious container for marketable kidneys, the line between medical innovation and factory farming disappears completely.

Executives at R3 Bio floated plans to reprogram monkey cells, cultivate complete organ systems, and engineer these living biological constructs to be intentionally primitive enough to bypass federal ethical guidelines.

But this isn’t some sudden Silicon Valley obsession. The ambition to redesign human biology has been gathering momentum worldwide for years.

They have a dream

In October 2022, biotech investors gathered in Zurich to debate the commercial viability of synthetic biology, openly celebrating the day human biology would be fully decoupled from traditional ideas of personhood. The attendees viewed the human body as an inefficient piece of legacy software requiring a total architectural overhaul. It was only a matter of time before the idea caught on.

Scientists at R3 Bio defended their research behind the usual wall of righteous PR speak, insisting their work aims to end the chronic shortage of donor organs and cure terminal illnesses. They publicly insist that full-scale human organ fabrication remains outside their current operational scope and that their public website reflects a commitment to safe, traditional cell therapy.

But the problem runs deeper than what R3 Bio says it is or isn’t doing today. It’s what history tells us can happen when scientific ambition outruns consent, oversight, and basic human dignity.

The playbook never changes. In 1951, researchers extracted cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks without her knowledge or consent, creating the HeLa cell line that generated billions in profit for pharmaceutical giants while her family struggled to pay medical bills. The medical establishment transformed a living human being into a self-sustaining corporate product, establishing a precedent that today’s biotech firms are eager to scale up to the entire human torso. There is an enormous amount of money to be made. And where the fevered dreams of high-tech immortality are concerned, human morality has a troubling habit of turning negotiable.

RELATED: Anti-aging mogul’s next act? He’ll harvest organs from his own clone

L-R: Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg/Getty Images; Aldara Zarraoa/Getty Images

A society grounded in the belief that human life possesses inherent dignity treats the human body as an inherently sacred structure rather than a machine assembled from interchangeable parts. The secular technocracy reigning in Northern California views the human body as a collection of meat components that can be optimized, monetized, and swapped out.

Death of the self

The transition from healing the sick to manufacturing customized human vessels happened while everyone was distracted by social media algorithms. Engineers want to replace a failing heart, grow an artificial liver in a vat, construct a brainless body to house the spares, and call the whole process market efficiency. The language of human medicine was completely swallowed by the inhumane jargon of auto repair.

This mechanistic worldview demands that every biological boundary be erased in the name of efficiency and infinite growth. If a brainless body exists as a legal product, the entity owning the patent exercises total property rights over a human biological shell. If a corporation can copyright the genetic sequence of a custom-grown torso, the concept of individual self-ownership becomes entirely obsolete.

Tech elites frequently talk about death as a minor coding error awaiting a software upgrade. They invest billions in longevity protocols, upload schemes, and cellular rejuvenation, completely convinced that their wealth entitles them to bypass mortality itself. They view the average citizen as a temporary user of biological material that will eventually be recycled into the supply chain.

When a society permits a handful of unaccountable individuals to determine what constitutes a real human being, we have entered troubling territory. Will the directors sitting on biotech boards inevitably declare themselves the rightful managers of the human species, reserving complete bodies for themselves while the rest of the population functions as the raw resource pool?

That may sound absurd. So did the idea that machines would one day run businesses, create music, and think well enough to replace the people who created them. Now, the same people who gave us artificial intelligence want to start redesigning natural intelligence.

The men running these laboratories will continue pushing the boundaries of biological desecration until explicit, uncompromising legal barriers stop them. They operate with the supreme confidence of individuals who believe they are God’s gifts to science, entirely blind to the horrifying reality of what they are creating.

Who asked America’s biotech heavyweights to play God? Not the average American, that’s for sure.

Nobody held a referendum on whether human beings should be redesigned, disassembled, and rebuilt by private companies with billions of dollars and almost no public accountability. But they’re not waiting for permission.

​Biotech danger, Tech 

Many Christians avoid reading texts like the Quran or the Book of Mormon altogether, fearing they could be led astray.

However, BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey argues that understanding what other religions actually teach can be valuable — if it’s done carefully.

“I don’t think it’s wrong to read the Quran or the Book of Mormon as a Christian to try to really understand like a primary source for what these people believe,” Stuckey explains, though she notes that she “wouldn’t do it alone” and “wouldn’t do it without your Bible.”

“I wouldn’t do it without supplemental resources from Christians who really have studied and understood these texts because I think it would be easy in the Book of Mormon to be like, ‘Oh yeah, well, you know, that kind of makes sense,’ but … we have to be comparing it to the word of God to make sure that everything totally aligns,” she says.

Looking into scholars who have “done a lot of work, understand the historical context,” and “have cross-referenced these texts” would be essential for anyone determined to understand other religious texts.

“So, I don’t know necessarily that you have to go to the primary source to understand their perspective,” she says.

Rather, “do so in community, do so with the leadership and mentorship of other mature Christians.”

“Do so alongside your Bible. I think if you do all of those things prayerfully, then it can be OK,” she continues.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

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​Allie beth stuckey, Book of mormon, Christians, Quran, Relatable 

As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, Americans are rightly reflecting on the enduring genius of the Constitution. For two and a half centuries, separated powers, federalism, and institutional checks have protected liberty against the concentration of power.

That system has survived civil war, depressions, and foreign totalitarian threats. Yet as the nation celebrates this milestone, a radical faction at home has published a manifesto aimed at dismantling the constitutional structure that made those achievements possible.

The platform calls for the ‘public ownership and democratic control’ of major corporations, energy grids, and transportation infrastructure.

The Democratic Socialists of America just released a national platform titled “Workers Deserve More.” The populist title conceals an agenda far more radical than another increase in the minimum wage or an expansion of organized labor’s influence.

This is not a conventional progressive wish list. It is a blueprint for remaking the American republic and weakening the constitutional limits that stand between citizens and concentrated political power.

The platform begins by demanding the abolition of the United States Senate. The DSA would replace the bicameral Congress with a single legislative chamber, concentrating federal lawmaking power in a radically expanded House of Representatives.

That proposal attacks one of the central compromises of the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The Senate protects smaller states from domination by a handful of heavily populated metropolitan regions and forces national majorities to build broader coalitions.

A single chamber based solely on proportional representation would move the country toward unchecked majority rule — precisely the danger James Madison warned against in Federalist 62.

RELATED: ‘Need a cop? Thank socialism’ is dumb – but dangerously effective

kali9/iStock/Getty Images

The assault does not stop with Congress. The DSA platform also calls for severe restrictions on judicial review, placing the Supreme Court under congressional control and preventing it from striking down unconstitutional laws enacted by the proposed single chamber.

The platform would also replace the independently elected presidency with a centralized “premier” chosen by the legislature.

Consider the structure as a whole: one dominant legislative chamber, a premier answerable to that chamber, and a Supreme Court stripped of its ability to enforce constitutional limits.

That is not democratic reform. It is the consolidation of federal power in a single political institution, with few meaningful safeguards for individual liberty or dissenting minorities.

The economic program is equally sweeping. “Workers Deserve More” calls for the “public ownership” and “democratic control” of major corporations, energy systems, and transportation infrastructure. In plain English, it proposes state control of large sectors of the private economy.

History offers no shortage of warnings about such nationalization. From Eastern Europe to Venezuela, government seizure of private industry has produced shortages, economic decay, corruption, and diminished personal freedom.

The DSA pairs this centralization of political and economic power with a direct assault on national sovereignty. Its platform treats borders and citizenship not as foundations of self-government but as obstacles to be removed.

RELATED: The Democrat civil war is real — and it is happening in Wisconsin

Yutthana Gaetgeaw/iStock/Getty Images

Its immigration plank demands unrestricted “freedom of movement,” abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an end to deportations, and federal voting rights for noncitizens.

Combined with proposals to eliminate cash bail, demilitarize law enforcement, and dismantle the carceral system, the agenda would weaken the government’s ability to protect law-abiding citizens while expanding its control over nearly every other part of life.

The timing is supremely ironic. This summer, as Americans celebrate 250 years under a system designed to limit government power, the DSA is offering a system designed to maximize it.

The organization claims to speak for workers. Its platform would instead make ordinary Americans increasingly dependent on a centralized state that controls political institutions, major industries, public safety, and access to citizenship itself.

The country should call this platform what it is: an anti-constitutional program dressed in democratic language. America’s strength lies in the limits placed on government, not in the power surrendered to it.

The DSA platform is a reminder that the struggle to preserve the republic did not end with its founding. On America’s 250th anniversary, citizens should defend the constitutional guardrails that have kept power divided and Americans free.

​Opinion & analysis, Constitution, Senate, Democratic socialists of america, James madison, Capitalism, America 250 

A Missouri motorist was caught on police dashcam video exiting his car on a bridge amid a police chase last weekend — and actually diving over the side of the bridge. But that’s only part of the wild turn of events.

The Stone County Sheriff’s Office said deputies tried to stop a car on the north end of Kimberling City around 1:50 a.m. last Saturday, KYTV-TV reported. Kimberling City is a little over half an hour west of Branson.

‘Contact water patrol. He just jumped over the bridge!’

The driver then fled going south, the station said, adding that deputies noted the car was going 75 miles per hour in a 45-mile-per-hour zone.

The pursuit led deputies to the Kimberling City Bridge, where the driver — later identified as Gavin Thor Lundgren — exited the car and jumped off the east side of the bridge, landing in Rock Lake, the station said.

An annoyed deputy can be heard on dashcam video remarking, “Contact water patrol. He just jumped over the bridge!”

According to Better Branson, the Kimberling City Bridge’s “vertical clearance above deck” is 15.8 feet. But Sheriff Doug Rader said in KYTV’s video report that it’s about a 40-foot drop to the water.

RELATED: Inmate hands judge ‘wad’ of counterfeit cash to pay bond — then actually tells judge to ‘keep the change’: Police

Deputies said they stopped Lundgren’s car as it was still in drive and was continuing to roll forward, KYTV noted.

Southern Stone County firefighters on a boat assisted in locating Lundgren while other units remained on shore, the station said, adding that a deputy on scene later found Lundgren.

“This was definitely a first, and luckily he survived the fall,” Rader said.

Besides his outlandish stunt, Lundgren also is accused of injuring three deputies while he was being taken into custody; KYTV said Lundgren head-butted two of the deputies.

Deputies eventually brought Lundgren to the Stone County Jail, the station said, citing the probable cause statement.

Jail records indicate that Lundgren, 26, is charged with resisting arrest by fleeing, careless driving, three counts of third-degree assault, and resisting/interfering with arrest for a felony. He remained behind bars Friday.

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​Missouri, Kimberling city bridge, Jump from bridge, Arrest, Assault, Police pursuit, Crime 

America remains deeply divided over whether the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. Millions believe the system failed them, while the media, intelligence bureaucracy, and the left have treated their doubts as something to suppress rather than investigate.

The documents released this week by the Trump administration do not close the case. They reopen it — and make the “nothing to see here” narrative indefensible.

Start with communist China.

The released intelligence reports that approximately 220 million American voter records are in Chinese hands. Tens of millions of records across 18 states were bought, stolen, or hacked and included names, addresses, phone numbers, party preferences, and other sensitive information.

A sovereign nation must know that the people selecting its government are its citizens.

That does not prove China changed a single ballot, but it does prove Beijing possessed a political targeting asset. When a strategic rival aggregates enormous datasets and applies modern analytics, it gains the ability to identify, target, and influence American voters at industrial scale.

The most disturbing disclosure involves the President’s Daily Brief — the president’s most sensitive and consequential intelligence product. In one released email, an official wrote: “We have deliberately massaged our one pending PDB to avoid any direct links to the election.”

In a separate internal chat, a counterintelligence official boasted: “I’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point.”

The left has spent years ridiculing concerns about a “deep state” as conspiracy theory. These revelations make that ridicule look increasingly like camouflage.

Then comes the voting-system reveal.

A Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency report included in the administration’s document release identifies weak access controls, outdated operating systems, flat networks, inadequate monitoring, and legacy remote-access pathways across state and local election environments. During multiple penetration tests and red-team exercises, CISA assessors gained full control of election-office networks within hours or days.

Separately, the report cites research involving one ballot-marking system showing that barcode-encoded votes could be altered without changing the human-readable selections displayed to the voter.

The release also includes intelligence concerning methods allegedly developed by Venezuela’s Maduro regime to manipulate electronic totals while concealing the changes.

Precision matters. A Venezuelan capability is not proof of an American operation. A demonstrated vulnerability is not proof it was exploited. The documents do not establish that American vote totals were secretly changed in 2020.

But they demolish the claim that election technology is immune from manipulation. These are computer systems with software, databases, vendors, administrators, updates, and attack surfaces. Compromise must be anticipated and independently detectable.

RELATED: America needs an artificial intelligence coalition, not an AI fortress

Burcu demir/Getty Images

A limited Department of Homeland Security review raises another alarm. The White House says it identified approximately 278,000 potential noncitizen registrations. DHS’ public follow-up described more than 250,000 preliminary potential matches in California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania — only four states.

No serious person should dismiss numbers of this magnitude. Biden’s certified Georgia margin in 2020 was 11,779 votes. In 2016, Trump carried Michigan and Wisconsin by a combined 33,452 votes — and Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania by just 77,744.

The media formula — “the documents do not prove vote totals changed; therefore they prove nothing” — is analytical malpractice. Absence of final proof is not proof of institutional innocence.

The proper question is whether this new information raises the probability that foreign influence, intelligence suppression, ineligible registrations, or exploitable technology played a larger role in the 2020 election environment than Americans were told — and whether future elections remain at risk.

The answer to both questions is yes.

That is why Congress must pass the SAVE America Act before November. The House-passed legislation requires documentary proof of citizenship for federal voter registration and photo identification for federal voting.

These are basic risk controls. Pew found that 83% of Americans — including 71% of Democrats and 95% of Republicans — support government-issued photo identification.

A sovereign nation must know that the people selecting its government are its citizens. A constitutional republic must demonstrate — not merely assert — that its elections are accurate.

Congress should stop stalling and pass the SAVE America Act. As the president likes to say: Let’s go.

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

​Save act, Donald trump, 2020 election, Election security, Deep state, Venezuela, Congress, Opinion & analysis, Chinese communist party 

Shane Gillis put on a night that his fans will never forget last week in Philadelphia, and it wasn’t an anomaly, it was the new normal.

Gillis broke two Guinness World Records at a sold-out Lincoln Financial Field that night, a venue that typically hosts NFL games.

‘I put all of your lives at risk.’

Gillis not only set a new mark for the largest audience for a comedian with 73,946 attendees, but he also sold the most tickets for a comedy show ever for a single billing with 77,047 tickets.

Moreover, what Gillis was able to do with nearly a city-sized group of fans sitting all around him was culminate almost 15 years of hard work into a cultural moment. Gillis brought with him everything he loves, a protest in its own right given how he was treated by the media for simply being a regular guy.

The Gillis tribute opened with a flyover followed by Millennials’ favorite rambunctious skateboarder Bam Margera, a Pennsylvania native, announcing a new season of Gillis’ Netflix comedy “Tires.”

A festival for the rest of us

Gillis tapped two of his friends and fellow comedians from the area to open for him, Matt McCusker and Jay Oakerson. While they were the only other comedy acts on the card, a series of unannounced appearances followed, each more surprising than the last.

For a comedian who was unilaterally labeled a bigot, racist, and homophobe just seven years ago, Gillis had no shortage of celebrities willing to appear under his banner.

RELATED: ‘Hot’ Chelsea Handler digs up dirt from Tony Hinchcliffe, Shane Gillis ex-files

Making appearances from the sports world were two Philadelphia Eagles players: offensive tackle Jordan Mailata and defensive back Cooper DeJean.

Former Eagles center Jason Kelce — brother of Travis Kelce, Taylor Swift’s husband — was also in the mix, coming on stage and screaming into the microphone to hype up the crowd.

The night also featured performances from rappers Meek Mill and Three 6 Mafia, and although Kanye West was rumored to make an appearance (he did not), in the end the biggest cameo came after Gillis’ 30-minute set.

Unexpected improv

Like a boxer on his way to the ring, Dave Chappelle walked down the aisle to screaming fans and joined Gillis for 20 minutes of off-the-cuff banter.

Chappelle immediately became that friend who brings up politics when he came to the stage and commented on what he described as an Air Force flyover.

“Y’all n*****s should be at the Straight of Hormuz, opening that s**t up. But I’m glad you could make it here for Shane’s show.”

Gillis quickly corrected Chappelle, laughing that they were actually World War II planes he needed to get insurance for.

“I put all of your lives at risk,” Gillis joked. “I was not worried about you guys, I was worried about how much money I would have to pay if a World War II Mustang crashed into you guys.”

RELATED: SNL comedian hosts ESPY Awards, celebrates immigrants while taking shots at American culture

Gonzalo Marroquin/Getty Images for Netflix

You’ll buy a ticket and you’ll be happy

Even Guinness World Records adjudicator Andy Glass praised Gillis’ ability to put on an unforgettable night.

“Tonight’s event was a powerful reminder that record-breaking achievements continue to capture people’s imagination around the world,” Glass said, per CBS News.

Gillis’ football field extravaganza is indeed the new normal for what was so recently portrayed as fringe entertainment for far-right audiences. Not only is he following in the footsteps of Tony Hinchcliffe’s frequent Madison Square Garden appearances, he is elevating the scene to new heights never imagined before.

Touring arenas and doing the occasional stadium is not new for comedians, but for ones who were universally excommunicated by the entertainment industry, it certainly is.

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​Comedy, Philadelphia, Shane gillis, Dave chappelle, Entertainment 

Pennsylvania police say they discovered a house of horrors after investigating a report of an emaciated dog that was too weak to stand up.

Sandra Alvarado, 40, of White Oak Borough called police on July 18 to report that she had found an extremely emaciated Doberman dog abandoned in a ditch on the side of the road.

They found more evidence that the dog belonged to her, and then found far worse.

When police responded, they found a dog so “beyond reasonable treatment” that it could only be euthanized, according to court documents.

Police reported the dog had fleas, infections, ulcers, and open wounds that included exposed tendons.

Alvarado told police she brought the dog into her home, but police grew suspicious. They said the home smelled of urine and was filled with flies.

Her story fell apart after police found the dog dry to the touch and with no signs of being outside after it had been storming during that day.

On Tuesday, officers obtained animal clinic records showing Alvarado owned a Doberman named Anubis. They then interviewed people in the neighborhood who indicated that Alvarado was the owner of the dog and they had seen him several times after he ran away from the home.

Police were able to obtain a search warrant for the home and forced their way inside on Thursday.

They found more evidence that the dog belonged to her, and then found far worse.

Police said she had several dog crates with feces and stagnant urine. In the rest of the home, they found “deplorable conditions” that included “overwhelming” flies, fleas, spoiled food, soiled litter boxes, and numerous bags of trash.

They also found two firearms that were easily accessible to children. A 16-year-old teen was found to be living in the home.

The residence was deemed uninhabitable by White Oak Code Enforcement Officer John Snelson.

RELATED: Mom and boyfriend arrested after two boys escape ‘house of horrors’ and are found naked, bruised and covered with feces and blood

Alvarado faces numerous charges, including five counts of aggravated cruelty to animals, three counts of neglect of animals, cruelty to animals, false reports to law enforcement, as well as endangering the welfare of children.

She is being held at the Allegheny County Jail on a $10,000 bond and will appear for a hearing on Aug. 3.

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​Animal abuse, House of horrors, Pennsylvania, Child abuse, Crime 

Parents accepted cameras on school buses for a simple reason: catching drivers who illegally pass a stopped bus and endanger children.

What they weren’t told is that the same technology could eventually become something much bigger: a nationwide surveillance network.

Cities have explored mounting AI-powered cameras on garbage trucks to identify property-code violations.

Spy school

According to leaked internal documents obtained by 404 Media, BusPatrol — the nation’s largest provider of school bus stop-arm camera systems — plans to transform those buses into a nationwide network of Automatic License Plate Readers. Instead of activating only when a stop-arm violation occurs, the cameras would reportedly record the license plate, location, date, and time of every vehicle they encounter before sharing that information with law enforcement databases.

If fully deployed, the system would operate on more than 40,000 school buses across 24 states, creating what could become the largest mobile license-plate reader network in the United States — a system capable of documenting the daily movements of millions of law-abiding drivers.

School buses are an obvious platform for expanding surveillance. They already travel nearly every neighborhood twice a day, five days a week. Building that kind of street-level network from scratch would cost billions and almost certainly provoke public opposition. But here, the buses, cameras, and routes already exist; only the mission changes.

Safety dance

The leaked documents also describe a data-sharing partnership between BusPatrol and Axon, the law enforcement technology company known for body cameras and digital evidence systems. Under the proposal, information collected by school buses could become part of a broader investigative network used by police agencies. Privacy advocates argue that transforms a child-safety program into a system capable of tracking the routine movements of people who aren’t suspected of any crime.

Those concerns aren’t hypothetical.

The Institute for Justice has documented multiple cases in which law enforcement officers allegedly misused license-plate reader databases for personal reasons. In Milwaukee, an officer reportedly searched the movements of a woman he was dating and her former partner nearly 180 times while claiming the searches were part of official investigations.

In Idaho, a sheriff searched his wife’s vehicle more than 700 times in three months, describing the searches as “tests.” In Georgia, a police chief was arrested after allegedly using ALPR systems to stalk private citizens. None of those incidents were automatically flagged by the systems themselves.

RELATED: We’re winning the fight against Flock — but the surveillance isn’t going away that easily

The Washington Post/Getty Images

Usual suspects

School buses also appear to be only one piece of a broader trend. Cities have explored mounting AI-powered cameras on garbage trucks to identify property-code violations because sanitation vehicles, like school buses, already drive every neighborhood on regular routes. Cape Coral, Florida, abandoned its proposal after public opposition, but similar ideas continue to surface elsewhere.

Private companies are expanding these networks as well.

Flock Safety has built a nationwide system of AI-powered cameras that identify license plates along with vehicle make, model, color, decals, and bumper stickers. According to Forbes, companies including FedEx, Lowe’s, Simon Property Group, and Kaiser Permanente have participated in information-sharing arrangements involving Flock’s network. Civil liberties advocates argue those partnerships expand vehicle tracking while operating outside many of the transparency rules that apply to government agencies.

Each program is introduced as a narrow solution to a specific problem — protecting schoolchildren, solving crimes, enforcing property codes, or improving security. Over time, however, they begin to overlap. School buses, garbage trucks, private security cameras, and commercial fleets become pieces of a much larger network that records where Americans travel and stores that information for future use.

Protecting children should never be controversial, and neither should giving police the tools they need to investigate legitimate crimes.

But turning 40,000 school buses into rolling surveillance platforms is a very different question.

Before that happens, Americans deserve an honest debate about where the line between public safety and routine government tracking should be drawn.

​School buses, Privacy, Security, Surveillance, Automotive 

Silicon Valley entrepreneur Bryan Johnson made his millions by founding the payments processing company Braintree (which acquired Venmo), before selling the firm to PayPal in 2013.

In the years since, Johnson has become widely known for his extreme, highly public anti-aging “Don’t Die” protocol, which involves a strict diet, a rigid sleep schedule, daily exercise, dozens of supplements, continuous biomarker testing, and occasional experimental treatments.

His stated goal is to slow or reverse biological aging across every organ system. The endeavor costs him roughly $2 million a year.

But that’s just the beginning of Johnson’s strange goals. According to a July 21 post, he has now supposedly “cloned” himself.

Glenn Beck sets the record straight on the reality of Johnson’s “cloning” experiment.

“He didn’t clone himself. What he actually did is he took a sample of his own blood, pulled out some cells, chemically rewound them back to a blank, a baby state — you know, the kind of cell that can grow into almost any body part,” he explains, noting that this making of stem cells has been going on since 2006.

“His plan is to eventually grow fresh tissue from these cells to repair his own aging organs. That’s it. There’s no baby, no second Bryan, no clone of any real sense. Just a dish with his own cells reset to act young,” Glenn continues.

The medical implications of this science — regrowing organs, restoring eyesight, reversing disease — are “really exciting,” he acknowledges.

But Glenn has seen too much to ignore the inevitable dark side of such a technology.

“I swear to you, every day I get up, every technological breakthrough now feels like we’re speed-running through the plot of every movie that terrified me as a child,” he says.

“’Frankenstein,’ written over 200 years ago, was basically one long warning that maybe, just maybe, we should spend as much time asking ‘should we?’ as we spend asking ‘can we?’” he continues.

The saddest part is that “technology genuinely could save millions of lives — Parkinson’s, blindness, heart disease, kidney failure, cancer” — but it’s what else it could do in the hands of the wrong people that troubles Glenn.

“I’m not scared of the science. I’m kind of scared by the scientists,” he admits.

“I just can’t shake the feeling that humanity is collectively walking through the opening scenes of every sci-fi movie ever made, smiling confidently while the audience is yelling at the screen, ‘Please stop!’”

To hear more, watch the video above.

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​Bryan johnson, Glenn beck, Silicon valley, Stem cells, Blazetv show