Let us give thanks to America’s ultra-rich from a bygone era. Without them, our world would be poorer in beauty.

That sounds like I’m making a joke, doesn’t it? The received opinion in America today is that the ultra-wealthy are slavering predators bent on “capitalisming” poor Gen Z coffee shop employees into penury.

That’s one of the best parts about the Shelburne Museum — very little is behind velvet ropes.

Well, I’m not joking, and the received opinion is baloney.

Tour de force

Whereas the anti-wealth advocates generally make their points by taking to the streets and screaming like lunatics, I’m going to try a different approach. I trust you’ll find it more pleasant.

Allow me to take you on a short tour of one of the finest civic legacies bestowed upon my state of Vermont: the Shelburne Museum. I hope this product of one socialite’s generosity inspires you to see what treasures may have been bequeathed to your town by a philanthropist of old.

I thank God for the ultra-rich of the past who practiced the lost art of noblesse oblige. Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie built more than 1,600 public libraries in the U.S. alone. Your town may have one. You know them by their quality, their gracious architecture, their built-in hardwood book cases and grand stairs.

Compare a Carnegie library to a modern concrete, glass, and steel monstrosity such as the Seattle Public Library.

American Versailles

Vermonters have Electra Havemeyer Webb to thank for the idyllic paradise on the shores of Lake Champlain called the Shelburne Museum. The 45-acre property has 30 buildings, one of the last steamships to ply the lake, a preserved general store and apothecary, and more. The footpath through the property is about a mile, and it takes you through rolling hills dotted with original buildings from the colonial era through the 19th century.

I imagine that it’s a bit like the Queen’s Hamlet at Versailles. Marie Antoinette constructed a working toy village at a short distance from the main palace, an idealized country village with a mill, a dairy, and charming bridges over streams. She liked to retreat from the frenetic court, and she used the Hamlet as a sort of proto-Montessori school to teach her children.

The Shelburne Museum is like an American version. All the old buildings are actually old buildings, not replicas. Most were transported to the museum grounds from other parts of Vermont and New England.

As you walk by the original saltbox-style house from the 1700s, you see the town jail built in stone on the other side of the path. It’s just two cells with doors of iron bars, but at least they gave the prisoners (likely just the town drunks) a stove for winter heat.

Josh Slocum

Up the path a bit you’ll find a working printshop that still uses an old Heidelberg press. The docents will ink up plates and press flyers right in front of you to show how events were advertised and how news was printed for distribution before the digital age, all on working antique machines.

Josh Slocum

Full steam ahead

Heiress to a sugar refining fortune, Webb was raised among the upper crust of New York City and taught to appreciate high European culture. But at a young age it was American craft that caught her eye. She devoted her time and fortune to amassing a vast collection of early American antiques, art, and everyday objects. By founding the museum in 1947, she opened that collection to the people of Vermont.

What she left is a true gift in the best philanthropic spirit of America’s old money. Mrs. Webb saved one of the last steamships to traverse Lake Champlain and had it hauled by rail onto dry land to be preserved. If you’re ever in town, bring your kids. Imagine the sense of magical whimsy when you crest a hill and see a 19th-century steamship over the horizon.

Josh Slocum

Go aboard, and find yourself immersed in Edwardian splendor. This is what travel used to look like.

See those chairs? You can sit in them. That’s one of the best parts about the Shelburne Museum — very little is behind velvet ropes. You get to touch most things, and you get to watch old machines come to life and do the job for which they were built.

Josh Slocum

The place is a paradise for boys who love mechanical toys. Go downstairs below the waterline, and you’re next to the towering vertical beam steam engine that turned the red paddle wheels and propelled the Ticonderoga at a brisk-for-the-time 17 miles per hour.

Josh Slocum

Keeping the flame

RELATED: Kerosene lamps: Your escape from the sickly glare of LEDs

The Print Collector/Getty Images

Let’s walk on to the general store. Again, this is no twee recreation of Ye Olde Time Store.

It’s a real general store, and everything inside it is from the period. The enormous cast iron stove sits in the middle of the room. On either side are goods behind the counter: tobacco, canned vegetables, molasses from a barrel, hardtack for the sailors.

Josh Slocum

The docent, a gentleman in his 80s in natty tweed, conducted me to the back room where the barber shop is preserved. Beyond that is the small tavern room where men would come after work to drink ale and rum while playing cards.

Beyond that is what may be one of the most perfectly preserved and extensively stocked apothecary shops (a forerunner of the drugstore) in the United states. Look at these cabinets full of what must be almost the entire range of patent medicines sold in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century.

Josh Slocum

And that lamp is one of the best-preserved examples I have seen of the most sought-after and expensive kerosene lamp of its day (I’m a collector).

The Angle Lamp was so named because it placed the wick burner at an angle, rather than vertically. Combined with the specially shaped milk glass shades, the Angle Lamp was the first oil-burning lamp designed to throw light downward and outward. It became a mainstay of workshops, where good lighting was a necessity.

The docent told me the museum officials had no idea of the lamp’s history or its place in commercial lighting, and they were delighted to note down more detail about a part of their collection. That’s another charming aspect of the Shelburne Museum; the people who work and volunteer there love what they do and are happy to learn as much from visitors as they teach.

And wouldn’t you like to get your hands on some of the remedies that can no longer be legally sold?

Josh Slocum

A doll’s house

Do you have girls who love dolls and life in miniature? Be sure to take them to the third floor of one of the last buildings on the path. The exhibit of dollhouses and dioramas is magical.

Here’s the lobby in one dollhouse set up as a late 19th-century hotel.

Josh Slocum

Some of the others are so detailed you could fool yourself into believing you were looking at a full-size room.

Josh Slocum

No collection of doll-related ephemera would be complete without That One Cursed Doll, and the Shelburne does not disappoint.

Josh Slocum

Good luck sleeping.

De gustibus

Your correspondent finds it difficult to write a column without finding something to mock, and fortunately Mrs. Webb provided for this with her collection of Impressionist paintings. The main home on the property features at least two Monets, and I’m here to tell you they look worse in person than they do in museum catalogs.

I mean, look at this:

Josh Slocum

My friend is an artist who made a beeline for the Monets. We stood in front of this representation of some primitive huts, and she didn’t say anything. I did.

“Well, it’s s**t, isn’t it?” I said.

“Yeah. That’s really ugly,” she replied.

Not all fine art is actually fine. Sorry.

But noblesse oblige is very fine indeed. It is, in fact, noble. Without the Mr. Carnegies and Mrs. Webbs, our country would be impoverished in beauty and the ability of the public to experience it. It takes robber-baron levels of wealth to collect, to curate, and, eventually, to bequeath to the public examples of the finest uplifting, aspirational, and enchanting machines and objets d’art that show the best of what man and woman can create.

This is something only the rich can do for us. Let’s hear it for Mrs. Webb.

​General store, Kerosene lamps, Shelburne museum, Electra havemeyer webb, Lifestyle, Philanthropy, Culture, Early americana, American history, Steamships 

Big Tech companies helped censor Americans during COVID. Now many of the same interests pillaging rural America for surveillance data centers want to suppress debate over their next great project. This time, they are not merely trying to censor speech. They are helping create the pretext to criminalize it.

Federal and state law enforcement should have their hands full with real threats: jihadist networks, political assassinations, attacks against ICE, and the growing culture of left-wing violence that led to Charlie Kirk’s murder. Yet last week, Wired obtained documents showing a coordinated effort among the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, and roughly 80 regional fusion centers to monitor supposed anti-tech and anti-data-center violence.

It is disgraceful to watch law enforcement silence Americans on behalf of Big Tech.

More than 1,000 pages of internal DHS, FBI, and fusion-center reports describe “anti-technology extremism” as an emerging domestic threat based largely on a handful of unverified threats against politicians. No one should excuse genuine threats or violence. But the idea that data-center opponents have created a domestic threat requiring this level of federal coordination is absurd. It is gaslighting dressed up as intelligence work.

This is the same logic behind the Trump administration’s decision to station marshals with surveyors for data-center transmission lines in Carroll County, Maryland. The point was not to respond to credible threats. The point was to frame opposition — especially in one of Maryland’s most conservative counties — as dangerous before the debate even began.

Which brings us to Dixon, Illinois.

Last week, resident Harley Delander organized a Facebook protest outside the home of former state Rep. Tom Demmer (R), who is now promoting a 387-acre data-center site through the Lee County Industrial Development Association. People can debate the prudence of protesting at an official’s residence, though such protests have become common in local disputes. But police produced no credible evidence that Delander or his friends planned violence.

Delander was arrested outside his home 12 hours later and charged with two felonies: intimidation and stalking. Police said his communications “knowingly and willfully” caused fear for Demmer and his family’s safety. Delander recorded the arrest.

This reflects a growing trend: criminalizing sharp public debate based on how a public official claims to feel rather than what a citizen actually did.

A Massachusetts resident was sentenced to prison and spent a full year behind bars before trial for writing angry emails to a local Michigan politician. The emails were ugly — the sort of language elected officials receive every day — but they contained no personal threats or even veiled threats. He was extradited to Oakland County, Michigan, in December 2023 and charged under Michigan’s law against intimidating public officials, which hinges on whether the “victim” felt “terrorized, frightened, intimidated, threatened, harassed, or molested.”

RELATED: After fierce debate, Trump opts for federal controls in AI development

Arvitalya/Getty Images

We have reached the point where heated political debate — a tradition as old as Adams and Jefferson — can become grounds for abridging the First Amendment. What a way to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence!

The crackdown is not limited to nasty emails or home protests. Across the country, law-abiding rural residents, many of them seniors, are getting roughed up or arrested for speaking too long or objecting too loudly at data-center hearings.

On February 17, Oklahoma farmer Darren Blanchard exceeded his three-minute speaking limit by a few seconds at a Claremore City Council town hall on “Project Mustang,” a proposed AI data center backed by Beale Infrastructure. Once his time expired, he stopped speaking and walked to the rostrum to give the city manager a written copy of his remarks. For that, police handcuffed and removed him, transported him to Rogers County Jail, and booked him on criminal trespassing charges.

In April, Imperial County, California, resident Ismael Arvizu was arrested and charged with trespassing, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, and threatening a public official. Did he attack an official? No. After speaking during his allotted time at an Imperial County Board of Supervisors meeting, Arvizu applauded when another resident threatened to start a recall petition against the supervisors. The Los Angeles Times reported that an officer led him out and arrested him, and prosecutors charged him with threatening a public official.

In Midland, Texas, video shows a resident calmly calling for a point of order under meeting rules at a data-center meeting. He was immediately grabbed and removed from the room. He does not appear to have been arrested or charged, but the point remains: Police increasingly seem prepared to remove data-center opponents before their speech, outbursts, or objections would traditionally qualify as disrupting a meeting.

RELATED: Self-driving trucks are about controlling the roads — not making them safer

Dylan Hollingsworth/Bloomberg/Getty Images

This is happening in deep-red counties across America. It is disgraceful to watch law enforcement silence Americans on behalf of Big Tech.

Recently, the Intercept obtained a law-enforcement bulletin from a fusion center housed within the Philadelphia Police Department showing that federal authorities were monitoring anti-data-center social media posts for “domestic violent extremists.” The bulletin warned that “domestic violent extremists” were “likely interested in targeting artificial intelligence data centers,” posing physical and cyber threats to infrastructure in the Philadelphia region. Then it conceded that authorities lacked “specific information on plans to target AI data centers in the Philadelphia area.”

That is the whole game. Invent a vague threat, inflate it into a domestic extremism category, and use it to justify surveillance, intimidation, and arrests. Then pretend ordinary citizens are dangerous because they object to surrendering their land, power, and communities to Big Tech.

The irony is hard to miss. Governments at every level are deploying censorship, surveillance, and criminal enforcement to service an agenda built on surveillance, data extraction, and control.

Talk about paying for the rope to hang ourselves!

​Data centers, Ai, Big tech, Covid, Dhs, Fbi, Trump administration, Law enforcement, Ismael arvizu, Opinion & analysis, Artificial intelligence, Surveillance, First amendment, Protest, Domestic terrorism 

The cultural obsession with — and corresponding private-public support for — all things non-heterosexual is waning, having apparently reached its zenith sometime earlier this decade.

New Gallup polling shows that support for homosexual “marriage,” non-straight relations, and so-called transgenderism is collapsing.

‘Those pro-LGBTQ+ attitudes peaked about five years ago.’

Whereas in 2023, 71% of American adults said that homosexual “marriages” should be valid — up from 27% in 1996 — that number has since dropped to 65%.

After reaching an all-time high in 2022 of 71%, the percentage of U.S. adults who regard homosexual relations as “morally acceptable” fell to 62% this year, the lowest it has been in a decade. This decline shows no signs of stopping.

Gallup started asking Americans in 2021 whether “changing one’s gender is morally acceptable.” That year, 46% of respondents said “yes,” but this year, only 38% of Americans said the same.

Just 5% of Republicans and 42% of independents said that “changing one’s gender” is morally acceptable.

RELATED: Just 1 MLB team opts out of Pride Night as league shifts toward LGBT ‘package’

Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

The polling outfit credited Republicans with the declining support for the LGBT agenda, noting that some of the most drastic changes in attitude regarding non-straight issues have taken place on the right.

In 2022, for instance, 55% of Republicans said that they support legal homosexual “marriage,” but over the past four years, that number has plummeted 18 percentage points.

Independents are similarly pumping the brakes on the rainbow train, with their support for same-sex “marriage” having fallen six percentage points.

While Democrats predominantly remain on board with the LGBT agenda, there are some signs of fatigue. This year, 81% said that homosexual relations are morally acceptable — down five points from 2025 — and 60% signaled support for transgenderism, down seven points since 2021.

“For about two decades, Americans grew more accepting of LGBTQ+ people and more supportive of their civil rights,” said Gallup. “However, those pro-LGBTQ+ attitudes peaked about five years ago and have since edged downward, mostly among Republicans.”

Coinciding with the change in attitude about non-straight issues, there has been a precipitous decline in the proportion of students identifying as “transgender” and “non-heterosexual,” as detailed in a study last year from the University of Buckingham’s Centre for Heterodox Social Science.

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​Lgbt, Gay, Homosexual, Trans, Transgender, Gallup, Poll, Opinion, Normalcy, Social contagion, Politics 

On June 2, Zach Lahn won the Iowa Republican gubernatorial primary. Campaigning as an “Iowa First” outsider focused on water quality, reducing corporate influence, and core conservative issues, the political newcomer and farmer/businessman pulled off a shocking upset, earning about 38% of the vote in a crowded five-candidate race and narrowly beating Trump-endorsed Rep. Randy Feenstra.

On this episode of the “Steve Deace Show,” Deace extracts “8 lessons” the political right can learn from Lahn’s stunning victory.

Lesson #1: Christian conservatives are changing from being profile-driven to issue-driven.

Deace explains that historically, Iowans have voted for people that look the part.

“We’re flyover country, and a lot of times the rest of the country just kind of wants to look down and sneer at us. So understanding us — being from us, one of us — is a big thing,” he says, noting how Iowa’s longtime senior Senator Chuck Grassley has been running successful campaign ads showing him “driving a tractor” for his entire political career.

But Lahn’s victory proved that voting based on profile is “no longer the model.”

“We can now see it’s a paradigm shift — that issues now matter more than the profile does,” says Deace, highlighting how Lahn “spoke to the issues” and defeated opponent Adam Steen who “represented the profile.”

Lesson #2: MAHA and Christian conservatives are the coalition of the future.

Lahn’s success was largely a result of his ability to appeal to Make America Healthy Again supporters. Endorsed by RFK Jr.’s MAHA Action PAC, his campaign zeroed in on Iowa’s cancer crisis, water toxicity, and use of chemicals and pesticides in farming.

Deace predicts that the union of MAHA advocates and conservative Christians will be the right’s strongest weapon in future elections.

“You see this especially with our mamas and our nanas,” he says, noting how the government’s handling of COVID-19 created a deep skepticism that will surely continue to influence voting.

Lesson #3: Issues still trump everything.

Just days before the primary, Deace — who had earlier endorsed Adam Steen — released a last-minute video endorsement for Lahn, which he says was the “last spackle of frosting on the cake” that pushed him to his razor-thin victory.

But that’s not a pat on his own back. Lahn, Deace argues, was only in the position where he could be nudged to victory because he ran on “hard-right issues.”

“If I put that video out about Zach Lahn, but he hasn’t been running all the issue ads they did the last few weeks, does it work? No,” he declares.

“They baked the entire cake. I helped them with the frosting.”

Lahn’s victory, he argues, is proof that “the number-one thing our people want to vote on is issues.”

Lesson #4: This wasn’t a ‘loss’ for President Trump, but one of his most impressive shows of force yet.

Many political observers and media outlets are interpreting Lahn’s win as a notable loss or setback for Trump, who endorsed Feenstra.

But Deace pushes back on that narrative. “Folks, this was actually one of the most impressive shows of force that Trump’s ever had with an endorsement,” he counters.

Deace marvels that Trump was able to “[take] a candidate that his own base did not like, who saw his negatives go up by 20 points in the last three months” and “in less than four days with no major media in our state” made him jump “at least 10 points.”

“He got people to vote for a guy they didn’t like because they like him more,” he says, calling it an “incredibly impressive feat.”

Even more impressive is that Trump was able to accomplish this despite rural Iowans suffering the most from the rise in diesel prices thanks to the U.S.’ ongoing conflict with Iran. The fact that Feenstra only narrowly lost to Lahn is proof of how deep Iowa’s Trump loyalty runs.

Lesson #5: The generational divide is real, and it’s here.

“What we saw is Feenstra won the oldest of voters, and Zach Lahn won every other group,” says Deace.

“If you’re 65 or older, you narrowly voted for Randy Feenstra, and if you were under 65, you narrowly voted for Zach Lahn,” he continues, noting that this same dynamic played out in the Thomas Massie-Ed Gallrein race.

Deace interprets this as proof of the “generational divide” within the Republican voter base.

Lesson #6: Reports of the demise of TPUSA continue to be greatly exaggerated.

Since the atrocious assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in September 2025, several outlets have reported that the nonprofit, which is heavily credited with helping Trump get re-elected in 2024, is losing influence.

But Deace says Lahn’s victory debunks this claim.

Immediately after Trump endorsed Feenstra, TPUSA formally endorsed Lahn, which Deace speculates was not a counter-endorsement but rather coincidental timing.

Even though this was the first time TPUSA has ever gone against Trump, the organization stuck with the endorsement and went “all in,” with door-knockers and full effort the weekend leading up to the primary, proving TPUSA is still a strong, committed organization.

Deace calls it “a helmet sticker for TPUSA.”

Lesson #7: If you don’t come in with your money or already have high name ID, you probably can’t beat the establishment in a statewide election.

Deace argues that in today’s environment, it’s almost impossible for a first-time candidate like Adam Steen to win a statewide race unless he comes with wealth (like Lahn) or already has high name recognition — because campaigns are very expensive.

The other factor at play is Trump’s “king” power. His endorsement holds so much weight that major donors and organizations are scared to back anyone else, fearing that Trump might endorse an opponent and make the investment worthless.

That’s why Feenstra, who was “as dead as Star Wars” on the Thursday before the primary, almost won, says Deace. Trump’s last-second endorsement was powerful enough to boost him from hopeless to the narrow runner-up.

Lesson #8: Nominate candidates who energize and unify the base.

Deace argues that Lahn is a much stronger general election candidate than Randy Feenstra because Iowa Republicans have a huge built-in advantage: “over 200,000 more registered voters than Democrats.”

Feenstra, he says, “disappointed” and “dissed” the conservative base as a congressman, which would negatively affect voter turnout. At the same time, Democrats would do what they always do and call him “the worst, most Nazi, most homophobic, transphobic, racist that’s ever racisted and transphobited.”

With Lahn, however, the base is actually excited and unified, meaning more Republicans will actually show up to vote in November.

“With Zach, we have a chance to control what we can control — mobilize, unite our base, inspire our base with messaging they want to vote for, not branding they want to vote against,” says Deace.

To hear more, watch the episode above.

Want more from Steve Deace?

To enjoy more of Steve’s take on national politics, Christian worldview, and principled conservatism with a snarky twist, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Steve deace, Donald trump, Steve deace show, Randy feenstra, Zach lahn, Iowa 

A disturbing discovery was made by police at a Minnesota home after a 14-year-old girl was reported missing from her school on May 26.

The parents of the girl called the Maplewood Police Department to report her missing, and the girl’s father told police the girl might have been at her friend’s home in Oakdale.

‘Her whole top half is out, and I’m like, “Whoa, what’s going on here? Why are you naked in front of a child?”‘

Police said they investigated the home and spoke to a woman named Angeline Olson. She told them the girl was not at the home but that she would take the girl home if she showed up there.

Police then said they returned to the home after a disturbing report from a neighbor at about 1:30 a.m.

“I came outside to smoke, and I’m minding my own business, and all of a sudden this little girl comes running past out her house, right in front of me, half naked,” said Teaira Vennes, the woman who called police.

“Next thing you know, Angel’s out the bushes, and Angel comes out naked. Like, her whole top half is out, and I’m like, ‘Whoa, what’s going on here? Why are you naked in front of a child?'” she added.

Police said the Olsons were argumentative and defied orders, so they were detained.

When police searched the home, they found the girl in a cardboard box that was under a pile of clothes in the Olson couple’s bedroom.

Police then obtained warrants to search the couple’s digital devices and found sexually explicit videos with the Olsons and the victim.

The couple was arrested, and 47-year-old Angeline Olson was charged with first-degree criminal sexual conduct. Andrew Olson, 49, was charged with three counts of possessing child sexual abuse material.

Their neighbors, who were outraged and terrified by the incident, told KARE-TV that Child Protective Services had taken away their teenage children prior to the incident.

“It’s not just another story; it’s another f**king victim. It’s another little girl,” Vennes said. “After going through this, I couldn’t never imagine that happening to my daughter.”

RELATED: Indiana teen targeted victims across several states for child sex abuse through social media, cops say

“My client is presumed innocent and looks forward to clearing his name where it counts: in court,” said John Chitwood, the lawyer for Andrew Olson.

Andrew Olson faces up to 18 years in prison if convicted, while Angeline Olson faces up to 30 years if convicted.

“They need to be locked up. I hope that they are locked up for a very, very long time,” Vennes added.

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​Sexually explicit videos, Missing teen, Child sex abuse, Crime 

This week, as critics lined up to call Steven Spielberg’s June 12 film “Disclosure Day” the best thing he has made in 20 years, Glenn Beck made a point on his program that matters more than the movie.

The real story, Beck argued, is not whether Spielberg is running a quiet psychological operation for the Pentagon. The real story is that we have entered what Beck calls “the death of free will” — an age in which the device in your pocket studies what frightens you, flatters you, and keeps you watching, then feeds each of us a private version of reality until no two Americans can agree on what is true.

A faction that insists on deciding how much reality you can handle and an algorithm that quietly decides which reality you will see are two versions of the same problem.

He is right. I would push the point one step further.

That is precisely why the fight over UFO disclosure matters more than it appears.

I am an attorney by training and a California public school science teacher of 19 years. I have published 20 books, all on governmental and corporate corruption, and none of them touched anything I would have called fringe. Two and a half years ago, I co-wrote “Catastrophic Disclosure: The Deep State, Aliens, and the Truth” with documentary filmmaker Michael Mazzola.

I came to the subject as a skeptic. What convinced me something serious was being hidden was not a sighting or a leaked photograph. It was a congressional hearing.

On July 26, 2023, three credentialed witnesses — Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch and Navy pilots Ryan Graves and David Fravor — testified before the House Oversight Committee. Anyone who has covered Capitol Hill knows witnesses are vetted exhaustively before they testify under oath.

Grusch described an active military program of UFO crash recovery, reverse engineering, and the retrieval of “biologic” remains. He said he was denied access when he asked for it. Either the witnesses were lying, or the government was. As a lawyer, my instinct was to look for what we call best evidence: the earliest accounts, made before anyone had reason to shade the truth.

That brings me to the documents.

RELATED: Pentagon publishes first tranche of ‘hidden’ UFO files

AFP/Getty Images

On May 8, the Pentagon began releasing what it calls “never-before-seen” files on unidentified anomalous phenomena under a new program called PURSUE. The first tranche, roughly 162 documents, includes Apollo-era astronaut sightings, decades-old military records, and pilot encounter reports over the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. More tranches are promised on a rolling basis. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard called it “the first in what will be an ongoing joint declassification and release effort.”

One document, dated December 19, 1947, is a letter from H.M. McCoy, the Air Force chief of intelligence, transmitting reports on what were then called “flying discs.” McCoy wrote that continued reports from qualified observers still made the matter one of concern.

A second document — a September 23, 1947, assessment by Lt. Gen. Nathan Twining of the Air Materiel Command — is blunter. Twining concluded that “the phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious.” He described disc-shaped objects roughly the size of manned aircraft, with metallic surfaces, maneuvering in ways that suggested intelligent control at estimated speeds above 300 knots.

That was the Air Force’s own view in 1947. In 2026, our best and brightest still cannot give the public a credible answer. We have walked on the moon. We have edited human DNA. Yet, we still cannot explain what military pilots record on infrared cameras over the Persian Gulf.

Credit where it is due. The May 8 release would not have happened without the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, chaired by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), and the persistence of Reps. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) and Eric Burlison (R-Mo.). President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deserve credit for the directive that made it possible. This is real progress and the kind of transparency that should not be a partisan question.

But it is a first step, not a final one.

When I started the book, my co-author described a quiet war inside the national security state between two factions. One wanted “controlled” disclosure, a careful release at a pace the public could absorb. The other wanted “full” disclosure, the entire record at once. The first faction feared the second would trigger what it privately called catastrophic disclosure — a revelation severe enough to disrupt the basic institutions of public life.

RELATED: The real mystery isn’t UFOs — it’s what the government won’t explain

Moor Studio/Getty Images

What that faction fears the public will learn, I do not know. I will not pretend I do.

Here is where Beck’s warning and my book meet. A faction that insists on deciding how much reality you can handle and an algorithm that quietly decides which reality you will see are two versions of the same problem. Both take away the same thing: the right to look at the evidence and judge it for yourself.

Beck worries that the machine will hand each of us a custom world and convince us we discovered it on our own. The defense against that is not a better algorithm. It is a shared, documented, public record — primary sources and sworn testimony any citizen can read and weigh.

That is exactly what disclosure produces. It is also exactly what the “controlled” faction wants to ration.

In an age when truth is splintered into a million private feeds, a common set of facts is not a small thing. It may be the only thing.

On June 12, Spielberg releases “Disclosure Day.” He has spent his career telling stories about contact, from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.” He is a serious filmmaker with serious sources. The question is whether the disclosure he puts on screen looks like what the government released May 8 — or like something larger it is still holding back.

I hope it is the larger one.

Beck asks what is real. In a free country, the answer starts with the documents.

The American public can handle them. We have earned them.

​Ufos, Steven spielberg, Disclosure day, Aliens, Pentagon, Glenn beck, Extraterrestrial life, Opinion & analysis 

Federal prosecutors said that four suspects turned themselves in after an investigation into a $30 million Medicaid fraud scheme.

Two Ohio state employees and two co-conspirators were indicted in the scheme that fraudulently billed the federal government for children’s behavioral health services, according to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

‘These initial suspensions mark a critical step forward in ensuring accountability and deterring abuse within the Medicaid system.’

Two of the defendants falsely claimed to provide the medical services through behavioral health organizations that they owned and operated, according to Blanche.

The four suspects were hit with 32 counts in the indictment.

The fake services provided included behavioral therapy and psychotherapy for young people who attended summer camps, church groups, and recreational programs. They allegedly diagnosed the kids with a behavioral adjustment disorder, but no tests were performed, and the children received no actual care.

Among the 14 luxury vehicles seized in the investigation were a Maserati, six Mercedes Benz, a Jaguar, a Bentley, and a McLaren.

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel added that $600,000 was seized through seven bank accounts.

The investigation was a part of the administration’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, led by Vice President JD Vance.

“It is disgusting that fraudsters were allowed to deprive essential developmental services from American children in need,” a spokesperson for Vance said to CBS News.

“Countless lives could have been made better by the millions of tax dollars stolen, but instead they were used to purchase luxury cars,” the spokesperson added. “This is another example of the type of fraud the vice president’s task force is putting a stop to.”

RELATED: Newsom lashes out at report of MASSIVE fraud in California

Also on Thursday, Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s administration announced the suspension of Medicaid payments to 49 businesses providing home health care that were flagged for waste, fraud, or abuse.

“These initial suspensions mark a critical step forward in ensuring accountability and deterring abuse within the Medicaid system,” said the Ohio Department of Medicaid Director Scott Partika. “We will continue using advanced analytics and enforceable action to protect Ohioans and preserve program integrity.”

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​Federal bureau of investigation, Justice department, Trump administration, Politics, Medicaid fraud 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent battled it out with Democratic Rep. Linda Sanchez of California during a hearing of the House Ways and Means Committee Thursday.

Sanchez accused Bessent of being complicit with what she called corruption of the Trump administration when they entered a shouting match at the end of her comments.

‘The congresswoman is slanderous. She has nothing but the unsubstantiated opinions, and I will not stand for that!’

She asked him about whether he had reviewed the decision to give the president’s family complete immunity from being audited by the Internal Revenue Service.

“Why are you allowing President Trump and his family to have complete immunity from being audited?” Sanchez asked.

“Since you’re a lawyer, you will understand that the U.S. Treasury and the IRS are represented by the Justice Department and the acting attorney general,” Bessent responded.

Sanchez interrupted and accused Bessent of refusing to answer questions about the immunity order.

“I’m curious to know who counts as Trump’s ‘family’ for the purposes of this immunity. Is it his children, his in-laws, his grandchildren, his second or third cousin, his great-great-grandchildren? Do you know the answer to that question, Mr. Secretary?” she asked.

“Again, I imagine you have the Justice Department phone number. I suggest you call them,” Bessent responded.

“I’m not the one that runs the Department of the Treasury or that oversees what is happening with this immunity that has been granted,” Sanchez fired back.

“I’m not the one either,” Bessent said. “We follow the instructions of our lawyers, and we obey the law.”

“I hope that you’re proud of your performance today,” Sanchez said.

“Well, I hope you get some social media clips!” Bessent said to Sanchez.

“I think it’s pretty safe to say that this is probably the most corrupt Treasury Department in our nation’s history!” Sanchez said.

“I am going to have to take exception to that. That is a slanderous statement!” Bessent hollered.

“While you dance around questions to protect Trump, Americans are suffering in Trump’s spiraling economy. Inflation is now raising faster than average hourly wages, gas prices are at an all-time high with the war in Iran,” Sanchez said.

“Nah!” Bessent interjected.

“The price of groceries has risen 3.2% over the past years, and prices on most goods have gone up because of Trump’s tariffs,” she continued. “So I don’t see how you can call that anything other than a failure of the most corrupt Treasury Department in history.”

Bessent was given the chance to respond after Sanchez’s time was over.

“The congresswoman is slanderous. She has nothing but the unsubstantiated opinions, and I will not stand for that!” Bessent hollered.

RELATED: Scott Bessent slaps down Newsom at Davos: ‘He’s here with his billionaire sugar daddy, Alex Soros’

“There is nothing corrupt. We move at the highest levels, and just because she cannot get the answer she wants, if she would like to give me facts — she seems … short on facts, long on hot air. And I will not stand for that,” he added.

“It’s a disgrace to make a remark like that,” Bessent concluded.

The IRS audit immunity order was announced by the Justice Department as a part of the $20 billion lawsuit from the president over the leak of his IRS documents.

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​Scott bessent, Rep linda sanchez, Irs audit immunity, Treasury department, Politics 

The momentum behind Spencer Pratt’s campaign is only growing, as his chances of beating his Democrat opponents are up significantly.

While according to the polls he had a 7% chance in February, he was up to a 26% chance at the end of May.

“There’s so much hype around Spencer Pratt, and that’s because he’s done a good job with this campaign. Like, he’s, I would say, outperformed expectations in a major way. The fact that anyone thinks he has any chance of winning this election is impressive,” BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere says.

“This is a place, if you don’t know, where Donald Trump lost this election by over 40 points in 2024, in an election that Donald Trump won, right? So to come in as a Republican and try to win in this area is near-impossible,” he continues.

“Almost everything has to go your way,” he adds, “And with Pratt, a lot of it has.”

One element that’s working in Pratt’s favor is his “completely incompetent opponent,” Karen Bass — who is polling only slightly above the reality star.

Pratt’s AI ads are also working well for his campaign, with one of his latest showing a conversation between a husband, wife, and their son, whom they found to be searching “Spencer Pratt” online.

“In this house, we don’t believe in Spencer Pratt. He’s MAGA,” the father told the son, who asked, “What about Spencer Pratt is MAGA?”

“You know those streets downtown, the ones that are full of piss and homeless people? He wants to clean them up,” the father responded.

“And those neighborhoods that burned down — the Palisades, Malibu — he wants to rebuild them,” the mother chimed in, wiping a tear away.

“You know how people inject heroin in front of children at the park? He wants to stop that,” the father added.

“There’s still that weird uncanny valley thing going on with the AI, but he’s just really good at the messaging here. Like, you shouldn’t be embarrassed to vote for a guy who wants to clean up your streets,” Stu comments.

Dave points out that Karen Bass has said that if there is “a homeless encampment near you, you’re not safe.”

“So is that MAGA?” Dave asks.

“The whole city is a homeless encampment.”

Pratt has also been expertly using social media, where he recently posted a video of a Los Angeles ballot box surrounded by homeless people.

“That’s how voting is supposed to happen,” Stu says, “you’re supposed to drop it over a homeless body as you put your ballot in the ballot box.”

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​Stu burguiere, Spencer pratt, Karen bass, Dave landau, Los angeles, Ai, Maga, Homeless, Stu and dave do america