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Abdul El-Sayed did Americans a favor when he sat down with Jesse Watters on Fox News this week. The Michigan U.S. Senate candidate gave us a remarkably clear lesson in the philosophy behind America’s growing democratic socialist movement. The real question is simple: Who owns your property — you or the government?The most revealing moment was not about Sharia law, transgender medicine, or even socialized health care. It came when Watters pressed El-Sayed about his proposal to tax the wealth of Americans with more than $100 million.Before giving government more power, ask what happens when the people wielding it decide that you, too, have more than you need.El-Sayed has made the argument before. Billionaires, he says, can surrender a substantial portion of their wealth and still remain billionaires. Their children and grandchildren will still be rich.Notice the premise. This is not merely an argument that government needs revenue for legitimate functions, nor a dispute over whether the top marginal income-tax rate should be 35% or 39%. The argument is that you possess more than you need — and government gets to decide how much that is.That is the part Americans need to understand.Suppose you build a company. You work for decades. You save, invest, and take risks. The company becomes enormously valuable. Under the traditional American understanding, the presumption is that the property is yours. Government may tax under constitutional authority, but it does not acquire an unlimited moral claim on your property because politicians decide you have too much of it.El-Sayed reverses that presumption. What are you going to do with all that money? Whatever your answer, the socialist argument says it is too much because you have more than you need.The proper question is not what you intend to do with your property. The proper question is: By what right does the government take it?That distinction takes us back to 1776. The founders understood that government is necessary to protect life, liberty, property, contracts, and the peaceful exercise of rights.But precisely because government possesses coercive power, it must be limited. The founders built a constitutional order around the insight that human beings abuse power, so power must be divided, checked, and restrained.Read the Declaration of Independence. The complaint against George III is repeatedly that political power has exceeded its proper bounds. The king interferes with colonial legislatures, imposes taxes without consent, and seeks to subject Americans to “absolute Despotism.”The central political problem was not how government could solve every problem. It was how citizens could prevent government from becoming one.RELATED: The data center mob wants your property rights too Brandon Bell/Getty ImagesCompare that instinct with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s declaration that there is “no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.” That is nearly the photographic negative of the American constitutional tradition.The founders asked: What powers have we actually given government, and how do we limit them? The new socialists ask: What problem is left for government to solve?El-Sayed’s wealth-tax argument reveals why. Once we abandon the presumption that your property is genuinely yours, the limiting principle becomes hard to locate. If $100 million is too much, why not $50 million? Why not $10 million? If politicians may determine how much wealth you need, why stop with billionaires?The issue is not whether anyone should feel sorry for billionaires. The issue is who owns the property.Redistribution is politically easiest when it begins with somebody almost nobody identifies with. He has plenty. You do not. Why shouldn’t government take some?Because a government powerful enough to decide how much property another person needs has been given a power that does not become harmless merely because its first target is richer than you.Then there is the comic assumption beneath the argument: Government will spend the money more wisely.El-Sayed’s home state offers a useful caution. The state auditor found Michigan’s Unemployment Insurance Agency ineffective during the COVID pandemic. Fraud controls were weakened, billions in improper or fraudulent payments went out, and later audits found serious failures in recovering them.These are the institutions that will reliably improve on the decisions of people who built billion-dollar companies?Government has legitimate but limited purposes, and legitimate taxation follows from those purposes. But legitimate taxation does not establish a standing claim to whatever share of your wealth politicians decide you do not need.This debate is especially important because socialism has found a receptive audience among younger Americans. Harvard’s 2025 Youth Poll found support for capitalism among young Americans at only 39%, while nearly half of young Democrats expressed support for socialism.That is, in part, a failure of education.We have spent enormous energy teaching young Americans to critique power and too little teaching them why constitutional government was designed to limit it. Much of contemporary oppression theory condemns authorities who presume to know how others should live, then demands political power to impose its own answers.The next generation needs a different lesson.RELATED: The DSA’s history lesson has one big omission Sarah Rice/Getty ImagesYour life is your responsibility. Your neighbor’s property belongs to your neighbor. Wealth does not become public property when it crosses an arbitrary number selected by a politician. Government exists to protect rights, not to decide how much prosperity citizens are permitted to enjoy.Freedom includes choices politicians consider foolish or wasteful. Save your money, give it away, invest it, build a business, leave it to your children, support your church, fund a charity, or buy something ridiculous. Within the law, those decisions belong to you.That is what limited government protects.The socialist temptation is perennial because it begins with an attractive promise: Give us more power, and we will use it to make life fairer.The American answer is older and wiser: Before giving government more power, ask what happens when the people wielding it decide that you, too, have more than you need.

On August 10, a powerful magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck western Colombia near the town of San José del Palmar in Chocó Department, killing at least 287 people, injuring thousands, and knocking down buildings in cities like Pereira and Cali.While Colombia is the most recent example, it’s certainly not the only country to experience devastating earthquakes in recent months. Since May, Venezuela, Indonesia, Mexico, and Japan, among several others, have all experienced the ground-splitting force of major quakes.On a recent episode of “Live Free,” host and Lakepointe Church pastor Josh Howerton, along with co-host and fellow pastor Carlos Erazo, dove into the biblical significance behind the uptick in earthquakes and other kinds of chaos. “When you look at Scripture, there's only one time that Jesus actually specifically explicitly addresses earthquakes,” says Erazo, “and the one time He does it, it happens in the context of the end-times and the return of Jesus.”He then reads Matthew 24:7-8, which documents Jesus’ answer to His disciples’ questions regarding the signs that will mark the end of the age: “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.”The earthquakes that are happening all over the world right now, Erazo says, are “literally what Jesus said 2,000 years ago would happen.” He acknowledges that skeptics will argue that earthquakes have always happened, but they’re missing a critical distinction. “There's always been earthquakes ... and that's true, but we haven't always had these amount of earthquakes in the context of literally everything else that we're seeing right now happening and unfolding in our world,” he says. He points to another of Jesus’ end-time signs in Matthew 24 — “wars and rumors of wars.” “Studies show today that in the last four to five years, there's been an increasing number in quote ‘active armed conflicts involving governments.’ 2025 set an all-time record high since World War II,” says Erazo.“In 2026, the amount of countries that were involved as well in conflicts outside of their own borders nearly doubled in the last 20 years, and according to this same report, it says quote, ‘Global peace is at its lowest level since 2007,”’ he adds, citing the 2026 Global Peace Index from the Institute for Economics & Peace. These natural disasters and global conflicts aren’t mere occurrences, Erazo argues, but signs that Jesus’ prophesies are coming to pass. “When you see stuff like that — earthquakes, wars, persecution, the insanity happening out there, chaos — Jesus said this would happen,” he says. For Christians, these signs herald the good news that Jesus’ final return draws nearer — but not so for the unbeliever, says Erazo. “If you're not a Christian ... this should scare you,” he warns. “Jesus spoke about birth pains, and this is just the beginning of something that's going to get worse.” To hear more, watch the episode above. “Live Free with Josh Howerton” is on BlazeTV+, YouTube, and major podcast platforms.Join BlazeTV+ and start watching Josh today at blazetv.com/JOSH. Use promo code JOSH40 to get $40 off your subscription.

Virtual Private Networks are meant to shield your browsing history from all manner of prying eyes, including your internet service provider, your workplace or school, and even potential hackers. If you use a VPN with your Windows PC, though, I have some bad news: Microsoft has a full record of your browsing habits, and it can even report your activity to the FBI.According to court documents released on July 1, a 19-year-old young man working with the cyber criminal group known as Scattered Spider was caught hacking into a computer system belonging to a luxury jewelry store. While inside, the hacker stole company data and demanded $8 million in cryptocurrency for ransom. Ultimately, the jewelry store kicked the hacker out of its system without paying the ransom, and the perpetrator was later arrested and charged. Every user is susceptible to unwarranted surveillance and government overreach.It’s a simple case of conspiracy, digital intrusion, and fraud ... but there’s a catch. The hacker’s identity should have been hidden from the feds. Reports indicate that the hacker used a Windows PC to access the jewelry store’s system. Before breaking in, he installed a VPN onto his device that was meant to conceal his IP address, location, and identity. The VPN worked as intended, but it still wasn’t enough to keep his activity from leaking to the FBI. Even with protections in place, Windows itself was the thing that outed him in the end, thanks to a little-known device identifier called Global Device Identifier, or GDID. What is GDID? Every installation of Windows is assigned a GDID. Up until recently, there wasn’t a lot of information on exactly what this identifier could do, and even now, details are scant. However, thanks to this case, we can make a few deductions. GDID can track and keep a record of the web browsing history on the device that it’s assigned, even if a VPN is installed. This information is saved over time, and it can’t be erased or cleared, even if with a system wipe or reinstall of Windows. GDID can’t see what a user did on the pages they visited. It doesn’t know what that person saw or read on the screen. However, simply visiting a certain URL may be enough to draw conclusions and bring legal charges, as was the case with the Scattered Spider hacker. What does this mean for regular users? For the criminally inclined, GDID is just another way for the FBI to serve justice in a world increasingly plagued by cyber criminals, AI-powered security threats, and system breaches. As more of our digital infrastructure comes under attack at the hands of quantum computing and other innovations we haven’t yet imagined, the feds will need all the help they can get to stop criminals in their tracks. And for the rest of us?RELATED: New malware is crippling Android phones, but not yours if you do this Jutharat Pinpan/Getty Images The revelation that Microsoft created Windows with browser-tracking spyware baked directly into the OS is neither shocking nor acceptable. A feature that can monitor a hacker’s browsing activity is a fatal flaw that makes every user susceptible to unwarranted surveillance and government overreach. This is especially egregious when you take into account what this could mean for something like the age-verification bills that are currently at Capitol Hill.Imagine what would happen if states begin to pass age-restriction laws. Instead of turning over their IDs, citizens would use a VPN to access the internet by routing their connection to a nonrestrictive state — a clear violation of the new law. A Windows PC would detect this behavior, and it could inform the government of such an infraction, resulting in legal repercussions. At that point, there’s no going back. How to disable GDID This is usually the part of the story where I try to deliver some good news — a solution to keep you, your devices, and your rights safe from Big Tech and/or the government. Unfortunately, there isn’t much that can be done here. GDID is built directly into Windows. It is assigned to your device whether you use your Microsoft account to log in or you use a local account. It is also persistent, meaning that once assigned, it doesn’t change. That identifier is attached to your computer and you for the rest of its life, and when you get another Windows PC, the next identifier will follow you too. The only way to avoid it is to choose a different PC platform altogether.

Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) recently made headlines when she claimed during an interview on ABC’s “This Week” with Jonathan Karl that “Woke 1 was crazy.” She was specifically referring to the extreme progressive rhetoric and positions of the 2020 COVID lockdown era, particularly calls to defund or abolish the police.Some have interpreted the DSA member’s words as evidence that the left is entering a more sane, commonsense phase — but BlazeTV’s Christopher Rufo believes the opposite is actually true.On this episode of “Rufo & Lomez,” Rufo and co-host Jonathan Keeperman sit down with foreign policy expert Zineb Riboua to dive into what Rufo predicts is the left’s next phase — a movement that will make the pinnacle of wokeism look tame. “It's long been my thesis that what's next on the left is the ideology of Third-Worldism,” says Rufo.Riboua breaks down what that term entails. “Third-Worldism is really about seeing everything through a very specific lens, where you show who is the colonizer, who is the colonized, who is the oppressor, the oppressed.”This “very binary” way of thinking, she explains, pits “the global north” against “the global south,” with the explicit goal of seeing the latter “triumph.”But this isn’t the massive shift some interpret it to be, she says. Third-Worldism, Riboua explains, is just “a different form” of the left’s longtime goal to take money and power from the West and give it to other groups via redistribution, reparations, and shifting power.“My kind of pet theory is that there's also just a change in racial focus,” Rufo adds, highlighting 2020’s BLM era, which was hyper-focused around “black America's historical grievances [and] historical oppressions” — an era whose “leadership class” ultimately “collapsed.”Rufo wonders if Third-Worldism is simply the shifting of the left’s racial focus off of black America and on to the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.“Is it just a racial shift in the subject — seeking the same policies, yes, but seeking a kind of stronger leadership class?” he asks Riboua.“While it's true that there is a change in ... which race we're going to give priorities for, I think that what is, I think, more fundamental about Third-Worldism is that it positions things in a way that anyone who feels oppressed can join,” says Riboua.“In a way, Third-Worldism is much more, I would say, inclusive of all these grievances against anything that is Western and de facto imperial, patriarchal even though things are obviously very much complicated in history,” she adds.To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.Want more from Rufo & Lomez?To enjoy more of the news through the anthropological lens of Christopher Rufo and Lomez, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.