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On June 17, Mass NOW in partnership with the MA Trans Political Coalition will put on its third annual “Trans Period Pride” — a “consciousness-raising” event featuring a group discussion on “menstrual equity” and “the experiences of trans menstruators,” a catered dinner, and free period underwear for attendees.But this isn’t some privately funded event. Democrat Mayor Michelle Wu’s Office of LGBTQ+ Advancement — which receives nearly $1 million annually from the city budget — is officially co-sponsoring the event.In other words, Boston taxpayers are being forced to bankroll this event while the city faces a nearly $50 million budget deficit.When BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey saw the advertisement for this Trans Period Pride event, she admits she had to do “a double take.” Allie says she's unsure who exactly this event is even catering to.“[Are we] talking about women who identify as men, still have their uterus and their eggs, and so they're having periods? ... Or are we talking about the men that I've seen on social media who claim because of the synthetic hormones that they're taking to try to look more like women that they have some kind of menstrual cycle, even though you don't have a uterus or eggs or any ability to menstruate?” she asks, speculating that the attendees will likely be “a mixed bag” of confused individuals.She calls the entire debacle “funny, but it's sad.”But “Trans Period Pride” isn’t the only absurdity Boston taxpayers are being forced to fund.In April, Mayor Wu’s Office for Immigrant Advancement partnered with the nonprofit OUTnewcomers on the “Belonging Matters” program, which aimed to provide $250-$500 “wellness allowance” vouchers to low-income LGBTQ+ migrants for non-clinical services such as yoga, meditation, massages, hair salon visits, gym memberships, and creative healing. The public backlash was so intense that the program was paused within days of launching.“The city faces a budget deficit of nearly $50 million, but sorry, the transgender people need their period underwear. The queer asylum-seekers need their yoga classes, okay?” Allie quips.To hear her full 2026 Pride Month breakdown, watch the episode above.Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Scott Bessent may well be the most consequential secretary of the treasury since Alexander Hamilton — not simply because of the policies he advances, but because of the conditions he confronts and the clarity with which he is executing President Trump’s broader economic vision.Like Hamilton before him, Bessent has stepped into an economy weakened by a long period of policies that, however well intentioned, failed to serve the enduring interests of the American domestic economy.Before entering public life, Bessent operated at the highest levels of global finance. As a key figure alongside Stanley Druckenmiller, he helped execute one of the defining macro trades of the modern era — the successful challenge to the Bank of England’s currency peg in 1992. The lesson was enduring: Systems that ignore economic reality do not last. Markets force alignment.What Bessent is executing is a re-centering, not only of economics, but of strategy.It is precisely that market-grounded realism that now underpins the implementation of the administration’s economic strategy. But Bessent is not simply a market practitioner. His time teaching the history of economic thought at Yale reveals the deeper foundation of his approach.He sees the economy not as a series of quarterly data points, but as a system shaped over time by production, energy, capital formation, and national power. That synthesis, of theory, history, and practice, places him firmly in the Hamiltonian tradition and makes him a natural architect for translating President Trump’s economic doctrine into operational policy.After the Revolutionary War, the United States was financially strained under extreme levels of debt, industrially underdeveloped, and newly severed from its economic relationship with the British Empire. Hamilton’s achievement was to turn that fragility into a foundation for strength.He tied fiscal credibility to growth, fostered domestic industry, and deployed tariffs with precision — high enough to generate revenue and support development, but not so high as to suffocate competition. He was not managing decline; he was reversing it.Bessent faces a modern analogue, an American economy navigating the aftermath of its own rupture, not from a formal empire, but from the post-World War II Pax Americana and the rules-based system it sustained. The task, again, is not to preserve a fading order, but to build a new foundation, one that reflects the strategic reset articulated by President Trump and now being systematically implemented through the Treasury Department and beyond.The parallel is difficult to ignore. Decades of globalization prioritized efficiency over resilience and consumption over production. The result is an economy that remains large but is increasingly imbalanced, dependent on external supply chains, tilted toward financial engineering, and less capable of sustaining broad-based growth. Bessent’s significance lies in recognizing this reality and acting on it, not in abstraction, but in execution of a defined national strategy.Like Hamilton, he is not merely managing the economy he inherited; he is working to re-anchor it, aligning markets with the administration’s emphasis on domestic strength, industrial capacity, and economic sovereignty.That begins with debt. The United States now carries historically elevated fiscal obligations layered on top of structural weakness. The answer, as in Hamilton’s time, is not austerity alone, but growth — stronger, more durable expansion rooted in production, investment, and rising capacity.Debt is not ignored; it is made sustainable through expansion, a core pillar of the administration’s supply-side orientation.RELATED: Grants are a secret weapon for American communities NicolasMe/Getty ImagesThis framework was articulated clearly in Bessent’s speech at the Reagan Library. At its core is a simple recognition: An economy hollowed out by flawed globalization cannot sustain either prosperity or fiscal stability.The answer is not withdrawal, but reordering, a principle that sits at the heart of President Trump’s economic agenda. His formulation — de-risk, not decouple — captures that balance. It preserves the benefits of trade while restoring the primacy of national resilience.This is not a rejection of globalization but its correction, a distinctly Hamiltonian instinct and one now being operationalized across trade, capital flows, and industrial policy.Energy is central to this vision. Cheap, secure energy is not a talking point; it is the precondition for winning the next phase of economic competition, particularly in artificial intelligence.Computing is power. Without abundant energy, neither technological leadership nor sustained growth is possible. This, too, reflects a deliberate alignment between Treasury policy and the administration’s broader push for energy dominance.So too does the shift back toward productive capital. For years, policy favored financial engineering over real investment. Bessent’s emphasis is different, directing capital toward infrastructure, manufacturing, and technological capacity, translating strategic intent into capital allocation.Markets have responded not in spite of this shift, but because of it.His early attention to Federal Reserve mission creep reinforces the broader theme. By insisting that the Fed operate within, not above, the constitutional framework, Bessent is reasserting a principle that has eroded: Economic power must remain accountable. It is a subtle but critical component of restoring coherence between monetary authority and elected economic leadership.To understand his significance, however, is to see the broader architecture now taking shape. This is not a collection of policies. It is a doctrine, one that reflects both intellectual lineage and political mandate.At its core is a modernized American system, domestic production, strategic protection, and national development. Layered onto it is a Monroe Doctrine-style approach to economic security, treating the Western Hemisphere as a strategic sphere.But what distinguishes this strategy is not its articulation but its execution — the translation of President Trump’s strategic instincts into coordinated economic statecraft.In late 2025, largely under the radar, pressure on Iran’s financial system intensified and key elements of its banking sector began to fail. It generated few headlines, but the signal was unmistakable — a targeted disruption of financial plumbing rather than a blunt sanctions regime.This is economic statecraft executed with precision — identifying pressure points, applying force selectively, and achieving strategic effect without spectacle. It reflects Bessent’s background in markets, where understanding fragility is everything, and his role in implementing a broader geopolitical-economic strategy set at the presidential level.RELATED: No more free ride for federal grant hogs Porcorex/Getty ImagesWithin this framework, Bessent is the intellectual anchor and operational executor, aligning fiscal policy, capital markets, and economic structure with national purpose as defined by the administration.What this represents is a break from the postwar consensus. The Pax Americana was a historic achievement, but over time it evolved into a system that often detached American policy from American strength.What Bessent is executing is a re-centering, not only of economics, but of strategy.Just as Hamilton anchored the early United States away from dependence on the British Empire and toward internally generated strength, Bessent is anchoring the modern economy back toward its domestic foundations, while executing a presidential mandate to rebuild American economic sovereignty in a more fragmented world.But the defining parallel is not philosophical. It is practical. Hamilton did not simply write or speak. He executed, building institutions, implementing policy, and translating theory into durable structure in real time. Bessent is doing the same, not in isolation, but as the principal architect and executor of a broader economic vision set from the top by President Trump.That is what makes him consequential. Not the speeches, though they matter. Not the framework, though it is clear. But the execution, policy applied in real time, reshaping the trajectory of the American economy.That is the Hamilton standard. And by that standard, Bessent is the first secretary of the treasury to meet it.Editor's note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

Several years ago, a team of researchers obtained numerous pig brains from a slaughterhouse and revived them off-site for experimentation purposes. That team has since moved up the food chain. Now it obtains human donors' brains, restores their functions, and uses them to test experimental drugs.Bexorg, a Connecticut-based biotech startup spun out of Yale University, boasts about having created a "platform that leverages the untouched potential of nature's most complex and enduring mystery: the human brain."'It’s a remarkable brain bank.'Whereas other researchers might be limited to experimenting on lab-grown, human pseudo-brains or cell cultures, the team at Bexorg meddles with "full mature, intact, and isolated brains for days on end" with the stated aim of advancing brain disease therapies.Unlike the company's slick pitch, the reality appears to be something of a horror show. After all, the over 700 brains that have been subjected to experimentation at Bexorg so far were apparently far from inert.Bexorg takes human brains from their newly deceased donors' bodies, places them in what are effectively vats, and feeds them liters of blood substitute and other fluids that provide oxygen from an artificial lung and carry away waste to a fake kidney. The tubes that carry the sustaining fluids are connected to blood vessels in the brain via four plastic ports.RELATED: Famed neuroscientist claims he's disproven free will — but his peers say he failed miserably RDB/Dukas/Universal Images Group/Getty ImagesAccording to the peer-reviewed academic journal Science, the company's proprietary life-support system BrainEx keeps the disembodied brains alive and preserves their key functions so that they can metabolize experimental drugs and react to other stimuli.After roughly 24 hours in a state of drugged limbo, donors' brains are cut up into hundreds of pieces for further study.Although the brains are alive and reactive for the benefit of "drug discovery," Bexorg CEO Zvonimir Vrselja has stated that "higher-level brain functions are not restored."According to a 2019 study in which Vrselja and other members of what became the Bexorg team used their technology to revive pig brains obtained from a food processing facility, "The observed restoration of molecular and cellular processes following 4h of global anoxia/ischemia should not be extrapolated to signify resurgence of normal brain function. Indeed, quite the opposite: at no point did we observe the kind of organized global electrical activity associated with awareness, perception, or other higher-order brain functions."To ensure against the re-emergence of consciousness among the subjects of their "wet-lab" experiments, researchers suppress the human brains' electrical activity with anesthetics, specifically the drug propofol.Propofol apparently causes brain activity to become unstable until the brain loses consciousness."The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness," Brenand Parent, a bioethicist from New York University Langone Health who sits on Bexorg's board, told Science.Despite the company's reassurances and use of multiple measures to block neuronal activity, some have raised serious ethical concerns about Bexorg's technology, which initially developed with the help of funding through the National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative. A source familiar told Blaze News that the company is not presently receiving NIH funding."This is brand-new, and there's no kind of institutional oversight," Yale bioethicist Stephen Latham told ScienceAlert in 2019 regarding the earlier experiments on pig brains."This is not animal research, because the brain comes to the researchers from an already dead animal," continued Latham. "But if consciousness were somehow induced in the brain, we don't have ethics committees … that are constituted to even think about how to do the kinds of trade-offs you do when you do research on human subjects or on animals."Vrselja claimed in a December 2025 study published in the Alzheimer's Association's journal, Alzheimer's and Dementia, that the 5-year-old startup's "perfusion‐based postmortem brain model can recapitulate the complexity of the brain at the cellular and systems level."The December study claimed further that "utilizing human disease brains as a preclinical model promises to substantially increase the probability of success in developing new therapies for AD."Bexorg did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.Bruna Bellaver, a research assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, told Science that BrainEx is "a huge step up from mouse models."Bruce Car, the chief science officer at Biohaven, one of Bexorg's collaborators, has used roughly 130 of the Bexorg-sustained brains to test drugs. Car told Science that one of the drugs, the intended use of which is to prevent toxic proteins from building up in the brain, didn't perform as desired in a mouse, but worked in the disembodied human brains at a lower-than-expected dose. This apparently saved Biohaven a year of development."It’s a remarkable brain bank," said MIT neuroscientist Li-Huei Tsai, who instead uses pseudo-brains grown from human stem cells.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

If there is a single idea that President Donald Trump holds with conviction, it is that the 2020 election was stolen.Millions of Americans agree with him. How it was stolen, and by whom, is still being investigated six years later. That is a problem, because another national election arrives this fall, and Americans deserve an answer as to whether the way we now conduct elections can actually produce honest results.Normal legislative remedies have failed. Congress has not passed the SAVE Act to ensure that only citizens vote, nor does it appear likely it will. It has done nothing about mass mail-in balloting or the vulnerabilities of electronic voting systems. Yet these are precisely the parts of the system that millions of Americans no longer trust — and for good reason.The notion that the federal government has no role in federal elections is plainly wrong.Consider what happened this past April. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell summoned the chief executives of America’s largest banks to an unannounced meeting, alarmed by a new artificial-intelligence model capable of finding and exploiting security flaws faster than any human defender could patch them. If the men charged with protecting the nation’s financial system feel compelled to convene Wall Street on short notice over what artificial intelligence now makes possible, our election systems — built with similar computer technology but with far less security — are open to the same threat and worse.Our electronic voting systemsFor most of American history, Americans voted on paper ballots, counted by human beings, watched by other human beings. Electronic voting promised speed and accuracy. What it delivered is elections that take weeks instead of a day, accuracy that is openly in doubt, and a counting process that has lost the transparency a republic requires. Citing proprietary software, the major vendors have become black boxes. The public is told to trust the output. Oversight is inadequate, and skepticism is the rational response.The deeper problem is the very idea that voting and tabulation should be done electronically. The major suppliers — Election Systems & Software, Dominion Voting Systems (now Liberty Vote), and Hart InterCivic — all record and tabulate American votes on networked digital equipment running proprietary software. The vulnerability is, in part, that many of the electronic components are made in communist China. But even if all the components were made in the United States, they are not immune to a remote intrusion, a firmware exploit, or a software supply-chain attack. The vulnerability is the architecture itself: an opaque, software-driven counting process exposed, directly or indirectly, to any determined bad actor, most especially a nation-state adversary. That is not a vulnerability at the margin. It is a structural compromise of the most sensitive function of self-government.This is not theoretical. The People’s Liberation Army fields a cyber force approaching one million men, and American critical infrastructure is one of its principal targets. In 2019, federal officials seized a Chinese-built power transformer destined for Colorado; analysis at Sandia National Laboratory revealed what appeared to be a hardware back door enabling remote disablement. In 2023, Microsoft identified Volt Typhoon, a Chinese campaign pre-positioning malware inside U.S. critical infrastructure to enable sabotage. To imagine that our election systems are immune to the same treatment is folly, more so now that the aforementioned use of artificial intelligence has become another weapon in the adversary’s arsenal.Some will point to the recent Reuters account of a federal examination of Dominion machines seized from Puerto Rico, in which investigators reportedly found no Venezuelan code and only one chip sourced from China. They will conclude that the foreign-component concern has been overstated. But that misses the point entirely. The question is not whether a particular batch of machines, examined on one occasion, contained components from a designated adversary. The question is whether a computerized voting system, however sourced and however audited, can be defended against the cyber capabilities of a nation-state intelligence service.The honest answer is no. The same Chinese cyber force that pre-positioned malware in our power grid, water systems, and ports does not require a chip stamped in Shenzhen to reach an American voting machine. It requires only that the machine exist, be connected to a network at some point in its life, and run software that can be updated. All three conditions are met.RELATED: John Cornyn’s defeat could be the end of the GOP establishment Antranik Tavitian/Bloomberg/Getty ImagesNew evidenceDirector of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has declassified the Jan. 15, 2020, National Intelligence Council memorandum “Vulnerabilities in U.S. 2020 Election Infrastructure,” which judged that Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea all had “the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure for the 2020 presidential election.” Senior officials briefed President Trump in February 2020. The public was never told. Subsequent declassified memos indicate that Chinese actors gained access to voter-registration databases in 12 to 18 states. Gabbard has opened a probe into allegations that intelligence officials suppressed this evidence, kept it out of the President’s Daily Brief, and hid it from Congress.This was a serious misrepresentation by members of the Intelligence Community, especially since the Chinese Communist Party declared a "People’s War" against the United States in May 2019 in response to President Trump’s efforts to halt its theft of American intellectual property. Communist China, which spends roughly $20 billion a year on intelligence and influence operations inside the United States, has every interest, as a matter of high government policy, in who sits in the Oval Office.The motive could not be plainer. A second Trump term meant continued tariffs, continued enforcement against Chinese IP theft, continued pressure on Huawei, ZTE, and the Chinese semiconductor industry, and a hardening U.S. posture across the Indo-Pacific. A Biden administration meant the reversal of all of it.Consider the numbers. Obama received 69 million votes in 2008. Clinton received 66 million in 2016. Biden received 81 million in 2020. A 15 million-vote surge for the least charismatic Democrat in living memory cannot be explained by enthusiasm.The January 2020 assessment noted that “adversaries could also use the registration data ... to tailor other interference or influence efforts.” It is well within the realm of possibility that communist China, armed with the names on those rolls, mounted an industrial-scale effort to produce counterfeit ballots indistinguishable from genuine ones and therefore votes for Joe Biden. Such a possibility must at least be entertained. Otherwise, one is left to ask the obvious question no one in Washington wants to ask: Why did communist China hack into those voter databases in the first place?Can elections be secured?Congress will not act. Blue states will not reform their mail-in practices or replace their electronic systems. Securing federal elections therefore falls to the president in his role as chief magistrate. Two executive orders are needed even if they will be challenged in court.The first is an emergency declaration outlawing electronic voting machines in federal elections, on the grounds that any networked, software-driven counting system is inherently vulnerable to nation-state cyberattack and cannot, under current conditions, deliver an election the public can verify. Executive Order 13848 from 2018 recognized the threat of foreign interference but triggers only after the fact. America cannot afford after-the-fact remedies.The second would require, since the electronic voting machines would no longer be used, federal elections to be conducted on paper ballots, hand-counted by human beings observed by other human beings, with photo ID, accurate voter rolls, election-day voting, and mail-in ballots reserved for the military and the genuinely confined. The counting would be live streamed. The result would be the most transparent election in American history.States today hold the constitutional delegation to conduct elections, and ideally, they would administer such a system themselves. Given the political divide, many will refuse. One alternative is for the federal government — preferably the National Guard, federalized and operating under each state’s adjutant general — to administer the election directly.Critics will invoke Article I, Section 4, which empowers Congress to alter the times, places, and manner of federal elections. That route would be preferable if our political system were not broken. Others will invoke states’ rights. But states do not have rights. Citizens have natural rights, and states are obliged to defend them. When states fail to defend the most basic right of a self-governing people – the right to a fair election – the federal government has the duty to act.RELATED: Polarization may be the cure — and the clarity — America needs Elen11/Getty ImagesThe country’s critical infrastructure, which includes our election system, falls under the Department of Homeland Security. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Election Assistance Commission sit in the executive branch. The notion that the federal government has no role in federal elections is plainly wrong. The problem is that those agencies are not currently equipped to defend against a nation-state cyber adversary at this scale. And cybersecurity against communist China is beyond the capacity of any individual state government acting alone.If federal authorities had actionable intelligence that a cyberattack was going to occur on America’s electronic voting systems during a federal election but did not have the ability to stop it, are they simply to stand aside and let the attack occur? The commonsense approach would be to find a method of conducting the election that was not vulnerable to cyberattack. That is precisely why the president’s executive order is so urgently needed.The choice at handAs Director Gabbard’s declassifications confirm, China has gained access to the voter-registration data that defines our electorate. No election conducted on networked computers that a hostile intelligence service has the demonstrated capacity to breach, and on voter rolls that service has already breached, can deliver the legitimacy a republic requires.Paper ballots, hand-counted, observed in the open, can. However controversial it may sound, it is the only way to ensure a fair election for the American people.This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.