Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Monday, August 31, that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is removing 110 commercial driver’s license training schools from the federal Training Provider Registry and issuing notices of proposed removal to more than 160 additional schools, a combined total of about 270 locations. The removals come as the Trump Administration continues to crack down on illegal aliens operating commercial vehicles on American roads.

The 110 schools must immediately stop administering curricula, using training facilities, and conducting behind-the-wheel instruction. Officials said those providers were linked to more than 5,000 drivers later cited for failing English-language proficiency checks during roadside inspections.

Each of the 110 schools had passed at least 10 such drivers, according to a press release from the Justice Department.

Duffy described the first group as the largest sources of those violations. “Today, what we are announcing is an emergency executive shutdown of 110 driving schools,” he said. “These are driving schools that account for 5,000 of the violations for English proficiency.”

The secretary went on to stress the administration’s emphasis on English proficiency tests that have often been ignored by many of the affected locations. “You have to speak English to operate a commercial motor vehicle. I didn’t create that rule. President Trump didn’t create that rule. That rule has been in place for decades,” he noted.

For the additional 160 locations that were given notices of proposed removal, Duffy cited inadequate space for required maneuvers, unlicensed instructors, missing documentation, and classrooms that did not meet federal standards.

The announcement comes after investigators inspected nearly 400 providers in 40 states and reported that about 40 percent did not meet registry rules. Drivers certified by schools in the proposed-removal group were linked to 239 commercial motor vehicle-related fatalities, according to federal officials.

A Department of Transportation breakdown of the emergency shutdowns listed the largest counts in Pennsylvania (13), Texas (13), California (11), Florida (10), Utah (9), and Ohio (7), with smaller numbers in other states and 23 online-only schools with no physical site. Named examples included Platinum Plus Truck Driving School in California, which certified 36 drivers later cited for language violations, and ASC Technical Institute in Texas, which certified 58 such drivers.

Duffy further stated that officials identified 10 third-party skills testers in one state who issued more than 2,000 commercial licenses to people who later could not meet English requirements

Since June 2025, more than 28,000 commercial drivers have been placed out of service for English-proficiency violations, and the department says states have been required to cancel more than 30,000 licenses issued to foreign drivers that did not meet federal rules.

“USDOT has spent the last year-and-a-half strengthening the rules of the road and removing dangerous foreign drivers from our trucking industry. To fully root out the scourge of fraud, hold criminals accountable, and restore safety, we need the support of federal law enforcement,” Duffy said in a written statement.

“I am so grateful for President Trump raising the alarm on this issue, and to Vice President Vance for leading the charge to crack down on fraud nationwide. From states failing to follow the law to shady training schools and illicit companies, together we will tackle every link in the chain.”

Cullen McCue, Trending Politics

Nova Scotia’s only Catholic hospital will lose its religious identity at the end of this month.

And with the ditching of its Catholic affiliation, the hospital will begin killing babies in abortions and euthanize patients.

The facility was founded by nuns more than a century ago, but St. Martha’s Regional Hospital will become Antigonish Memorial Regional Hospital on October 1 after the Mission Assurance Agreement expires September 30. The Sisters of St. Martha, who founded the hospital in 1906, are withdrawing their name and ending their sponsorship role.

Provincial officials say the publicly funded hospital’s services and policies will then more closely align with those of other secular hospitals across Nova Scotia.

The 1996 agreement, signed when the sisters transferred ownership to the province, had protected the hospital’s Catholic mission and barred killing babies in abortion. Medically assisted dying, initially prohibited on campus, has been available since 2019 in a separate building.

The expiration of the agreement removes those remaining religious restrictions on abortions and “assisted suicide” inside the hospital itself.

Health and Wellness Minister Michelle Thompson announced in March that the province would not accept another Catholic sponsor after the sisters said they could no longer continue in that role.

“When the current agreement concludes, the services and policies at St. Martha’s will more closely align with all other hospitals across Nova Scotia,” the Department of Health and Wellness said. Thompson has said the government wants all hospitals to have the same services, policies and procedures.

The sisters proposed Catholic Health International, based in New Brunswick, to carry on the mission. The government declined.

Sister Brendalee Boisvert, congregational leader of the Sisters of St. Martha, said the congregation decided after discernment and prayer that it was time to step back because of aging membership and fewer sisters in health care.

“We decided as sisters, after we took a discernment time, prayed and thought about it, that in order for people to realize it’s not the same hospital we will have to take the name back,” she said.

Boisvert, who opposes euthanasia, added: “I don’t believe in MAID, I believe in palliative care and that people need support, and St. Martha’s has a strong palliative care service.”

She called the loss of Nova Scotia’s only Catholic hospital “a great loss.”

“People have come to St. Martha’s knowing they will receive good care and be treated with respect,” she said. “The difference was that every month we would talk about the mission, how we’re living it and how we can do it better. I don’t think the government has any idea what the loss will be when you lose that kind of focused attention.”

Bishop Wayne Kirkpatrick of the Diocese of Antigonish expressed deep concern in a March 7 letter, describing more than a century of “Gospel-inspired care rooted in compassion, dignity and respect for life at every stage.” He wrote that Catholic health care bears witness to “the inviolable dignity of every human person” and the duty “to serve and defend human life at every stage.”

Without the agreement, he said, “the Catholic ethical framework that has guided the hospital’s mission will diminish.”

Fr. John Barry, a senior priest of the diocese, wrote to the sisters that the government’s refusal undermines “the very essential reasons for our basic existence. Above all, the sanctity of human life from its very inception, ongoing care and provision to its natural end. St. Martha Hospital has constantly and consistently, from its very beginning, upheld and promoted these principles.”

Steven Ertelt, Lifenews

I consider this my country, but not my government.

The government is (self-evidently) a group of (bipartisan) toxic grifters and legalized mobsters masquerading as a champion of the rights of man. Most people live under intellectual sedation where the government is concerned, and there will be no moving them until things get so bad it will be too late.

The Democratic Party is now hard socialist and Communist. As early as 2028, they will regain the White House and Congress. Or a little later. When–not if–that happens, they will impose the totalitarian agenda without hesitation. This includes red states, who will either roll over or secede or break apart from the federal regime imposing all the socialist directives. Communism is coming. It doesn’t mean most want it; but it’s coming. The only choice will be the response.

Doomsday scenario? Not so much. It’s an objective fact that the Democratic Party has radicalized. Democrats are voting for the Communists, which may even include AOC (or some equivalent) for President in 2028. The Communist can win, and sooner or later will win, because the Democratic Party is one of our two major parties, and wins about half the time. This is what we’re getting. Will enough of us keep fighting back to make any kind of difference? That remains to be seen.

America may be the first civilization in history whose government-run schools taught generations of students to hate their OWN country and to root (and vote) for its destruction. Not just the destruction of America, but destruction of reason and Western civilization itself. It’s logically inverted and indicative of suicidal self-destruction and insanity.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville said the Democratic Party faces an ideological “reckoning” in 2028 but rejected the idea that primary voters will choose a democratic socialist presidential nominee.

Speaking on “Saturday in America,” Carville offered his prediction of how Democratic voters will approach the party’s 2028 presidential primary.

“The reckoning will be in a nominating process for the nominee of the Democratic Party in 2028. This has to be taken to Democratic voters,” Carville said while discussing recent victories by candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

I don’t agree. I say Carville is out of touch, living in his more glorious professional past of 35 years ago. Today’s Democrat voters are fine with anything that’s not Republican. They associate Republicans with liberty, free markets, fiscal solvency, low taxes, law and order, a strong military, and low regulations. In practice, most Republicans practice none of these things, but they pay lip service to these conventional American, rational, Western values — and Democrats LOATHE these things. Perhaps most Republicans (Trump was an exception) don’t stand up (when voting) for anything decent, but most Democrats believe Republicans do — and that’s precisely why they despise Republicans.

Granted: Some of the older Democrats, like Carville, are concerned about the rise of radical (i.e., consistent) socialists, but they have no problem voting even for a Communist if the choice is between a Communist and a MAGA Republican. Carville will not vote for Rubio or Vance in 2028; nor will he stay home. He will vote for AOC, or any Democrat Communist served up. Democrat voters will never, ever turn Republican; they WILL vote for any Communist or fascist or Muslim radical any day, any time, not just over a Trump, but over a Marco Rubio, a J.D. Vance, a Bush, anyone. The younger the Democratic voter, the truer this trend is.

I believe America is on a trajectory to complete socialism, if not Communism, over the next 10-15 years tops. The only question is whether everyone will submit, or whether the whole country will break apart, not just state by state, but county by county and town by town — with probably lots of bloodshed. Not an organized Civil War like the first time; just a disintegration and breaking up. I see this as plain as if it’s already happening, because it has already started happening: Observe openly Communist mayors in Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, D.C., Chicago and increasingly in Congress. It starts with the big cities, then the smaller cities, then the purple states and finally the conservative red rural areas. This is not negativity or conjecture. It’s a simple observation of facts developing right before our eyes, daily.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer is turning up the pressure on the U.S. Senate, demanding to know why legislation requiring proof of citizenship and voter identification remains stalled despite what he described as overwhelming public support.

Appearing on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Emmer argued that the Republican-controlled House has repeatedly done its job by passing major pieces of the GOP agenda — only to watch them languish in the Senate.

“The House has been working,” Emmer said. “We’ve been getting our stuff over to the Senate. The Senate’s got to start to perform.”

Among the legislation Emmer singled out was the SAVE America Act, which would establish new federal election-integrity requirements centered on citizenship verification and voter identification.

“We sent the SAVE America Act several times, and it sits over there languishing in the Senate,” Emmer said.

The Minnesota Republican also pointed to the CLARITY Act on digital assets and what he called “Reconciliation 3.0” as additional House priorities awaiting Senate action.

But Emmer reserved some of his strongest criticism for the Senate’s apparent inability to assemble the votes necessary to advance the SAVE America Act.

Guest host Cheryl Casone noted that it remained unclear whether Senate Majority Leader John Thune had enough support to move the legislation.

Emmer was incredulous.

“What’s coming out of the Senate? Everybody has heard them say, ‘We don’t have the votes.’ Really?” Emmer asked. “You don’t have the votes for something that is an 80 percent issue across this country?”

Emmer said the basic principles behind the legislation should be straightforward: voters should establish that they are U.S. citizens and verify their identity when casting a ballot.

“People believe it’s reasonable that in order to vote in this country, you must first establish that you are a lawful citizen,” Emmer said.

He continued by arguing voters should also be required to confirm their identity with photo identification.

“That’s an 80 percent issue,” Emmer said.

The House GOP whip then challenged senators who claim the votes simply are not there to explain exactly which provisions they oppose.

“When you say you don’t have the votes, tell us what the problem is,” Emmer said. “What exactly do you disagree with when it comes to the American people? And they are not telling us that.”

The confrontation comes as Congress prepares for a compressed legislative stretch, with lawmakers facing government funding and other major deadlines.

Emmer said the House expects to address a continuing resolution that would fund the federal government through December 11, along with appropriations measures and a surface transportation bill.

But his message to the Senate was unmistakable: the House has already sent over major pieces of the Republican agenda, and senators now need to act.

“It really is going to be on the Senate’s shoulders to start getting something done when we get back,” Emmer said.

With the SAVE America Act still hanging in the balance, the pressure is increasingly shifting toward Senate Republicans — and toward an uncomfortable question raised by Emmer:

If citizenship verification and voter ID really command the level of public support he says they do, why can’t the Senate find the votes?

Big League Politics

The U.S.–Canada trade talks broke down on Aug. 21. Although both sides hold completely different views, they agreed on two common dealbreakers: bilateral coordination on Canada’s future trade deals with third countries and how deep tariff-rate cuts should go across sectors like autos, steel, and aluminum.

A third, exempting U.S. companies from having to feature French-language content on streaming platforms, was resolved on Aug. 27 when the United States dropped the demand.

Analysts say both sides share one other thing: the China factor, which neither names but looms over both positions.

Neither the Canadian Prime Minister Carney nor U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, in their own public accounts, named China as a reason for the collapse, although both cited the same three sticking points: tariff-rate cuts, trade-deal coordination, and French-language protections.

The United States is concerned that Canada could be used as a backdoor for Chinese overcapacity to flood the U.S. market despite tariffs on Chinese imports. For Canada, China is also part of the calculus for offsetting U.S. pressure, but analysts say that could bring long-term damage to Canadians.

Meanwhile, Yeh Yao-yuan, professor of international studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, sees Beijing’s hand in Ottawa’s approach to Washington.

He told The Epoch Times that it’s “very likely” Beijing is involved behind the scenes because Ottawa is taking an “unnecessarily hardline position” against Washington that may harm the Canadian economy.

The Epoch Times has contacted Carney’s office for comment.

Stephen Nagy, a senior fellow at the Canadian think tank Macdonald-Laurier Institute, lays out a more specific mechanism.

He warned on Aug. 25 in an article published by nonpartisan Canadian think tank MLI that Canada “must prepare for a targeted wave of Chinese cognitive warfare designed to exploit our domestic anxieties regarding the failed trade pact.”

He wrote that Beijing is exploiting the diplomatic impasse between Washington and Ottawa to play wedge politics and further divide North America.

‘Chinese-Styled Counterattack’

Global Times, the English-language mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), celebrated the U.S.–Canada rift.

In an editorial, it called Canada’s tariff retaliation a “Chinese-styled counterattack.” It claimed that Canada, a member of NATO and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, dealt a heavy blow to the United States’ “unilateral bullying.”

Carney on Aug. 22 described his position as defending sovereignty when he was explaining why he suspended trade talks with the United States the night before.

“We were not prepared to compromise Canada’s sovereignty, or to undermine our key industries,” he said on national television.

On the same day, a 50 percent tariff on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods, previously paused pending a deal, took effect. Three days later, Canada announced its retaliatory tariffs—its prime minister called them “dollar for dollar”—effective Sept. 8.

“Canada is the only country to retaliate against us besides China,” Greer said in an interview with Canada’s national public television network, CBC, on Aug. 26.

In the same interview, Greer clarified that the United States wants bilateral coordination when Canada strikes a trade deal with another country.

“When it comes to things like steel and aluminum, the idea is if we’re going to lower our tariffs and give you the best deal in the world on steel and aluminum, we can’t have Canada be a place where you can get flooded with steel and aluminum from other countries and be used as a backdoor into the U.S.,” he said. “We have to have mutual protection.”

The idea of coordinating economic security has not been one-sided. In May, Carney mentioned at the Global Progress Action Summit in Toronto that “Canada remains open to deeper integration, including options for fortress North America in selected sectors.” The core issue is the “economic boundary of the North American economy,” Ian Fletcher, trade-policy author, told The Epoch Times.

He has written two books, “Free Trade Doesn’t Work” and “Industrial Policy for the United States,” and also serves on the advisory board of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a trade advocacy group for American manufacturers and farmers.

Sometimes, transshipments don’t literally mean goods shipped from Shanghai to Vancouver and then to U.S. ports.

He added a scenario he called a “virtual transshipment situation,” in which the Canadian market is overtaken by, for example, steel and aluminum from China and then Canadian businesses export freed-up domestic production to the United States. That’s not illegal and is very hard to control with rules of origin.

Such potential transshipment is a major concern for the White House.

In the report “The Great Transshipment Scam,” released on Aug. 13, the White House identified Canada as a tier 1 risk, categorizing transshipments as “embedded in broad legitimate trade flows.” The report estimated lost tariff revenue due to transshipment through all countries at between $15 billion and $27 billion.

Therefore, requiring Canada to control its economic border directly affects U.S. interests. For that reason, a similar clause is in effect in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

Under Article 32.10, any of the three countries shall inform the other two countries three months before negotiating a free trade agreement with a non-market economy, and the others have the right to exit the USMCA with six months’ notice.

Yet Canada said such a right-to-know request violated its sovereignty. Yeh said the framing echoes CCP-style logic, suggesting Ottawa’s posture may not be its own.

Using Beijing to Counter Washington

Carney’s approach to Beijing may have also added to the Trump administration’s concerns.

Carney visited Beijing in January. During his visit, he announced a deal allowing China to export up to 49,000 electric vehicles to Canada each year at the most-favored-nation tariff rate of 6.1%. That reversed the 100 percent tariff on Chinese EVs that the Trudeau government implemented following the United States.

The Biden administration imposed the tariff over national-security concerns that connected Chinese EVs could be used to surveil the United States, echoing the Alliance for American Manufacturing’s 2024 warning that Chinese autos entering the U.S. market could be an “extinction-level event” for the industry.

The 49,000 quota in the Canada-China deal might increase in the future. The deal also allows Chinese green investments in Canada. In return, China lowered its tariffs on Canadian agricultural products.

Along with the EV deal, Beijing and Ottawa also announced a new Canada-China “strategic partnership.”

In Carney’s defense, the deal was not a free trade agreement and therefore was not applicable under Article 32.10 of the USMCA. It was unclear whether he coordinated with Washington on the Chinese EV deal.

Washington didn’t react favorably. President Donald Trump threatened a 100 percent tariff on Canadian goods if Canada integrated further with China.

In June, a hot mic moment captured Carney and Trump discussing the EV deal Canada struck with China. Carney assured Trump it would not open the floodgates to Chinese products, and Trump responded, “That’s good.”

Electric vehicles are one of the high-stakes issues on which China uses “selective, reward-heavy pressure” to prevent Western coordination, Nagy said, arguing that breaking apart a North American manufacturing alliance is a bigger prize for Beijing in maintaining its global economic leverage.

That tension resurfaced as the scheduled USMCA review began on July 1.

William Lee, chief economist at consultancy Global Economic Advisors, doesn’t believe that Canada’s integration with China will stop at the EV deal. “The [lowered EV] tariff rate is the biggest piece of evidence the United States has about how earnest Prime Minister Carney is about allowing China into the supply chain,” Lee told The Epoch Times.

“That’s really the camel’s nose under the tent. If it’s successful, that will be the beginning of even more industrial inputs from China into the United States,” he added, acknowledging the difficulty of curbing Chinese products at the U.S.–Canada border.

He cautioned that there could also be large volumes of “Chinese proxies”—transshipments from Cambodia and Malaysia.

His read is that Carney is determined to address inflation in Canada by allowing cheap Chinese imports. The resulting job loss won’t show up in the economic data for a while.

Carney is enjoying the rising tide of nationalism. Three in four Canadians support his decision to suspend trade talks with the United States, according to nonprofit research organization Angus Reid Institute.

Before the trade talks collapsed, his approval rating fell from 63 percent in February to 51 percent in July, according to the same nonprofit. His hard line against the United States will reverse the slide, said Lee.

Because Canada’s economy depends so heavily on the United States, and cheap Chinese imports carry their own long-term costs, both Yeh and Lee think Carney is pursuing political gain at the expense of longer-term damage to the Canadian economy and the lives of average Canadians.

“The lesson here is: be very careful of nice, glittery, pretty stuff that is offered by China, because that glitter will not last,” Lee warned. “You’ll wind up in worse trades than when you started.”

Terri Wu, Epoch Times

A new analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has put a precise number on something many people already suspected: most people retiring this decade will collect more from Social Security than they and their employers paid in.

Using Congressional Budget Office figures, CRFB finds scheduled benefits equal about 133% of combined payroll taxes on a present-value basis. In plain terms, the typical retiree is slated to get back $1.33 for every $1 contributed, plus interest. Lower-income retirees do even better; the top fifth of earners roughly break even on the combined worker-plus-employer tax.

Those numbers are not a rounding error. They are why the program is on a collision course with insolvency — the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund is projected to be depleted around 2032, after which automatic cuts would hit unless Congress acts. Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system. Current workers fund current retirees. The “trust fund” is an accounting device, not a lockbox of your personal savings plus investment returns.

That reality undercuts the popular slogan that beneficiaries are “just getting their own money back.” CRFB published the analysis in part to answer that claim. For most people outside the highest earners, the math does not support it.

Recasting Social Security as Welfare Has Consequences

Some conservatives have used this fact to reframe Social Security as welfare rather than an earned pension. They are not wrong about the structure. But if that is the standard, consistency quickly becomes inconvenient.

Why Keep a Flat Payroll Tax?

If Social Security is welfare, why finance it with a flat payroll tax that hits low-wage workers hardest? FICA takes 12.4% for Social Security (plus Medicare) with no deduction for the working poor. A program sold as social insurance for people we want in the labor force is funded in a way that makes work more expensive at the bottom. Treating it as welfare would argue for scrapping the dedicated payroll tax and paying for it out of general, progressive revenue. Higher earners would pay more. That is the logical implication, not a talking point most fiscal hawks enjoy.

“I Want My Money Back” Does Not Stop at Social Security

The same “I paid in, I want my money back” test does not stop at Social Security. Adjusted for inflation, the federal government has spent tens of trillions on national defense over a lifetime. Individual taxpayers received no itemized return on Vietnam, the Iraq wars, the Cold War, or current operations. The Constitution never required a large standing army; the Second Amendment assumes an armed citizenry. If the metric is personal ROI, a lot of Pentagon spending fails it.

The same applies to schools if you have no children, and to highways if you do not drive or live in the states that receive the transfers. Once government is treated as a personal investment account, almost every program looks like a bad deal for someone.

The State-Level Balance Sheet Is Even More Awkward

The same pattern appears at the state level, and the political alignment is awkward. Federal data compiled by the Rockefeller Institute of Government show that many states receive far more in federal spending than their residents pay in federal taxes. The biggest net beneficiaries tend to be lower-income, rural, and Republican-leaning states. Alaska, West Virginia, Kentucky, Wyoming, Montana and several others consistently come out ahead on a per-resident basis. Virginia and Maryland look generous too, largely because of federal payrolls and contractors clustered around Washington. New Mexico is an outlier on the Democratic side.

The states that typically send more than they get back include New Jersey, New York, California, Washington, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. If the rule is “stop subsidizing people who take more than they put in,” a lot of red-state budgets would feel it first.

Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has praised Ayn Rand. Wisconsin, like many states in that cohort, is a net recipient of federal dollars. Applying the Social Security critique uniformly would require telling those constituents to stop living off transfers they did not fully fund.

Selective Accounting Is Not a Fiscal Argument

None of this proves Social Security should be left untouched. The program is underfunded relative to promised benefits, and pretending otherwise is dishonest. What it does show is that “give me my money back” is a terrible organizing principle for a national government. Taxes fund public goods, insurance, and transfers that do not produce a clean personal ledger. People who apply that ledger only to Social Security, and then stop, are not making a fiscal argument. They are picking the one program they dislike and ignoring the rest of the balance sheet.

If the country wants to debate whether Social Security should become a more explicitly progressive welfare program, or whether benefits should be means-tested, or whether the payroll tax should be replaced, that debate is worth having. Selective accounting is not.

Global Market News

In popular mythology, America is the land that innovates while Europe regulates. America gets on with things while Europe prevaricates by allowing Luddites, environmentalists and all kinds of naysayers to call the tune.

There is some truth in that, which is why the growth in the US economy has outstripped that of Europe this century. It’s also why America has a near monopoly in the tech sphere that now shapes our age.

Now, however, America, like Europe, finds itself consumed by a popular war against data centers. Given that these centers are the beating heart of the modern economy, just as the coal mines were the lifeblood of the industrial revolution, this presents a very big problem.

Unless it can be resolved, an eager China may very well seize the advantage and get ahead in a technological revolution that, until now, has been led by America.

Over the past few months, there has been an explosion of protests about data centers as well as legislative moves against them. As Robert Bryce reported in our last issue, the first seven months of this year saw 274 cases in which the construction of data centers across the US was either banned or subject to severe restrictions. Until this year, developers had few problems building them wherever they wanted. Now, we see increasing hostility from local residents and politicians.

New York State has passed a one-year moratorium against new construction. In Maine, legislators tried to block the building of large centers altogether, until their bill was thrown out by Governor Janet Mills. Even Loudoun County, Virginia – which is known as the world’s data-center capital – is looking at new restrictions.

There are a number of reasons for the resistance. Data centers bring noise and urbanization without, crucially, creating much in the way of employment. But above all they are voracious consumers of power and water. While it might be tempting to think the current industrial revolution is much cleaner than the original one, with its boilers and smokestacks, the energy consumption of data centers is extraordinary, and is growing rapidly.

Every time AI bots are upgraded, their need for power leaps to a new level. According to McKinsey, 5 percent of last year’s US electricity consumption came from data centers. Google is said to use as much energy as a city of 250,000 people.

Moreover, the rush of data centers comes just as Americans are seeing their fuel bills rise. Data centers are not the only cause, of course – there is also the small matter of the Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which around 20 percent of the world’s crude oil supplies used to pass.

At the same time, it should not come as a surprise that people make a connection between their soaring bills and the construction work down the road: the installation of data centers is competing with domestic demand and pushes up prices for everyone.

Vice President J.D. Vance has addressed the issue. If developers want to build data centers, he says, they are going to have to address the issue of local power supplies. The federal government, he claims, will make it easier for them to combine construction of data centers with the construction of power plants.

Some have suggested that the centers provide a prime opportunity for renewables. Wind and solar plants might suit the image of a fast-growing 21st century, but sadly those who are in the business of operating data centers are generally less keen. They need access to reliable power 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Without a leap in battery technology to allow large quantities of energy to be stored at far lower costs, local gas plants are more realistic. But that does leave the issue of water consumption which, in some locations, may prove a bigger problem.

The obvious places to put data centers are in the desert, where they will annoy the fewest people. But desert areas have an acute shortage of water and present the biggest risk of the machines overheating.

It may turn out that these are transitory issues. Over time, it is quite possible that the trend in energy consumption by AI models will be reversed. It is perhaps a good thing that there is some pressure on Big Tech over energy consumption now, because it will incentivize developers to look for ways of improving the efficiency of their technology as well as its performance. This is one aspect in which China may be outpacing America, with DeepSeek claiming that its large language model can operate at one tenth of the energy consumption of its US competition. And if AI starts to consume less power, then water, used for cooling, will become less of an issue.

Even so, if America is to continue to be the world leader in AI, it is vital Americans learn to live with data centers. Democracies do not have the advantage that Chinese industry has in being able to foist its plants on the population, regardless of the level of civic opposition.

To win public affection, the data-center industry is going to have to accept that it can’t simply plug its plants into the existing grid; it is, as the Trump administration insists, going to have to become a significant supplier of power, too. That will not guarantee the US eternal success in the tech sector. But it would move an important obstacle out of the way.

The Spectator

All the shopper wanted was to buy a laptop.

Instead, a routine trip to a Best Buy turned into a bizarre confrontation over gender, pronouns and whether a customer should be compelled to address a biological male employee as “ma’am.”

Video of the encounter shows the Best Buy employee, who presented with a distinctly masculine appearance, objecting after the customer referred to the employee as “sir.”

The employee insisted on being addressed as “ma’am.”

The customer wasn’t having it.

His position was straightforward: the person standing in front of him appeared to be a man, and he wasn’t going to be forced to say something he didn’t believe simply because an employee demanded it.

You can argue that mistakes happen and that most decent people aren’t deliberately looking to insult a stranger.

But that’s not what made this encounter different.

The confrontation represented something much bigger: a “woke” ideology that reached its cultural peak several years ago and somehow transformed ordinary human interactions into ideological minefields.

Today, even progressives have a name for that era: Woke 1.

And apparently Woke 1 “was crazy.”

During a recent ABC News interview, progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez repeated a phrase connected to New York City Councilman Chi Ossé: “Woke 1 was crazy.” The phrase has since exploded.

Woke 1 basically describes the cultural and political environment surrounding the pandemic and the upheaval following George Floyd’s death, an era when ideas previously considered fringe suddenly became fashionable.

Defund the police, abolish the police, cancel culture, you name it. Identity politics seemingly injected into everything. And increasingly complicated rules governing what ordinary Americans were permitted to say about race, gender and sexuality.

But now some liberal politicians who embraced that environment are distancing themselves from their old rhetoric.

For example, Wisconsin progressive Francesca Hong declared in 2020, “I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police.” She later moved away from those positions. Ocasio-Cortez has likewise said rhetoric from the lockdown era isn’t rhetoric progressives would necessarily use today.

The political winds changed.

Perhaps politicians discovered what millions of Americans already knew: telling people that police departments should disappear, prisons should be abolished or that ordinary language must constantly be reconstructed around someone’s personal identity was never going to work in the real world.

Which brings us back to Best Buy. The employee in that viral confrontation appears to be living in a cultural moment that much of the country — and increasingly even parts of the political left — has already begun leaving behind.

Yet somehow even that became a cultural confrontation.

That apparent retreat from Woke 1 hasn’t escaped the attention of Joe Rogan, who recently challenged politicians who once embraced the “defund the police” movement to explain exactly what changed.

“How far out did you track the consequences of defunding the police?” Rogan asked. “Because I immediately went to… you’re gonna have more crime because no one’s gonna be able to stop the crime.”

Then he posed perhaps the most important question:

“What did you think defund the police meant? Everyone’s gonna, like, eat mushrooms and we’re all gonna, like, be flower children? What did you think? Because there’s no police around, no one’s gonna do crimes?”

Behind Rogan’s sarcasm was a legitimate criticism of the Woke 1 era: what was the actual endgame?

His criticism went further. He questioned whether politicians genuinely reconsidered those policies after examining their consequences or simply abandoned them once public opinion turned against them.

“Or have you changed your opinion?” Rogan asked. “And if you did change your opinion, what were you thinking back then?”

That’s the question politicians who embraced Woke 1 should have to answer.

Changing your mind isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But when the policy involves policing, crime and public safety, Americans deserve more than a catchy phrase acknowledging that things went too far. They deserve an explanation of why those ideas were embraced in the first place.

For several years, Americans who questioned some of these ideas were routinely told they were the unreasonable ones. Now many of the same political circles that entertained those ideas are acknowledging that maybe things went too far.

Woke 1 is dead, but not everyone is up to speed, like the Best Buy employee. But what comes next?

If politicians themselves now acknowledge that Woke 1 went off the rails, what exactly will “Woke 2” look like?

We’ll find out soon enough, but hopefully it won’t include defunding police!

Eddie Molina, Law Enforcement Today