Democratic U.S. Senate candidate state Rep. James Talarico has launched a $25 million statewide initiative to reach Black voters six weeks before election day.

The initiative is multifaceted and launched as Talarico continues to lead Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in the polls. A Real Clear Politics average of multiple recent polls has Talarico beating Paxton by three points. The once strong Republican seat has been labeled toss-up by Real Clear Politics and other organizations.

“There is no way to win Texas without sustained, on-the-ground engagement in Black communities,” Talarico said. His campaign’s plan “further solidifies our commitment to organize and energize Black Texans who have been taken for granted for far too long by both political parties.”

His campaign has launched a “Souls to the Polls” initiative, expanding outreach primarily to Black churches in Texas. It’s similar to a Souls to the Polls initiative launched in Virginia in 2021 by former Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrat Terry McAuliffe. The initiative also primarily targeted Black churches, The Center Square reported. McAuliffe lost to Republican Glenn Youngkin. Critics have argued Souls to the Polls campaigns violate IRS rules governing tax-exempt entities, including churches.

“Black churches have carried Texans to the polls for generations,” said Carl Davis, founder of C.D. Davis and Associates, who is running the Souls to the Polls initiative. “Our job is to make sure every voter who hears the call to vote on Souls to the Polls Sunday has a plan to vote and makes their voice heard. Wherever Black people of faith gather, we’ll be there.”

Talarico’s campaign also launched a door-to-door canvassing operation in partnership with the Texas Together Coordinated Campaign. It’s also invested in BlackTOP, an initiative of the Texas Organizing Project PAC, to turn out Black voters in Harris County.

This week, Talarico for Texas launched a multi-million-dollar digital, radio and print ad buy in Black media statewide. His campaign’s newest radio ad, “Legacy,” is slated to run on gospel, talk, hip-hop, R&B and news stations statewide. His digital ad, “Afford It,” is airing statewide on digital platforms and TV. The campaign is also running ads in historic Black newspapers statewide.

Three Black-owned firms are leading the latest paid communications outreach. They include Bryson Gillette, a strategic communications firm founded by Bill Burton, the former press secretary for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign who also served as deputy press secretary in the Obama White House. They also include Foston International Communications, based in Fort Bend County, which ran ads for former U.S. Rep. Robert (Beto) O’Rourke’s 2018 U.S. Senate campaign and 2020 gubernatorial campaign, and Advantage Communications Group of Houston led by Linda Brown. Brown was the former press secretary for Rev. Jesse Jackson and senior advisor to the late U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and the late Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner among others.

Talarico is leading Paxton among Hispanic and Black voters by 19 points and 77 points, respectively, according to the most recent polls. Paxton leads Talarico among white voters by 19 points.

Talarico is leading Paxton by more than 30 points among independents, according to the latest Texas Public Opinion Research poll.

Talarico has said throughout the campaign that he recognizes there’s a hesitancy among Black voters but his campaign is committed to reaching them, as well as Republicans and all voters. At a campaign event at a large church in Houston in July, Talarico was confronted by Black voters who said they “didn’t trust him” and that he couldn’t win without their vote. Kandice Webber, an organizer with Houston’s Black Lives Matter, demanded that he answer her questions or “suffer the consequences.” Voters raised questions about reparations for descendants of slaves and police brutality.

Black voters and others have also expressed opposition to Talarico’s pro-transgender policies and comments about multiple sexes and genders and God being “non-binary,” according to multiple polls. In the last several years, Black and Hispanic Democratic politicians left the party over these issues, arguing the party no longer represented them, The Center Square reported. By the 2024 election, Texas Democrats suffered massive losses with politicians and voters leaving the party and largely Hispanic districts at the border overwhelmingly voting Republican.

Two years later, a growing percentage of Texas voters who were polled who previously voted for President Donald Trump now say they are voting for Democrats. The primary reason they give is Trump administration economic policies they say have made life unaffordable, including tariffs and the Iran war, The Center Square reported.

Talarico’s campaign says its Black voter outreach plan “is the largest of its kind in modern Texas history.”

Paxton’s campaign hasn’t launched a comparable initiative. Paxton’s campaign office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bethany Blankley, Center Square

From tariffs and grocery shelves to AI and martial law, election-season fear keeps outrunning the facts.

Jack Hellner | October 1, 2026

From tariffs and grocery shelves to AI and martial law, election-season fear keeps outrunning the facts.

For decades, the media and other Democrats have continually used fear to push leftist policies and defeat Republicans.

In 2025, when Trump imposed tariffs, many predicted the stock market and economy would collapse, store shelves would empty, and inflation would soar. Here’s just one example from thousands: “Retail wipeout: Trump tariffs stoke fears of shortages and price hikes.”

The dire predictions were 100% wrong.

In fact, the stock market has risen rapidly, the economy continues to grow, store shelves are full, and core inflation has continued to decline from the levels seen during Biden’s presidency. Note, too, that the so-called experts never predicted Biden’s disastrous inflation or blamed his policies for it.

Under Trump, core inflation driven by COVID panic and Biden’s policies has declined: 2020, 1.6%; 2021, 5.5%; 2022, 5.7%; 2023, 3.9%; 2024, 3.2%; 2025, 2.6%; August 2025 to August 2026, 2.4%.

World Cup tourists were amazed at how many products Americans have on store shelves.

The experts also predicted widespread food shortages and high food inflation because Trump closed the border and began sending illegal immigrants out of the country. When I asked AI to summarize the predictions, I got this:

Numerous articles, research papers, and government filings detail how closed borders, strict immigration crackdowns, and a resulting decline in foreign workers risk causing supply-shock food shortages and sharp inflation.

From tariffs and grocery shelves to AI and martial law, election-season fear keeps outrunning the facts.

For decades, the media and other Democrats have continually used fear to push leftist policies and defeat Republicans.

In 2025, when Trump imposed tariffs, many predicted the stock market and economy would collapse, store shelves would empty, and inflation would soar. Here’s just one example from thousands: “Retail wipeout: Trump tariffs stoke fears of shortages and price hikes.”

The dire predictions were 100% wrong.

In fact, the stock market has risen rapidly, the economy continues to grow, store shelves are full, and core inflation has continued to decline from the levels seen during Biden’s presidency. Note, too, that the so-called experts never predicted Biden’s disastrous inflation or blamed his policies for it.

Under Trump, core inflation driven by COVID panic and Biden’s policies has declined: 2020, 1.6%; 2021, 5.5%; 2022, 5.7%; 2023, 3.9%; 2024, 3.2%; 2025, 2.6%; August 2025 to August 2026, 2.4%.

World Cup tourists were amazed at how many products Americans have on store shelves.

The experts also predicted widespread food shortages and high food inflation because Trump closed the border and began sending illegal immigrants out of the country. When I asked AI to summarize the predictions, I got this:

Numerous articles, research papers, and government filings detail how closed borders, strict immigration crackdowns, and a resulting decline in foreign workers risk causing supply-shock food shortages and sharp inflation.

American Thinker

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) wrote a 26-page letter to the American people on Tuesday, urging them to vote for Democrats in the midterms.

“Although American politicians often win your votes through deception and false promises, as Trump did, you can change the makeup of the government if you apply the criteria for good leadership in choosing the people you vote into office,” the IRGC said. “Remove from power the evil, deceitful, and violent politicians who are responsible for America’s current state.”

The IRGC then asked Americans to “take back control.” The letter referred to Trump as a tyrant and said that Islam “requires believers to stand up to tyrants.” The IRGC offered “help” to the American people to “liberate themselves from the tyranny of oppressive powers.” The letter did not specify how the regime would aid the American people in “liberating” themselves.

“The United States of America is a great nation. To allow vulgar and immoral individuals to continue steering your politics and policies will only further humiliate and undermine the U.S. Any politician who thinks they can buy your vote for 5,000 dollars is unworthy to lead you. Take back control.”

The group argued that Americans bear responsibility for their government’s actions, rejecting the idea that voters who oppose U.S. military operations are powerless to stop them.

“Your response may be that you do not accept these atrocious actions but are powerless to do anything about them. This answer, however, is not acceptable. You are the ones who empower, with your votes, the government and allow it to do what it does.”

The IRGC claimed that American perceptions of Iran are “improving” while hostility toward Israel “is visibly increasing.” That assertion comes after a primary season in which several Democratic candidates with records of anti-Israel activism defeated longtime incumbents.

In New York, Darializa Avila Chevalier defeated Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat in the primary for the state’s 13th Congressional District. As The Daily Wire previously reported, Chevalier refused to condemn Hamas’ October 7, 2023, terrorist attack, questioned Israel’s legitimacy, and helped organize pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University after the massacre.

In Colorado, democratic socialist Melat Kiros defeated 15-term Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette. Kiros had described October 7 as “the inevitable consequence of apartheid” and questioned why calls for eliminating the Israeli state were considered antisemitic.

The IRGC’s appeal to American voters, meanwhile, came with a warning: if Washington does not change course, people around the world will rise up and “set fire to all of America’s interests and assets throughout the world.” The letter predicted a “massive economic earthquake that will affect the lives of all Americans.”

“The era when the U.S. could plunder the wealth of nations through military might has come to an end,” it continued. “This century is the century when the will of the people will triumph. If the U.S. chooses to continue on its evil path, a painful fate awaits it.” After urging Americans to oust their leaders, the IRGC sought to explain away the regime’s “Death to America” chant, insisting its hostility is directed at the government rather than the people. “It is, in a word, not an expression of ill will toward the American people.

And we are certain that if the American people truly understood the reality of the evil their leaders commit in their name, they would disavow their leaders — as they gradually are doing — and would stand by the people of Iran in indicting their common oppressor,” it read.

Brecca Stoll, Daily Wire

Don’t look now, but Germany’s “ruling” Christian Democratic Union party has not only lost another state election, but lost it so badly they didn’t even win a single seat.

Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party has suffered the worst defeat in its history, failing to win a single seat in a crucial German state election.

The chancellor’s centre-Right party won 4.9 per cent of the vote in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, final results confirmed on Monday.

The state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is north of Berlin on the Baltic Sea, stretching between the German state of Schleswig-Holstein and Poland.

The hard-Right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) took 38.2 per cent of the vote, while the hard-Left Die Linke beat the CDU in mayoral elections in Berlin. Mr Merz is scheduled to address the public on Monday afternoon.

The astonishingly poor result meant that, for the first time, the CDU failed to win enough votes to enter a state parliament in Germany.

Under the country’s voting system, parties that fall below the 5 per cent threshold are not assigned any seats in the next parliament.

Such a scenario was virtually unthinkable for the CDU – the German version of the Conservatives and a mainstay of coalition governments for decades – until Sunday night.

Actually, CDU’s pro-illegal immigration policies, and the resultant rise of the AfD, have made it pretty thinkable for a while now.

Mr Merz was already facing calls to resign over his party’s poor performance in a previous election in Saxony-Anhalt this month, where the CDU lost swathes of support to the AfD.

According to DPA, a German news agency, the CDU held a crisis meeting about the results on Sunday evening, with the talks descending into “verbal clashes”.

Another crisis meeting later that night was attended by seven CDU state leaders, some of the most senior figures in the party, and was said to have lasted for nearly two hours.

Christian Gräff, a former CDU state MP and the chairman of the Berlin Mittelstand Union, called for Mr Merz’s resignation over the election results.

“Merz has got to go. He can’t do executive work and he can’t do communication,” he posted on X.

He later told the DPA news agency: “I believe that the people in Germany want reforms. Merz lacks the skills and communication abilities to implement them.”

Merz indeed seems unequal to the moment, but he’s not the one who has consigned his own party to the dust-bin of history. That dubious honor belongs to former Chancellor and CDU leader Angela Merkel.

An East German-born politician who came to lead Germany’s staunchly anti-communist, “mainstream” right party, Merkel, a protege of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, had a reputation as a colorless functionary, but in one of her first prominent roles, as Minister for the Environment and Nuclear Safety, she pushed for climate change legislation to limit greenhouse gases.

But her biggest mistake was throwing open German borders to accept huge numbers of unassimilated Muslim illegal aliens into the country. Though various leftist European political parties favored such policies in the cynical expectation of engineering an electorate more favorable to themselves, Merkel doing the same as both head of the EU’s most important country and as head of a “conservative” party was unprecedented. That wasn’t the only leftist policy she implemented, but it was certainly the one that’s had the biggest role in destroying the CDU and engineering the rise of the AfD.

All across Europe, native born citizens are revolting at the importation of unassimilated Muslim illegal aliens that European elites have imposed on them. But the collapse of support for the CDU is particularly notable, because it was previously the dominant party, and a party of the right until Frau Merkel began her demolition job.

To be sure, the immigration crisis isn’t the only trouble besetting the CDU: The high cost of energy in the wake of the Russo-Ukrainian War, Germany’s unwise decision to base it’s industrial policy on cheap Russian natural gas at the same time it was shutting down nuclear and coal plants, etc. all contributed to its decline. But almost every one of those foolish decisions can be traced back to Frau Merkel’s decisions to pull CDU policy to the left.

Why, a more conspiratorial man than myself, might view Merkel as a sleeper agent planted by the East German Stasi to destroy a newly united Germany from within. But then who can we blame for most of the rest of Europe’s insistence on importing unassimilated Muslims?

To bring things around full circle, I merely note that back in 1993, Merkel was elected leader of the CDU in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern…

It is found in the book of Genesis in the Bible and the Torah, and is also featured in the Quran.

An archaeological research group believes it has newfound evidence of buried remains of Noah’s Ark in eastern Turkey.

Researchers from Noah’s Ark Scans, an archaeological research project investigating the Durupinar site near Mount Ararat, exclusively shared the results of a new ground-penetrating radar scan with NewsNation’s Meagan Medick.

In a preview clip from next week’s episode of “Unreported,” airing on NewsNation’s YouTube channel, Noah’s Ark Scans founder and archaeological researcher Andrew Jones shared the team now has data below the surface for the first time.

A team of researchers claims to have found what they believe is evidence of Noah’s Ark at the Durupinar site in eastern Turkey, using advanced scanning technology.

With the use of the radar system, BakhtarRadar, which Jones described as a “cat scan of the Earth,” researchers were able to go down into the ground as far as 95 meters in some site locations.

“In the past, we’ve all argued about what’s there. People have said, ‘oh, it’s a big rock, it’s a syncline, it’s a bedrock, the mud went around it and formed a ship shape that just happens to be the length of Noah’s Ark.’ But now we’re actually drilling into it and we’re discovering that no, there’s no rock there. It’s not a complete one solid block of rock, it’s soil,” Jones told Medick.

Our theory is that this is the buried remains of Noah’s Ark,” he added.

In 2025, Jones told NewsNation his team has been investigating the ship-shaped rock formation since 2019. Turkish Army Capt. Ilhan Durupinar first discovered the site in 1959.

“Now we’re looking into the mountainside, but the mountains are full of rocks and dirt and possible voids. (The radar) can mask all of that natural geology out and focus on what they call in geophysics, anomalies, things that stand out that shouldn’t be there,” Jones said.

Our theory is that this is the buried remains of Noah’s Ark,” he added.

In 2025, Jones told NewsNation his team has been investigating the ship-shaped rock formation since 2019. Turkish Army Capt. Ilhan Durupinar first discovered the site in 1959.

“Now we’re looking into the mountainside, but the mountains are full of rocks and dirt and possible voids. (The radar) can mask all of that natural geology out and focus on what they call in geophysics, anomalies, things that stand out that shouldn’t be there,” Jones said.Inside the ‘mushroom murder’ trial that stunned the world | Unreported

“There’s organized structure below the surface without even digging. So we don’t have to put a big hole in it right now, hopefully never, but you know, hopefully we can do limited excavations in the future. So this year we’re focusing on this type of pinpoint scans,” he added.

Among the Abrahamic religions — Christians, Jews and Muslims — Noah’s Ark is believed to be a historical account of Noah being called by God to build an ark, sparing Noah and his seven family members, along with one male and one female animal of every kind, from the great flood brought about as punishment for humanity’s sins.

It is found in the book of Genesis in the Bible and the Torah, and is also featured in the Quran.

Patrick Djordjevic, NewsNation

Nikole Hannah-Jones regrets sending her daughter to a ‘bad school’. But she misses the crucial reason why it failed its pupils

Back in 2002, not long after the US was struck by terrorists, and I watched the world spin into chaos, my mother told us we had to leave our apartment. She had lost her job the year before and had fallen behind on rent. We were evicted.

We moved in with my great-grandmother and shared a bedroom for two years. My mom enrolled me in the local school in Kansas City, Missouri. In sixth and seventh grade, from age 11, I went to an inner-city middle school where most of the kids were on free or reduced-cost lunch.

For the first time in my life I was a minority, attending a majority-black school, experiencing firsthand exactly what Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote about in her viral piece for The New York Times earlier this month. In the piece, Hannah-Jones — the creator of the 1619 Freedom School, a non-profit educational programme aimed primarily at helping black students improve literacy while also teaching black history, culture and civic identity — revealed that she felt profound remorse for sending her daughter, Najya, to an inner-city school. Najya, now 16, recently told her mother: “I never really got the education I wanted.”

The difference between my mother and Hannah-Jones is that my mother didn’t send me to this school to virtue-signal to her elite friends that she was “doing the work” to challenge “separate” and “unequal school systems” — it was out of financial hardship and circumstance. Within two years, my mom married again — only because she wanted to get me out of that school.

Hannah-Jones argued that her decision was in part informed by her understanding that “nationally, a black student is less likely to have teachers who are qualified and experienced” and to “have up-to-date technology and attend school in modernised facilities”.

But studies have disputed that these schools receive less funding. A recent academic report on racial disparities in school spending showed that the typical black pupil attended a school receiving 8.8 per cent more per-pupil spending than the typical white pupil in the same metropolitan area. A Hispanic pupil’s school received 5.1 per cent more than their white counterparts. This is partly because lower-income schools are more likely to have pupils without English as a first language, which makes education more expensive.

From my experience, I learnt that even if a school is well-funded (the one I went to had no lack of funding; we even had PalmPilot computers in our classrooms) and has good teachers, disruptions can be so frequent that learning becomes nearly impossible. This was my biggest challenge, not a lack of experienced teachers or school funding.

Unless you’ve experienced this firsthand, it is impossible to understand. Every day is a fight for survival, not a place to get an education. During passing periods, I’d hurry as fast as I could to avoid being “jumped”. I’d walk down the hallways seeing fights break out with alarms blaring and the school’s lone police officer running through masses of pupils after a kid had been beaten up. It’s impossible to learn when you’re constantly in survival mode.

At the end of seventh grade, there was a succession of bomb threats. Some days my mom kept me home; other days pupils had to vacate the building until police officers could sweep it. My mom had more meetings than I can count with school administrators, begging them to expel the pupils who were threatening to beat me up daily. They didn’t.

Hannah-Jones’s daughter began complaining about her school and so she visited during lunchtime. She noted it was “chaotic” and she saw children who were “running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored”. I saw this happen with my teachers, too. But it was often due to outbursts during class. A pupil would stand up and cuss out a teacher; sometimes I saw them get physical. The kids would often create commotions in the classroom — displaying that they had no interest in learning. But it wasn’t that the teachers were “bored” or “lazy”, as Hannah-Jones observed in her piece; it was that they did not, or could not, enforce the rules.

This was when public schools introduced critical foundational algebraic concepts to children. I fell permanently behind in math and never caught up. I later moved to a new school in the suburbs, but I remember having no idea what was going on in my eighth-grade math class. My math grades in high school and my ACT math scores were so low that, in college, I needed remedial classes for the first few years. The university in Kansas I attended was majority white but in my remedial math class, nearly half the students were black or non-white. School administrators had failed these children, just as they had failed me.

The truth is, most pupils in these schools are not “troublemakers”; they truly want to learn. But the 10 per cent who do cause daily disruptions are hardly ever expelled. According to a 2025 academic review: “At least 29 states and DC have passed laws limiting formal suspensions and expulsions.” California represents one of the most aggressive examples of this shift in school discipline: state law bars schools from expelling pupils for “wilful defiance” or disruption alone. Ironically, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Freedom School has advocated against disciplinary measures for disruptive pupils, preferring “restorative” options over punitive ones.

My school failed me. Hannah-Jones now believes her daughter’s school failed her. In different ways, the adults surrounding both of us failed, too. By not insisting that pupils adhere to basic behavioural standards, teachers and administrators hurt the majority of pupils who really want to succeed.

Hannah-Jones’s daughter will probably be all right. I was. So many children were not. And that is the greatest sin of all.

Evan Barker, The Times UK

Hasan Piker, close ally of the Democratic Party’s choice for U.S. Senator for Michigan, says the U.S. deserved 9/11.

High profile Democrats like the possible next U.S. Speaker of the House say the Democratic Party is a big tent, and there’s room for all.

Seriously? Room for this?

I wonder if Piker would take the steps to implement the sick vision of the 9/11 attackers? Would he fly a plane into a skyscraper or the Pentagon to prove that he means it? Or will he continue to live in comfort off his parents’ wealth, while using his status as darling of the new Democratic Party left to ensure that the rest of America will drown in impoverishment and despair under the woke 21st Century version of Communism? Voting Democrat means you’re applauding THIS. Shut the hell up about Trump. He’s trying to preserve what’s left of the tattered American Constitution and Western civilization. The Democratic Party — represented by horrific ghouls like Piker — openly seeks to incinerate everything generations of Americans fought for.

Piker is not unique. Nearly all of today’s prominent and rising Communists in America are wealthy. They hate capitalism — but they sure love money.

Economist Stephen Moore: “America’s loudest democratic socialists have a problem: Many of them are too rich. Hasan Piker, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, and an entire class of young socialist influencers are all extremely wealthy. Yet even though their wealth was acquired through a capitalist system they see as immoral, they give very little of it away.”

“It is remarkable how many of these leading, so-called advocates of socialism have come from rich families or have gotten rich on capitalism themselves,” Moore said. “So even people like Bernie Sanders are wondering whether there’s a degree of hypocrisy here. I mean, there’s a reason why just about everybody in the world wants to come to the United States. It’s not because we have socialism, it’s because we have free market capitalism.”

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The economy is growing at a rapid rate, with the Atlanta Fed’s GDP estimate showing a five percent growth rate for the third quarter. Unemployment has fallen to 4.1 percent, a level below the Federal Reserve’s longer-term estimate of full employment. Jobless claims are running at the lowest levels since the late 1960s. Business investment is soaring. Manufacturing output and employment are rising. The purchasing managers’ indexes suggest a broad economic boom. Profits are soaring and the S&P 500 is up nearly 12 percent for the year. Consumer spending has remained robust, defying predictions that high gasoline prices would dampen buying elsewhere.” [Economic editor, John Carney, Breitbart 9-29-26]

AND YET … The Democratic Party media daily saturates people with bad news. “Gas prices are high, AI is going to incinerate us all, and bombing Iran has created Armageddon.” People believe the media, because most do not think; they merely feel. And the depressing tone of the one-Party media leads millions to feel, “Vote for affordability.” Which means: Communism. 90 percent tax rates, socialized everything, including government-run grocery stores. Guaranteed income for all. Of course Communism will lead to affordability. The shelves will be empty. Nobody will work; therefore, nothing will be produced. We are told that high gas prices will starve us. What about Communism? Isn’t that far worse than temporarily high gas prices that are still lower than during Biden?

I miss the days when at least SOME were willing to think. Today: it’s all feelings.

As Laurel Allen writes on Facebook:

“Gas over $4.00 a gallon sucks, but watching people pay $9.00 for a 12-ounce coffee with fake chocolate flavoring, a dash of foamed milk, and sprinkles—and then complain about gas prices—is deeply ironic.”

What’s left of the Iranian regime — in media outbursts (paid for by whom?) — urges American voters to reject President Trump and his party in November’s elections.

Of course they do.

Iran wants U.S. voters to strip Trump of power so they can obliterate Western civilization with their fanatical cult and engage in nuclear blackmail. And millions of U.S. voters stand ready to do it. What will their “affordability” matter with atomic barbarians at the gates and store shelves empty? But no worries. “Trans kids” will be OK. Utter madness.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

“I thought my parents were very strict, but seeing the current generation, I realize they saved me.” (Jason Statham)

I wholeheartedly agree. However, the central issue in childhood isn’t strictness. The essential issue is instilling thought and reason. If you teach your child critical thinking (primarily by doing it yourself), then strictness will not be as necessary. Rational thought leads to self-discipline as a matter of self-preservation.

What I see throughout society today is a lack of independent, rational, objective thinking. The present generation was taught EXCLUSIVELY to feel. Thought and reason are routinely denounced as toxic masculinity, racist and outdated. The result? A generation of people who are so lost, helpless and clueless–with only their feelings to guide them–that they yearn to obey. Hence the appeal of command-and-control economics, and mindless “woke” conformity. Abandon reason, and you’re left with two things: feelings, followed by blind submission to authority.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The software that powers self-driving cars is no longer the domain of proprietary systems built by billion-dollar companies.

Open source assisted driving systems like Comma AI’s Openpilot have made it possible for anyone tech savvy enough to turn their set of wheels into a self-driving experiment. If you have $1,000 to spare and possess a willingness to serve as a lab rat in pursuit of automotive automation, you can buy a kit from Comma to retrofit your grocery getter with autonomous-driving ready sensors and cameras.

With all the attention that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system and Waymo’s robotaxis get, these DIY options have largely flown under the radar. We may have recently gotten a taste, however, of what the reaction to this aftermarket tech going mainstream might look like.

Over the weekend, a man going by Mike LaBarbera on X posted a video of his Tesla Model Y driving itself using Comma Four, the latest version of Comma AI’s self-driving hardware.

“My FSD subscription ended last January, and this isn’t Tesla Autopilot,” LaBarbera said. With this open source alternative, he boasted, he was “no longer renting a closed system.”

Actually, LaBarbera clarified, what was running the car in the video is “Sunnypilot,” an Openpilot fork — someone else’s custom version of the software, essentially.

While a compelling testament to how far self-driving tech has come along, the video has also alarmed some observers with how easy it apparently is to install custom tech to control your car.

“I do not think we should be letting people run any software they want on their self-driving car,” said Cairo Smith, a writer, in a post that attracted more likes than the original. “It is not Skyrim for Linux. You do not get mods on the freeway.”

Interestingly, some of the most scathing critiques came from apparent proponents of mainstream self-driving efforts. One viral hot take fumed at the possibility of getting into a fatal accident because of choosing to drive “an opensource repo with 3,000 stars instead of just buying the actually good system” on a car that was originally built to support self-driving, like a Tesla.

Another called it a “joke.”

“Imagine getting home with your family, and this guy crashes into you because of some vibe coded PR in a GitHub repo with 2k stars,” the user wrote.

The software has also gotten the attention of federal regulators. Last week, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration opened an investigation into Comma AI after five crashes involving cars that were running Openpilot. In each of the crashes, the vehicles slammed into slow-moving or stopped vehicles in their lanes. Eleven people have been injured across these incidents, and three have died.

Per Electrek’s coverage, the investigation covers 30,000 Comma hardware kits, including Comma Four. One area that the agency is zeroing in on is Comma AI’s marketing, which promises “hands free driving for the car you already have,” despite its fine print stating the cars require constant supervision.

It’s a problem that becomes yet more thorny when you consider that many Comma users may not be using it out of the box, but installing modded versions of the software. Your head starts to spin at all the subtle ways that these mods affect a car’s safety, all without the ostensible accountability you get from a system being built at a large, commercial entity like Tesla.

And that’s without getting into how the rise of vibe coding means that it’s also not a remote possibility that someone inexperienced will use an AI model to customize Openpilot to their liking. Barring major regulatory intervention, we may have to get used to sharing more of the road with people’s homemade robot chauffeurs.

More on self-driving vehicles: Scientists Download Frontier AI Model Into Self-Driving Car Let It Loose

Frank Landymore, Futurism