From the article -- Fifty-four-year-old former Nebraska senator, husband, and father of three, Ben Sasse, was tragically diagnosed only six months ago with stage 4 pancreatic cancer and told he had three to four months to live. While the clinical trial that his doctors put him on has given him more time on earth than doctors predicted, the cancer has sadly continued to spread to his liver, lymph nodes, lung, and vascular system.
Each day that he lives is a miracle. Knowing this has caused Sasse to focus on what is truly important, and he has graciously shared his wisdom in several interviews recently. The following are five insights that we would all be wise to listen to and reflect upon.
2) “It’s Time to Abolish Public Schools: Public schools survive what no business could: monopoly protection, union entrenchment, and taxpayer bailouts -- proof that education works best when government gets out of the way.” (Larry Sand, American Greatness)
From the article -- In the 1830s, education reformer Horace Mann viewed public schools as a “crucible of democracy.” He sought to have the state take over schools and raise taxes to fund them. Mann even predicted that if public schooling were widely adopted and given enough time to take effect, “nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete,” and “the long catalog of human ills would be abridged.”
Clearly, Mann was dead wrong. Almost 200 years later, our nation, with its massive education bureaucracy, is more divided than ever, crime rates are high, and we have more “human ills” than we can handle. And taxpayers fork over about a trillion dollars a year in the process.
While Mann’s utopian goals obviously didn’t come to fruition, they did create a link in people’s minds between the “institution of public schooling and the ideals of public education” that, sadly, still exists today.
But the status quo is simply unacceptable.
Related articles: “Would You Leave Your Child There? One School District’s Answer Should Alarm Every Parent in America” (Julio Rivera, American Greatness)...”Declining Birthrates, Immigration Drive Enrollment Crisis in US Public Schools (AG News Staff)...“May Day Madness with the Chicago Teachers Union: Before students can engage in civic action, they must first learn to read and write.” (Aidan Grogan, City Journal)
3) “The Democratic Party Is Dead, Long Live the Jacobins! -- Today’s Democratic Party has abandoned its traditional working-class, patriotic roots and embraced a radical Jacobin ideology built on division, coercion, and political extremism.” (Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness)
From the article -- For the past century, the agendas of the Democratic Party were predictable. They professed concern for working Americans and supported blue-collar unions. Unemployment insurance, a 40-hour work week, disability insurance, and Social Security were their trademarks—often rapidly achieved by growing government bureaucracies and continually raising taxes. Still, many Democrats were socially conservative.
By the 1970s, Democrats still deplored antisemitism. Party officials had rejected their own segregationists to champion civil rights. Presidents like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy all supported strong defense and military deterrence.
All that is now passé.
Related article: “Why So Many Political Pyromaniacs, Assassins, and Other Scary Types?: How moral certainty turns crimes into causes and culprits into symbols.” (Daniel J. Flynn, American Spectator)
4) “Islam’s Turbocharged Takeover of Europe” (Nils A. Haug, Gatestone Institute)
From the article -- Meanwhile, Iran and its jihadist proxies appear innocent of the Western "infidel" concepts of just wars, international laws, human rights or the Geneva conventions. They are mainly directed, it seems, by medieval Sharia law.
"Leadership in times of crisis," it has been said, "is not measured by the absence of risk, but by the willingness to accept it." In avoiding risk, the cowardly leaders of Western Europe – those sell-outs to an increasingly antagonistic extremist Muslim electorate upon whom they are increasingly dependent for political office -- are a disgrace to their nations. They are also a great disappointment to those who believe in the preservation of history's finest civilization – one with freedom, democracy, human rights, and an embedded Judeo-Christian moral foundation.
These leaders seemingly reject any obligation to oppose attempts to destroy their nations' traditional way of life. In the tradition of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who in 1938 imagined that he had a peace deal with Hitler, they have taken on a greater risk: that of appeasement.
European nations, it appears, have succumbed to Islamization. Their rapidly changing demographics reveal it; their failure to adequately protect their small Jewish communities against vociferous hate reveal it; their compromise on basic individual freedoms in their own countries reveal it, and their refusals to support the US, their erstwhile protector, reveal it.
Related articles dealing with the War with Ira, Radical Islam, Europe’s surrender to Islam, Anti-Semitism --- “Hamas is Humiliating Trump's ‘Board of Peace’” (Khaled Abu Toameh, Gatestone Institute)...“Political Islam sees Europe as a territory to be claimed” (Konstantinos Bogdanos, Brussels Signal)...“An empire that cannot speak its name” (Ralph Schoellhammer, Brussels Signal)...“Antisemitism, Islam and the future of the GOP: The red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists is fueling hatred for Jews and Israel among young people, while giving Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly a new audience.” (Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS)...“Why are liberals and Democrats embracing anti-Israel extremists?: Mainstream support for Senate candidates like Graham Platner and Abdul El-Sayed reflects both panic about Trump and the acceptance of antisemitism.” (Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS)...“How Intense Political Polarization Is Fanning The Flames Of Antisemitism (John Rodrigues, Harbinger’s Daily)
5) “When the Machine Decides: The Growing Threat of AI Agency” (Robert Maginnis, Washington Stand)
From the article -- Over the weekend of April 25-26, PocketOS founder Jer Crane confronted what every business owner fears — nothing. His company’s production database has vanished. Three months of customer reservations, payment records, and vehicle assignments gone in nine seconds, because an AI software assistant encountered a login error and decided on its own to fix the problem. The AI found a digital access key — essentially a master password — hidden in an unrelated file, connected to Railway, the cloud-hosting service where PocketOS stored its data, and issued a deletion command that wiped the database and every backup simultaneously, with no human being asked to approve a single step.
Most readers will not recognize PocketOS. The principle at stake touches every one of them.
What Crane experienced sits at the frontier of autonomous AI — software that no longer waits for human approval at each step but acts independently to complete tasks, make decisions, and execute commands in the real world. These systems already write news stories, conduct financial trades, screen job applicants, and assist military planners. Humans are increasingly supervisors of processes they cannot fully audit and, as Crane discovered, cannot always stop before the damage is done.
Related article: “It’s No Longer Just A Tool, AI Is Where The Self-Worship Epidemic Is Heading” (Greg Laurie, Harbinger’s Daily)
Other Excellent Reads from the Week
* “How Women Have Led to the Erasure of Women: Modern sexual and family norms have blurred the meaning of womanhood, weakening motherhood and accelerating a cultural shift that treats biology as optional.” (Jennifer Galardi, American Greatness) (Also see “Stop Telling Women They’ll Only Enjoy Motherhood When They Aren’t Watching Their Kids” (Abby Johnson, Federalist))
* “Price Gouging, Now Personalized Thanks to Surveillance Pricing and Collusion: Corporate greed isn’t just bad ethics -- it’s the fastest way to make socialism sound reasonable.” (Buck Throckmorton, American Spectator)
* “Is America an Idea? Not According to the Founding Fathers” (S.A. McCarthy, Washington Stand)
* “Neil Gorsuch Is Wrong, America Isn’t A ‘Creedal Nation’” (John Daniel Davidson, Federalist)
* “Bureaucrats Improperly Paid Out $186 Billion In Taxpayer Money In 2025: Will the public sector ever come to grips with the scale of the problem?” (Christopher Jacobs, Federalist)
