As Europe's record-breaking heat wave continues and excess deaths in France climb past 1,300, a Paris official says Americans bear responsibility for the crisis because of emissions and air conditioning.
Audrey Pulvar, Paris' deputy mayor for international relations, lashed out at American tourists and influencers who had mocked the city for its lack of widespread air conditioning as temperatures soared past 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
'OMG, this is so rich.'
"Dear American journalists and social media 'influencers': for days, some of you have been criticising and making fun of Paris because the city does not have A/C in every room. ... OMG, this is so rich!" she wrote on Instagram.
She argued the U.S., which she claims is the world's second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, bears a "significant amount of responsibility responsibility" for the warming driving the crisis, noting American cities are roughly 90% air-conditioned. "So please, enough with the lecture. Just start doing your part."
France has recorded at least 1,300 excess deaths since June 21, according to Sante Publique France, with officials warning the count could climb higher.
About 15,000 elderly people died in France's 2003 heat wave, though air conditioning still hasn't caught on nationwide. As of June 25, officials had confirmed at least 55 drowning deaths — a toll likely to keep climbing — after many have sought relief in unsupervised waterways.
Paris went so far as to ban public alcohol consumption on streets and in parks to "preserve emergency services and allow medics to concentrate on taking care of the most vulnerable."
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Only about a quarter of French households have air conditioning, versus roughly half in Spain and Italy and 90% in the U.S. and Japan. The French have long associated air conditioning with illness, attributing colds to "thermal shock" from sudden temperature changes, according to GB News.
With Parisians sleeping in parks and booking hotel rooms to escape the heat, even traditionally AC-skeptical politicians — including France's Green Party — have conceded wider adoption may now be unavoidable.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright drew fire days earlier, telling a London conference that "cold is a vastly larger killer than heat is," citing deaths tied to high energy prices after Russia's 2022 Ukraine invasion.
On Europe's air conditioning scarcity specifically, Wright said a "shale gas revolution" in the U.K. could have cut electricity bills and avoided the shortage altogether.
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The debate over autonomous weapons has started from the wrong premise.
Critics ask whether the United States should permit machines to kill. Advocates frame the question as whether we can afford to fall behind adversaries who will deploy such systems regardless. Both sides treat autonomous lethality as a novel moral category that demands a novel governing framework.
The United States will field autonomous systems regardless of whether the public debate reaches a satisfying resolution.
The U.S. military already possesses such a framework, however. It has been used for decades, it scales naturally to autonomous systems, and the public debate would improve considerably if both sides understood these realities.
The military governs the use of force through weapons control statuses, a graduated system that every air defense operator and ground commander knows by three commands. “Weapons hold” authorizes engagement only in self-defense or under specific order. “Weapons tight” authorizes engagement only against targets positively identified as hostile. “Weapons free” authorizes engagement against any target not positively identified as friendly.
A commander sets the status based on mission, threat, and environment, as units within his command may operate under different statuses depending on the situation. The framework already calibrates lethal authority to circumstance. It does not require a soldier to seek individual approval for every trigger pull, because the controlling judgment comes from the posture the commander has set rather than in each discrete engagement.
This structure maps directly onto the problem of autonomous weapons.
The objection that a machine cannot exercise the contextual judgment that distinguishes a combatant from a civilian, a threat from a bystander, has force only in environments where discrimination is genuinely difficult — precisely the condition the weapons control framework already addresses.
The Taiwan Strait and downtown Tehran are not the same operating environment, and no serious framework should govern them in the same way.
Consider the contrast. An autonomous system operating in the Taiwan Strait is tasked with engaging naval vessels in a declared conflict zone where civilian traffic is minimal. Every surface combatant of a certain signature is presumptively hostile and faces a discrimination problem that is nearly trivial. The environment is uncluttered, the targets are large and militarily unambiguous, and the consequences of restraint include the loss of American ships and sailors to adversary missiles that outpace any human operator’s reaction time.
A weapons-free or weapons-tight posture for autonomous engagement in that environment is defensible on the same grounds that justify those postures for human-operated air defense.
The same autonomous system operating in a dense urban environment such as downtown Tehran, where combatants and civilians occupy the same streets, should operate under weapons hold, which requires a human to authorize each engagement. The environment dictates the posture, and the framework already exists to make that determination.
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The Pentagon has, in fact, started to incorporate this framework into existing policy. Directive 3000.09, updated in January 2023, requires that autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force. It also requires that the design of such systems confine each engagement to a time frame and geographic area consistent with commander and operator intentions.
The directive presupposes that the appropriate level of human control varies with the system and mission rather than holding constant across all cases.
What the directive does not yet do, and what the public debate has not yet grasped, is connect that variation to the weapons control vocabulary the force already uses, which would render the entire question legible to commanders, policymakers, and the public in terms the military has been employing for generations.
Adopting this approach requires trusting the military to set the posture, which is the crux of the matter for a public institution. The objection that the U.S. cannot trust commanders to calibrate autonomous lethal force responsibly proves too much.
We already trust those same commanders to calibrate human lethal force through an identical framework — one that, when commanders adopt the wrong posture, produces civilian casualties.
An autonomous system governed by the same logic inherits the same accountability structure, because the commander who sets a weapons-free posture for an autonomous system owns the consequences exactly as the commander who sets it for a battery of human-operated interceptors.
A public institution governing an autonomous force must establish this policy explicitly rather than allow it to emerge on a case-by-case basis from procurement decisions and after-action reviews.
The military should state as a matter of doctrine that autonomous weapon systems operate under weapons control statuses set by the responsible commander; that the status a commander may set for a given system depends on the discrimination difficulty of its operating environment; and that the most permissive postures remain available only in environments where the discrimination problem is genuinely simple.
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This codification would accomplish two things that the current ambiguous debate does not. First, it would give commanders a clear and familiar vocabulary for governing systems that would otherwise arrive without doctrinal handholds. Second, it would give the public a transparent standard by which to hold the institution accountable, because a weapons control status is a decision with a name and an owner rather than a diffuse property of an algorithm that no one can identify.
The alternative is not a world without autonomous weapons. Adversaries are building them, the technology is proliferating, and the United States will field autonomous systems regardless of whether the public debate reaches a satisfying resolution.
The alternative to adopting a clear framework is fielding these systems under an ambiguous one, in which the absence of explicit doctrine forces operators and engineers to improvise the hardest decisions in the moment rather than letting commanders govern them in advance within a system the nation has already validated across decades of use.
The military knows how to use lethal force. The framework is sound, familiar, and accountable. The task now is to apply it deliberately to new autonomous systems rather than assume that such systems require the country to invent its ethics of force from scratch.
Editor’s note: This article appeared originally at the American Mind.
For years, discussion of the U.S.-funded biological laboratories in Ukraine was dismissed by critics as little more than a Russian talking point.
Now, newly declassified documents released by Tulsi Gabbard confirm it's real — but that’s not stopping establishment voices from calling her a propagandist.
“Tulsi comes out, what was it, Friday, and she releases, she declassifies slides of these documents about U.S.-funded bio labs in Ukraine and beyond. Over 40 labs, hundreds of millions, dangerous pathogens, anthrax, plague, ebola,” Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck explains.
“And now it’s a Russian conspiracy theory that those exist,” he says.
“Does it make common sense to you if we have anthrax and ebola sitting in a laboratory in Ukraine that is currently at war with Russia? Do you think it’s a good idea or should we just go take a flamethrower and burn all of those dangerous pathogens out of those buildings?” he asks.
“Why do we have them sitting there in these bio labs that are in a war zone? Now, look at the loudest people shouting about this. The ones who are saying, 'You know, she’s a conspiracy theorist,’” he continues, pointing out that these people include “embedded Ukraine correspondents, strong advocates to send more money to Ukraine in Congress, and defense analysts that are tied to the status quo.”
These, Glenn says, are “the same people clutching their pearls over the new DNI chief. They don’t like what she did with Ukraine.”
“They’re framing this whole thing as Kremlin propaganda,” he explains. “Like Tulsi Gabbard is now working for the Kremlin. Have you ever noticed when outsiders get close to auditing foreign entanglements, surveillance powers, risky overseas labs, the defenses go nuclear?”
“All of a sudden, it’s got to be stopped. It’s the worst problem ever. They just go crazy. To me, it feels like fear of exposure,” he continues, adding, “And maybe not all of them, but somewhere, somebody in that web is applying enormous pressure.”
To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
Though the Trump administration has faced a series of legal setbacks on tariffs, it seems to have found a solution. After the Supreme Court ruled that the administration’s reciprocal tariffs were wrongfully imposed, the president immediately leapt to Plan B: Section 122 tariffs, which allow the temporary placement of global tariffs.
But these tariffs — derived from the Trade Act of 1974, which Trump used to install a 10% levy on most imported goods — expire in just over two months, and a court has ruled them unlawful. Although that case is still working through the system, the administration is already planning to replace Section 122 tariffs with Section 301 tariffs. These, too, stem from the Trade Act, but unlike the previous tariffs, they will be here to stay.
These tariffs ... are durable, cover almost all American imports, and leave no questions for investors.
They will also allow the Trump administration to target countries that have relied on unfair trade practices such as lax environmental standards that let our trade “partners” produce at excess capacity — essentially to get one over on the United States.
Section 301, in short, gives the president the power to counter unfair foreign trade practices. Unlike the reciprocal and 122 tariffs, they can be placed only after a long process that includes public hearings and comment periods. While this may frustrate those who want quick action, the process practically guarantees courts will not rule them unconstitutional, as the authority is laid out explicitly in the statutory text.
Currently, the only active 301 tariffs are against China, which have been in place since the first Trump administration. But the second Trump administration is planning to broaden the use of Section 301 significantly.
The Office of the United States Trade Representative launched two investigations in the spring that covered 60 countries, accounting for nearly all American imports. The first investigation focused on products made with forced labor across the globe. Earlier this month, the administration revealed the results: Those countries, including the European Union, had failed to ban products made with forced labor or to stop forced labor within their borders.
The second investigation, which is somewhat narrower in scope, is ongoing. It targets “excess capacity” — essentially unfair government intervention stemming from weak or absent environmental regulations abroad, with pollutants from China having been found in American water and air. This harms America’s labor force and limits businesses’ ability to expand facilities and production.
According to United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, these tariffs are being pursued on “an accelerated timeframe” while still ensuring all legal requirements are being met. The next step for the forced labor tariffs will be a comment period ending in early July, followed by a hearing and — most likely — the announcement of the new tariffs.
By relying on Section 301, the Trump administration is making a smart play for three key reasons.
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First, President Trump is obviously committed to dismantling “free trade” ideology and replacing it with fair trade. Leaving office with only a handful of trade agreements and tariffs only on China — tariffs that all but the purest free traders would support — would not meaningfully advance that goal.
But if comprehensive Section 301 tariffs can be placed on countries found violating a range of agreements, it becomes significantly harder for future administrations to lift them, as the Biden administration discovered with the China tariffs levied by the first Trump administration.
Second, Section 301 is a more concrete process. It requires hearings and comment periods, conducted in a way where — even if the outcome is broadly understood — there are no surprises. Markets will therefore have essentially priced them in.
While President Trump’s reciprocal tariffs came from a well-reasoned place, their back-and-forth nature spooked investors and at times threatened his broader economic agenda. These tariffs, by contrast, are durable, cover almost all American imports, and leave no questions for investors.
Most importantly, Section 301 allows the United States to target trade both broadly and narrowly. Broadly, in the sense that a wide array of countries can be targeted at once, as the investigation of more than 60 countries shows. Narrowly, in that it allows the administration to focus on problems long derided by President Trump, including topics many conservatives have overlooked such as “inadequate environmental protections” and labor law violations.
In previous Republican administrations, these would not have been priorities. But the United States has extremely strong environmental protections and labor laws; ignoring the disparity between our laws and those of our competitors means trade deficits never close and American jobs get offshored.
With Section 301, that era is ending. New global tariffs will soon arrive, and this time they won’t be blocked by a court.
Editor’s note: This article was published originally at the American Mind.
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.
For 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.
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Director 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?
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.
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The 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.
As 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.
A few years ago, journalist Ezra Levant received the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal for defending freedom of expression after refusing to “bend the knee” and publishing Danish cartoons of Muhammad.
Now, the prime minister of the United Kingdom has banned him from the country.
“To have the prime minister of the United Kingdom ban me, a journalist … I’ve never done anything illegal in my life. I’ve never even had a parking ticket in the U.K. When I go there, it’s to do journalism,” Levant tells Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck.
“Glenn, your radio and you would be shut down within a week; I’m sorry to say it,” he continues. “Your First Amendment in America is more important than almost anything else, because with that, you can fight for all your other freedoms. Never give up your First Amendment.”
While everyone assumes other Western countries have the same First Amendment rights, Levant explains that they’re different.
“In the United Kingdom, according to the Times of London, a very prestigious newspaper, on any given day, on average, 30 people are arrested for what they post on social media. 30 a day. I’m not a fan of Russia, but even they don’t arrest 30 people a day for word crimes,” Levant says.
And the government doesn’t go after those who are actually harming others.
“They’re targeting people who criticize the government, especially on the issue of mass immigration. And the number-one thing that they’re scared about talking about is the rape gangs of largely Pakistani Muslim men targeting white girls,” Levant explains.
“When people have a march or a rally against these rapes, the government goes into freakout mode because it challenges the entire multiculturalism and immigration structure of the U.K.,” he says.
“So,” he continues, “never give up your free speech, Glenn, because you can see it in real time in the U.K.”
To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
Pence is entitled to oppose compensating victims of lawfare. What he is not entitled to do is pretend he had no role in creating them.
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