A little over three years ago, Anthony Fauci went on MSNBC to address critics of his COVID policies. What made the attacks on him especially "dangerous," the doctor cautioned, was that they were actually "attacks on science."These days, of course, Fauci is eager to distance himself from the dubious "science" he once championed, be it public mask mandates, school shutdowns, or confident statements that the virus did not originate from a lab leak. It should be clear by now — if it wasn't before — that "science" is just as susceptible to superstition and groupthink as any human endeavor. Contradicting conventional wisdom can entail real risk.Had his rabies vaccine not worked on 9-year-old Joseph Meister, French microbiologist Louis Pasteur could very well have ended his career in disgrace and in prison. Not only did Pasteur have no proof that his vaccine would work on humans, he had no medical license allowing him to administer it. By that point in his career, Pasteur was already quite successful and had no reason to rush development on his cure for rabies. In the 1860s, he had disproved the conventional wisdom that illness and pests who spread it arose spontaneously from nonliving matter by showing that invisible bacteria were to blame. Identifying the enemy allowed the development of effective ways to stop it: among them the well-known process of destroying microbes in beer and milk that takes Pasteur's name. He also pioneered the process of artificially weakening bacilli in order to use them in vaccines. But the boy's mother was desperate for any chance at saving her son from a hideously painful death. For some idea of what he faced, we can turn to this contemporary case study:On the 17th of June, 1981 an Englishwoman traveling in India was bitten on the leg by a dog. The wound was immediately cleansed by her husband using whisky as an antiseptic. She later attended a local clinic where the wound was again washed and packed with antiseptic powder. The woman returned to England in July and the wound was redressed in her local hospital. By the middle of August she became constantly tired and complained of aches and shooting pains in the back. She was anxious and depressed, and appeared to catch her breath when trying to drink. By the 19th of August she found it impossible to drink more than a few sips. She could not bear the touch of the wind or her hair on her face and had moments of apparent terror. The following day she was confused, hallucinating, incontinent of urine and quite unable to eat or drink. For the next two days she was intermittently hallucinating and screaming with terror until she collapsed and had a cardiac arrest. Although she was resuscitated in the ambulance whilst being carried to intensive care, she died two days later, on 24th of August 1981, without recovering consciousness.So, Pasteur summoned some medical colleagues and proceeded to put his reputation on the line. As he wrote in his notebook: “The child’s death appeared inevitable. I decided not without acute and harrowing anxiety, as may be imagined, to apply to Joseph Meister the method which I had found consistently successful with dogs.”Whatever mixture of charity and ambition prompted Pasteur to make this audacious bet, it paid off. Meister fully recovered and lived into his 60s, and rabies was no longer a death sentence.

It’s been a difficult stretch for the American institutions forming the cornerstones of our society. Donald Trump’s felony conviction last month in a New York court is only the latest and most extreme example of the increasing weaponization of the criminal justice system. The Supreme Court, with a durable right-leaning majority, has come under sustained attack from the left for the supposed failure of some conservative justices to recuse themselves from certain court matters, or for allegedly accepting gifts from wealthy political patrons.Several government agencies have exhausted decades of goodwill in service of dubious ends, eroding hard-won credibility in the process. Public health services lost citizens’ confidence during the COVID-19 pandemic by pushing rigid mandates supported by neither science nor objective reality. While challenging such now-debunked policies could result in the loss of one’s livelihood, no apologies (nor proper accounting) have followed. If institutions are necessary but badly degraded, what can be done?While the U.S. military discharged unvaccinated soldiers, it also solemnly pledged to root out the so-called existential threat of "white supremacy" in its ranks, which its own studies later revealed did not exist. As the military squandered its traditionally high regard, veterans from various "alphabet soup" intelligence agencies united to support the Biden campaign just before the 2020 presidential election. Dubbed the "Dirty 51" by the New York Post, they declared the Hunter Biden laptop "Russian disinformation," despite the FBI validating its authenticity in late 2019 and Hunter Biden's current criminal proceedings confirming it again.The pandemic revealed rot at the local level, with public schools pushing DEI, critical race theory, and other “woke” principles through Zoom classrooms, finally observed by previously blinded parents. It also illuminated the unredeemed grift of public sector unions, exemplified by the Chicago Teachers Union, which consistently fought for massive pay increases while seeking to keep schools closed for as long as possible.Outside the public sector, other revered pillars of civil society have also abased themselves. Fortune 500 companies have eagerly embraced each successive progressive cause, but don't expect a refund or even an acknowledgment of the shareholder value transferred to Black Lives Matter and similar organizations focused solely on self-enrichment. Elite and middling universities have promoted noxious ideologies on campus for years, so it is no surprise that anti-Semitism and other hateful creeds now run rampant there. Meanwhile, major media outlets run think pieces and “news analysis” on the rising threat of disinformation while shamelessly evading responsibility for their starring roles in the Russian collusion and Hunter Biden laptop hoaxes. I could continue, but there seems little doubt that our institutions are rotten. Gallup’s 2023 survey of confidence in institutions reveals lows not seen in decades, if ever, for the U.S. military, Congress, public schools, the media, and many other organizations. As confidence in the entities meant to embody our values and advance societal objectives recedes, we must ask: Does declining faith in institutions matter? If so, what can be done?Many on the political right, having observed progressives hijack just about every American institution, have cheered the richly deserved comeuppance of everyone from Ivy League presidents to newly unemployed network anchors. While such schadenfreude is understandable, particularly given the odor of elitism and (whisper it) unearned privilege attached to these institutions and their toadies, it’s not so easy — and may in fact be foolhardy — to cashier them. Why?Consider what our institutions fundamentally are: repositories of rules and norms that shape or constrain our behavior or advance some widely held objective. They are the pillars of any functioning civil society, providing both a counterweight to one another and, critically, to the public sector and its various instrumentalities. A healthy community benefits from the balance of power among respected institutions with varying and competing agendas. The resulting diversity and redundancy, like telecommunications or neural networks, avoid the “bottlenecks” associated with concentrations of power or influence. Positive values tend to thrive when distributed widely. As the federal government expands in both size and scope, extending ever further into our lives, it is essential to have other legitimate societal loci of authority.If institutions are necessary but badly degraded, what can be done?Any solution requires an objective diagnosis of each institution’s specific ills. The nature of the organization is also crucial in devising a remedial strategy. The myriad challenges our institutions face include capture by ideologies or groups with distinct agendas, perverse incentives, lack of viewpoint diversity, groupthink, a dearth of moral courage, and lack of competition, among many others. Once we properly identify the problems with any given institution, we can develop a course of action. Recognizing that sturdy, functioning institutions are in the public interest, the solution set can be summarized as the new “3 Rs”: reject, replace, or reform. This approach transcends the simplistic right-wing caricature of failed institutions as irredeemably corrupt and avoids the left-leaning establishment’s default impulse to salvage any incumbent organization over which it exercises dominion.Rejection is most appropriate when an institution is so badly decayed by corruption, a muddled mission, or moral turpitude that it becomes "irredeemable," to borrow from Hillary Clinton. Examples of organizations that have lost their way or succeeded in their grift only through false advertising include the Southern Poverty Law Center, Snopes, and Black Lives Matter. The world would be a better place without these organizations, as they serve no salutary purpose. A replacement approach may apply where the stated (if not actual) mission has merit and competition is appropriate but where the subject institution is simply too far gone to be saved. Examples include media outlets like CNN and MSNBC, or certain universities. The emergence of schools like the University of Austin suggests that viable alternatives to “traditional” higher education can also spur reform of existing organizations. Charter schools in primary education play a similar role.Reform best applies to those institutions with “worms in the apple” but where more than a little of the original mission and luster remain. These institutions may have simply lost their way for some period or faltered under uniquely misguided leadership. Reform also may apply to those institutions that cannot be easily rejected or replaced as they are natural monopolies. These include the U.S. military, some universities (particularly public universities; with reforms at the University of Florida showing the way), and many large corporations.It’s tempting to throw away our debased institutions given the ignominy with which they have covered themselves. But they can play an essential role as shock absorbers within a healthy civil society. Without them, our choice is between autocratic, unchecked central government and anarchy. Maintaining legitimate, functional institutions is the only viable option for a free society.

In the same week that a 13-year-old girl was raped by recently released illegal immigrants, Joe Biden unilaterally and illegally granted amnesty to more illegal immigrants. Republicans have no better issue, timing, or political opportunity to engage in a government funding fight. Why does House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) refuse to draw a line on September 30 funding? And why is Trump giving him cover to sell us out? Biden has flooded the border for more than three years. Heading into the election, he aims to temporarily relieve border pressure while focusing on securing the permanent residency of millions of illegal immigrants in the interior. Biden on Tuesday announced amnesty for an estimated 550,000 illegal immigrant spouses of legal residents. This was not his first amnesty effort. He has already extended “temporary protected status” indefinitely to 860,000 illegal immigrants. It’s clear that any immigration plan that does not fully deputize the states is ineffective. How can Republicans continue to fund the government after September 30 without defunding these programs and enabling states to ban and deport illegal immigrants? Some states, like Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Iowa, have already partially criminalized illegal presence. However, federal courts are blocking these laws. There are only about 6,000 ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations agents. Meanwhile, 7.4 million illegal immigrants are on ICE's undetained docket, most of whom likely have criminal records in addition to immigration violations. Only 38,500 are currently in custody, meaning millions of invaders, including gang members and violent criminals, effectively have amnesty. Even if Trump wins the election and follows through on his promise of mass deportations, we cannot significantly improve enforcement and deterrence without states taking action on the ground. If there is one issue worth having a budget fight over in Congress, it must be immigration enforcement. The key policy to demand in exchange for passing the budget is explicitly deputizing the states to enforce all aspects of federal immigration law. As I’ve noted before, isn’t it precisely before the election when you’d want to have this fight? We are such a closely divided country, yet 62% of Americans want mass deportations, including majorities of nearly every demographic? Just consider the amount of intellectual ammo Republicans would be able to throw at the left if they held a press conference and announced, “No Border? No Budget” as an official policy for this coming fiscal year. Just think of the number of rape and murder cases they could pin on Biden’s policies during a government funding fight. In just the past week, the Harford County, Maryland, sheriff announced the arrest of Victor Antonio Martinez Hernandez, 23, a Salvadoran illegal immigrant who “fled” to the United States after committing murder in his home country. Hernandez is charged with murdering Rachel Morin, a Maryland mother of five, in a quiet part of a rural trail 1,800 miles from the border. Hernandez breached the border in February 2023 and allegedly committed a home invasion and assault in California before crossing the country to Bel Air, Maryland. This case demonstrates how illegal immigrants are free to commit crime in this country. It demonstrates how violent criminals are now fleeing justice in their own countries to commit crimes in our country. It demonstrates the worst nightmare of most Americans who want to remain safe — that there is nowhere to hide from criminal aliens. Unlike domestic crime, which is usually limited to urban areas, illegal immigrants are fanning out to every corner of the United States. The child rape problem among illegal immigrants is real and rampant. Last week, the NYPD arrested Christian Geovanny Inga-Landi, a 25-year-old Ecuadorian illegal immigrant, for allegedly sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl in a Queens park. An immigration judge ordered his removal after the Biden administration released him in 2021, but he remained in the country. Millions with deportation orders are still at large, most with some form of criminal record, and we are needlessly bearing the cost of their recidivism. Regarding undocumented criminals from foreign countries, thousands of illegal immigrants granted amnesty by Barack Obama received legal documents despite having criminal records. We were told that DACA recipients were the best and brightest among us — more American than our own children. Yet, according to USCIS data, nearly 68,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records were granted legal status, more than twice the number of applicants who were rejected based on a criminal record. Among these “American-as-apple-pie” valedictorians-in-waiting were 7,926 theft arrests, 6,892 drug arrests, 4,210 DUI arrests, 3,421 battery arrests, 3,308 assault arrests, 1,956 vandalism arrests, and 1,471 burglary arrests. There were even hundreds of sexual offenses, 173 kidnappings, and 15 murders among those granted amnesty. Last week, in Indiana, authorities arrested five illegal immigrants for kidnapping a teenage girl. Kidnapping is one of the crime categories endemic to their countries of origin. Republicans now have a wealth of stories and data to drive their message all summer, using it as leverage in a government funding fight. It’s clear that any immigration plan that does not fully deputize the states is ineffective. Illegal immigrants reside in the states and are likely to return even if deported. If Republicans cannot or will not fight on this issue now, don’t believe for a minute they will do so next year. By then, it will be too late.

Around 2016, an obscure clinical psychologist and professor named Jordan Peterson aptly diagnosed the malaise troubling so many young men: a chronic lack of purpose. Not only did Peterson give voice to these frustrations, he was also one of the few to offer a solution. Legions of aimless, disaffected young men responded to this unlikely role model’s simple yet powerful message: The essence of manhood is responsibility, he reminded a generation raised to believe that masculinity was "toxic," and it is only by willingly taking on responsibility that a man will build a life worth living. The uncompromising 'trad life' left her demoralized and unhappy. Women, by comparison, appear to be thriving. They dominate education by virtually every metric, from performance and enrollment to graduation rates. In those few areas where they lag behind, such as participation in STEM, incentive programs have made headway in raising the numbers. It is the same in the workforce. Though male-dominated industries still exist, the gender gaps are closing even there. According to 2022 Pew Research, women under 30 are out-earning men of the same age in several U.S. cities. Lost girls Why, then, do women seem less happy than ever? They may be thriving materially, but spiritually, they're lost. Women are navigating uncharted territory, growing up in an overtly sex-positive society where "professions" like prostitution and pornography have been destigmatized if not outright encouraged. A wide ideological gap is forming between the sexes, with dates resembling uneasy diplomatic negotiations more than romantic meet-cutes. Every week, a new "normie" woman seems to go viral on X by posting a video in which she confesses, often in tears, that she’s at the end of her rope. Trapped in unfruitful cycles of self-sabotage intermixed with unsavory digital footprints, a short-term mating strategy that won't lead to long-term commitment, and an absence of deeper meaning beyond dopamine hits via social media, they have a mass psychosis of learned helplessness. Healthy role models are in short supply. Girlboss caricatures, shameless, hypergamous sugar babies, and raunchy podcasts encourage young women to have fun and ignore those nagging fears about age and fertility. On the other side, they face antagonism from condescending manosphere gurus and conservative trad girlies who are more interested in flexing their moral superiority than steering them in the right direction. Maybe women need the kind of firm but empathetic authority that cuts through the nonsense and offers them straightforward, time-tested advice on how to live. In other words, women need a Jordan Peterson of their own. Rage-baiters need not apply I can tell you who isn't — professional rage-baiters like Pearl Davis, Megha Lillywhite, or Isabella Riley Moody, despite their vocal insistence and desperation to be some revelatory voice on gender relations. Their insights range from the lazy — "men good, women bad" — to the downright disturbing. Moody promised Zherka, a man who thinks it’s cool and edgy to claim that he’s a pedophile, that she and her husband will have their newborn baby "ready for him as a virgin." If it sounds unhinged beyond belief, that's because it's performance art. They're provocateurs uninterested in good-faith dialogue. They create more noise than any meaningful dispute. It isn't all doom and gloom out there, however. There are some prominent women whose contribution to the discourse is like finding a gallon of water in the Sahara desert. They run the gamut from conservative to apolitical, from mommy bloggers to young women yet to have children. All serve an important role in steering women past the various nihilistic and hedonistic dead ends our culture offers. These women beckon us not to choose between the defeatist learned helplessness of fringe leftism or the meme of limiting tradwife ideals in the 21st century but to choose a secret third thing: a "return" to normalcy. Freya India Freya India Freya is an English Zoomer writer who publishes the newsletter GIRLS on Substack. She rightly attributes much of the rift between the sexes to American universities, which tend to be poisoned by radical leftist academics. Not only do more women than men go to college, but women tend to have the kind of personality traits — high agreeableness, neuroticism, risk aversion, and compassion — that leave them open to the seductions of various social justice crusades. Increasing screen time doesn’t help, either. Women average over eight hours a day, much of it spent consuming far-left propaganda, which their algorithms continue to feed them in what Freya deems an "algorithmic conveyor belt." The solution, she suggests, is to delay young girls' entry to social media, to stop documenting your every lived experience, and ideally to get offline. Helen Roy Helen Roy Helen's writing is a breath of fresh air in the mommy blogging world, always managing to find profundity in simple, everyday life. You may not think you care about motherhood, but Helen’s eloquent discussion of its unique trials, tribulations, and joys makes you realize you should care about it. Her prescriptive anecdotes about managing your time, effectively training to prepare for motherhood, and navigating a culture that is unfriendly, if not antagonistic, to mothers, are incredibly insightful and philosophically derived, though not untethered from real-world experience. She manages to walk the perfect balance between idealism and pragmatism. Her biting remarks criticizing the ideological blinders of pro-sexual revolution feminists and trad cosplayers are compelling and contain just the right dose of tasteful snark. Helen provides fresh angles to examine popular narratives, finding the underrated contentions everyone would rather conveniently ignore than be pained to engage with. You can read her sharp analysis here on Blaze News, listen to her aptly named podcast "Girlboss, Interrupted," and subscribe to her substack. Brett Cooper Brett Cooper Brett Cooper brings a much-needed young female perspective to the Daily Wire, where she espouses socially conservative ideals that are neither an uncritical deference to the way things "ought to be" nor some desperate zealous trad LARP characteristic of newly born-again Christian converts on social media. She boasts an approachable, down-to-earth communication style; her reasonable appeals to tradition allow for more nuance than one usually expects from her grumpy, less emotionally intelligent colleagues. What especially makes Cooper stand out from her peers is a familiarity with struggle and suffering. Her upbringing was tumultuous and marred by loss: Her parents went through a messy divorce; she lost one brother to cardiac arrest when she was just five; and another brother spiraled into drug addiction and schizophrenia. As a young working actress, Cooper was already living on her own when she emancipated herself from her parents at fifteen. Cooper hardly comes from the kind of privilege that so many critics like to say accounts for the "sheltered" worldviews of conservatives. Cooper’s background in the arts gives an appreciation for them as a significant driver of culture, something her contemporaries seem to gravely underrate. Storytelling matters; it's why liberals have a choke hold on the culture as we know it. You can watch her content on her YouTube channel, "The Comments Section with Brett Cooper," and soon enough, you can see her play Snow White in the Daily Wire's upcoming production "Snow White and the Evil Queen." Lauren Southern Lauren Southern Southern has had the most staying power of anyone on this list, though her turbulent personal and political career has cost her a lot over the years. She rose to fame for her bold political conservative activism, which saw her banned from countries, interrogated for hours, and forced to cut contact with close friends. Southern retired from political life and made an attempt to live out the trad lifestyle that she so earnestly promoted in her early career. As documented in a recent interview with Mary Harrington for Unherd, the uncompromising "trad life" left her demoralized and unhappy. Worse, it turned her into exactly the kind of figure that trads tend to villainize: a divorced single mom. After recalibrating the personal with the political, Southern settled into a less antagonistic form of activism. She gives a firsthand account of where trying to live up to impossible standards set by fringe online charlatans can lead you. Despite unforeseen circumstances and vicious attacks from her own side, she's remained resilient, an eternal optimist. Southern models an intellectual honesty rare among people who have burned in the sphere — owning the mistakes she's made and refusing to denounce conservative traditionalism altogether while offering reasonable anecdotes of its pitfalls when taken to its extremes. She also offers uniquely valuable perspectives, like her "Conservative Sensitivity Training" video, during which she pleads for conservatives to reclaim the value of sensitivity rather than allowing it to be co-opted by progressives as a synonym for mollycoddling. Her most important contribution recently? Beckoning us to go outside — to touch grass. That's the thing about those pipelines; they just don't have any grass. When she is online, you can catch her content on her personal channel or over at TENET Media.

What are the latest FF14 Twitch drops? Final Fantasy 14 has been going for over a decade now, and one of the ways to keep things fresh is by unlocking new avatar items like mounts. In fact, mounts are famously one of the most popular items in any MMO, and now we can get one of the cutest ever thanks to Final Fantasy 14 Twitch drops. Alongside the awesome Chocorpokkur mount whistle, you can also claim some important items simply by watching your favorite Twitch streamers play the MMORPG game. As you get get ready to play Dawntrail, the latest Final Fantasy 14 DLC, you might want some buffs, and these buttery mogbiscuits and fat choco choco Twitch drop rewards are going to buff your EXP - though it looks like one seedkin in particular might have had a bit too much chocolate already! Here's how to claim all that and more with FF14 Twitch drops. Continue reading All current FF14 Twitch drops and how to get them MORE FROM PCGAMESN: The best MMOs, FF14 Dawntrail release date, FF14 Island Sanctuary guide

Gigabyte has just extended its range of graphics cards featuring its new concealed power connector. The new Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super WindForce MAX OC 16G graphics card not only makes for neat cable tidying, by hiding the power connector on the back of the graphics card, but it also means you can plug the cable into the card in a straight line from the side, with no need to bend it. There is an ever-present anxiety if you own the best graphics card, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, because the 16-pin power connection has a disturbing tendency to melt, particularly if the plug isn't secured properly in the socket, which is sometimes the result of a bend putting pressure on the connection. However, with Gigabyte's straight connection on its WindForce MAX card design, you can hopefully reduce this risk. Continue reading Gigabyte’s new Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti Super card has a hidden power socket MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Gigabyte Aero 15 laptop review, Gigabyte Aorus X470 Gaming 7 WiFi review, Best AMD gaming motherboard

The new lineup of Intel Arrow Lake gaming CPUs looks set to have higher base clock speeds than the company’s current processors, according to a new leak. The base clock is the frequency at which a processor ostensibly runs when it’s processing everyday tasks, and not being pushed hard by intensive jobs such as gaming or video encoding, and the latest information shows this clock speed could be significantly higher on Intel’s new CPUs than on its current ones. There’s a catch, though. When you’re looking for the best gaming CPU, it’s the boost clock (or turbo clock) that you really want to be higher, rather than the base clock, as that’s the maximum speed the CPU will hit when you’re gaming. Recent rumors pointed to Intel Arrow Lake boost clocks being lower than those of current Intel 14th gen CPUs, but it looks as though the base clocks will now be higher. Continue reading Intel’s new CPUs may have faster clock speeds, but there’s a catch MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Core i5 14600K review, Best gaming CPU, Core i9 14900K review

As expected, FromSoftwares brand-new expansion for Elden Ring, Shadow of the Erdtree, is dividing players because of its difficulty. Soulslike purists are keen to make gameplay as punishing as possible, while casual Tarnished were relieved to have the new Blessing System in their arsenal that made combat a little easier.

Ever since Days Gone rolled its credits, post-apocalyptic lovers have been eager for a continuation into its freaker-invested open world, especially due to its cliffhanger ending. While critics bashed the Bend Studios title because of technical issues and its initial slow pace, many PlayStation fans couldn't get enough, and over the past few years, have even gone as far as creating a petition for Sony to consider making Days Gone 2.

Lee Zeldin Says Trump Is Closer to Winning New York Now Than He Was