Category: The Washington Free Beacon
Spotify to continue airing ICE recruitment ads despite Soros-linked complaint
The Trump administration has been actively recruiting new Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to assist in the effort to enforce United States law and remove illegal foreigners from America. However, some organizations have taken issue with the advertising efforts on Spotify to recruit people at this critical time.
‘This ad is part of a wider campaign from the US government running across multiple platforms, including television, streaming, and online channels.’
MoveOn, a George Soros-affiliated organization, started a petition to specifically pressure Spotify to remove ICE recruitment ads from its platform.
The petition calls the advertisements “offensive government propaganda” that uses “inflammatory and dehumanizing language.”
“And now Spotify and other streaming platforms are letting ICE use the platform that people pay for entertainment and connection as ICE’s recruitment tactic. It’s intrusive, offensive, and disturbing,” the petition reads.
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Photo by Jamie Kelter Davis/Getty Images
The petition does not call out any other streaming platforms by name.
“This ad is part of a wider campaign from the U.S. government running across multiple platforms, including television, streaming, and online channels,” a Spotify spokesperson told Blaze News
“Users can also help manage their ad experience in-app by liking or disliking an ad or logging into their account via web browser and updating their ad preferences,” the spokesperson added.
The petition fails to mention that the only users affected by the ads are free subscribers. Paid subscribers do not receive advertising, leaving them virtually unaffected by the ads.
On Blaze News’ last count, the petition has 36,914 signatures. The goal is 40,000.
MoveOn and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.
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The Associated Press is getting obliterated online for shaming pet owners over climate change
Pet owners are demolishing the Associated Press after the outlet published a video suggesting that pets make climate change worse.
The video, posted to social media, said that pets worsen climate change by needing food with high meat content. The video also recommended that people seeking to own a pet avoid breeders and instead adopt pets without owners.
‘From the people who brought you “you will all eat bugs,” comes “sacrifice your pets for climate change.”‘
“Pets have a pretty sizable climate impact. But not all carbon…pawprints…are created equal. So if you’re looking to get a pet, which ones emit the least?” read the post from AP.
“And if you’ve already got one, how do you make sure it has the smallest foot (or paw) print?” it added. “There are some options.”
The video quickly garnered over 2.3 million views, many from angry pet owners and others who told the AP where it could stuff the suggestions.
“None of this matters in the slightest. It’s all silliness. The countries that worry about it will become poor, the ones that don’t will not,” responded Charles Cooke of National Review.
“We at the AP have decided life isn’t unpleasant enough. Here’s another way you can make it worse,” replied writer Jon Gabriel.
“If I tried for forty years…better yet if God made me immortal and I spent eternity…an entire eternity with no other mission…I would not be able to care less about my pet’s carbon footprint,” responded influencer Chance McClain.
“You have to be mentally deficient to base the choice of your next pet on whatever this article has to say,” said showrunner Joseph Mallozzi.
“Whenever you think you are depressed and useless, just remember there is someone at AP that researched and approved this article,” read another reply.
“From the people who brought you ‘you will all eat bugs,’ comes ‘sacrifice your pets for climate change,'” responded writer Drew Holden.
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Others were more curt in their responses.
“I have a proposal for you on this: Go f**k yourself,” read one popular reply.
In a memo released in October, billionaire Bill Gates appeared to concede that the effort to thwart climate change directly was failing. He said that world governments should instead dedicate their efforts toward mitigating the negative effects of climate change on at-risk populations.
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JD Vance offers calm election reflection, warns against ‘idiotic’ overreaction to Dem winning streak
Vice President JD Vance is cutting through the noise and reminding Republicans not to overreact to the Democrats’ latest winning streak in local and state elections.
To onlookers, it might seem like Democrats have regained their footing. New York City elected its first openly socialist mayor, California is poised to redistrict the state in a manner that gives Democrats an even greater electoral advantage, and fantasizing about murdering political opponents no longer disqualifies a person from holding the highest law enforcement office in Virginia. In short, Democrats won every election they were hoping to win on November 4.
‘The infighting is so stupid.’
In the wake of these electoral losses, Vance gave Republican voters a reality check.
“I think it’s idiotic to overreact to a couple of elections in blue states, but a few thoughts,” Vance said in a Wednesday post on X.
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Photo by ADAM GRAY/AFP via Getty Images
Vance noted that one of Republicans’ challenges is voter enthusiasm. Voter turnout has historically been difficult for local elections, even more so among Republicans. Because of this, Vance emphasized the importance of energizing the base and engaging voters in future elections.
“[Scott] Pressler, TPUSA, and a bunch of others have been working hard to register voters,” Vance said. “I said it in 2022, and I’ve said it repeatedly since: our coalition is ‘low propensity’ and that means we have to do better at turning out voters than we have in the past.”
Affordability was at the forefront of all successful campaigns this cycle. As Vance noted, cost of living will be a defining issue for all future elections, and it’s one Republicans need to stay focused on both on the campaign trail and in office.
“We need to focus on the home front,” Vance said. “The president has done a lot that has already paid off in lower interest rates and lower inflation, but we inherited a disaster from Joe Biden and Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
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Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
“We’re going to keep on working to make a decent life affordable in this country, and that’s the metric by which we’ll ultimately be judged in 2026 and beyond.”
Above all, Vance encouraged the MAGA movement to tune out distracting “infighting” and focus on the movement.
“The infighting is so stupid,” Vance said. “I care about my fellow citizens — particularly young Americans — being able to afford a decent life, I care about immigration and sovereignty, and I care about establishing peace overseas so our resources can be focused at home.”
“If you care about those things too, let’s work together.”
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Sen. Markwayne Mullin Says Schumer Squashed Government Reopening Until After Election
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) held a closed-door meeting in which he squashed his party’s plans to reopen the government until after Tuesday’s elections, fearing that a deal before the election could dampen Democratic turnout, according to Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R., Okla.).
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Clothing should be fun
I do a lot of things for work. I take photos, I take videos, I write stories, I write columns, I write about style, and I write about life.
I also help guys dress better. Officially it’s called style advising, but down to brass tacks, it means me helping guys get clothes they are happy with. Helping them get rid of the junk that sits in their closet that they never wear and get into clothes that make them look, and feel, their best.
Exercising creative control in the physical space feels good in a way that’s deeper than exercising the same kind of creativity in the digital space.
It’s one of the most rewarding things I do. I know lots of guys dismiss the importance of clothes, but they do so at their peril. Our clothes really do have a huge impact on our psychological state. They can make us pretty unhappy or pretty happy.
Ready to wear
Does that make us “superficial”? No. It’s an acknowledgment of the fact that what we wear represents who we are to others —and to ourselves. If you aren’t happy with how you present yourself, you aren’t going to be happy with yourself. It’s that simple.
So I take personal satisfaction from watching a guy transform his wardrobe over the course of a year or two. What’s particularly satisfying is observing how his attitude toward clothing changes as he overhauls his closet.
The process usually starts with a pragmatic interest in not looking like a slob. Achieving a baseline presentability eliminates any negative attention slovenly dress attracts. From that point he may start to notice that looking a little more “put together” actually attracts positive attention. And once he starts to experience the fruits of dressing decently in public, he’s ready to start enjoying his clothes.
This means he’s comfortable and confident enough that he no longer sees dressing himself as a test to get “right,” but as an opportunity for personal expression and creativity. Clothes finally become what they’re meant to be: fun.
Or as a client deep into his own wardrobe revamp recently told me, “I’m just blown away by how fun this stuff can get.”
What a difference in attitude and mindset. A realization like that is generally a sign that a certain kind of psychological transformation has been completed.
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Making the man
I’m aware that the word “fun” may connote something shallow or frivolous — and in some respects clothing can be both. But the pleasure we derive from clothing also derives from its deeper meaning: the way it reinforces the eternal forms of man and woman, emphasizes our dignity as human beings made in the image of God, and reflects our culture, values, and even religious beliefs.
Remember the pastel cars of the 1950s? It’s hard to believe it, but there was a time when when cars weren’t only black, gray, or white. There was a time when cars were fun. Well, it’s the same thing with clothes. If you really look at the stuff the guys were wearing back in those old movies, they were actually having much more fun than the guy who wears dark jeans, a black T-shirt, and a gray hoodie in 2025. Coming to the final realization that clothes should be fun is actually a kind of returning to tradition.
Creative control
The thoughtfully designed, personal interior of your home feels more welcoming than an airport terminal. A carefully cultivated garden is more beautiful than an expanse of artificial turf. And a well-fitting and harmonious combination of shirt, jacket, and trousers is more flattering than a prison-like monochrome sweatsuit.
There’s also a peculiar psychological benefit to embracing clothes as a domain of fun. Exercising creative control in the physical space feels good in a way that’s deeper than exercising the same kind of creativity it in the digital space.
In our screen-dominant era, the experience of joyfully controlling your personal environment is humanizing and refreshing. It’s good to like how you look and know that you are the one responsible for it. It feels like we are actually doing something rather than just moving pixels around.
Of course, it goes without saying that not all fun is good fun. We know that’s true about all sorts of stuff in life. Many a bad decision sure was fun at the time. So it goes with the temporary thrill of donning stupid neon graphic T-shirts, grotesque Crocs, alien-green sweatpants printed with pizza motifs.
Many men today begin their style journey as overgrown children who have enjoyed this “bad” kind of fun for most of their lives: the dumb T-shirts and the stupid shoes. But then they decide to grow up, and after working through their wardrobe, they come to understand that these classic clothes are not just good for the soul or society. They are fun, and they are the right kind of fun, the kind of fun that edifies and enriches us.
It’s the testosterone, stupid!
It was with great interest that I read Matthew Gasda’s latest essay, on the state of men in 2025, “Masculinity at the End of History.”
Gasda has a lot of things to say that are germane to my new book, “The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity” (out December 16), not least of all whether America — and indeed the Western world as a whole — exhibits what could be called a “crisis of masculinity” in the first place.
We have reams of data showing what can only be described as a civilizational decline in testosterone levels, a decline that may have no parallel in history.
There are plenty of observers — writers, social scientists, journalists, politicians, celebrity psychologists — who think so.
A crisis in need of a crisis
Gasda disagrees. In fact, he believes the absence of a crisis is precisely what’s ailing America’s young men. Men need crises in order to be men. Without crises, their mettle isn’t tested, they have no higher aspirations to direct themselves toward, and so they fall into a listless state, an aimless state, a kind of suspended adolescence.
Porn. Pot. Video games. Social media. Processed food. Logging on and dropping out. We all know what it looks like.
“Masculinity is desperate for a crisis,” Gasda writes in the opening paragraphs of his essay.
It is docile, unsure, and formless. At most, it is at the germinal phase of crisis, lacking a catalytic agent to propel it to its full-blown state, which at least can be registered and reckoned with. After all, crisis implies that something is happening, that something is at stake. The uncatalyzed proto-crisis, or the noncrisis, of American masculinity is repressed, unexpressed, yet omnipresent.
It’s a typical literary switcheroo — Gasda is a playwright, after all — but he’s not wrong. Nor is he the first to say that what men really need is a crisis — read: something extraordinary — to give full form to their potential.
Declaring ‘war’
Back in 1910, the pragmatist philosopher William James, brother of the novelist Henry, wrote an essay called “The Moral Equivalent of War.” A committed socialist and pacifist, James nevertheless regretted the march of progress and with it the (apparent) decline of war, because he recognized war’s power to form young men and inculcate in them the highest possible virtues. War teaches men to subordinate themselves and their needs to those of the collective, to pursue a higher goal, and, if need be, to give their lives for it. War teaches men courage, service, self-sacrifice, stoicism, and patriotism, and all of these things are necessary for a properly functioning nation in peace.
But war is also a terrible, terrible thing — and it was rapidly becoming much worse, though just how much worse James could not have foreseen. What we need, James argues, is a “moral equivalent” of war, a substitute that could teach men the same lessons without the enormous destructive cost.
James’ proposal is quite clever: Rather than a war against each other, we need a war with nature. Young men should be enlisted into a national struggle to conquer and tame nature and to revolutionize the means of production. Send boys off to build railroads and skyscrapers and ships, and they’ll return as men, ready to lead families and the nation.
Manufacturing manhood
This isn’t too different, actually, from what Gasda advocates in his new essay, when he says a national project in which all or many men could participate might be a great spur to masculine revival.
If the objective of America in the years ahead is to reclaim global leadership in industrial production, that is, in the making of things in the real-world economy, as opposed to just in the realm of bits and pixels, then new avenues for masculine exertion, discipline, creativity, and camaraderie may arise from such a project.
There’s much to like in Gasda’s essay and much to agree with. He’s right about how the breakdown of communities and the loss of tradition have hindered the transmission of masculine ideals across the generations. He’s right about the need for rites of passage to confer status on men. Countless anthropological studies have shown the crucial role, in virtually every kind of society except our own, of tests of courage and fortitude at key moments in life, and psychologists have demonstrated how pain and trauma bond people together and provide a sense of shared identity.
He’s also right to argue that Americans must “historicize” masculinity. That is, they must understand its peculiar focus on strenuous exertion and relentless self-making in its particular historical context: a masculine ideal developed in conflict with a frontier, both the physical frontier of western expansion and the social and moral frontiers of a new national identity.
And he’s right, obviously, that we live in an age that’s fundamentally hostile to expressions of masculinity and that we can’t simply return to the past and past ideals, as so many simple-minded critics of the modern world, especially on social media, seem to believe.
That’s all to the good. But there are also serious problems.
No country for men
For one thing, it’s not clear just how much American men really could get behind a drive to, in Gasda’s words, “reclaim global leadership in industrial production.”
If America does return to industrial pre-eminence, most if not nearly all manufacturing is going to be high-tech and automated — hardly the kind of gigantic Soviet five-year plan that could simply swallow up millions of men and give them jobs in factories or even give them jobs at all.
It’s not just manufacturing that is on the verge of making human labor largely a thing of the past. Whole swaths of industry and even white-collar fields are undergoing the same revolutionary changes. Librarians and lawyers and proofreaders and doctors will be replaced by AI and large language models too.
The testosterone decline
A far graver problem, from my perspective, is that like the vast majority of the so-called “crisis of masculinity” literature that he derides, Gasda fails to take seriously, or even acknowledge, the biological changes that are throwing men’s masculinity into doubt — in particular, a headlong decline in testosterone, the master male hormone that’s responsible for making men men and not women.
Testosterone is not just responsible for sexual differentiation — for the physical characteristics that define boys, beginning in the womb and proceeding through infancy and the teenage years into adulthood — but it also governs male mood, motivation, libido, and even things like political attitudes.
Although we should be careful not to say testosterone determines political views, social psychology experiments reveal that a testosterone boost will make a man more likely to defend his position even when he’s outnumbered by people who disagree with him; it will make him more likely to continue fighting against a much stronger opponent; it will make him more accepting of hierarchy and inequality; it will make him more generous to his in-group — his own people — and more aggressive toward his out-group — potential enemies.
In short, testosterone and its effects are complex, but they work in ways that obviously tend toward behavior we associate with traditional masculinity. The less of it men have, the less masculine they become, as a basic rule.
Aggressively overlooked
Open a best-selling book like Richard Reeves’ “Of Boys and Men,” head to the index, and look for “testosterone,” and you’ll find a poverty of references. Reeves talks about testosterone for just a few pages, but only to dispel the notion that boys “are their hormones,” meaning boys aren’t doomed to be aggressive because they have more testosterone (pop science’s “aggression hormone”) than girls. That’s it. Apparently, biology just isn’t important when we’re talking about the serious problems with men today.
It’s a strange oversight. We have reams of data showing what can only be described as a civilizational decline in testosterone levels, a decline that may have no parallel in history. We know what this decline entails, and if we don’t, we really should try to find out.
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Compelling evidence
The first real herald of a civilizational decline in testosterone levels was the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, a gold-standard double-blind controlled study of men in the Boston area. The study took place over a period of around 20 years, from the end of the 1980s to the early 2000s. Men of all ages were selected at random and given a battery of tests at regular intervals. When the testosterone data was finally analyzed in 2007, it showed testosterone levels were declining year over year at a rate of about 1%.
That might not sound like much, but over a period of 20 years, that’s 20%, or one-fifth. On a longer timeline, say 50 years, that’s half of all testosterone — gone.
Researchers in other countries, including Finland and Israel, wanted to see whether the same trend was happening in their countries. In Finland, where male reproductive parameters are generally better than in the U.S., the researchers believed the Boston trend would not be replicated. Guess what? The trend was actually worse, and the researchers showed it was taking place over a much longer period of time. The results of the MMAS were replicated in Israel, too, and in other American studies.
Quantifying maleness
It’s hard to quantify exactly how many men have low testosterone, in large part because nobody agrees on exactly how little testosterone counts as low. Ask one doctor and he’ll give you one figure; another will tell you it’s half or double that amount.
Symptomology is generally the best way to go looking for low testosterone, and what we see, everywhere we turn, is men who look and behave like they have low testosterone.
In Japan today, there are millions of hikikomori, or extreme social recluses — young men who simply refuse to participate in society. They hide themselves away at home, often with their parents, and play video games, eat junk food, and just “rot,” to use a current term.
At least one expert believes there may be as many as 10 million hikikomori, in a nation of 120 million people — that’s one in 12 people. Unsurprisingly — to me at least — research has shown young Japanese men are at significantly greater risk of becoming hikikomori if they have low testosterone.
America has its hikikomori too, although they aren’t called that. Maybe as many as 6 million, by some estimates.
Some of them congregate in special subforums on the website Reddit, like r/lowT, where they discuss what it’s like to be a man with low testosterone: how they have no motivation, no libido, can’t sleep, can’t get an erection, are developing gynecomastia — man boobs — and are overweight and anxious all the time.
Many of these men also describe the miraculous effects of increasing their testosterone, more often than not through a doctor’s prescription of testosterone in gel or injectable form.
Spermageddon?
What’s even more worrying about this decline is that it’s part and parcel of a broader decline in reproductive health parameters among men.
This isn’t a surprise: If men’s testes aren’t functioning properly and producing enough testosterone, they’re unlikely to be producing enough of other important things either. Sperm counts and sperm quality — a measure of sperm’s ability to swim properly and do their job — are declining so rapidly that one expert, Professor Shanna Swan, is predicting a “spermageddon” scenario, in which humans are unable to reproduce by natural means.
Swan made this the subject of a 2021 book, “Count Down.” Simply by extrapolating the data for sperm-count decline, Swan has shown that by around 2050, the median man will have a sperm count of zero. One half of all men will produce no sperm at all, and the rest will produce so few that they might as well produce none, because they won’t be able to get a woman pregnant, try as they might.
What’s causing these changes? It’s lots of different things, a whole range of lifestyle factors — lack of exercise, smoking, bad diets, poor sleep, stress — but also widespread exposure to harmful chemicals known as “endocrine disruptors,” for their negative effects on the body’s hormonal (endocrine) system.
From low-T to trans
When I say endocrine disruptors are everywhere, I mean it: They’re in the food, the air, the water, the clothes we wear, our bedding and furniture, the deodorants and fragrances we put on our bodies, the little scented trees we put in our cars, anything that’s made from plastic.
A significant proportion of these harmful chemicals directly or indirectly mimic the effects of the hormone estrogen, interfering with the body’s crucial hormonal balance (more testosterone and less estrogen for men, the opposite for women). This is a nightmare for both sexes. As well as reducing testosterone and fertility in men, exposure to endocrine disruptors can lead to genital abnormalities, weight gain, and metabolic issues and even certain kinds of cancer.
New research has linked exposure to endocrine disruptors during gestation to transgenderism. French boys exposed to the chemical diethylstilbestrol, which used to be given to mothers at risk of miscarriage, had a massively increased risk — perhaps as much as a hundredfold — of undergoing gender transition later in life. On paper, it was always plausible that exposure to endocrine disruptors should be linked to gender dysphoria, but since transgenderism is such a toxic issue politically, there’s been little desire, until now, to pursue research into the link.
In a very real sense, then, not only have we created a society where masculinity is ridiculed, dragged through the mud, and denounced as retrograde, we’ve also created one where the biological constituents of masculinity, its very building blocks, are under direct attack at the same time. It’s a complicated problem, and it’s viciously circular. Biology and society exist in feedback loops, with negative effects reinforcing each other, deepening the spiraling decline.
While Gasda, like William James before him, may be right that men need a crisis to bring out the best in them, the very real danger today is that when one finally comes, men won’t have the energy or enthusiasm or desire to put down the controller, stand up, and answer its call. And if that really is the case, testosterone — the lack of it — will be to blame.
Abigail Spanberger Wins Virginia’s Gubernatorial Race After Bruising Campaign
Former Virginia congresswoman Abigail Spanberger (D.) secured victory over lieutenant governor Winsome Earle-Sears (R.) in the Old Dominion’s gubernatorial race. The result, though expected, came at a cost for Spanberger, who struggled to answer questions on transgender issues and faced criticism late in the race for standing by her party’s disgraced attorney general nominee, Jay Jones.
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Mikie Sherrill Clinches New Jersey Governor’s Mansion
Former Navy pilot and congresswoman Mikie Sherrill (D.) pulled up from a nosedive just in time, narrowly defeating Republican Jack Ciattarelli in a tight race for the New Jersey governor’s mansion.
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