Commentary Culture Investigations

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AIBy Jack GleasonIt doesn’t have to be this way, but seeing the truth and voting intelligently can set us free.

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ChatGPT ai-generated illustrationBy Brian C. JoondephDifferent threats, familiar warnings — and the same prescription: more government.

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NASA Goddard Space Flight CenterBy J.B. ShurkGovernments that cause more problems than they fix do not deserve to survive.

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AI for American ThinkerBy Arthur SchaperGavin Newsom’s polished media appearances reveal a carefully managed strategy to ignore both his actual record and schisms among Democrats.

A Denver photojournalist with credits and features in several local publications—and ties to socialist congressional candidate Melat Kiros—was arrested for allegedly kicking a counterprotester to the ground during a chaotic anti-ICE student walkout.
Students who ditched school to oppose ICE on September 4 quickly turned violent, mobbing a handful of counterprotesters and prompting at least three hospitalizations. Two were arrested for graffiti, while an adult, Armando Geneyro, was arrested for simple assault, according to the Denver Police Department.
Geneyro took a counterprotester’s sign and kicked him “in the right leg making the victim fall on the ground,” a police report obtained by the Washington Free Beacon states. He was handcuffed at the scene after the victim provided police with video footage of the attack, “but he was then released after being issued a citation,” a spokesperson said. Police were “unable to provide the video” because it’s part of “an open court case,” the official added.
Other footage, however, places Geneyro immediately next to several violent incidents. In one video posted by the Peak News, he is seen encroaching on a counterprotester being swarmed by students and pelted with water bottles and is later part of a group surrounding an independent journalist who gets knocked to the ground and has his camera stolen.

Geneyro appears close to Kiros, who is widely expected to succeed Rep. Diana DeGette after defeating the 15-term incumbent in June’s Democratic primary for Colorado’s deep-blue First Congressional District. Kiros also attended the anti-ICE protest, where she called the truant students “brave” and accused “this fascist administration and this rogue agency” of “kidnapping our neighbors and throwing them into concentration camps.”
At Kiros’s election night party, Geneyro, a military-veteran-turned-conscientious-observer who until recently worked for Denver Public Schools’ student equity office, was granted close access to her and Hasan Piker, an influential figure on the political far-left who has said that “America deserved 9/11.”
Kiros has also co-published several Instagram posts with Geneyro, including one in which he endorses the socialist candidate and praises her for her anti-Israel positions. Kiros replied that she “couldn’t be more honored to have this endorsement.” She also follows at least three Instagram accounts associated with him and posed for a photo at a wine event he runs.
Colorado publications—including the Colorado Sun, Denver Post, and the health equity-focused Colorado Collective—have routinely used Geneyro’s photography in their reporting. He has also been profiled by several local news outlets such as Westword and Denverite for capturing Latino and hip-hop cultures in Denver. The city government, the airport, and History Colorado, a museum run by the state of Colorado, have also featured his work, while a city councilman commissioned him to take photos of Denver to use as Zoom backgrounds during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Neither Kiros nor Geneyro responded to requests for comment, nor did the news outlets that publish his photos.
Geneyro has said he takes photos of protests because it’s his way to “voice how I feel about certain issues and certain topics and how I want to lend my support when it comes to advocating for those issues.” No news outlets credited him with photos from the September 4 rally or Kiros’s party, suggesting he was attending in a personal capacity.
Several other adults with histories of left-wing disruption encouraged the student at the walkout to attack the counterprotesters, video captured by a producer for the Wayne’s Word Podcast shows. Laura Gonzalez—who earlier this year faced harassment charges for using a bullhorn to repeatedly call the leader of the Jewish group that was firebombed in an antisemitic attack a “genocidal cunt” and for berating a Boulder city councilman and allegedly pushing his wife over his refusal to condemn Israel—told one group, “Don’t complain when the kids come at you,” then shouted, “Another Nazi’s trying to come into your camp, kids!”
After several dozen agitators pushed the counterprotesters and independent journalists out of the park, Gonzalez stood in front of the teens holding an Israeli flag with blood strewn on it as they continued throwing water bottles. She shouted, “You get what you deserve, Nazis.” She was flanked by Jeanette Vizguerra-Ramirez, an illegal immigrant and activist who gained international attention when she spent months hiding in a Denver church to avoid deportation during the first Trump administration. ICE detained her in 2025, but she was released after nine months.
The pair chanted “Fuck ICE” with the students before a third activist, Emma Landis, joined them. She walked into the street and started beckoning the students, who followed suit and again charged the counterprotesters and began brawling with one. Landis, meanwhile, said she wants “to see happiness and health and peace and calmness with everybody’s lives” after an off-duty employee of a detention center shot her in the foot during a demonstration earlier this year. The employee said protesters threatened his children and called him and his colleagues “Nazis” and “race traitors.”
Gonzalez, Vizguerra-Ramirez, and Landis did not respond to requests for comment.
Rep. Jeff Crank (R., Colo.) has asked the Justice Department to investigate the violence at this month’s anti-ICE rally.
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A group housed at the New York University School of Law and backed by billionaire climate activist Michael Bloomberg quietly closed its doors in late August amid congressional scrutiny into its funding and operations. The so-called State Energy and Environmental Impact Center’s signature initiative involved placing paid, climate-focused “fellows” in Democrat-controlled state attorney general offices nationwide as those offices sued the oil industry and other energy providers.
The center’s sudden closure comes as a surprise: It continued to update its public database tracking state attorney general actions relevant to its climate priorities until Aug. 31, the date of its apparent closure. It also released an episode of its in-house podcast, Recharged with the State Impact Center, less than three weeks prior to that date. And in its 2025 “year in review” report released last December, the center indicated that it would continue operating throughout 2026.
But prior to its closure, the center was coming under increased pressure for effectively paying the salaries of state law enforcement agencies that were pursuing lawsuits in line with the center’s priority of going after energy providers.
The center, which did not announce the closure in a press release or social media post, now states on its website that it is “historical material as it existed on August 31, 2026.” While much of the website remains intact, its contact email is now listed as a private non-NYU address, and a page identifying members of the center’s advisory board has been removed. Its now-former executive and deputy directors no longer list the center as their current place of employment on LinkedIn, according to a Washington Free Beacon review.
The disappearance of the center comes as it faced multiple congressional and state-level investigations over alleged ethics issues related to its funding and its practice of paying the salaries of officials it placed in state attorney general offices. Media reports and lawmakers often referred colloquially to those officials as “Bloomberg fellows” because Bloomberg helped found the center in 2017 with two seed grants worth $2.8 million each. Tax filings show that Bloomberg provided the grants through his eponymous charity, the Bloomberg Family Foundation—one of the country’s most influential charities—that focuses on climate activism.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee opened an investigation into the center last year, stating that its activities “raise questions as to whether participating state attorneys general are acting on independent judgement to best serve the interests of their states’ citizens.”
“The Bloomberg-NYU program effectively offers states partisan money from a billionaire to carry out official functions of their offices,” the panel wrote at the time. Bloomberg, it continued, “disguises his donations as ‘philanthropy'” and uses the impact center as a mechanism “to skirt legislative bodies and effect partisan policy.”
In a statement to the Free Beacon, the Oversight Committee’s chairman Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.) said he remained concerned that the center “undermined public integrity and pushed radical Democrat policies that increase energy costs for Americans, despite billing itself as ‘nonpartisan.’”
“The Committee is glad to see that this center will no longer be in operation,” he added.
Months after Comer initiated his investigation, a group of Wisconsin State Senate leaders opened their own investigation into their state’s attorney general for employing a “special attorney general” whose $90,000 a year salary was paid for by the center.
The Wisconsin senate also created a committee to coordinate the investigation. “Outside influence from highly self-interested sources is unacceptable,” that committee’s chair, Wisconsin State Senate president Mary Felzkowski (R.), said at the time.
In addition to that probe, two Wisconsin groups that represent dairy farmers sued the state’s attorney general over his office’s arrangement with the center, arguing it gives the center “unique, insider access and influence over DOJ’s work on agricultural and other environmental issues.” The February 2025 complaint suggested that the center’s fellow had coordinated enforcement actions Wisconsin had taken against dairy farmers. An oral ruling in that case is scheduled for later this month, according to court records.
Overall, since its founding, the center has placed “climate fellows” in attorney general offices in Washington, D.C., and at least 10 states nationwide, including Minnesota, Maryland, and New York. It has exclusively hired fellows to work for Democrats.
The officials it has placed in the state offices have worked on actions targeting the oil and gas industry, favoring wind and solar development, and opposing the Trump administration’s energy agenda.
The Free Beacon reported last year, for example, that Lauren Cullum, the center fellow embedded in the Washington, D.C., attorney general’s office, has been behind a number of the office’s high-profile climate-related actions since she was hired in 2022. Cullum, whose official title is special assistant attorney general, was listed as a prosecutor on multiple environmental justice lawsuits targeting chemical companies and has represented Washington, D.C., in federal comment letters arguing in favor of green energy initiatives.
And the Free Beacon later reported that the center had expanded by placing fellows in state-level public service commissions, oft-overlooked agencies that regulate utility companies and permit energy infrastructure like pipelines and power plants. That development suggests the center and its funders sought to play a more active role interfering with traditional fossil fuel infrastructure development at the local level.
The center’s advisory council, meanwhile, included the CEO of a major wind energy developer and the vice president of the green energy industry group the American Clean Power Association, an archived copy of its website shows. Green energy interests stood to gain from the state-level work conducted by center fellows.
The State Energy and Environmental Impact Center and Bloomberg Philanthropies did not respond to requests for comment.
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America “will most likely be majority non-Christian” within the next 50 years, a professor at Johns Hopkins wrote recently in the New York Times.
“Big if true,” as the saying goes. A Christian decline to less than a majority would have significant and potentially profound implications on culture and politics on topics ranging from class warfare to Middle East foreign policy. Attitudes toward Jewish presence in the land of Israel, for example, are frequently founded in the Bible, and the biblical commandments against stealing and against envy have implications for property rights and the conversation about inequality.
Europe and Great Britain have already seen such steep declines, with political ripple effects. Fewer than half of people in England and Wales identified themselves as Christian in the 2021 census, and the New York Times also reported recently on the planned repurposing of tens of thousands of churches across Western Europe “expected to become vacant in the coming years as their societies’ connection to Christianity wanes.” In New York City, a Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has credited his fellow Muslims—many, like him, immigrants—with contributing to his 2025 electoral victory.
America overall isn’t there—yet. A 2023 Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey pegged the U.S. at 64 percent Christian, and Pew Research Center polling between 2020 and 2025 found the share of U.S. adults identifying with Christianity holding “fairly stable” between 64 percent and 62 percent.
But some surveys in the U.S. are already detecting Christian minority status, at least in certain places and in certain younger age demographics.
A Pew Research Center Religious Landscape Survey conducted in 2023 and 2024 found that among 18 to 29 year olds, 45 percent identify as Christians, while 44 percent are religiously unaffiliated and 9 percent identify with other religions.
A poll of 2,096 18-to-29-year-olds in the United States, the Spring 2025 Harvard Kennedy School IOP Youth Survey, using data collected from Ipsos Public Affairs, found Catholic, Fundamentalist/Evangelical Christian, Protestant, and LDS/Mormon respondents summing to 40 percent of respondents, with no religious preference, not sure, refused, and decline to answer adding up to 49 percent.

A survey of 3,204 young people aged 14 to 22 fielded in April and May 2026 by the Harris Poll for Unicef USA found 33 percent had ever been a member of a religious group or organization, fewer than the 43 percent that had participated in athletics, the actual opiate of the masses.

Less scientific polls conducted at specific institutions show similar indications.
A senior survey by the Daily Princetonian of Princeton University’s Class of 2026 had Catholic, Protestant, Other Christian, and Orthodox Christian categories adding up to 32.1 percent, less than the 41.6 percent total who reported “agnostic” or “atheist.”

At Brown University, where President Christina Paxson has spoken openly about recruiting students at religious day schools and from “tight-knit Christian communities,” a survey of the freshman class of 2030 by the Brown Daily Herald counted “not religious,” agnosticism, and atheism at a total of 54.1 percent, Christianity at 24.6 percent.

At Yale, the Yale Daily News’s survey of the class of 2030 had agnostic, atheist, and no religion at 43 percent, with Catholic, Christian, Protestant, Orthodox, and non-denominational Christian totaling 30.4 percent. The Yale chaplain’s office has data for the Yale classes of 2024-2027 that put atheist, agnostic, and unaffiliated at 29.8 percent and various Christian denominations at 45.96 percent. It notes, “The current voluntary survey has a 32% response rate.”
The theory is that if today’s youth remain as irreligious as they age and if they eventually transmit their own beliefs or lack of them to their children, U.S. Christianity will dwindle. Factors suspected of contributing to the decline include the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, an influx to the U.S. of non-Christian immigrants from Asia and the Middle East, church-state litigation that has driven religion out of public schools and spaces based on an expansive interpretation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause that is now being viewed as mistaken, pandemic-era restrictions against in-person church attendance, the rise of politics as a functional substitute for religion, and a general fraying of the social fabric of the sort documented in books such as Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone.
But so far, it’s only a theory. The Johns Hopkins professor who floated the forecast in the New York Times, Exceptional Hatred author James Loeffler, hyperlinked to a September 2022 Pew Research Center report with the subheadline, “If recent trends in religious switching continue, Christians could make up less than half of the U.S. population within a few decades.” Yet subsequent Pew research found what the center describes as a five year period of “relative stability” in the religious composition of the U.S. public. A 2025 Pew report was headlined, “Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off.”
I checked with Pew and asked if they agree that “within the next half-century” the U.S. “will most likely be majority non-Christian.” A communications specialist there, DeVonte Smith, got back to me: “We checked with our research team, and we can’t quantify the likelihood of any future outcome for this.” While the 2022 Pew analysis was based on the trends then, the most recent research shows Christianity stable, not declining.
There are even some other signs hinting at a potential religious revival. In April of 2026, the Gallup Poll reported a surge in church attendance and religious identity among young men. “The percentage of young men reporting monthly or more frequent attendance at religious services rose seven points between 2022-2023 and 2024-2025, reaching 40% — its highest level since 2012-2013,” Gallup found. “The percentage of young men saying religion is very important to them is now similar to the percentage for men aged 30-49 and only slightly lower than for senior men.” Some are describing a religious revival as a “Charlie Kirk effect” after the assassinated Turning Point USA leader.
The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics collects the American Time Use Survey, which asks how people spend their time. Its number for the percent of the population aged 15 years and up participating in religious services on an average weekend or holiday day hit a recent high in 2025. It doesn’t measure what religion, so it’s possible some of the uptick could be newly arrived devout Muslim immigrants engaging in daily prayers.

The history of Christianity—and of religious demography, more generally—dictates caution for anyone making long-term forecasts. Who could have predicted the rise of Christianity itself before the birth of Jesus, the rise of Protestantism before Martin Luther, the Great Awakening in America before the arrival of George Whitefield?
One of my teachers on these matters has been the political scientist James Q. Wilson. In a 2005 lecture he observed, “Though there has been a growth in the proportion of nonreligious or secular voters in the United States, that growth is nothing like what has occurred in most of Europe.”
As context, Wilson described what he called the “secularization theory,” which is that “modernization … leads to a decline in the social significance of religion.” As he summarized the theory, “If factories teach technical skills, if public schools provide nondenominational education, if health and welfare agencies care for the sick and the deprived, if people live mixed together in large cities that display the benefits of a consumer society, and if science seeks only naturalistic explanations for everything from the nature of life to the origins of the cosmos, what can religion possibly offer?”
Wilson’s view then was that the U.S. differs from Europe because here, the lack of a government-established church forces religious institutions, free-market-style, to compete and provide value. He concluded, “the United States, perhaps the most modern society in the world, is filled with people who believe in God, go to church or synagogue, and pray to the almighty. The secularization theory may be in some trouble.” In other words, thank God for the First Amendment.
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