1) “The Biggest Loser of Trump’s 2026 SOTU: The Unborn” (Suzanne Bowdey, Washington Stand)
From the article — As far as theatrics go, Donald Trump’s sixth State of the Union had everything a showman could want — the golden boys of Team USA, the heart-wrenching moments of grieving parents and miraculous recoveries, the drama of Democratic protests, and the president’s answering antagonism. But for all that’s been written about the record-setting night, the biggest takeaway may not have been what was said, but what wasn’t. In a speech of 10,599 words, not one was about life.
For conservatives, the lack of even a single mention of the unborn in an almost a two-hour running commentary of the last year was disappointing for a host of reasons. This is a man who, in the recitation of his greatest second-term achievements, omitted what a lot of Americans would consider some of his finest. After four years of Joe Biden’s social extremism, taxpayers are no longer living under a government that forces them to finance the culture of death — in most programs at home and overseas. His administration has done everything from protecting conscience rights, defunding Planned Parenthood, rolling back policies that force insurance companies to cover abortions, stopping the grotesque practice of fetal tissue at NIH, and even turning off the spigots for free abortions for illegal immigrants.
But Tuesday’s vacuum on life, one of Trump’s core first-term issues, says a lot about the president’s recent reluctance to engage in key aspects of this debate — when, unfortunately, it’s raging the fiercest.
2) “Israel’s Forgotten Christians” (Robert Nicholson, Providence)
From the article — Much of the recent coverage of Christians in Israel suffers from a basic analytical flaw: it focuses almost exclusively on the places where the fewest Christians actually live.
Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza dominate the conversation. These communities matter, but they are not representative. More than 70 percent of Israel’s 188,000 Christians live elsewhere—primarily in the north, especially in Galilee—and their absence from the discussion has distorted the picture beyond recognition.
The Christians of northern Israel are not marginal figures. They play an outsized role in education, medicine, and business. They are overwhelmingly laypeople, yet media coverage fixates almost entirely on religious officials. One might be forgiven for concluding that Christianity in Israel is a clerical caste rather than a living community of families, professionals, and citizens.
If these northern Christians are mentioned at all—and usually they are not—they are treated as an afterthought, stripped of agency and relevance. The result is an account of Christian life in Israel that is incomplete and misleading.
3) “AI, Addiction, and the Soul of a Nation: A Biblical Warning for Our Time” (Bob Maginnis, Washington Stand)…
From the article — OpenAI recently released a 37-page report, Disrupting Malicious Uses of AI, documenting how criminals and state-linked actors are already exploiting generative AI to conduct fraud, impersonation, and influence operations. Romance scams are now scripted by machines. Fake legal identities are fabricated with bureaucratic precision. Foreign adversaries use AI to refine propaganda and calibrate narratives for maximum psychological impact.
None of this is theoretical. The architecture of deception is being rebuilt, brick by digital brick.
But the deeper danger lies beneath those headlines.
These AI tools are being deployed inside social media ecosystems that dozens of state attorneys general allege were deliberately engineered to be addictive. Internal documents disclosed in litigation against major platforms reveal that executives understood how algorithmic feeds stimulate dopamine responses — particularly in adolescents — yet continued optimizing for engagement over truth. We built platforms designed to capture attention at any cost. Now we are arming them with persuasion machines.
That is not a technology story. That is a civilization-level moral crisis.
Related articles: “Souls in the Algorithm: What AI Is Doing to Us – and What the Church Must Do about It” (Bob Maginnis, Washington Stand)…“Even the Best AI Scenario Is the End of Everything We’ve Ever Been: AI is not merely another technological leap — it may be the moment machines begin to eclipse the very human talents that built our world.” (Edward Ring, American Greatness)
4) “The Disturbing Doctor Touring the Country to Promote Her Career of Third-Trimester Abortions: Sella had no doubt she was killing babies, and she loved it anyway.” (Ellie Gardey Holmes, American Spectator)
From the article — Abortion doctor Shelley Sella is so proud of her 20-year career killing babies that she is traveling around the country in a sort of victory tour. Calling herself, in celebratory fashion, “the first woman to openly practice third-trimester abortion care in the U.S.,” Sella has spent the past year promoting her new book and evangelizing people into supporting late-term abortions. Her book, titled Beyond Limits: Stories of Third-Trimester Abortion Care, tells the stories of six babies she killed. And, yes, she herself calls them “babies.”
Sella has headlined events in Washington, Illinois, Missouri, Massachusetts, Arizona, and Wyoming, and has appeared in such publications as New York Magazine, the Nation, Time, and Mother Jones…
In her book, Sella explains that her desire to perform abortions emerged from a radical feminism. Evidently, she was so passionate about her love for abortion that only the prospect of killing babies who could survive outside the womb excited her. This so thrilled her that she spent 20 years commuting by plane from California to work in late-term abortion clinics in New Mexico and Kansas.
Sella told Mother Jones that she is outraged by state constitutional amendments that guarantee a right to abortion up to the point of viability. “Now’s the time,” she said, “to push back on viability and gestational limits, because Roe has been overturned.” Roe, Sella explained, was “problematic” because it allowed for restrictions post-viability. “So to think, ‘Let’s go backwards and restore Roe,’ to me, is wrong thinking. We have an opportunity to think big.”
5) “Teen Marijuana Use Doubles Chances of Future Psychotic Disorders, Study Finds” (Dan Hart, Washington Stand)
From the article — Dr. Ryan Sultan, a psychiatrist and cannabis researcher at Columbia University, described the results of the study as “very, very, very worrying.”
The new JAMA study is merely the latest datapoint in a body of evidence of marijuana’s health dangers stretching back at least a decade. After California legalized the recreational use of the drug in 2016, cases of cannabis-induced psychosis that required emergency room visits increased by 54% within three years. In 2019, the American Psychiatric Association found that there was a “strong association” between use of the drug and the “onset of psychiatric disorders.” In April 2022, a team of researchers found that if marijuana use were eradicated globally, it would result in a 10% reduction of all schizophrenia cases.
Other studies have laid out clear evidence showing the multi-faceted array of serious health risks associated with marijuana use. In July of last year, a major study that sifted through a cadre of 24 other studies found that regular cannabis use is associated with a twofold risk of serious cardiac problems, including death due to heart attacks. That study, along with another one from November 2023, found that regular marijuana use raises the risk of heart failure by 34% when compared to non-users. Dr. John Ryan, a cardiologist at the University of Utah Hospital, remarked that he has witnessed numerous “heart attacks in otherwise healthy people who use marijuana regularly.”
Related article: “Adolescent cannabis use linked to doubling risk of psychotic and bipolar disorders” (Edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Robert Egan, Medical Press)
Other Excellent Articles from the Week:
* “Why People Don’t Like Talking About Politics” (John Halpin, Liberal Patriot)
* “The Dating Emergency: America’s dating crisis isn’t just personal — it’s cultural, fueled by tech, feminism, and lost manners, and threatens both romance and the nation’s future.” (Katya Sedgwick, American Greatness)
* “The Anti-Zionism Exception: A court decision just carved Jews out of civil rights law” (Matthew Segal, Tablet)
* “UK Police Officers Worked With Muslim Assault Gang” (Catherine Salgado, PJ Media)
* “The Middle East: A Stack of Fake Narratives, An Attempted Fake ‘Palestinian State’ and the Real Threat to the West” (Guy Millière, Gatestone)