The fight over Flock cameras might be one of the few topics where many Democrats and Republicans agree, even if they come at it from different angles.

Flock cameras are the license plate readers on poles that log every car driving past, and there are more than 120,000 of them across the country. Republican Senator Josh Hawley warns those cameras build something close to a gun-owner registry by tracking people headed to gun shows and the like. Critics on the left worry about the next immigration crackdown. And in at least 36 states, people have sawed the cameras down, shot them, or rammed them with trucks.

I can see both sides of this argument.

I’ve had thieves steal from my home and my car, and cameras like these might have caught them. They could catch plenty of worse criminals, too.

But I also traveled to the Soviet Union in the 1980s, where the KGB alone was estimated at half a million people. Watching an entire country used to take an army of agents. Now, it just takes cameras on poles and a basic online search.

In one case, an officer searched nearly 20,000 cameras across more than 1,500 cities and gave his reason as “LMAO.” There have been several cases of cops tracking exes or other women they are (or want to be) romantically involved with.

Generally, you have no expectation of privacy in public. A cop can stand on the corner and watch you all day without a warrant. But the Supreme Court ruled that aggregating that information, say, by putting a GPS tracker on someone’s car, is a search.

So is a Flock camera the cop on the corner, or the tracker on your bumper? Federal judges have come down on both sides.

I don’t have a neat answer for this one. I lay out the best case against the cameras and the best case for them, including some good uses that have nothing to do with crime. But is a camera on a pole really where privacy makes its last stand, considering how much of it most of us gave up a long time ago?

You can watch the video here and see what I learned.

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And another one!

Last week we published “What’s the deal with Mormons?” It’s not a takedown video. Mormonism is one of the most mocked religions in America, yet by almost all of the quality-of-life metrics, Mormons are doing better than the rest of us. I wanted to know whether the unusual parts of their religion have anything to do with that.

You can check it out here.

– Ken

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Friends —

On the wall of my studio hangs an evacuation order from 1942. I put it there as a reminder of how harshly governments can treat their own citizens during a crisis.

My parents, who lived through the war, saw those Japanese internment camps much differently than people do today.

Most of the country did as well. In 1942, 93% of Americans said moving Japanese immigrants off the West Coast was appropriate, and 59% said the same about their American-born children, who were full citizens. Today, just 13% agree.

That gap is what intrigued me. We were taught to see internment as a racist stain on the country’s history, and certainly race was part of it. But I wanted to understand how so many people got to “yes” … and racism isn’t the only answer.

This one is also close to home. The biggest of the temporary holding centers was the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia, the town where I grew up. At its peak it held nearly 19,000 people, half of them living in converted horse stalls.

To judge 1942 fairly, you have to understand the context. Guam, Hong Kong and Singapore fell within weeks of Pearl Harbor. Americans had heard what Japan’s army did to the cities it took. And on a tiny Hawaiian island, something happened on the first day of the war that rattled military intelligence for good reason.

And here’s something I didn’t expect. Hawaii was closer to Japan, had a far larger Japanese population, and was the place that actually got bombed. Yet almost nobody there was locked up. The reason tells you a lot about how leaders were thinking.

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Then there’s the part many people never heard about. Some of the officials with the best intelligence in the country doubted the threat before any people were moved. And the Army produced a report so damaging to the government’s case for internment that officials burned every copy. But they missed one; it didn’t surface for nearly 40 years, and I took a look at it in this video.

I learned a lot from this one, and I tried to present it fairly. Check it out here.

– Ken

P.S. We also took a look at Rosa Parks last week. Most of us grew up with the story of a tired seamstress too worn out to change her seat. Lately, plenty of people online call the whole thing a staged publicity stunt. Both versions miss that she’d been doing civil rights work for over a decade before she stepped on that bus. And that famous photo of her? It was staged, but not the way critics claim. You can see it here.

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Friends —

Most of us have heard some version of the smallpox blanket story: U.S. soldiers deliberately handing out infected blankets to Native Americans and killing thousands on purpose. It's been repeated so often that it feels like settled history.

But when I dug into it, I found as much fiction as truth. Actually, I found two smallpox stories.

One is real. The other was completely invented by a college professor.

In 1763, during a Native American offensive, it’s indisputable that the British military attempted to use smallpox as a biological weapon.

British officers atld Fort Pitt, Pennsylvania, gave two Indian emissaries blankets and a handkerchief taken from the fort’s smallpox hospital. One of them even wrote in his journal that he hoped it would “have the desired effect.”

In more than 300 years of bloodshed, it’s the only documented case. Even then, historians can’t say whether it actually worked.

But for a decade, there was a much worse story told throughout America.

It detailed how the U.S. Army deliberately infected the Mandan people in the 1830s, the same people who assisted Lewis and Clark.

It was completely invented by a University of Colorado professor named Ward Churchill. And I was surprised at how easily disprovable it was.

There was no Army at Fort Clark. The epidemic came up the Missouri River on a steamboat. Churchill sourced his claim to a scholar, who had said nothing of the sort. And each Churchill he retold the story, it got bigger. Eventually the death toll topped 125,000.

Churchill died this August.

What strikes me is that none of the fabrication was necessary. The real history is brutal, but not as deliberate. As much as 90% of the Native population of the Americas was gone within a century or two of Columbus. Disease often traveled along trade routes faster than Europeans themselves, so epidemics hollowed out villages before anyone there had seen a settler. War, removal, and outright extermination campaigns came on top of that.

I also dug into how Churchill’s version survived for more than a decade with almost nobody checking it, and what finally changed that. You can watch it here.

– Ken

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PS: If you missed it, I also did a video on Joseph McCarthy, whose name has become shorthand for any witch hunt. But old Soviet spy records later came to light, putting a twist on our history. Here’s what I learned.

This newsletter is sponsored by Surfshark VPN.

Friends —

Today, one in 31 kids is now diagnosed with autism. For boys, it’s now one out of 20.

Twenty-five years ago it was closer to one in 150 kids. Before that, it was even rarer.

Chicago’s public schools spend nearly $2 billion a year on special ed, almost double what they spent in 2019, and officials point straight to autism.

Numbers like that demand an explanation, and depending on who you ask, you’ll get one of three. Something in the environment is harming kids’ brains. Or it’s the same kids as always, and we just changed the definition. Or it’s become a racket, a label that scores your kid extra time on the SAT.

I didn’t really understand this debate until I dug into it.

Part of what pulled me in is how political it’s gotten. The Health Secretary is openly at war with the CDC over this. To a lot of parents with an autistic child, that makes him a hero, not a crank, and I get it.

I’ve watched medical scientists let politics override their judgment, and I’m convinced plenty of top experts flat-out lied during COVID. But that leaves us all in a bind. It’s true that sometimes the experts are wrong. But most of the time they aren’t. I’m still going to weigh a researcher who’s spent a career on a disease over some guy on a podcast.

This newsletter is sponsored by Surfshark VPN.

The threats you don’t see coming are the ones that get you.

On a recent international trip, I found myself at the airport, and I realized how vulnerable all our information is when we travel. Logging in to airport Wi-Fi to do some work, scanning a QR code at a restaurant, checking accounts from a hotel lobby … any of those moments can expose passwords, financial accounts, and personal data to anyone else on that network. Most people don’t think twice about it. But 1 in 4 public Wi-Fi networks lacks sufficient encryption, and crowded spaces are prime hunting grounds for fake hotspots designed to steal your information.

Surfshark’s Virtual Private Network encrypts your connection on public Wi-Fi, masks your identity and data, and covers unlimited devices under one account. Its CleanWeb feature blocks ads, trackers, malware, and phishing attempts, and the built-in Ad Blocker stops ads from following you around the web. And Alternative ID lets you generate a fake online identity for sites you don’t fully trust, keeping your real information out of the wrong hands.

There are a lot of bad actors trying to steal your data and your money. Surfshark hunts down the threats before they reach you.

Go to https://surfshark.com/elephants or use code ELEPHANTS at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN!

The thing I hadn’t appreciated going in was the autism infrastructure. Every institution that touches an autism diagnosis, from schools to insurers to researchers to the people who literally write the diagnostic manual, has a reason to hold the door open, and not one has a reason to close it. The man who chaired the 1994 manual revision now says he helped set off a “false epidemic.”

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What stuck with me is who gets hurt in all this. It’s not the kids at the mild end. It’s the mother trying to get an aide for her nonverbal son, making her case to a system worn out by a decade of milder claims.

I just posted the full video here. I’d love to know what you think.

– Ken

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This newsletter is sponsored by Incogni.

Friends —

For a few years, ISIS was the biggest story on Earth. Then it just … wasn’t.

We were told it might last for generations, a brand-new terrorist state the size of Portugal, ruling 8 million people. Instead, it seemed to disappear overnight, at least from the public consciousness.

I remember some of it too clearly. Videos like the one of a captured Jordanian pilot locked in a cage and burned, with the whole thing scored like a movie. Live-streamed beheadings. Mass drownings. That kind of thing doesn’t leave you.

But the part I most wanted to get right is the ending, because it runs straight through two presidents who agreed on almost nothing. Ask an Obama supporter and a Trump supporter who beat ISIS, and you’ll get two confident, opposite answers. I tried to walk through what each administration actually did, as straight as I could, and let you decide.

Here’s one piece of it: when the administrations flipped, the rules of engagement in the Trump presidency loosened. Field commanders could approve strikes on their own, in minutes, instead of sending each one up the chain to Washington and waiting days. And the goal itself shifted, from pushing ISIS out of a city and letting the survivors run, to surrounding the city, sealing the exits, and destroying the fighters where they stood. Mattis called it moving "from attrition to annihilation."

And then there’s the part nobody back home ever added up: what winning cost. Tens of billions of dollars, a city we mostly leveled ourselves, allies left exposed, and camps full of fighters’ kids still sitting in the desert. A messy, expensive story that most Americans barely remember happening.

The full video’s up now, and you can watch it here.

This newsletter is sponsored by Incogni.

Your data is out there. Here’s how to get it back.

I used to get spam calls constantly from different numbers, always knowing just enough about me to sound legit. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because my information is sitting in a dozen broker databases I never signed up for.

Here’s how it works. Data brokers scrape your personal information like your name, phone number, home address, even your relatives, and resell it on people-search sites and shady directories to anyone willing to pay. And with data breaches climbing every year, the odds of your info getting swept up keep going up.

Incogni tracks down where your data is exposed and sends removal requests on your behalf across hundreds of known data brokers. If your data shows up somewhere off their automated list, their Custom Removals feature lets you send them the link, and they’ll take it from there. It’s not a one-and-done fix either. Incogni keeps monitoring and re-submitting removal requests so you stay off those lists.

If the idea of your information being bought and sold without your consent bothers you, this one’s worth doing.

Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code ELEPHANTS on their website and get 60% off an annual plan.

One more, on something completely different. Is nicotine actually bad for you?

Here’s the number that got me: survey a thousand American doctors and four out of five will tell you nicotine causes cancer. It doesn’t — the tar does. That distinction has been in the science since before World War II, and we’ve spent my whole life blaming the wrong culprit.

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I’m not here to sell anybody on it. It’s addictive, and I’d think hard before starting. But the gap between what we assume and what’s actually true was wide enough that I had to dig in.

You can watch that video here.

– Ken

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Friends —

Some topics you circle for years before you’re willing to touch them. This was one.

The numbers on Black homicide in America are staggering. The rate runs about seven times higher than for white Americans, and it’s been roughly that wide for fifty years. But you can’t say that out loud without half the room deciding you’re either excusing something or attacking someone. So most people don’t. This topic is the kind of thing that gets you misread no matter how carefully you handle it.

So I decided to actually dig in. Not a hit piece — you can find plenty of those — and not a defense either. I just wanted to see how much of it holds up.

What surprised me was how much of the popular explanation falls apart when I looked at it. Poverty correlates weakly and inconsistently. As for gun ownership, it doesn’t explain things at all.

The murder rate overall rises and falls in huge waves. It can double in a decade and halve the next, usually tracking how tough or lenient we’ve decided to be on crime during that time. But those waves explain the swings. They don’t explain the racial gap.

Something slower is underneath it — and it’s not what most people on the left OR the right assume.

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I also learned that most of the violence comes from a small number of men on a small number of blocks. Which means most people in those neighborhoods aren’t committing it. They’re living inside it.

Watch the video here.

– Ken

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Friends —

It took me a while to figure out why data centers were striking such a nerve in America.

We’re not talking about oil refineries or pig farms here — we’re talking about warehouses full of computers. How did buildings full of computers become such a contentious political issue?

The complaints also seemed random. Some said it was about them using too much electricity. Others were worried about them using water or making noise.

And usually, the more someone learns about a scary-sounding thing, the calmer they get. Not here. With data centers, the more folks learn, the angrier they get. Gallup found Americans are now more opposed to a data center going up in their town than a nuclear power plant.

And these fights have turned genuinely dark — one public official in Indianapolis who supported a local data center woke up to gunshots and bullet holes across the front of his house.

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I didn’t want to make a “Big Tech is evil” takedown, because the honest version is messier. Some of the anger I found is dead-on. Some of it — the water panic especially — I’m not convinced is warranted.

What stuck with me is that the data center has become a stand-in for something bigger. It’s a physical thing people can actually stand in front of and fight, in an age when most of what unsettles us, like Big Tech and AI, doesn’t have one real location.

So here’s the one a lot of you have been asking for. I’d love to know what you think.

– Ken

Friends —

Today’s post is sponsored by Surfshark VPN.

In America, women earn 58% of college degrees. Men … just 42% . That’s the lowest share ever recorded.

When the numbers for women were lower, the country treated it as a problem to solve. We instituted Title IX and held investigations, and there was a national push to get girls into universities and STEM programs. It worked spectacularly well. Women’s enrollment was even with the guys in 1982, then blew right past it.

But now that the gap is bigger in the other direction, there are no laws, no commissions, nothing. I think a lot of it is timing. Because we heard for decades that we need to help girls, it’s now something we just continue to accept as fact. When someone suggests boys might need help now, a lot of people hear that as taking something away from girls.

And college is just the end of a pipeline that starts at four years old. Boys get expelled from preschool at four and a half times the rate of girls, and they make up two-thirds of the lowest GPAs in the country — while scoring about even with girls on standardized tests. Grades measure whether you sat still and turned the homework in, and that’s the exact thing boys are slowest to develop.

Some of these young men aren’t failing at life, though. College costs several times what it did a generation ago, plenty of degrees no longer earn back what they cost, and men in the skilled trades are out-earning a lot of degree-holders, without college debt. An 18-year-old who does that math and picks the paycheck over the diploma made a smart call.

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But he’s the kid who had college as an option and didn’t pick it. He’s not the kid who got expelled at four. Those are two very different boys with two very different problems. Only one of them is going to be fine without any help from us.

I made a video about everything I learned, and you can check it out here.

Thanks to Surfshark VPN for sponsoring this newsletter!

The threats you don’t see coming are the ones that get you.

On a recent international trip, I found myself at the airport, and I realized how vulnerable all our information is when we travel. Logging on to airport WiFi to do some work, scanning a QR code at a restaurant, checking accounts from a hotel lobby … any of those moments can expose passwords, financial accounts, and personal data to anyone else on that network. Most people don’t think twice about it. But 1 in 4 public WiFi networks lacks sufficient encryption, and crowded spaces are prime hunting grounds for fake hotspots designed to steal your information.

Surfshark’s Virtual Private Network encrypts your connection on public WiFi, masks your identity and data, and covers unlimited devices under one account. Its CleanWeb feature blocks ads, trackers, malware, and phishing attempts, and the built-in Ad Blocker stops ads from following you around the web. And Alternative ID lets you generate a fake online identity for sites you don’t fully trust, keeping your real information out of the wrong hands.

There are a lot of bad actors trying to steal your data and your money. Surfshark hunts down the threats before they reach you.

Go to https://surfshark.com/elephants or use code ELEPHANTS at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN!

And also … What if Hitler had won World War II?

I’ve watched a few “what if Hitler won” videos, and they’re all a bit fantastical — more dystopian novel than history. I wanted to do a clearheaded version, because the real story doesn’t need any embellishment. Hitler wrote his plans down, in detail, with maps.

The part I can’t shake is how close it came. At least three times, one different decision would have handed him all of Europe. In December 1941, German scouts were fifteen or twenty miles from the Kremlin, close enough to see Moscow through field glasses. We like to think the good guys were always going to win, but that’s not necessarily true.

Here’s my takeaway, though. The Reich probably would have cracked eventually. The money was fake, the empire ran on conquest, and the leadership was a pit of vipers. But “eventually” is doing a lot of work there. The difference between a regime that rots on its own in fifty years and one you stop in 1945 can be measured in tens of millions of dead and a lot of misery.

Freedom wasn’t inevitable. People chose it, in specific moments, and they could have chosen otherwise. Check out my video on that possible alternate history and let me know what you think.

– Ken

Friends —

Ten years ago, El Salvador was the murder capital of the entire world, outside of active war zones. In 2015, more than 6,600 people were killed in a country of just 6 1/2 million people … a homicide rate of more than 100 per 100,000.

This year, the country has gone 150 days without a single murder.

Today your odds of being killed in El Salvador are lower than anywhere else in North or South America. Statistically, it’s safer than Canada. I’ve been covering news a long time, and I can’t think of a national turnaround this fast or this complete.

In fact, I found it so fascinating that I took my staff down there to see it firsthand. We found streets full of people out at night — eating, drinking, having a good time, with no signs of trouble. We often didn’t even bother locking the door where we were staying. It felt safer than plenty of American cities I could name.

It seems like a happy ending for a country that’s seen so much horror. President Bukele fixed a broken, extremely dangerous country, and everyone I talked to there seems thrilled. Except that’s not the whole story.

The interesting question about El Salvador isn’t whether Nayib Bukele made it safe. But what did it cost and who paid?

Getting to this point meant arresting more than 80,000 people, over 1% of the entire country. It’s the highest incarceration rate on Earth. It meant suspending basic rights, holding mass trials, and locking people up on little more than a tattoo or a neighbor’s tip. Bukele himself later said 8,000 of them were released because they were innocent.

Inside the country, his approval is near 94%. People lived through hell, and they’re grateful and don’t want to go back. Outside, human rights groups are using phrases like “crimes against humanity.” I should point out that these are people who never lived under the threat of violence in El Salvador. But I can see and understand both points of view.

And Bukele fixed the country by sidestepping its institutions — purging the courts, rewriting term limits, and sidelining rules meant to constrain him. But he won’t be president forever. What happens to a nation that’s learned to trust one strong man instead of its own rules?

I’ve seen this up close before. I worked in Venezuela back when it was still a democracy, and I talked to people who were happy to trade a little freedom for a crackdown on crime. A few decades later, the men they’d cheered on had run one of the richest countries in the hemisphere straight into the ground.

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I’m not saying that’s El Salvador’s future. It might genuinely go the other way; I hope it does. But that question needled me the entire time I was there.

I made a video about what I learned and what we experienced in the country. You can check it out here. Thanks for watching!

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– Ken

Friends —

I know people in both camps on global warming. Some are convinced we’re cooking the planet and don’t have much time left. Others roll their eyes at the whole thing. And both sides think the science is on their side.

But they can’t both be right … can they?

I’ve wanted to tackle this one for a while, and honestly, I put it off because it’s a minefield. The underlying science has some uncertainty, but there are real concerns about our planet, too. And both sides have spent twenty years weaponizing whatever data supports their team. Untangling the actual science from the politics takes some work.

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So that’s what I tried to do. I tried to find out what’s actually settled versus what scientists are still genuinely arguing about. I also wanted to dig into the cost side honestly. Just because a threat is real doesn’t mean every proposed fix is worth its price tag.

This isn’t a hoax video or a doom video. What you’ll find is what I could actually verify, laid out as plainly as I could, plus my own take on where I land after all that.

You can watch it here.

– Ken

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Friends —

A few months ago, I made a video that touched on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. I said what I think most people believe: that Jefferson was the father of her children. I thought it was settled history.

When some readers pushed back, I dug deeper.

What I found is a genuinely fascinating story about how a “maybe” became a “definitely.” It wasn’t because the science demanded it, but because people wanted a clean answer … and maybe a racial reckoning.

The DNA proved “a Jefferson” was the father of Hemings’ youngest son. And the media turned that into “Thomas” without a whole lot of proof.

Was Jefferson the father? I genuinely don’t know, but there’s a name that shows up in early oral histories and almost disappears from later accounts. He was Jefferson’s younger brother who lived nearby, visited regularly, and his own descendants said he was the Jefferson connection. There may even be a DNA test coming that could finally settle it.

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I also want to be honest: I had a small taste of what it costs to even raise these questions. When I started hedging on my original take, I was hit with accusations that I was a conspiracy theorist or a white supremacist. For a historian or academic, the downside is a lot steeper than a rough comment section. Sometimes the safest career move is to never ask the question at all.

I think that’s worth examining, and it’s exactly why I made this video.

You can watch it here.

– Ken

P.S. If you haven’t seen them yet, you can also check out my videos on why innocent people shouldn’t always talk to cops, and on why climate activists pull crazy stunts that actually makes people less likely to support their cause. I’ve been busy!

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Friends —

I worked at Fox News during the 2016 election, and I can tell you firsthand: most people there were as shocked as anyone else when Trump won. Every polling model called for a comfortable Hillary Clinton victory, and to the experts, Election Day was almost a formality.

That memory has stuck with me for a decade. Because it wasn’t just one bad night. It happened again in 2020. The polls actually got worse underneath, even though Biden won. Then came 2024, and the industry missed again, this time in every single swing state.

So I wanted to dig into what actually happened inside the polling industry. Not too much of the “rigged election” stuff (but a little), and not the “shy Trump voter” explanation either, which I’ll show you doesn’t hold up. The real story involves the move to cell phones, collapsing response rates, and an industry that knew its foundation was cracking years before 2016 and didn’t solve it.

On top of those problems, their attempts to fix things allowed their biases to creep in.

When everyone you work with and socialize with shares the same assumptions about what’s politically possible, those assumptions start feeling like facts. I think that explains a lot about why an industry full of smart people with unlimited data kept getting this wrong, year after year.

This video digs into the mechanics most people never think about — and I think once you see it, you’ll never look at a poll the same way again.

– Ken

PS: I am soon heading to El Salvador. It went from one of the worlds most crime-ridden countries to one vying with Canada as the safest in either North or South America. I find that intriguing.

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Friends —

I spent almost two decades at Fox News, running the West Coast bureau and eventually FoxNews.com. I’ve sat in editorial meetings, watched the ratings come in, and been in the room deciding how to cover some of the biggest news events of the time. I’ve seen this industry from the inside.

So when people ask me why the media is so broken, I usually have a pretty quick response. But when I actually sat down to make a video about it — to trace how we went from the founding era to today — I realized my standard answer was incomplete.

What I found was that almost nothing about how the press evolved was driven by ideology or ethics. It was driven by economics. The penny press, the wire services, the rise of cable news, the internet collapse of local papers — all of it was driven by economics.

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I’ll be upfront about something: This one’s personal. The Fox News years, the cable wars, the shift from news to opinion programming — I watched it happen from the inside, and in some cases I was part of it. I’ve tried to be fair about all of that, and you can decide whether I pulled it off.

And this goes really far back. The founders — Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison — weren’t victims of a partisan press. They built it.

We’re not living through something unprecedented. But we are living through something genuinely new in terms of speed and scale. I find that either reassuring or terrifying, depending on the day.

I just posted the full video. I’d love to know what you think.

– Ken

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Friends —

I wanted to learn why there was still slavery today, and I began researching.

I first learned that roughly 50 million people are currently living in some form of modern slavery. And that number is up about 10 million from 2016.

My first reaction was: how is this not the only thing anyone is talking about?

My second reaction — after digging for a while — was more complicated.

I’ve noticed a pattern across a lot of hot-button topics. Whether it’s homelessness, hunger, or the environment, advocacy groups often face a real temptation: exaggerate the problem to attract attention and funding. But this often backfires. The inflated number gets out, skeptics tear it apart, and suddenly people who should care about the real problem just … tune out entirely.

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That’s what’s happening here. When you trace the 50 million figure back to its source, you find an advocacy organization — not a neutral research body — with methodology that one UN advisor called “complex, opaque and incomplete.” Their single largest category of “slaves” worldwide is within forced marriages. And in their count, those can include women who were coerced into a marriage with a peer, fell in love, built a family, and have no desire to leave. There might be a problem with how that started, but it’s not slavery.

To be clear — there are still millions of people living in what, by any definition, looks strongly like slavery. Forced work camps for Uyghurs in China. Or North Korea, where they throw entire families into prison for the “crime” of just one person. Or Mauritania, one can still be born into slavery.

Here’s the part that actually surprised me, though. When you cut through the inflated numbers and look at what’s real, the story underneath isn’t one of despair. It’s one of the most remarkable quiet victories in human history — one that almost nobody is talking about because the people who should be shouting about it are too busy chasing funding.

You can watch it here.

– Ken

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Friends —

When I was growing up, “Mother Teresa” basically meant goodness itself. She was the tiny woman in simple clothes, holding strangers pulled from the gutters of Calcutta. She had a Nobel Peace Prize. She was canonized as a saint. When she died, India gave her a state funeral on the same carriage that carried Gandhi.

These days, you’ll find her on social media with devil horns.

I’ll be honest — I was skeptical going in. Tearing down beloved figures is an easy way to get clicks, and a lot of the people dunking on her online seemed to be getting their takes entirely from Christopher Hitchens. He’s a journalist who hated organized religion and never hid it.

But some of the criticisms are real, and I wanted to find out which ones.

What I found was genuinely complicated. The medical care in her homes was poor by any clinical standard — inadequate pain relief, reused needles, and untrained volunteers making medical decisions. Some of that was a failure. Some of it, though, was an Indian legal system that made morphine almost impossible to obtain for anyone, not just nuns. Critics rarely mention that part.

The money questions are harder to answer, because the Missionaries of Charity never published a consolidated audit in 75 years. Then again … as far as we know, they were never asked to. What we do know is that donations were enormous, and the conditions in her homes stayed largely unchanged. I’m not sure if that reflects her choices or the Vatican’s hand in where the money went.

What I kept coming back to, though, is this: even with those and other criticisms, she was still pulling dying people off the streets of Calcutta and making sure they didn’t die alone. Nobody else was doing that then. Nobody else is doing it now.

I tried hard to be fair, and I think you’ll find this video worth your time.

– Ken

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Friends —

Here’s something a lot of people find hard to believe about my time at Fox News. Many of the people we hired leaned left.

If you believe the stereotypes, that should blow your mind. But it actually makes a lot of sense. FNC was headquartered in Manhattan, and most people who live there tend to be liberals. Those were the people who applied for the jobs.

But why?

When I started researching this week’s video — about why cities vote so differently from rural areas — I found out that the divide we all treat as permanent and obvious is actually new. As in, it happened in my lifetime … within a single generation. And I genuinely hadn’t understood everything surrounding it until I dug into the data.

In the 1940s and 50s, urban and rural voters moved almost in lockstep. Republicans used to run half of the 12 largest American cities as recently as the year 2000. And rural America? In the late 1800s, the most radical left-wing political energy in the country was coming out of the countryside, with farmers demanding the government take on the banks and railroads.

That framing feels bizarre today.

I’ll be honest — this is a little less edgy than my usual videos. But if you want to actually understand what’s happening in American politics — not just who’s winning or losing, but why the map looks the way it does — this is the foundation.

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I got into the Great Migration, the economic gut-punch of the 1990s, and the self-reinforcing mechanisms that keep the two sides from ever really talking to each other. Some of it I expected. A lot of it surprised me.

Hope you find it worth your time. You can click the button above or right here to view it. Have a great day!

— Ken

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Friends —

I’ve been sitting on this one for a while.

Not because the data is hard to find — there’s a mountain of research on why Black Americans die younger than white Americans. It’s a troubling gap.

The problem is almost the opposite. There’s so much research, so much certainty, and so much professional pressure to reach the “right” conclusions that the actual picture is hard to figure out.

That bothered me enough that I finally decided to dig in.

What I found is genuinely surprising. I learned that foreign-born Black men live, on average, 11 years longer than U.S.-born Black men. Even longer than U.S.-born White Americans.

Same country, same racism, sometimes even the same neighborhood. And that advantage disappears in a single generation. That data point should make a lot of us rethink our assumptions.

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Here’s what else I kept running into: the explanations you hear most — food deserts, green space, healthcare access — turn out to be much weaker than their reputation suggests.

And there’s no single answer to the question; factors like diet, obesity, and homicide affect the numbers dramatically. Sadly, many researchers have learned not to ask about some of them, often to protect their jobs and reputation.

It’s how the incentives work in academic medicine, and it’s worth being honest about. Because until we ask and answer the right questions … nothing will change.

You may enjoy the whole video on YouTube for a deep dive into this American issue.

– Ken

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Friends –

Why do often times smart, successful people join Scientology?

It has a bizarre “origin” story and often behaves like a criminal organization.

Even journalists are routinely frightened from reporting on it. I worked at Fox News for almost 20 years, with a massive legal budget and a news division that wasn’t easily scared off. We investigated big targets routinely.

But there was a lot of nervousness about taking a closer look at Scientology. There are always a hundred good stories to chase, and everyone quietly understood that going there would almost certainly bring problems.

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So I decided to actually dig in on Scientology. Not to do a hit piece (you can find plenty of those already), and not to defend them either. I know some smart, successful people who are Scientologists, and some of their practices make a lot of sense. But we also know the stories of space aliens and people getting hooked up to machines for therapy. What’s really going on?

What I found was complicated. Some of what Scientology delivers is genuinely real. But the way it treats its critics is pretty scary.

I just posted the full video on YouTube.

Have a great weekend!

– Ken

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This is something different than you’ve seen from me.

I usually write about a larger issue in life, trying to offer whatever insight I can. This, though, is about the lessons I learned from a singular event that shaped my life.

It’s more than a story about me, but a look at crime, justice, and politics in America through the lens of a single, traumatic event. And strangely, the biggest lessons didn’t come right after the murder. They came years later, in ways I never expected.

It’s also a story I’ve really never told in this type of detail. It’s painful to do so.

You can either watch it on this video here, or you can read the complete story below. Hopefully, you find some value from it all.

– Ken

February 11, 1976.

On a Wednesday evening, two police officers showed up at my family’s front door. My dad thought it was a subpoena for a business issue. Then he started screaming in a way I had never heard before or since. That’s how we learned my sister had been killed.

I had just turned eleven. My family lived in Arcadia, California, a middle-class suburb of Los Angeles. My parents had grown up poor during the Great Depression, but through hard work and sacrifice, created a comfortable life for us. My sister Cathy was eighteen, recently out of high school and working at an animal hospital. She was deeply involved in her church, where she met her boyfriend, Bob Morton.

After my dad’s initial reaction, it was hard to understand what he was saying. He kept shouting “NO,” over and over. The only words I could eventually make out were: “They say Cathy’s dead!” The police told us Cathy and Bob had been found dead in Bob’s van in the hills above our town. They didn’t share more details, and I can’t imagine how difficult that job must have been for those officers.

My parents didn’t want to tell our extended family over the phone, so throughout the night aunts, uncles, and cousins came to the house one by one, heard the news, and many collapsed in grief. I stayed in my room, more stunned than anything else. I didn’t even cry until a few days later.

The first lesson that stayed with me is how people react to death in wildly different ways. When I see someone acting strangely in the face of loss, they deserve a lot of leeway.

The second lesson is that sometimes lightning just strikes. Cathy and Bob were just two young people taking a hike in the mountains. There was no reason to think twice about it. And yet, in an instant, everything changed. That kind of randomness can be hard to accept, but once you do, life becomes a little easier to face.

February 11 was a beautiful day in the Angeles National Forest. That afternoon, a man walking his dog saw Bob’s Volkswagen van parked off the road, and something caught his eye. When he looked in the back, he saw two people—and a lot of blood. Bob was bound and gagged; Cathy wasn’t. Both were fully clothed, and both had been shot with a .22 caliber rifle—Bob five times in the back of the head, Cathy four times in the face.

Police found money in both Bob’s wallet and Cathy’s purse. They speculated it might have been an attempted sexual assault, but really had no clear theory. Cathy hadn’t been raped, and her autopsy showed no adrenaline spike, which you would expect. That led investigators to wonder if she knew her killer and didn’t expect to be harmed.

Finding a Killer

The months that followed were confusing and painful. Police questioned friends, classmates, and church members. There wasn’t much to go on, and a “love triangle” of some sort seemed the most likely explanation. But for five months, there were no solid leads. It was surreal to know their killer was out among us, and no idea why he did what he did. Fifty years later, we still don’t know why—but we do know who.

Investigators called early one Sunday morning to say they had caught him. And they caught him because someone answered the phone—his wife turned him in. The man, Richard Johnson, had told her he murdered two people in the Arcadia foothills, and had also told her about another woman he killed in Missouri ten months earlier. She finally went to the police after he tried to shoot her as well.

That led to another lesson I’ve carried through my journalism career: murderers often brag about their crimes. I see it all the time. They just can’t seem to keep it to themselves. Johnson likely would never have been caught otherwise. He had zero connection to Cathy and Bob, which made him especially difficult to track.

I have mixed feelings about his wife. She knew about the Missouri murder from the day it happened, but said he threatened her into silence. Without her call, he might never have been caught. But if she had gone to the police at any point during those ten months, my sister and Bob would be alive.

A trial and a sentence

Johnson also told another friend, who, along with his wife, testified at trial. His handprint matched one found on the van, and he still had the rifle at home, which matched the shell casings at the scene. Our family attended every day of the trial, and there was little doubt about his guilt. He was convicted, and the jury recommended the death penalty for each murder. The judge agreed.

This was California, so we never really expected him to be executed. But him being locked up for the rest of his life was enough—or at least, we thought it was.

Soon after, he was also convicted in Missouri for the murder of Gwynne Arrant, whom he had strangled, stabbed, and raped. He had actually been arrested in that case earlier but was released because police couldn’t prove it. There’s reason to believe he may have killed other women as well, including cases from that same timeframe that are still officially unsolved.

The takeaway here is uncomfortable. No one wants to live in a country where innocent people are convicted, so it’s critical that the justice system treats the accused fairly. But there’s a corollary: there can be deadly costs when dangerous people walk free. More than 20,000 people were murdered in America last year, and when you look at the numbers, many of their killers will never be caught—and some who are will kill again.

Then, another shock

Life moved on—until we were hit with something that, to this day, was harder to process than the murder itself.

I was sixteen, just five years later, when one of the original detectives told us Johnson was up for parole. If two out of three members of the parole board agreed, he could walk free. That raised an obvious question: how do you go from two death sentences to a parole hearing?

As it turned out, he didn’t even need a new court ruling. After his sentencing, the California Supreme Court struck down the death penalty, so his sentence defaulted to two counts of life in prison. At the time, that meant eligibility for parole in five and a half years—even for two counts of first-degree murder.

My parents were furious. We all were. We had come to accept that something random and evil could happen. But the idea that the government might release him felt different. That wasn’t randomness—that was a decision.

Changing a system

No one in my family was political. My parents were small business owners with little formal education and didn’t really understand how that system worked. My dad went to the mayor for help and was essentially told there was nothing to be done. But as it turned out, that wasn’t entirely true.

As we started reaching out to elected officials in California in the early 1980s, we noticed something. The reactions were very different depending on who we spoke to. Democratic officials offered sympathy but avoided involvement, giving general thoughts about criminal justice and rehabilitation. By the end of those conversations, it was clear they weren’t going to help.

Republican officials, from our point of view, reacted like normal people. They were horrified that someone like Johnson could walk free and were equally alarmed at the state’s laws. Our local legislator—whose priorities didn’t align with ours on most issues—helped us gather signatures, use his office, and connect with people who could make a difference. When one group avoids you and another steps in on something this important, it shapes how you see politics.

There’s a broader lesson in that. Many of us pick a political tribe and then tend to accept that tribe’s views across a wide range of issues. But personal experience can override that quickly. If my circumstances had been different—if, say, a family member had been wrongly accused—I might have ended up with a very different outlook.

My mom transformed from a beautician into a political activist. Her beauty shop became something like a campaign headquarters as we launched a petition that gathered tens of thousands of signatures. This was before the internet, which made that even more significant.

We demanded the right to speak at his parole hearing. We testified and worked to change laws so victims’ families would have a voice in the process. Before that, families often weren’t even told about hearings or the status of the person who killed their loved one.

Parole hearings are difficult to attend. They take place inside maximum-security prisons, usually in small rooms, with the parole board sitting just feet from the killer and his lawyer. They ask him questions about the crime, his behavior in prison, and his plans if released. Then we speak—essentially asking government officials to keep him behind bars.

So far, we’ve been successful. He has been denied parole eight times. But every few years, the process starts again. Letters, petitions, media outreach. My parents are gone now, so it’s me and my sister Linda continuing the effort.

The biggest takeaway from this part of the story is that change is possible. In a democracy, focused pressure can work. Governments respond when people organize and persist.

Stepping back, though, it’s also striking how policy shifts over time. Politics tends to move like a pendulum. I’ve watched criminal justice in California swing back and forth over the decades. The policies of the 1970s and 1980s sparked a backlash as crime rose and stories like ours became more common. Judges lost their positions, politicians faced voters who cared deeply about crime, and the system responded.

Sentences got tougher. Three-strikes laws were introduced, sending repeat offenders to prison for life, and crime declined.

But over time, the pendulum swung back.

Concerns about long sentences and prison overcrowding grew, and policies shifted again. Today, California’s prison population is at its lowest point in decades, even as the state has grown significantly. In areas throughout the country, criminals have been emboldened and new victims have suffered.

I don’t know how this ends. I do know that Richard Johnson is still in prison, and that my family helped keep him there. Our political system isn’t perfect, but people can change it for the better. I saw that with my own eyes.

Sometimes that’s the most you can ask for.

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Friends —

We think of charity as doing good, and most of us assume that giving helps people out of a bad situation. But what if our good intentions are actually hurting the people we’re trying to help?

I started thinking about this after reading a book called “Toxic Charity,” which changed how I think about giving entirely. In today’s video, I dig into what happens when donated clothes flood Africa (spoiler: it gutted their textile industries, which was very bad). And I looked at Haiti, which has over 10,000 charitable organizations and is somehow still a failed state.

There’s also a psychology to dependency that nobody wants to talk about. And there’s a difference between “betterment” — doing things FOR people — and “development” — doing things WITH people. One feels good in the moment, but the other actually works in the long term.

I’m not saying to stop giving. But maybe we should all take a closer look at how we give. It’s not about whether we feel good afterward; it’s about whether the people who received help eventually need it less.

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And another one!

On Friday, we published, “Why is Latin America so poor?”

You can drive from San Diego into Mexico and, within minutes, pass through neighborhoods with dirt roads and open sewers. Household income drops by 80%. How is that even possible when they’re right next to each other?

While we’re at it, how did Venezuela go broke when it’s sitting on the largest oil reserves in the world??

You can check it out here if you’d like to learn more.

– Ken

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