Cuba loves to play the victim at the UN, when their Communist leaders are living in luxury and their people suffer in darkness. The United States stands with the Cuban people and their dreams of freedom and prosperity. Great to be with @kilmeade on @FoxandFriends

"In 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a 17-year-old girl gave birth to a son. The school administrators had told her she couldn't finish high school. She pushed back anyway. Her name was Jacklyn Gise. And the baby she was determined to raise would one day become one of the most influential people on Earth. Being a pregnant teenager in 1960s Albuquerque wasn't just difficult — it was scandalous. When Jacklyn tried to return to school after giving birth, the administration told her no. She didn't accept that answer. ""I pushed back and I kept on pushing back,"" she would later recall. ""Eventually the school relented."" But there were conditions. She couldn't talk to other students. She couldn't eat in the cafeteria. She had to arrive and leave within five minutes of the bells. She agreed to all of it. And she graduated. Her marriage to her son's biological father, Ted Jorgensen, didn't survive. They were both teenagers when they married. He struggled with alcohol. They divorced before Jeff was even two years old. Suddenly, Jacklyn was a single mother with no money. She found work as a secretary, earning $190 a month. It was barely enough to afford rent. She couldn't even pay for a telephone. Her father rigged up a walkie-talkie system so she could check in with her parents every morning at 7 a.m. ""That's how we were able to stay in an apartment,"" she later explained. ""Because I didn't have to pay for a phone."" Determined to continue her education, Jacklyn enrolled in night school. She chose her classes based on which professors would let her bring her infant son to class. She would show up with two duffel bags — one filled with textbooks, the other with cloth diapers, bottles, and toys to keep baby Jeff occupied. It was in one of those night classes that she met a young Cuban refugee named Miguel Bezos. He had arrived in the United States at age 15, fleeing Castro's regime with almost nothing. They fell in love. Mike, as everyone called him, adopted Jeff and gave him his name. Together, Jacklyn and Mike built a home where hard work, education, and big dreams were the foundation of everything. Jacklyn never stopped learning. Even after putting her college dreams on hold to raise her family and support Mike's career, she went back. In her late thirties, she enrolled again. She was relentless. At age 40, Jacklyn Bezos finally earned her college degree. ""When I graduated from the College of Saint Elizabeth at the age of 40,"" she said, ""I had never been more proud of myself."" Then, in 1995, her oldest son came to her and Mike with a proposal that sounded risky. Jeff wanted to quit his stable Wall Street job to start a company selling books on the internet. Most people had barely heard of the internet. Almost no one was shopping on it. He told his parents there was a 70% chance the company would fail. They invested anyway. Jacklyn and Mike put approximately $245,000 into their son's startup. It was an enormous leap of faith. If Jeff was right about the odds, they would lose everything. The company was called Amazon. By 2018, that investment had grown to approximately $30 billion. But the money was never the point for Jacklyn. Jeff Bezos has spoken publicly about his mother countless times. He called her story ""incredible."" He credits her not just for the financial investment, but for the foundation she built — the values she instilled, the example she set, the sacrifices she made when he was too young to understand them. Jacklyn Bezos never sought the spotlight. While her son became one of the most recognizable people on the planet, she worked quietly behind the scenes. She co-founded the Bezos Family Foundation, donating hundreds of millions to education and health causes. She championed opportunities for young people, especially those who faced obstacles like she once did. She passed away in August 2025 at the age of 78, after battling Lewy body dementia. Her son announced her death with a simple tribute: ""She pounced on the job of loving me with ferocity."" Jacklyn Bezos's life proves something important about parenting. The most valuable gift you can give your children isn't money. It's showing them what's possible by refusing to accept what others say is impossible. She was a teenage mother who society might have written off. Instead, she raised a son who changed the world — and she did it by changing hers first."

🇺🇸 Bipartisan Win for American Patients! On Monday, President Trump teamed up with Mark Cuban at the White House to supercharge TrumpRx — expanding it with over 600 affordable generic drugs in partnership with Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs, GoodRx, Amazon Pharmacy, and more. The goal? Cut out middlemen, slash prices dramatically, and deliver the lowest possible costs on prescriptions for all Americans — regardless of politics. Trump: “We’re increasing the number of drugs available… by nearly seven times.” Cuban: “Republicans want cheaper drugs. Independents want cheaper drugs. Democrats want cheaper drugs… together we’re going to do something special.” This is real progress on lowering healthcare costs. Can we all agree this is great for America? (Video: AI)

This painting is called Stay. And once you notice what is really happening in it, you’ll realize it’s a word almost all of us have wanted to say to someone, at least once, when it was already too late… A girl in a pink dress reaches out toward a man standing beside her, but he is no longer quite there: his body has turned to glass, so clear you can see the sky right through him. Look closely and you’ll find small yellow flowers and flecks of color still caught inside him, as if he were made of memories, while his face has almost dissolved, and behind them the sky turns into something closer to a dream. It was painted in 2022 by Reynier Llanes, an artist born in Pinar del Río, in Cuba, who moved to the United States in 2007, and anyone who has ever lost someone will recognize the gesture at its heart instantly: the hand stretched out a little too late, toward a person who is disappearing while you are still looking at them. Llanes often gives invisible feelings a visible shape, and here grief and longing take the form of someone slowly fading away. He never tells us who the man is: he might be a father, a friend, a grandparent, a love that ended, and because we only see the girl from behind, we end up standing exactly where she stands, reaching out toward our own person... All he gives us is that single word, the one we so often never manage to say in time: stay. He first showed it in a solo exhibition in Ohio, named after the secret the fox shares in The Little Prince, words that could almost be written beneath this painting: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” I started my newsletter because the world is full of beautiful artworks like this one, and so few people ever stop to give them the attention they deserve. Every week I try to. If that is something you'd like to be part of, you can join through the link in my bio! Thanks for reading.

The West Was Once a Beacon of Freedom For generations, people around the world looked to Western nations as symbols of opportunity, individual liberty, free speech, and equal rights under the law. Millions dreamed of moving there because those societies offered something rare in human history: the freedom to choose your own path. But somewhere along the way, many leaders stopped asking a simple question: "What cultural values made these societies successful in the first place?" Instead, they embraced the idea that all cultures, beliefs, and social norms were equally compatible with Western freedoms. History suggests otherwise. A free society is not guaranteed. It depends on shared values that support liberty, personal responsibility, equality before the law, and respect for individual rights. Women in the West today enjoy freedoms that many women throughout history could only dream of. The ability to work, vote, own property, choose a spouse, start a business, speak freely, and live independently. Those freedoms should never be taken for granted. Around the world, there are still countries where women face severe restrictions on their rights, movement, dress, education, or personal choices. That reality should serve as a reminder that freedom is not the default condition of humanity - it must be protected and preserved. The lesson is simple: A society that stops defending its values eventually risks losing them. Freedom survives only when people are willing to recognize its value and stand up for it before it's gone. History shows that rights are far easier to lose than they are to regain. Look at Iran, Lebanon, Cuba, parts of Nigeria, Syria, Afghanistan, etc. You scroll past multiple videos online on the subjugation of women in Muslim majority countries and think nothing of it. You see Muslim people get elected to mayor, you think nothing of it. You see Muslim people get elected to the halls of Congress, you think nothing of it. You hear Sharia law is now being implemented in some parts of Texas, you think nothing of it. You start seeing Democrat politicians popping up with ideals around socialism and islamism, you think nothing of it. There will come a day when you will wake up a little too late.

Tony Montana casually eating a lemon from a bowl might seem like a humorous detail, but it reveals something much deeper about his character in Scarface. Surrounded by expensive suits, luxurious restaurants, and wealthy people, Tony is determined to prove he belongs among the elite. Yet the bowl in front of him isn’t meant for eating. It’s a finger bowl, traditionally used to rinse your fingers during a formal meal. Tony doesn’t realize this, and no one bothers to correct him. That’s what makes the moment so revealing. He can afford designer clothes, expensive dinners, and a lavish lifestyle, but wealth can’t instantly teach him the social customs of a world he never grew up in. Coming from poverty in Cuba, Tony never had the opportunity to learn the unwritten rules of high society. His ambition has earned him a place at the table, but he’s still unfamiliar with the culture surrounding it. That single lemon becomes a subtle symbol of his journey. Tony has the money to enter a world he once dreamed of, but he hasn’t fully learned how to fit into it. In a movie defined by power, greed, and violence, one tiny detail reveals more about his character than an entire conversation could.

Ayn Rand finished We the Living in 1936, the novel is the cleanest fictional autopsy of what collectivism does to actual human beings. She lived it. Born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg in 1905, she watched Red Guards seize her father's pharmacy on Nevsky Prospect, leaving the family to scrape through the famine years. The book is her least ideological and most personal: no John Galt speeches, just Kira Argounova trying to study engineering while the Soviet state strangles every path she takes. The economics sits underneath every scene. When the Bolsheviks abolished private trade, they did not abolish scarcity. Rather, they abolished the price signals that let anyone allocate scarce goods. Kira stands in bread lines because central planners cannot calculate what a market computes automatically through profit and loss. The result is rationed potatoes, confiscated apartments, and jobs handed out by Party loyalty rather than competence. Rand dramatized the calculation problem that Ludwig von Mises had already proven unsolvable, and she did it with a food shortage instead of an equation. The regime demands not just Kira's labor, but her soul. She must inform, conform, and recite the collective catechism to survive, and the state treats her refusal as sabotage. When the government owns all property, it owns you, because you cannot eat without its permission. Economic control and political control are the same control. American publishers rejected the manuscript for years (too anti-Soviet for the fashionable 1930s intelligentsia, who still admired Stalin), and it sold modestly until Rand's later fame pulled it back into print. Its diagnosis holds everywhere a planner promises abundance through compulsion: Venezuela's empty shelves after 2014, Cuba's ration books, Zimbabwe, which was turned from a paradise into a giant shithole. Every regime that mistook confiscation for production.