Former President Donald Trump promised at a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday to cut energy and electricity prices in half in 12 months if elected president in November. 

Trump made the comments during a rally in the town of Indiana where he focused on the economy, immigration, and energy, which polls show are his strongest issues. The event took place at the Ed Fry Arena at the Kovalchick Convention and Athletic Complex with a crowd of about 5,000 as hundreds waited outside. 

“It’s great to be back in this beautiful commonwealth with thousands of proud, hard-working American patriots,” Trump said. “We’re here today because early voting begins in Pennsylvania over the next two weeks, and we need each and every one of you. Don’t take anything for granted. We have to win Pennsylvania.”

During the speech, which came after several other campaign stops in Pennsylvania, Trump ripped into the Biden-Harris energy policies, including a liquid natural gas export ban. The ban is on hold after a coalition of Republican attorneys general sued to block it. 

“I will terminate the natural gas export ban, which makes it impossible for you to sell your product to a lot of countries that want it desperately,” Trump said, promising to get Pennsylvania workers “pumping, fracking, drilling and producing like never before.”

He also promised to lower energy prices, which have increased dramatically since President Joe Biden took office. 

“If you vote for me, I will cut your energy and electricity prices in half within 12 months,” Trump said. “We have more liquid gold under our feet and we’re buying oil from Venezuela. We don’t need it at all. It’s crazy!”

Trump also criticized Vice President Kamala Harris for her apparent flip-flop on fracking, which she previously promised to ban when running for president back in 2019. 

“If anybody here believes that she will let your energy industry continue – like fracking – you should immediately go to a psychiatrist and have your head examined,” Trump said. 

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Trump also focused much of his speech on illegal immigration and the influx of migrants into small towns across the country, prompting some in the crowd to chant, “Send them back.” 

Trump has a crowd chanting “send them back” about the Haitians in Springfield pic.twitter.com/dOqYwGWrKh

— captive dreamer (@captivedreamer7) September 24, 2024

“It takes centuries to build the unique character of each state,” Trump said. “But reckless migration policy can change it very quickly and it can destroy everything in its way just like we’ve seen in London, and Paris, and Minneapolis.”

“If Kamala Harris wins this election, she will flood Pennsylvania cities and towns with illegal migrants from all over the world—and Pennsylvania will never be the same,” he added. “When I’m president, all migrant flights to Pennsylvania will stop immediately.”

Republican Senate candidate David McCormick also appeared at the rally, saying his campaign against Democratic Senator Bob Casey was a “battle between common sense” and “radical liberal policies.”

Trump’s rally came after earlier stops on Monday at a grocery store in Kittanning and a South Huntingdon farm. Pennsylvania is one of the key battleground states expected to determine the outcome of the 2024 election.

RELATED: Trump Buys Groceries For Pennsylvania Mom, Promises To Bring Prices Down

A Princeton University astrophysicist believes that with the help of a new telescope in Chile, she and her team can confirm exactly what happened after the Big Bang that created the known universe 13.8 billion years ago.

Scientists have theorized that by observing the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the remnant of the light left after the explosion of the Big Bang, they could determine how the universe has been inflating ever since.

But as astrophysicist Jo Dunkley explained, scientists can “extrapolate backwards and infer what could have happened to produce the patterns we see in the CMB … But there are other scenarios you could imagine that could produce those patterns.”

Dunkley told New Scientist’s Jonathan O’Callaghan, “Before we had any of the particles we are familiar with now – protons, neutrons, light and so on – we think the universe was permeated by a different kind of energy. We call it the inflaton field, but we really don’t know exactly what it was. The energy stored in that field drove this exponentially fast growth of space at the beginning of time. It did so until the inflaton field decayed and we started forming the particles we know and the universe evolved into the form we have now.”

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Dunkley said she and her colleagues have been using the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile, but the new telescopes at the Simons Observatory will make the job more accurate. She explained that they want to observe gravitational waves —ripples in the fabric of space-time that “squeeze and stretch space in a particular way; they squeeze in one direction and stretch in another” to see how the light of the CMB is polarized.

“We’re looking for this very, very faint polarized signal in the CMB that could only come from gravitational waves,” she stated.

But because it’s a tiny signal, and the scientists have to peer through the Milky Way to see it and light from other sources in the galaxy complicates matters as well as water vapor in the atmosphere, the capacity to use both the Simons Observatory in Chile and the BICEP-Keck telescopes at the South Pole could prove crucial to getting a better view because conditions at the two telescopes are different.

“We’re looking for variations in what we can think of as the temperature of the CMB that are billionths of a fraction of a degree,” Dunkley said. “The polarized signal is a very subtle departure from something uniform. The Simons Observatory will help because it has tens of thousands of detectors, which is 10 times more than previous generations of telescopes such as the ACT.”

“There’s so much richness of information in the CMB,” Dunkley enthused. “I remember a few years ago people thinking we had measured the CMB, and that was it, done. Then we realized how much there is to know, not only in its polarization, but as a backlight through the whole universe. It just keeps producing more exciting stuff.”