Although there has been a long slew of adaptations, parodies, and spin-offs of “Frankenstein,” many fans of Mary Shelley’s famous novel were looking forward to the newest iteration by Guillermo del Toro, which just came out.

In the age of AI, gene therapy, and the modern aversion to death, the story of a scientist who gives life to a creature of his own design naturally resonates with most people. Moreover, a director who is known for his ability to craft fantastical narratives, gothic settings, and unworldly monsters seemed like the perfect fit for such a story.

What could have been a story of redemption and radical love is turned into one of violent horror and unavoidable tragedy.

But with such a tale from such a director at such a time, there was also a good chance the whole film could become an overwrought piece of woke propaganda. Would del Toro stay faithful to the source material, or would he indulge his worst tendencies and recreate “The Shape of Water” with Shelley’s basic premise?

Sadly, he opted for the latter.

Woke makeover

While showing his usual visual flare, del Toro and his writers nonetheless succumbed to transforming the romantic tale of man’s excesses and consequent fall from grace into a woke narrative of a marginalized victim suffering from an oppressive father figure. The monster is not a hideous abomination that goes on a killing spree to spite his creator, but is rather a misunderstood, sensitive outcast who deserves sympathy.

It is his creator, Victor Frankenstein, who is the real monster: Not only does he abuse his own creature, but he murders multiple people and lies about it.

In fairness to del Toro, he probably planned out the film a few years ago when such a script happily aligned with the woke spirit of the time. And he did win an Oscar for “The Shape of Water,” so he can’t be blamed too much for returning to the same formula. How was he supposed to know that this would all become tedious and unfashionable in 2025?

And yet for all that, it’s wrong to assume that the original novel lacked these themes entirely.

Original intent

While most fans and critics examine the science-fiction elements of the novel and the Promethean allegory of man’s creation running amok, an honest reading would show that the novel is first and foremost a Romanticist manifesto. The main character is neither Victor nor his creation but the Swiss Alps that provide the backdrop of every scene, monologue, and conversation. The main conflict is not Victor attempting to stop his monster from terrorizing his friends and family, but finding meaning and unadulterated joy in the world rendered cold and dull by Enlightenment philosophy.

Most importantly, the book’s main argument is the problem of loneliness and how it animates humanity’s darkest impulses. The movie actually deals with this idea somewhat, though the novel is fully based on it.

How else should the reader make sense of all three of the main characters (besides the Alps), who all suffer from profound loneliness? The first character to appear in the book is the ambitious explorer and scientist Robert Walton, who attempts to go to the North Pole. Besides detailing his progress to his sister in a series of letters, he also mentions his lack of a friend. This leads him to immediately take interest in the Swiss scientist Victor Frankenstein, who just happens to be in the Arctic, searching for his monster.

Frankenstein, in turn, also reveals his own introverted nature and consequent desolation.

RELATED: How Disney butchered ‘Snow White’ — and it’s worse than just wokeness

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Even though he has good friends, a loving father, encouraging teachers, and a bride waiting for him, Frankenstein seems to reject their company. Either he feels unworthy of such friends, especially after the mayhem inflicted by his monster, or he desires full control in his relationships.

More than anything, this antisocial stance seems to be the main inspiration for creating his monster. Even though many naturally assume he was driven by glory, power, and morbid curiosity, Shelley hardly mentions any of that. Instead she details Victor’s loving upbringing and beautiful surroundings, only to have him forget all this and conduct a weird experiment of bringing a monster to life.

Then, of course, there is the monster himself, who is quite open about his loneliness and resorts to terror to have a companion. Abandoned by Victor, the creature roams the countryside, fruitlessly searching for a human being who can stand to befriend him. Long story short, this doesn’t happen, so he takes revenge on Victor for putting him in this situation.

Alone, we break

Read through the prism of loneliness, the novel makes a surprisingly compelling case not only for cultivating friendship but also for the kind of dysfunction that results from the lack thereof.

This is especially pertinent for audiences today who are forced to cope with the mass atomization of modern life.

In terms of their social life, most young people in the developed world often resemble Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, Frankenstein’s monster, or some combination thereof. They feel misunderstood, have few outlets for their thoughts and emotions, and respond in similar ways to the characters: They seek internet fame, indulge in darker temptations, and even lash out against a world that seems to reject them.

Much like the literary critics and adaptors who miss this larger theme in their analysis of the smaller ones that result, today’s social commentators who remark on the pathologies of the youth do the same.

At the heart of all this dysfunction is loneliness. And behind the social crisis lies a spiritual crisis.

Had Frankenstein abided by Christian teaching, he would accept his limitations and work to overcome his personal misgivings of befriending and serving others. Instead of trying to build a companion for the monster, only to dismantle it in a fit of rage, Victor could have loved his creation, much as God does. Instead of the monster basing his morality on Goethe, Plutarch, and Milton — which all promote epic struggles and titanic egos — he could have picked up the much more available (and readable) Gospels, which stress forgiveness and humility.

Then again, this is Mary Shelley’s story, and she was far from a devout Christian. Similarly, del Toro is also an atheist and likely shares the same outlook on the Christian demands of friendship, virtue, and human creativity.

What could have been a story of redemption and radical love is turned into one of violent horror and unavoidable tragedy.

Created for fellowship

Still, even if such Romantic secular humanism makes for better dramatic tension and suspense, it elides the deeper truth that comes out of the story: Man is not meant to be alone.

Victor’s real crime was not his ambition or curiosity but forsaking everyone around him. It wasn’t an abusive father that led him to this (as the new film suggests) but his willful ignorance of the Father in Heaven. As such, he creates a personal hell with its very own devil.

Even if Shelley and del Toro miss this point, readers and audiences should take heed and confront the problems of loneliness and nihilism in the world around them.

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Many working in technology are entranced by a story of a god-tier shift that is soon to come. The story is the “fast takeoff” for AI, often involving an “intelligence explosion.” There will be a singular moment, a cliff-edge, when a machine mind, having achieved critical capacities for technical design, begins to implement an improved version of itself. In a short time, perhaps mere hours, it will soar past human control, becoming a nearly omnipotent force, a deus ex machina for which we are, at best, irrelevant scenery.

This is a clean narrative. It is dramatic. It has the terrifying, satisfying shape of an apocalypse.

It is also a pseudo-messianic myth resting on a mistaken understanding of what intelligence is, what technology is, and what the world is.

The world adapts. The apocalypse is deferred. The technology is integrated.

The fantasy of a runaway supermind achieving escape velocity collides with the stubborn, physical, and institutional realities of our lives. This narrative mistakes a scalar for a capacity, ignoring the fact that intelligence is not a context-free number but a situated process, deeply entangled with physical constraints.

The fixation on an instantaneous leap reveals a particular historical amnesia. We are told this new tool will be a singular event. The historical record suggests otherwise.

Major innovations, the ones that truly resculpted civilization, were never events. They were slow, messy, multi-decade diffusions. The printing press did not achieve the propagation of knowledge overnight; its revolutionary power was in the gradual enabling of the secure communication of information, which in turn allowed knowledge to compound. The steam engine unfolded over generations, its deepest impact trailing its invention by decades.

With each novel technology, we have seen a similar cycle of panic: a flare of moral alarm, a set of dire predictions, and then, inevitably, the slow, grinding work of normalization. The world adapts. The apocalypse is deferred. The technology is integrated. There is little reason to believe this time is different, however much the myth insists upon it.

The fantasy of a fast takeoff is conspicuously neat. It is a narrative free of friction, of thermodynamics, of the intractable mess of material existence. Reality, in contrast, has all of these things. A disembodied mind cannot simply will its own improved implementation into being.

RELATED: ‘Unprecedented’: AI company documents startling discovery after thwarting ‘sophisticated’ cyberattack

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Any improvement, recursive or otherwise, encounters physical limits. Computation is bounded by the speed of light. The required energy is already staggering. Improvements will require hardware that depends on factories, rare minerals, and global supply chains. These things cannot be summoned by code alone. Even when an AI can design a better chip, that design will need to be fabricated. The feedback loop between software insight and physical hardware is constrained by the banal, time-consuming realities of engineering, manufacturing, and logistics.

The intellectual constraints are just as rigid. The notion of an “intelligence explosion” assumes that all problems yield to better reasoning. This is an error. Many hard problems are computationally intractable and provably so. They cannot be solved by superior reasoning; they can only be approximated in ways subject to the limits of energy and time.

Ironically, we already have a system of recursive self-improvement. It is called civilization, employing the cooperative intelligence of humans. Its gains over the centuries have been steady and strikingly gradual, not explosive. Each new advance requires more, not less, effort. When the “low-hanging fruit” is harvested, diminishing returns set in. There is no evidence that AI, however capable, is exempt from this constraint.

Central to the concept of fast takeoff is the erroneous belief that intelligence is a singular, unified thing. Recent AI progress provides contrary evidence. We have not built a singular intelligence; we have built specific, potent tools. AlphaGo achieved superhuman performance in Go, a spectacular leap within its domain, yet its facility did not generalize to medical research. Large language models display great linguistic ability, but they also “hallucinate,” and pushing from one generation to the next requires not a sudden spark of insight, but an enormous effort of data and training.

The likely future is not a monolithic supermind but an AI service providing a network of specialized systems for language, vision, physics, and design. AI will remain a set of tools, managed and combined by human operators.

To frame AI development as a potential catastrophe that suddenly arrives swaps a complex, multi-decade social challenge for a simple, cinematic horror story. It allows us to indulge in the fantasy of an impending technological judgment, rather than engage with the difficult path of development. The real work will be gradual, involving the adaptation of institutions, the shifting of economies, and the management of tools. The god-machine is not coming. The world will remain, as ever, a complex, physical, and stubbornly human affair.

​Ai, Return, Tech 

Presidio Healthcare recently made history by launching the nation’s first pro-life, Christian health insurance option in Texas at a time when many families are experiencing both historic rate increases and decreasing subsidies in the Obamacare marketplace.

While the heart of our mission focuses on serving families with an affordable option that protects both their values and their financial security, the vision for how we accomplish that aim rests on a lesser-known Christian principle that I believe provides a road map for reforming our broken health care system.

Health care policy should focus on expanding options for families while empowering them to own their own health insurance.

That principle is called “subsidiarity,” which represents a system of values that puts families first — in contrast to our current system that ignores the individualized needs of Americans.

The Christian principle of subsidiarity states “that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest, or least centralized competent authority rather than by a higher and more distant one, whenever possible.”

The latest debate over Obamacare subsidies serves as a great example of how our current system prioritizes the higher and more distant authority (i.e., Washington, D.C.) over the least centralized authority (i.e., American families).

The Obamacare market was designed to provide subsidies for low-income Americans, which by itself does not inherently violate the principle of subsidiarity. Rather, the problem lies with the insistence that this one federally controlled market should serve as a one-size-fits-all solution for everyone, including middle-income Americans who do not qualify for adequate subsidies.

The centralized answer that Democrats offer requires the Obamacare market to be propped up inefficiently with more subsidies. The subsidiarity answer would propose decentralizing the market by allowing alternative risk pools regulated at the state level to serve the middle-income Americans with products designed for their needs.

To summarize the principle for a broader application: Health care policy should focus on expanding options for families while empowering them to own their own health insurance.

In a decentralized system, Americans would become smarter consumers of health care as they bear the responsibility of owning and paying for their own health care expenses. The impact would reach beyond the economic. The key benefit to subsidiarity is its preservation of each of our relationships to God through our individual decision-making responsibility.

If tomorrow’s health care shoppers were individuals and families (instead of governments and employers), private insurance markets would be forced to serve the Christian and pro-life values of families, as opposed to our current system of serving government agendas and large employer needs. Presidio is building toward that tomorrow and starting now in Texas.

RELATED: Medical ‘experts’ want to jab a needle through your God-given rights

EKIN KIZILKAYA/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Unfortunately, there is a major roadblock to this future.

Ironically, the employer-sponsored marketplace and the single-payor Medicare program — two markets that conservatives often support — in many ways violate the principle of subsidiarity to a greater degree than the much smaller Obamacare individual market.

We need to be consistent if we want to reform our health care system. Employers control the health insurance decisions for close to 150 million Americans, and all of us are forced to pay into a federally centralized Medicare program that exhibits some of the worst elements of socialism, such as dictating prices that distort our entire system.

The spiritual impact is evident through the contraceptive mandate and employer decisions that force millions of Christians to be insured on products that cover abortion, abortifacients, contraception, and other immoral services. Through Medicare, we have collectively forfeited our health care autonomy to Washington, D.C., when we turn 65, creating problematic scenarios that could prioritize our federal budget over dignified treatment for end-of-life care.

We need to do more than just talk about Obamacare — and we need take action now.

The good news is that health care policymakers need to look no farther than to what the private market is already doing.

Presidio is part of a decades-long movement in the health care industry to launch innovative alternative services that serve families directly. This includes affordable non-Obamacare alternatives, health-sharing ministry plans, and, more recently, “ICHRA” benefit platforms that are moving employers out of the business of purchasing health insurance and into a defined contribution model where employees purchase and own their own insurance.

The road map is there. Government and employers can assist families in purchasing health insurance rather than purchasing it for them. Private market innovations would follow.

At Presidio, we are building toward a future where subsidiarity replaces centrally controlled markets and the pro-life values of Christian Americans drive pro-life health insurance options that help fund life-affirming care. We do not take federal subsidies, and we do not want your employer forcing you to have Presidio coverage.

As in all authentic Christian movements, we rely on individual families to help build Presidio, and we look forward to serving your needs while we expand our vision of a health care system in America founded on the principle of subsidiarity.

​Health care, Presidio healthcare, Christianity, Christian, Subsidiarity, Faith 

The number one country song in America isn’t sung by a human. Instead it was generated entirely by AI — which may have devastating implications for music, creativity, and the very definition of humanity.

The song “Walk My Walk” is by AI artist Breaking Rust and features lyrics like, “Every scar’s a story that I survived / I’ve been through hell, but I’m still alive.”

“They say slow down, boy, don’t go too fast / But I ain’t never been one to live in the past,” croons the AI artist.

“If you look at some of the lyrics of this song, I mean it talks about how he’s been dragged through the mud. He’s, you know, had to really stand. I mean, it doesn’t know any of this stuff. None of it is real. And yet it is assembling it in a way that is so appealing, it’s number one on the Billboard country music chart,” Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck says on “The Glenn Beck Program.”

“The whole world is about to change,” he continues. “You know, I just heard Elon Musk say that in five years, there’s not going to be phones or apps. It will just be some sort of a box or device that you kind of carry around with you and it’s listening. It’s anticipating. It’s AI.”

“And it will know what you want to hear, what you want, and it will create the music you want to hear. It will create the podcast you want to hear. It will do all this stuff for you. So we will be in our own universe even more than we are right now,” he adds.

This has led Glenn to ask some serious introspective questions like, “If AI can fake being a human and sing soulfully while not having a soul, what does it mean to be human?”

“I think a lot of people won’t care,” BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere chimes in. “Like, people won’t care if it is made by humans or not if they like it. And they seem to like it.”

While both Glenn and Stu agree AI will likely take over the arts, Glenn believes that “handmade is going to come back into style at some point.”

“Human-made will come back into style,” he says. “But … we’re going to go through a period where it’s going to get really scary.”

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

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For decades, U.S. education has been dominated by the American left. Its stranglehold was highly visible during the Biden administration, with countless stories about wildly inappropriate books in school libraries, critical race theory being taught in classrooms, and national associations calling for parents to be designated domestic terrorists.

How did our public school systems — including those in red states, from Iowa to Alaska — become infected with radical leftist ideology? The answer is education consulting groups.

As long as Republicans continue to outsource their governance and expertise to thinly veiled activist groups, nothing will change.

Most Americans don’t realize that every aspect of governance, from parks and wildlife departments to the curriculum in kids’ schools, has been outsourced to a coalition of nameless, faceless NGO consulting groups that are funded by millions of taxpayer dollars funneled through the government. One of the worst offenders is the American Institutes for Research.

AIR is currently under contract with at least 25 states, with the majority involving contracts to develop state standards. For those unfamiliar with education policy, standards determine what students need to learn and when they need to learn it. Lesson plans, curriculum, and textbooks are required by law to be aligned with standards.

AIR’s tentacles stretch from D.C. into health care and counseling policy — and education. It has long been entrenched in most red-state education departments to “facilitate” standards revisions. Take its influence in Alaska as a recent example.

Alaska has had multiple contracts with the nonprofit, including the School Climate and Connectedness Survey, which focuses on social-emotional learning and adult education content standards. AIR is also cited as a teaching resource for curriculum implementation.

On the Alaska Department of Education’s social studies website, AIR is listed as a source multiple times, including in the HQIM Rubric and in a PowerPoint presentation that was given to the state board, which was co-presented with an AIR employee. The presenters insisted that standards must have an equity focus and touted a shift from learning about social studies to student activism, or “action civics.”

These standards were implemented in Alaska’s new social studies curriculum, and the results are predictably a mess. Developed by a panel selected by race rather than merit, the standards are chock-full of land acknowledgments and other progressive claptrap. Alaska is now training its kids to be activists rather than teaching them about the American founding.

Worse yet, Alaska is also a partner with AIR for its Indigenous Student Identification Project, headed by Nara Nayar. On her LinkedIn account, she proudly lists her work “on comprehensive sexuality education for elementary and middle school students.”

This is where Alaskan taxpayer dollars are going: equity education, activism training, and filling the pockets of far-left education consultants who teach sex ed to elementary students.

Turning to the Midwest, Iowa’s social studies overhaul is in consultation with Stefanie Wager, a former AIR employee who is a glorified activist. She lists “racial justice, equity, and inclusion” as top priorities. Wager has an extensive list of extremist views that influence her work as an education consultant.

Wager was once president of the National Association for the Social Studies, a left-wing outfit that has shaped red-state history instruction. She has also worked as the education partner manager for Bill Gates’ personal office. Wager began as an AIR employee embedded within the Iowa Department of Education. When news broke about her involvement, she left AIR and joined the Iowa Department of Education full-time.

These aren’t just one-off examples — they are emblematic of the reach and influence of shadow consultant organizations that control public education. Peruse nearly any state department of education, and you will find rubrics with equity focuses, social studies curriculum full of progressive ideology, and AIR-linked content on state websites. Nebraska, for example, contracted AIR for a social studies report that is spotlighted on AIR’s website.

RELATED: Trump admin takes major step toward dismantling the Department of Education

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The worst part is that state taxpayers are unknowingly funding all of this. South Dakota signed a nearly quarter-million-dollar contract with AIR to facilitate work-group meetings to revise the state’s social studies standards, which produced standards laced with wokeness. The blowback was so swift that then-Gov. Kristi Noem (R) had to intervene and force South Dakota’s Education Department to restart its standards revision work from scratch.

The result was some of the best standards in the country.

Alaska has likely paid millions for its various studies and surveys, but the cost of only one project, at $350,000, is publicly available. Iowa awarded AIR a $31 million contract for testing assessments. This is a patronage scheme using taxpayer dollars to fund pet leftist programs. To make matters worse, most red states keep all of this hidden. In Alaska, you have to pay the state for a contract to be disclosed.

As long as Republicans continue to outsource their governance and expertise to thinly veiled activist groups, nothing will change. Schools will continue to be breeding grounds for left-wing extremism, school libraries will be filled with radical propaganda — and taxpayers will keep funding all of it.

Red-state legislatures and governors need to look to trusted alternative providers that reflect their states’ values. They should create and fund parallel structures that put outcomes above partisan dogma and properly vet each person to whom they give their constituents’ money. This is the only way to begin countering the efforts of the shadow government in our states.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.

​K-12 education, Left wing, State education, Opinion & analysis, Department of education, Public education, American institutes for research, Standardized tests, American founding