Artificial intelligence has already transformed the way Americans work and research.

But BlazeTV host Daniel Horowitz believes the public is being sold an inflated vision of artificial general intelligence — and pouring staggering resources into the wrong model to achieve it.

“I actually like AI,” Horowitz tells BlazeTV host Steve Deace. “And I believe for narrow tasks, edge computing, localized sovereign data … there’s a lot of good stuff being done.”

“My concern is, we’re misallocating resources away from the most useful, least painful, least consuming analogues of AI and using an all-of-government approach towards this AGI, which in my view is the least useful … most expensive, really unfeasible the way they’re trying to do it, and also problematic,” he explains.

“For the average person out there, like me, that only knows about AI doing that or asking ChatGPT questions, help them understand the distinction that you just drew in ways that would relate to their understanding of the technology,” Deace says.

“If you want an ‘ask me anything,’ what they did was get people addicted to it, and then they’re like, ‘OK, it doesn’t cost anything,’” Horowitz explains.

“But then it does. Actually, we’re going to have to build five hyperscales in every county, and this much power, and yada yada, and make everything else more expensive,” he says.

“So, now that’s an ROI thing,” he continues. “It’s not that there is no use to artificial general intelligence, right — this open-ended generative AI. It’s not that there’s no use to it. It’s that there is a question of an ROI in the way they’re going about doing it.”

“Is it accurate to say that you believe, therefore, we’re overselling this technology to the American people based on what you just told us?” Deace asks.

“We’re overselling the need and utility of centralized cloud hyperscale model for AI. In terms of deploying it in low latency, narrow at the edge, there’s things like the Iron Dome in Israel. You know, Israel has no hyperscale,” Horowitz replies.

“My core thesis is what they’re selling you on — again, and people could disagree with me, but my contention is that, just the opposite. Not only am I not opposed to it, I believe they are doing what government does in health care and many other sectors,” he continues.

“They’re misallocating resources towards a bubble and to Oracle’s grift of their 1970s technology of a centralized cloud in an impossible way that would perpetually have to scale in a way that either becomes obsolete or unfeasible,” he adds.

Horowitz goes on to explain that one of the only reasons this is being done is “a surveillance state.”

“Remember, China doesn’t have nearly as many of these because they built their surveillance state — in large part from these same companies, by the way — before AI. So, they already have it. They don’t need it,” he says.

And what Horowitz finds extremely concerning is that auto companies have just “won the rights to your texts when they get cycled through the car player.”

“They got all of it, and they won in court that they’re able to keep it,” he says.

“Your car, your home, your appliances. They would ideally want every step you make, every breath you take,” he adds.

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​Artificial intelligence, Daniel horowitz, Surveillance state, Steve deace, Ai, Blazetv show 

Humility is the necessary virtue.

Let me unpack that a little: Without humility, Saint Peter will not let you pass through the Pearly Gates.

Our culture has moved so far toward autonomy that we can barely imagine obedience as anything other than weakness.

And what is humility?

Like the old adage says, humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less. If you study the lives of the saints — or, for that matter, almost any historically admirable person — you’ll recognize that humility is an immensely attractive quality.

Celebrity cleric

Blessed Fulton J. Sheen, America’s most famous Catholic bishop of the 20th century, had plenty to be proud of. Now on his way to sainthood, Sheen was a brilliant scholar, a gifted writer, and one of the most compelling communicators of his age. His radio broadcasts reached millions. His television program, “Life Is Worth Living,” drew audiences in the 1950s that rivaled the biggest entertainers in America.

Yet two episodes in Sheen’s life suggest that one of his greatest virtues was not eloquence at all. It was obedience.

The first came before almost anyone knew his name.

After his ordination in 1919, Sheen pursued advanced studies in Europe and distinguished himself at the University of Louvain in Belgium. He became the first American to win the prestigious Cardinal Mercier Prize and earned the university’s coveted agrégé degree. By the time he was 30, Oxford and Columbia reportedly wanted him to teach philosophy.

Then, in 1926, his bishop ordered him home to Peoria, Illinois — not to a university, but to St. Patrick’s, one of the city’s poorest parishes.

Sheen went.

He visited the sick, celebrated Mass, begged for parish funds, and preached. Nine months later, his bishop explained what had happened. People worried that Sheen’s European success had made him “high-hat,” too important to take orders. The parish assignment had been a test.

He passed.

Entertainer in exile

Soon Sheen was sent to teach at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., beginning the public career that would eventually make him famous.

Four decades later, obedience cost him far more.

By then, Sheen was a household name. His television audience reached into the tens of millions. But he had also clashed with New York’s powerful Cardinal Francis Spellman over money Sheen raised for the missions. Sheen appealed the dispute to Rome and prevailed. Spellman, according to accounts of the dispute, did not forget it.

In 1966, Sheen was sent to Rochester, New York. Many biographers have interpreted the transfer as a form of exile: One of the world’s most famous religious communicators suddenly found himself running a relatively modest diocese far from the center of American media.

His years there were difficult. Accustomed to packed auditoriums around the world, Sheen once gave a series of retreat talks in Rochester’s largest auditorium and drew a disappointing crowd.

“The whole world comes to hear Fulton Sheen, except his own diocese,” he reportedly told a fellow priest.

RELATED: Tens of thousands attend beatification of anti-communist TV star priest Fulton Sheen

Dick Lewis/New York Daily News/Getty Images

Right or wrong

It’s tempting to make the lesson here that Sheen’s superiors were right. They were not necessarily right at all. Spellman may have acted vindictively. Sheen himself made mistakes in Rochester. Authority can be petty, shortsighted, and simply wrong.

But that’s precisely why obedience — like its close friend, humility — is a virtue.

Obedience means little when the person in authority agrees with you. Its real test comes when you believe you are more talented, more informed, or more capable than the person giving the order — and perhaps you are.

Modern celebrity culture teaches almost the opposite. Discover your gift. Build your brand. Grow your platform. Maximize your reach. If an institution doesn’t recognize your genius, leave it. If a boss frustrates your calling, find another boss. If a church constrains your ministry, start your own.

That instinct is not always wrong. Institutions can become corrupt, and conscience has claims no human authority can erase. Obedience is not servility, nor does it require cooperating with evil.

But our culture has moved so far toward autonomy that we can barely imagine obedience as anything other than weakness.

Serving in silence

There is a particularly American — and, yes, Protestant — dimension to this. The Reformation elevated individual judgment against ecclesial authority, while the American experiment elevated independence and suspicion of hierarchy. Those impulses produced real goods. But untethered, they can also produce a Christianity in which everyone becomes his own pope, pastor, and doctrinal court of final appeal.

Catholicism proposes something harder: Your gifts are not entirely your own. Your vocation does not entitle you to the largest audience. You may be called to serve where no one applauds. You may even be badly deployed by legitimate authority.

Sheen, who had every reason to believe his voice belonged on the biggest stage available, accepted assignments beneath his stature and endured humiliations he did not deserve.

In 1979, near the end of Sheen’s life, Pope John Paul II embraced the frail priest in St. Patrick’s Cathedral and offered what may be the perfect summary of his legacy: “You have written and spoken well of the Lord Jesus Christ. You are a loyal son of the Church.”

Not the most famous son. Not the most brilliant.

A loyal one.

In an age obsessed with building our platforms, Fulton Sheen leaves us with a harder question: Can we remain faithful when obedience costs us the audience we think we deserve?

​Cardinal francis spellman, Catholicism, Christianity, Entertainment, Fulton sheen, Protestantism, Blessed fulton sheen, Pope john paul ii, Faith 

For policymakers and citizens sick of decades wasted on failed globalist experiments, Marco Rubio’s nationalist speech in Athens on Wednesday was a huge gulp of fresh air. The alternative to collectivist one-world ideology can sound almost embarrassingly obvious: Nations should pursue their own interests, recover confidence in their inheritance, and cooperate from a position of strength rather than dissolution.

Rubio’s setting made the point for him. Speaking at the Pnyx beneath the Acropolis, he traced America’s inheritance through Athens, Rome, Christendom, medieval Europe, and England. He called for the West to recover the ambition, confidence, and national power it once took for granted. His speech made the civilizational case in deliberately grand terms.

Pretending the Eastern Romans never existed — or that they have nothing to tell us about who we really are — leaves us poorer, more arrogant, and less prepared for the trials ahead.

But his civilizational reset could have been stronger and surer. The great omission was the thousand-year span defined not by Athens, Rome, or even Jerusalem, but by Constantinople — capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and guardian of a Roman Christian civilization that survived long after the political West had collapsed.

Its final outposts fell only about three decades before Columbus reached the Americas. For perspective, 30 years ago the Unabomber was arrested, the first Motorola flip phone appeared, and IBM’s Deep Blue became the first computer to beat a reigning world chess champion in a game under standard tournament conditions.

That Byzantium received no real showing in Rubio’s address is hardly surprising. Despite its millennium-long life after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Eastern Empire has endured generations of Western neglect, condescension, and selective amnesia.

There are many reasons. One is that the modern West became preoccupied almost to obsession with its own political development — its revolutions, constitutions, ideological struggles, and repeated attempts to construct an order that could tame human nature without destroying liberty. Somewhere along the way, the East came to seem like the place where history had stalled.

“Byzantium” — no longer “really” Rome in Western eyes — became shorthand for decadence, intrigue, stagnation, and oriental despotism. The important action supposedly moved elsewhere: to the Latin West, where Europe would eventually beat back Islamic power at Tours, Lepanto, and Vienna and narrate the victories as its own civilizational story.

That is an impoverished self-understanding. Excising the Eastern Roman Empire deprives the West of some of the warnings it most needs as it flails through geopolitical waters that seem unprecedented, mostly because we have forgotten so much precedent.

The Eastern Romans spent centuries fighting for survival against great powers on their frontiers. Their long rivalry with Sasanian Persia culminated in a ruinous early-7th-century war that exhausted both empires. Almost immediately, Arab Muslim armies surged through territories Rome and Persia had fought over for generations. Centuries later, Latin Christians inflicted one of Byzantium’s worst wounds themselves when the Fourth Crusade diverted to Constantinople and sacked the city in 1204. The empire was restored in 1261, but it never recovered its former strength.

RELATED: Rubio celebrates Western exceptionalism, warns civilization is at an ‘inflection point’

Mark Schiefelbein/POOL/AFP/Getty Images

The point is not that the modern West owes Byzantium an apology, although some historical humility would be healthy. The point is that civilizations sometimes face grueling, protracted defense requiring a spiritual sobriety to match. Today the West is dangerously tempted by visions of global end-zone dancing — speedrunning the uncool parts of geopolitics in favor of a world-war blitz won by super-duper wonder-weapons.

Some Constantinopolitan emperors knew the temptation. Nikephoros II Phokas, the warrior-emperor who reigned from 963 to 969, won spectacular victories against Muslim powers and reportedly sought church recognition of soldiers killed in those campaigns as martyrs.

The church refused. Patriarch Polyeuctus invoked St. Basil’s Canon 13, which says that although killing in war had not traditionally been treated as murder, soldiers who shed blood should abstain from communion for three years because their hands were not clean. Whatever else one makes of the canon, the answer to Nikephoros was unmistakable: Military victory did not automatically confer holiness.

That is a useful warning against today’s temptation to treat defeating our enemies by whatever means we choose as the height of spiritual purity and moral heroism. It is also a reminder that strong, healthy, independent churches can serve as an irreplaceable counterweight to political rulers who begin to imagine themselves as spiritual authorities and their regimes as godlike powers before which citizens and foreigners alike must bow and scrape.

RELATED: The last knight of Europe rides again

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

And Polyeuctus’ victory points toward something still more important. Spiritual authority does not arise from the top-down power of worldly lawgivers. Holiness begins with people willing to make the difficult purification of their own hearts a lifelong athletic practice — the opposite of the performative, self-flattering spiritual box-checking Jesus decried in the parable of the Pharisee and the publican.

The West would benefit from reordering its sociopolitical habits in that direction — not to weaken itself or retreat into inert obscurantism, but to recover clarity and responsibility at a time of immense division and instability.

Much of today’s turmoil arises from efforts to turn political might, now amplified by astonishing technology, into a new god and a new church with very old stripes. Rubio is right that the West must remember what it is. But Athens and Rome are not enough, and “Christendom” becomes dangerously abstract if we skip the civilization that carried Roman Christianity for a thousand years while the Western world was being remade.

Pretending the Eastern Romans never existed — or that they have nothing to tell us about who we really are — leaves us poorer, more arrogant, and less prepared for the trials ahead.

​Citizens, Confidence, Eastern roman empire, Greece, Marco rubio, Responsibility, Technology, Vienna, Western civilization, Christendom, Rome, Athens, Constantinople, Byzantium, Opinion & analysis 

Share the Arrows, Allie Beth Stuckey’s annual women’s conference, returned for a third year on Saturday in Dallas, Texas. The “Relatable” host built the event to encourage and strengthen Christian women seeking sound doctrine and sisterhood when the progressive culture takes aim.

As always, the lineup fit the purpose. Rosaria Butterfield, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Alisa Childers, and Costi Hinn, among other prominent names in the evangelical world, each took the stage, with Christian music duo Shane & Shane leading worship.

At 37 weeks pregnant with her fourth child, Stuckey closed the event with a powerful speech on the importance of clarity and courage — two words that undergird the entire Share the Arrows conference and her broader platform.

“Clarity comes from knowing God and His Word, and courage comes from trusting God and His Word,” she said.

While these concepts seem to go hand in hand, they’re not always working together as they should. And when they don’t, man gets himself in trouble, Stuckey warned.

The first example, she said, of how knowing God’s Word doesn’t always translate to trusting it goes all the way back to Genesis, when the serpent approached Eve in the garden.

Stuckey pointed out how Satan asked Eve, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’” Eve’s response was the correct answer: “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.”’

Satan responded with what Stuckey called a “half-truth”: “You will not certainly die. For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

This was enough to convince Eve to disobey God’s command and convince her husband to do the same.

“Eve knew God’s words. Eve had the biblical knowledge. … She could repeat God’s words back to Satan even in a high-pressure moment,” said Stuckey.

What she lacked was “trust.”

“Because of that choice, because of the buying in to the confusion, there’s a distance from God,” she explained. “There’s difficulty with creation, and there’s dissonance between each other.”

The pattern of Eve’s sin — knowing the Word of God but not trusting it — is still playing out today, Stuckey warned. Christians are still confronted with that same question: “Did God really say …?” and Satan is still at the ready to answer with confusion — a “half-truth” that almost sounds biblical.

“The people in shady corners of Manhattan don’t sell knockoff Louis Vuittons by convincing you a Kroger bag is the real thing,” she analogized. “They give you something that looks really close to the real thing because that’s the only way you’ll buy it.”

Satan, too, she warned, is also a master of “counterfeits,” and if we don’t know and trust God, we’ll fall victim to his schemes.

“Ultimately, all believing of lies, all sin comes down to this: Who do you trust?” Stuckey said. “Satan is satisfied with having us puffed up with knowledge. He is OK with us having clarity. None of that matters if we do not trust God.”

She pointed out the epidemic in modern culture, especially when it comes to “progressive Christianity,” of people knowing what God’s Word says about gender, sex, marriage, and the sanctity of life but choosing to believe lies anyway.

“Bible knowledge is not enough if we do not trust God,” she reiterated.

Stuckey then pointed to the example of Jesus, who, like Eve, was tempted by Satan and responded by repeating God’s Word. However, He triumphed because He did what she failed to do: trust God.

“Jesus is the perfect embodiment of not just clarity but clarity and courage,” she said.

God, she urged the audience, is worthy of our courage to trust him. “This God who is love, who is kindness, who is righteousness, who is compassion, who has not spared his own son … if this God is for me … who in the world can be against me?” she asked.

“If this God is for me, then what He tells me to do, what He tells me to say, what He tells me is right, and what He tells me is wrong is for my good and is done in love. It’s not just enough to know that. … You have to trust it.”

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​Allie beth stuckey, Share the arrows 

Americans shouldn’t wait until Sharia courts become widespread before deciding where they stand — and Brigitte Gabriel is doing everything in her power to help them see the threat before it’s too late.

Gabriel tells BlazeTV host Nick Freitas that she was shocked to relive her upbringing in Lebanon — where her home was attacked by Islamic extremists — on 9/11, when her daughter sat watching the towers fall on the news and asked her, “Mommy, why did they do this to us?”

“And I found myself, Nick,” she explains, “looking into my daughter’s eyes and repeating to her the exact same words my father said to me when I was a 10-year-old little girl, laying wounded in a hospital in Lebanon, hooked up to IVs on both arms, one blood bag in one arm, one IV in another, asking my father, ‘Why did they do this to us?’”

“And my father told me, ‘They hate us because they consider us infidels, and they want to kill us.’ Here we were two generations apart, two continents apart. I had to look into my daughter’s eyes and repeat to her the same words my father said to me,” she continues.

“That day I was reborn as an activist,” she adds, noting that this is why she started the Act for America foundation in 2002.

This foundation serves to “organize people in chapters nationwide to teach them how they can impact policy at their local level.”

Not only does the foundation now have over 5 million members nationwide, but it has successfully passed 300 bills at the federal and state level.

And the latest bill it is putting through Congress is the Preserving Our Constitution Act of 2026.

“It says no Sharia courts are allowed to operate in the United States. We are building the firewall to make sure that this does not happen,” Gabriel explains.

Freitas warns that this could easily become a problem for the U.S., as in the U.K. right now, there are 84 Sharia courts.

“Please understand that when Brigitte here is talking about Sharia courts in the United States, it is an inevitability unless you’re proactive,” Freitas says. “Because the moment they start going, and you haven’t prepared yourself for this, now all of a sudden, they win a couple of cases in court, and nobody wants to challenge them, and they start setting them up everywhere.”

However, Gabriel has some bad news.

“The Sharia courts are already operating in the United States,” she says. “The first Sharia court was established in Richardson, Texas, in 1991. Since then, we have documented 150 cases judged under Sharia law in the United States in 23 states.”

This is why in 2009, Gabriel got to work on the American Laws for American Courts bill, which says that “no law that is not compatible with the U.S. Constitution would be allowed to be practiced in an American courtroom.”

“We were able to pass that law in 13 states,” she explains.

“We’ve been fighting this battle for a long time,” she adds.

“Making the Argument with Nick Freitas” is available on BlazeTV+, YouTube, and major podcast platforms.

Start watching Nick Freitas NOW at blazetv.com and use the promo code NICK for $20 off your BlazeTV+ subscription.

​Americans, Lebanon, Sharia courts, Uk, Islamic extremists, 911, Islam, Nick freitas, Blazetv show, Brigitte gabriel 

Banned Books Week is baloney.

Not because nobody ever tries to suppress a book. People do. The lure of the ban hammer is strong.

We are staging arguments over banned books in a country where too many people barely read books.

But let’s be serious. A challenge is not a ban. A school-library dispute is not the Palmer raids. A parent objecting to what an 11-year-old reads is not Anthony Comstock resurrected.

Words should mean something.

The American Library Association has spent years blurring those distinctions, and every October around this time, we get the same little morality play: librarians as defenders of civilization, readers as brave dissidents, famous novels wrapped in the aura of forbidden fruit.

Last weekend at a Barnes and Noble in Southern California, I saw the display in person.

A table that had been marked “required reading” a few weeks prior was now the “read banned books” table. There sat “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” and all the usual suspects. All for sale.

Some ban!

The ALA will object that it uses “ban” in a fairly narrow sense. A book need not disappear from American commerce to count as banned. Remove it from a school or library collection and the word applies.

That’s exactly the problem.

Removing a book from one institutional collection is not the same as suppressing it from public circulation. A restriction is not automatically a ban. Precision is not too much to ask from an organization supposedly devoted to books.

America has known censorship. Real censorship.

In 1926, H.L. Mencken deliberately sold a copy of the “Hatrack” issue of the American Mercury in Boston after the Watch and Ward Society targeted it as obscene. He got arrested.

He beat the charge.

The Postal Service also declared the issue un-mailable. Had that ruling stood, the government could have put his magazine out of business.

Woodrow Wilson’s government sent Eugene V. Debs to prison for an antiwar speech. Federal agents swept up radicals in the Palmer raids. In Schenck v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a man who distributed anti-draft leaflets.

RELATED: Don’t fall for the fake ‘banned books’ narrative

Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service/Getty Images

That is what censorship looks like when the government means it.

Yes, school boards still do stupid things.

In 2013, a North Carolina board pulled Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” after one member said he could find “no literary value” in it. Nine days later, after national ridicule, the board reversed itself.

In 2010, a Riverside County, California, school district briefly pulled Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary because a parent objected to its definition of “oral sex.”

The dictionary came back too.

Somebody does something foolish. Somebody else objects. The fool backs down. That’s generally how freedom works.

And no, Ron DeSantis did not “ban books” in Florida. He signed laws governing what public schools may place in classrooms and school libraries.

Calling every restriction a ban is how you turn a policy dispute into a stupid morality play.

Azar Nafisi knows more about actual censorship than most Americans ever will. She lived under the Islamic Republic of Iran. In “Read Dangerously,” she writes about “literature as resistance” — literature resisting kings, tyrants, and “the tyrants within us.”

She asks how we confront an enemy without becoming like him or surrendering to him. Good question!

Reading dangerously under tyranny is one possible answer.

But at the risk of stating the obvious, America is not Iran.

And if we are going to use the word “dangerous,” let’s make it mean something.

A dangerous book is not simply one somebody objected to. It may be a book with such a rotten reputation that people condemn it without reading it. A book a publisher drops. A book a retailer refuses to carry. A book that goes out of print and can’t be had for love or money. A book people would rather summarize for you than let you judge for yourself.

Jean Raspail’s “The Camp of the Saints” will do.

First published in France in 1973, the novel imagines a flotilla of impoverished migrants sailing toward Europe. For decades, it has been reduced to a racist anti-immigrant tract.

I have read it. That is not what the book is principally about.

Raspail’s real villains are the politicians, journalists, clergy, and intellectuals who have lost the nerve to defend their own civilization.

For years, English copies were scarce and expensive. A new translation appeared last year. Amazon briefly pulled the physical edition. People complained. Amazon restored it.

That is a dangerous book because its reputation has done much of the work its critics should have done themselves.

RELATED: Jean Raspail’s notorious — and prophetic — novel returns to America

Pascal Parrot/Sygma/Sygma/Getty Images

So I say read Raspail and Julius Evola and Sam Francis. Read Nafisi and Ralph Ellison and Salman Rushdie.

Read authors who annoy your friends. Read writers your political allies dismiss. Read books with appalling reputations. Read the book everybody quotes and almost nobody seems to have opened.

Or don’t.

There is no virtue in reading a controversial book. Buying “Nineteen Eighty-Four” at Barnes and Noble does not make you Solzhenitsyn.

But please do not pretend.

Do not pretend a challenge is automatically a ban or that a book is unavailable when it is sitting on a table in front of you. Do not pretend reading a famous novel everyone can buy is an act of resistance.

We are staging arguments over banned books in a country where too many people barely read books.

Mencken praised the “gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries” and thereby proved “that doubt, after all, was safe.”

He was right.

Read dangerously, if you like. Just read.

​Censorship, Ron desantis, Amazon, Banned books, Camp of the saints, 1984, American library association, Post office, Reading, Azar nafisi, France, Europe, Opinion & analysis 

An athlete attending an event with the president will always drum up noise with liberal media, but it is fast becoming a circus that the pros are tired of fielding questions about.

Look no farther than Baltimore Ravens defensive back Marlon Humphrey, who answered a series of questions about a ride he took with President Donald Trump to a shipyard near Baltimore earlier this week.

‘I don’t really have any political beliefs.’

Ravens Ryan Eckley, Tyler Loop, Nick Moore, and Humphrey all met with the president on Tuesday before he announced plans to open a shipyard with Anduril Industries that could create over 3,000 jobs in the area.

After Humphrey posted a video of himself riding behind the president in a “very armored vehicle,” he faced questions from the media upon his return to team facilities.

“President Trump actually asked us if we wanted to ride with him, and I was not going to turn down a ride with the president,” Humphrey said of the video.

“That was quite the experience.”

The 30-year-old addressed more questions about his political views, but stated he “did not vote” in the last election, and likely has never voted, before claiming, “I don’t really have any political beliefs.”

Viewers on social media were irate about the football player’s answers and quickly labeled him a pawn of the administration.

“Look in the camera. Stand on it,” a Baltimore sports talk radio account wrote.

“He can’t even look up,” another claimed.

Others called Humphrey a “useful idiot” and a “political prop.”

Insults even came from Dallas Cowboys writer Clarence Hill Jr., who described Humphrey’s answers as a “clown show.”

However, a former wide receiver from those same Cowboys, Dez Bryant, called out the writer and asked why he was bothered by Humphrey’s comments.

“Why does it matter? I’m telling the world now..as soon as I see Trump.. I’m taking a photo with him,” Bryant wrote.

RELATED: Flock of Ravens swarm President Trump in Baltimore: ‘Do yall know this guy?’

“I hope he’s down to have a margarita,” the Texas native added.

During the same interview, Humphrey said that he planned to dedicate himself to learning more about politics for the upcoming election.

“I did try to vote this last time, but my absentee ballot didn’t come in,” he told reporters.

“I do plan on voting the next time around,” the star defensive player explained, before adding, “I am extremely uninformed on what laws are going on, to be honest.”

Simply put, Humphrey said he planned on making an informed decision on who to vote for based on where his beliefs line up with each party.

RELATED: Fans accuse Chicago Bears player of performing Muslim prayer during national anthem: ‘Is this respectful?’

Humphrey also spoke about the opportunities for the area itself — Sparrows Point, Maryland — and said that as an investor in local neighborhoods, he was glad there was an “opportunity to have a greater economy” come to the area.

“I believe in the area, and I’m pretty excited for the economy boom that could come from this,” he stated.

The interview closed with Humphrey being asked if he had seen any of the reactions to his presidential meeting on social media. The athlete immediately chose a positive route and said he hadn’t had the opportunity to react to any “love” he had received online.

“I am on social media at a max of about five minutes a day, so I was not able to interact with all the love I have received,” Humphrey said.

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​Nfl, Donald trump, Baltimore ravens, Football, Dez bryant, Marlon humphrey, Sports 

Sagebrush was starting to encroach on a field my father-in-law had painstakingly cleared over the years. So this week, I climbed onto his old tractor and did some mowing, unsupervised. In rural Montana, that hardly qualifies as news, but I’m putting it on my résumé.

First, it’s bigger than a riding mower, which makes it a large tractor in my estimation. Second, it’s old. I believe it was originally built to pull a chariot.

When you have spent years being the person others depend on, admitting you need help can catch in your throat.

I remember my father-in-law stopping at our Nashville home while hauling it west on a trailer. Ronald Reagan was president, and the tractor wasn’t new then.

For most of my adult life, we lived five miles from downtown Nashville. We didn’t have much tractor time, and I have always been intimidated by large machinery. That sounds pitiful coming from a guy who has visited Montana for decades and now lives here, but hear me out.

Public speaking frightens plenty of people. From the set of “The Today Show” to keynote speeches at conferences, it has never bothered me. Give me a microphone and a room full of strangers, and I’m comfortable.

But a tractor pulling a mower across ground so slanted that the cows need shorter legs on one side to keep from tipping over? I have questions.

Oh, did I mention rocks? Even with scarce rainfall, our rocks keep thriving and growing.

Fortunately, I have several neighbors I regularly call for help. Full disclosure: I rotate the calls, hoping none gets too accustomed to seeing my name and letting it go to voicemail. Sometimes I disguise my voice, but my Southern accent gives it away.

I’d love to swagger and say, “No problem.” But swagger won’t tell me which lever to pull, so I call someone who knows.

My father-in-law is in assisted living now. His competence with that tractor is legendary, but translating his instructions into something useful between my ears takes some doing. Sitting in that worn seat, I quickly discovered my confidence behind a microphone contributes remarkably little to my understanding of a tractor’s controls.

RELATED: Before you ask us to trust again

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So I FaceTime patient neighbors and ask a lot of questions.

Over the years, I have told countless medical professionals, plumbers, carpenters, and even tractor operators, “I’m a talker, an exceptional pianist, and a pretty good writer. That’s where my skill set stops. So explain it to me simply. Use crayons if necessary.”

One morning, after chasing a moose out of our hay barn, I called my college piano professor, who is thankfully still alive. I told him he hadn’t covered moose extraction in class.

He laughed. “You must have missed that day.”

Apparently, I missed several. And despite 40 years of caring for my wife, I’m still discovering gaps in my education that have nothing to do with tractors or moose. I know medications, insurance forms, hospital routines, and the particular sound that means something is wrong. Yet there are still calls to make and questions to ask, sometimes about things I think I should already understand.

Those calls can be harder to make than you would expect. When you have spent years being the person others depend on, admitting you need help can catch in your throat. You tell yourself you ought to know, manage, and figure it out. Meanwhile, the problem waits patiently for you to finish arguing with yourself.

In Montana, limits tend to announce themselves plainly. The ground is steep, the equipment is heavy, and the weather has no interest in your credentials. “I’m fine” can sound great right up until the tractor plows through a fence.

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The same reluctance follows us into hospital rooms and home to unpaid bills. We offer a cheerful “We’re doing fine” when what we need is someone to sit with a loved one for an afternoon or help make sense of the paperwork. You should see the emails I write to my CPA friend. Apparently, piano proficiency also has limited application to the tax code.

Earlier this year, I framed in a doorway. Last week, I spent some time with a chainsaw, a nerve-racking undertaking for a pianist and writer. This week, a tractor. I’m pleased to be learning new things, but I’m also learning to reach for the phone before determination and pride become an expensive lesson.

If you are the person everyone calls, consider whose number you need on speed dial. Tell them where you’re stuck. In my experience, plenty of people are willing to share what they know once I stop pretending I already know it.

Fortunately, I still have all my fingers as I reach for the phone again … and my neighbors are still answering.

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October is here again, so what the advertisers call “spooky season” is upon us. Stores are packed with Halloween candy and costumes, along with spiders and bats and skeletons (and they have been there since school started, but that’s a complaint for another day).

Last week, we talked about how too many Christians are fixating on what they perceive as the evil of Halloween — its emphasis on ghosts, witches, and death — without acknowledging that it sprang from both Christian and pagan roots and has been largely sanitized into a cultural holiday focused on costumes, candy, and neighborhood fun for children.

DON’T hit them over the head with a Bible. But don’t hide your faith either.

This has led to some (wrongly) judgmental attitudes, much of it springing from bad theology.

I ended that article with a promise that there is a better way to reclaim and redeem Halloween, because surely we Christians can do better than being the always-dark, candy-less house on the block.

Trick or tract?

Our highest calling, of course, is to love our neighbor. And Halloween brings those neighbors to our door, literally. What if we prayerfully and thoughtfully considered how we can bless those neighbors on this one day, with an eye to building relationships?

I am not talking about handing out Christian tracts instead of candy. Don’t be that person.

I am talking about eagerly seeking an opportunity to connect with at least one if not more families in your neighborhood with whom you can begin to build relationships. This, in fact, is why God has you where you live (see more on this here).

Let me tell you about what one family did for Halloween. They set up a tent in the driveway, hung lights from it, and under the tent placed their BBQ grill, on which they cooked hot dogs. A table held buns and condiments, a bowl of Halloween candy, and Jell-O shots for the adults. They publicized this on the neighborhood webpage a day or two before Halloween.

To be clear, they weren’t Christians seeking to love their neighbor. They were seeking to promote the father’s business. But how might we promote our Father’s business similarly?

Halloween hospitality

If you have access to one, a tent in the driveway with lights strung on it is very welcoming on a dark night!Grilling hot dogs was a pretty good idea — another might be a big crock-pot filled with chili, with paper cups and spoons for serving.A hot drink station with cocoa, cider, tea, etc.Freshly made pumpkin bread or oatmeal cookies in little treat bags as an alternative to commercial candy.Set out lawn chairs and invite people to sit down and rest for a moment — and if they do, introduce yourselves and get to know their family.Let your kids dress up and pass out the goodies (if you also allow your kids to trick-or-treat, one of you can hold down the fort while the other takes the kids around the neighborhood).Let people know a day or two ahead that you welcome them to come by and “sit a spell,” as the saying goes.

This will cost you time, effort, and money. But it is a ministry investment in the lives of precious people God has placed in your neighborhood. You can’t love them if you don’t make an effort to know them, and you can’t know them if you never even meet them.

And they will know you after this!

You could also just set out lawn chairs toward the end of the driveway where you will be able to actually see and converse with the adults as you pass out candy. Compliment the kids’ costumes. Ask the adults where they live in the neighborhood. They won’t linger long without a reason to stop at your house, but at least you’ll physically meet some of them. Since most parents don’t accompany their kids all the way up to the door, you at least have to get out where they are!

RELATED: Halloween isn’t opening a door to demons. Christians need to stop pretending it is.

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A few do’s & don’ts

DO wear a costume. Bible costumes are fun. So are a lot of others. Don’t be anything that will scare children. Don’t be a witch. Don’t be the devil (duh).DON’T hand out Christian literature that talks about how evil Halloween is. In fact, you don’t have to hand out Christian literature at all. But if you do, hand it out with full-size candy bars.DO ask their name and where they live in the neighborhood. Discreetly record a voice message to yourself or write down names and information — the idea, after all, is to use Halloween to start building a relationship. See #6 below.DON’T exclude your kids from this opportunity. Recruit them to participate as fully as possible in your family blessing the neighborhood, whatever you end up doing.DON’T be a Halloween hider. What a sad message you send to your children by turning off all the lights to avoid the neighbors. God put you in your neighborhood. Unless you live somewhere with no trick-or-treaters, get out there and redeem the opportunity.DO follow up! Sometime in November, reach out to someone you met on Halloween and invite him or her over for coffee or to watch the big game or for a casual dinner. Your goal here is to become an authentic friend. As you get to know each other, don’t be afraid to ask for help on something, either — that’s what friends do.DON’T hit them over the head with a Bible. But don’t hide your faith, either. Practice transparent honesty and pray for the opportunity to discuss deeper things. Until then, BE the deeper thing.

Halloween is an opportunity for your family to bless others and begin forging relationships to lost people in need of Jesus. I would love to hear about your family’s experience redeeming this annual event by loving your neighbor!

Editor’s note: This article has been slightly expanded from Diane Schrader’s 2025 article on Halloween.

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As the nephew of televangelist Benny Hinn, Costi Hinn grew up inside the prosperity gospel and Word of Faith world. In 2013, while preparing to preach on Jesus’ healing of a man at the pool of Bethesda, he studied a John MacArthur commentary, and the faith-healing formula he had believed and preached for years began to unravel. By 2017, he was publicly repudiating the prosperity gospel and embracing Reformed theology.

Today he is the teaching pastor of Shepherd’s House Bible Church in Chandler, Arizona, a Reformed church he helped plant in 2022, and founder and president of the online ministry For the Gospel.

At Allie Beth Stuckey’s third annual Share the Arrows — a women’s conference built to equip Christian women with sound doctrine and to stand with believers under cultural fire — Hinn became the first man to take a teaching slot at the event.

From the stage, Hinn spoke on the difference between a wife who is “the crown of her husband” from Proverbs 12:4 and the one who is contentious, as warned about in numerous verses from Proverbs.

“God has given you a divine calling. You have a responsibility, and it’s not to control everybody else and control every other outcome,” he said. “It is to first and foremost be under the submission that you’re called to be under Christ and to be self-controlled.”

A marriage, he warned, is often “the enemy’s number-one target” because so many other things — parenting, education, and politics — flow “downstream from the home.”

What determines the health of a home, he argued, is the state of the marriage.

“If you have an unhealthy marriage, the devil is going to wreak havoc in so many other areas of your life,” Hinn warned.

Much of a marriage’s health, Hinn said, rises or falls with the wife.

“The greatest benefactor of [a woman’s] ministry,” Hinn preached, “is actually not the world, not the school system, not the arenas” of the world; it’s her “husband.”

“An excellent wife — a woman of high character, of strength, and of valor, and of dignity — this woman, she is the crown of her husband.”

He contrasted this godly woman with the “contentious woman,” whom the book of Proverbs compares to the “continual dripping of rain” and “rottenness in [her husband’s] bones.”

Hinn listed multiple ways wives “drip” on their husbands, including sarcasm, condescension, public shaming, comparing him to other men, being controlling and demanding, and holding past mistakes against him, among others.

There are four truths, he said, every wife needs to know:

“Every wife is building or breaking her home.”“A contentious wife tears down her husband and her home.”“Contentiousness is a heart issue; it’s not a husband issue.”“An excellent wife is the crown of her husband.”

Hinn concluded with a powerful reminder that the days are fleeting, but the ministry of wives and mothers is eternal.

“[The home] is your ministry. … God gave you it, and all He wanted you to do is to relish in it and enjoy it. Sit in the mess, and know that in the mess, that’s the ministry.”

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