Category: blaze media

Blaze Media and Nicole Shanahan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s former vice presidential running mate, have teamed up to bring her podcast, “Back to the People,” to Blaze Media. Starting soon, the podcast will be available to BlazeTV+ subscribers on BlazeTV.

“Back to the People” features in-depth interviews and candid conversations with thought leaders, cultural critics, and the voices shaping the future of the country. Shanahan has a particular focus on the Make America Healthy Again movement and has been working tirelessly to help Americans live healthier lives.

Blaze Media CEO Tyler Cardon is excited that Shanahan is joining the network. “Nicole brings a unique perspective and a growing audience of Americans who are hungry for real dialogue outside the filter of legacy media.” He added, “We’re proud to support her vision and help her reach even more people who care about raising healthy families and Making America Healthy Again.”

Shanahan wants the Blaze Media audience to know that “we’re living through a time when trust in the mainstream media has collapsed — and for good reason. People want to hear real conversations that challenge the status quo, that speak to our values, our families, and our future.” She added, “Partnering with Blaze Media gives ‘Back to the People’ the platform to grow into exactly that — a home for truth-seekers, free thinkers, and those who still believe in the strength, wisdom, and resilience of the human spirit.”

“Back to the People” will be available on BlazeTV, YouTube, Spotify, BlazeLive, X, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you may get your podcasts.

​Back to the people, Blazetv, Nicole shanahan 

California’s wide range of problems — including declining schools, widening inequality, rising housing prices, and a weak job market — shows the urgent need for reform. The larger question is whether there exists a will to change.

Although the state’s remarkable entrepreneurial economy has kept it afloat, a growing number of residents are concluding that the progressive agenda, pushed by public unions and their well-heeled allies, is failing. Most
Californians have an exceptional lack of faith in the state’s direction. Only 40% of California voters approve of the legislature, and almost two-thirds have told pollsters the state is heading in the wrong direction. That helps explain why California residents — including about 1.1 million since 2021 — have been fleeing to other states.

California needs a movement that can stitch together a coalition of conservatives, independents, and, most critically, moderate Democrats.

Unhappiness with the one-party state is particularly intense
in the inland areas, which are the only locales now growing and may prove critical to any resurgence. More troubling still, over 70% of California parents feel their children will do less well than they did. Four in 10 are considering an exit. By contrast, seniors, thought to be leaving en masse, are the least likely to express a desire to leave.

In some ways, discontent actually erodes potential support for reform. Conservative voters, notes
a recent study, are far more likely to express a desire to move out of the state; the most liberal are the least likely. “Texas is taking away my voters,” laments Shawn Steel, California’s Republican National Committee member.

New awakenings

Given the demographic realities, a successful drive for reform cannot be driven by a marginalized GOP. Instead, what’s needed is a movement that can stitch together a coalition of conservatives, independents (now the state’s
second-largest political grouping), and, most critically, moderate Democrats.

Remarkably, this shift has already begun in an unlikely place: the ultra-liberal, overwhelmingly Democratic Bay Area. For years, its most influential residents — billionaires, venture capitalists, and well-paid tech workers — have abetted or tolerated an increasingly ineffective and
corrupt regime. Not only was the area poorly governed, but the streets of San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and other cities have become scenes of almost Dickensian squalor.

Over the past two years, tech entrepreneurs and professionals concerned about homelessness and crime worked to get rid of progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin. Last year, they helped elect Dan Lurie,
scion of the Levi Strauss fortune, as mayor, as well as some more moderate members to the board of supervisors. Lurie, of course, faces a major challenge to restore San Francisco’s luster against entrenched progressives and their allies in the media, academia, and the state’s bureaucracy.

Similar pushbacks are evident elsewhere. Californians, by large majorities, recently passed bills to strengthen law enforcement, ditching
liberalized sentencing laws passed by Democratic lawmakers and defended by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). Progressive Democrats have been recalled not only in San Francisco but also in Oakland (Alameda County) and Los Angeles, with voters blaming ideology-driven law enforcement for increasing rates of crime and disorder.

Critically, the liberal elites are not the only ones breaking ranks. Pressure for change is also coming from
increasingly conservative Asian voters and Jews — who number more than 1 million in the state and largely are revolted by the anti-Semitism rife among some on the progressive left. Protecting property and economic growth is particularly critical to Latino and Asian immigrants — California is home to five of the 10 American counties with the most immigrants — who are more likely to start businesses than native-born Americans.

These minority entrepreneurs and those working for them are unlikely to share the view of
progressive intellectuals, who see crime as an expression of injustice and who often excused or even celebrated looting during the summer of 2020. After all, it was largely people from “communities of color” who have borne the brunt of violent crime in cities such as Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco. Minorities also face special challenges doing business here due to regulations that are especially burdensome on smaller, less capitalized businesses. According to the Small Business Regulation Index, California has the worst business climate for small firms in the nation.

The shift among minority voters could prove a critical game-changer, both within the Democratic Party and the still-weak GOP. In Oakland, for example, many minorities backed the removal of Mayor
Sheng Thao (D), a progressive committed to lenient policing in what is now California’s most troubled, if not failed, major city.

Latinos, already the state’s largest ethnic group, constituting about 37.7% of the workforce, with expectations of
further growth by 2030, seem to be heading toward the right. In the last presidential election, Trump did well in the heavily Latino inland counties and won the “Inland Empire” — the metropolitan area bordering Los Angeles and Orange Counties – the first time a GOP presidential candidate has achieved this in two decades.

Back to basics

After a generation of relentless virtue-signaling, California’s government needs to focus on the basic needs of its citizens: education, energy, housing,
water supply, and public safety. As a widely distributed editorial by a small business owner noted, Californians, especially after highly publicized fire response failures in Los Angeles earlier this year, are increasingly willing to demand competent “basic governance” backed by a “ruthless examination of results” to ensure that their government supports “modest aspirations” for a better life.

California once excelled in basic governance, especially in the 1950s and ’60s under Democratic Gov.
Edmund G. “Pat” Brown. The state managed to cultivate growth while meeting key environmental challenges, starting in the late 1960s, most notably chronic air pollution. In what is justifiably hailed as a “major success,” California helped pioneer clean air regulatory approaches that have vastly reduced most automotive tailpipe emissions as well as eliminated lead and dramatically cut sulfur levels.

All of this starkly contrasts with the poor planning, execution, and catastrophist science evoked to justify the state’s climate agenda. Even Pat Brown’s son, former Gov.
Jerry Brown (D), recognized that California has little effect on climate. Given the global nature of the challenge, reducing one state’s emissions by cutting back on industrial activities accomplishes little if those activities move elsewhere, often to locations with fewer restrictions such as China and India.

Rather than focusing on “climate leadership,” Sacramento needs to tackle the immediate causes of record
out-migration, including sluggish economic growth and the nation’s highest levels of poverty and homelessness. The great challenges are not combatting global temperature rises but the housing crisis and the need to diversify the economy and improve the failing education system. As these problems have often been worsened by climate policies, there seems little reason for other states and countries to adopt California’s approach as a model.

halbergman via iStock/Getty Images

Fixing housing

California now has the nation’s
second-lowest home ownership rate at 55.9%, slightly above New York (55.4%). High interest rates that have helped push home sales to the lowest level in three decades across the country are particularly burdensome in coastal California metros, where prices have risen to nearly 400% above the national average. The government almost owned up to its role in creating the state’s housing crisis — especially through excessive housing regulations and lawfare on developers — earlier this year when Newsom moved to cut red tape so homes could be rebuilt after the Los Angeles fires.

Current state policy — embraced by Yes in My Backyard activists, the greens, and unions — focuses on dense urban development. Projects are held up, for example, for creating too many vehicle miles traveled, even though barely 3.1% of Californians in 2023 took public transit to work, according to the American Community Survey. As a result, much “affordable” development is being steered to densely built areas that have the highest land prices. This is made worse with mandates associated with new projects, such as green building codes and union labor, that raise the price per unit to
$1 million or more.

A far more enlightened approach would allow new growth to take place primarily outside city centers in interior areas where land costs are lower and where lower-cost, moderate-density new developments could flourish. These include areas like Riverside/San Bernardino, Yolo County (adjacent to Sacramento), and Solano County, east of San Francisco Bay. This approach would align with the behavior of residents who are already flocking to these areas because they provide lower-income households, often younger black and Latino, with
the most favorable home ownership opportunities in the state.Over 71% of all housing units in the Inland Empire are single-family homes, and the aggregate ownership rate is over 63%, far above the state’s dismal 45.8% level.

Without change, the state is socially, fiscally, and economically unsustainable. California needs to return to attracting the young, talented, and ambitious, not just be a magnet for the wealthy or super-educated few.

More than anything, California needs a housing policy that syncs with the needs and preferences of its people, particularly young families. Rather than being consigned to apartments,
70% of Californians prefer single-family residences. The vast majority oppose legislation written by Yes in My Backyard hero Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener banning single-family zoning in much of the state.

Investment in the interior is critical for recreating the old California dream for millions of aspiring households, particularly
among minorities who are being driven out of the home ownership market in the coastal metropolitan areas. The only California metropolitan area ranked by the National Association of Realtors as a top 10 pick for Millennials was not hip San Francisco or glamorous Los Angeles, but the more affordable historically “redneck” valley community of Bakersfield.

The numerous housing bills passed by Sacramento have
not improved the situation. From 2010 to 2023, permits for single-family homes in California fell to a monthly average of 3,957 units from 8,529 during 1993-2006. California’s housing stock rose by just 7.9% between 2010 and 2023, lower than the national increase (10.3%) and well below housing growth in Arizona (13.8%), Nevada (14.7%), Texas (24%), and Florida (16.2%).

A more successful model can be seen in
Texas, which generally advances market-oriented policies that have generated prodigious growth in both single-family and multi-family housing. This has helped the Lone Star State meet the housing needs of its far faster-growing population. A building boom has slowed, and there’s been some healthy decrease in prices in hot markets like Austin. Opening up leased grazing land in state and federal parks — roughly half the state land is owned by governments — could also relieve pressure on land prices. Until California allows for housing that people prefer, high prices and out-migration will continue into the foreseeable future.

Ultimately, California has room to grow, despite the suggestions by
some academics that the state is largely “built out.”In reality, California is not “land short,” either in its cities or across its vast interior. Urbanization covers only 5.3% of the state, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, while parks, agricultural land, deserts, and forests make up the bulk of the area.

Diversifying the economy

Even Jerry Brown has remarked that the “Johnny one note” tech economy the state’s tax base depends on could stumble. This would reduce the huge returns on capital gains from the top 1% of filers, who now account for
roughly half of all state income tax revenues. This overreliance may be particularly troublesome in the era of artificial intelligence, where tech companies may continue to expand but have less need for people. Indeed, San Francisco County, which boasts many tech jobs, experienced the nation’s largest drop in average weekly wages, 22.6%, between 2021 and 2022.

To expand opportunity and, hence, its tax base, California has to make more of the state attractive to employers. The best prospects, again, will be in inland areas.Today, when firms want to build spaceships, a clear
growth industry where California retains significant leadership, as well as battery plants and high-tech and food processing facilities, they often opt to go to Nevada, Arizona, Tennessee, and Texas. Given lower land and housing costs, San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, as well as spots on the Central Coast, should be ideally situated to compete for those jobs.

The current economic pattern creates a situation where AI developers, elite engineers, and venture capitalists may enjoy unprecedented profits, but relatively little trickles down to the mass of Californians. Not all Californians have wealthy parents to subsidize their lifestyle, and few are likely to thrive as AI engineers. To address the dilemmas facing the next generation of Californians, the state needs to focus not just on ephemera, software, and entertainment but on bringing back some of the basic industries that once forged the California dream. In this way, President Trump’s policies could actually help the state, particularly in fields like high-tech defense and space.

In the 1940s, California played a key role in the American “arsenal of democracy.” Today, it could do the same, not so much by producing planes and Liberty ships, but drones, rockets, and space-based defense systems. Indeed, there are now discussions of reviving the state’s once-vaunted
shipbuilding industry that buoyed the economy of Solano County — something sure to inspire the ire of the Bay Area’s rich and powerful environmental lobby.

Photo by Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Improving education

Climate and environmentalism are not the only barriers to California’s revival. No problem is more pressing and consequential than
the state’s failure to educate California’s 5.9 million public school children. In fiscal year 2023-2024, California will spend about $128 billion on K-12 public education — an amount exceeding the entire budget of every other state except New York. Despite this level of spending, about 75% of California students lack proficiency in core subject areas based on federal education standards.

Two out of three California students do not meet math standards, and more than half do not meet English standards on state assessments. Overall,
less than half of California public school students performed at or above grade level for English language arts (reading, writing, etc.), while only 34.62% met or exceeded the math standard on the Smarter Balanced 2023 tests. The failures are particularly clear among minority students. According to the latest California testing results, only 36.08% of Latino students met or exceeded proficiency standards for English language arts. Only 22.69% met or exceeded proficiency standards in math. Latino students, for example, in Florida and Texas do somewhat better in both math and English, even though both states spend less per capita on education than California.

Not surprisingly, many parents object to a system where half of the state’s high school students barely read
at grade level. One illustration of discontent has been the growth of the charter school movement. Today, one in nine California schoolchildren attend charter schools (including my younger daughter). The state’s largest school district, the heavily union-dominated Los Angeles Unified School District, has lost roughly 40% of its enrollment over two decades, while the number of students in charters grew from 140,000 in 2010 to 207,000 in 2022.

In addition to removing obstacles to charters, homeschoolers are part of the solution. California homeschool enrollment jumped by 78% in the five-year period before the pandemic and in the Los Angeles Unified School District by 89%. Equally important, some public districts and associated community colleges, as
in Long Beach, have already shifted toward a more skills-based approach. Public officials understand that to keep a competitive edge, they need to supply industrial employers with skilled workers. This is all the more crucial as the aerospace workforce is aging — as much as 50% of Boeing’s workforce will be eligible for retirement in five years. In its quest for relevance, Long Beach’s educational partnership addresses the needs of the city’s industrial and trade sectors.

This approach contrasts with the state’s big push to make students take
an ethnic studies course designed to promote a progressive and somewhat anti-capitalist, multicultural agenda. They will also be required to embrace the ideology of man-made climate change even if their grasp of basic science is minimal. A “woke” consciousness or deeper ethnic affiliations will not lead to student success later in life. What will count for the students and for California’s economy is gaining the skills that are in demand. You cannot run a high-tech lathe, manage logistics, or design programs for space vehicles with ideology.

More to come

Conventional wisdom
on the right considers California to be on the road to inexorable decline. Progressives, not surprisingly, embrace the Golden State as a model while ignoring the regressive, ineffective policies that have driven the state toward a feudal future.

Yet both sides are wrong. California’s current progressive policies have failed, but if the state were governed correctly, it could resurge in ways that would astound the rest of the country and the world. Change is not impossible. As recent elections showed, Californians do not reflexively vote for progressives if they feel their safety or economic interests are on the line.

If change is to come in California, it may not be primarily driven by libertarian or conservative ideologies but by stark realities. Over
two-thirds of California cities do not have any funds set aside for retiree health care and other expenses. Twelve of the state’s 15 large cities are in the red, and for many, it is only getting worse. The state overall suffers $1 trillion in pension debt, notes former Democratic state Rep. Joe Nation. U.S. News and World Report places California, despite the tech boom, 42nd in fiscal health among the states. This pension shortfall makes paying for infrastructure, or even teacher salaries, extraordinarily difficult at the state and local levels.

Without change, the state is socially, fiscally, and economically unsustainable, even if a handful of people get very rich and the older homeowners, public employees, and high-end professionals thrive. California needs to return to attracting the young, talented, and ambitious, not just be a magnet for the wealthy or super-educated few.

This can only happen if the state unleashes the animal spirits that long drove its ascendancy. The other alternative may be a more racial, class-based radicalism promoted by the Democratic Socialists of America and their allies. They have their own “cure” for California’s ills. We see this in debates over rebuilding Los Angeles, with progressives pushing for heavily subsidized housing, as with the case of the redevelopment of the
Jordan Downs public housing complex, while seeking to densify and expand subsidized housing to once solidly affluent areas like the Palisades.

California has survived past crises — earthquakes and the defense and dot-com busts — and always has managed to reinvent itself. The key elements for success — its astounding physical environment, mild climate, and a tradition for relentless innovation — remain in place, ready to be released once the political constraints are loosened.

Fifty years ago, in her song “California,” Canada-reared Joni Mitchell captured the universal appeal of our remarkable state, not just its sunshine, mountains, and beaches, but also how it gave its residents an unprecedented chance to meet their fondest aspirations. Contrasting her adopted home with the sheer grayness of life elsewhere, she wrote, “My heart cried out for you, California / Oh California, I’m coming home.”

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.

​Opinion & analysis, California, Golden state, Education reform, School choice, Housing, Environmentalism, Gavin newsom, Taxes, Population decline, Industry, Manufacturing, Crime, Public safety, Public schools, Pat brown, Jerry brown, Poverty, Homelessness, Wealth, Climate change, Entrepreneurship, Technology, Progressivism, San francisco, Inland empire, Dan lurie, Riots, Soros prosecutor, Chesa boudin, Elderly, Real estate 

Say what you will about Donald Trump — he knows how to drum up publicity. He’s even managed to interest Americans in Canada’s upcoming federal election, now less than a week away.

The president’s influence on the contest was all but guaranteed last month, when he made good on his threats to levy a 25% tariff on Canadian steel and aluminum — with further duties on lumber and pharmaceuticals a possibility.

Despite his ostensible Canada-first outlook, Pierre Poilievre has been in lockstep with the Liberal government policy on Ukraine for over three years.

Prior to this movie, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party was strongly favored to unseat the reigning Liberal Party, led by Justin Trudeau successor Mark Carney.

Not so today.

Agreeing to agree

The Liberals have benefited from a surge of Canadian antipathy toward Trump, to the extent that they now seem to be running more against the American president than the opposition Conservative Party — something that the American media has not failed to notice. For his part, Trump has actually endorsed Carney.

With the April 28 election looming, what has become a two-party race between Liberals and Conservatives remains close.

While the vote may serve as a referendum on Trump’s economic policy, another issue has proven depressingly uncontroversial: support for Ukraine. For all of their differences, Canada’s four major political parties all share a turgid and demented determination to continue to pour billions of dollars into the black hole of Kyiv.

This despite Trump’s repeated pledge to end the Russia-Ukraine war. While saying he could do it in a mere 24 hours may have been typical Trumpian hyperbole, it’s clear that securing peace remains a priority for the president.

Biden’s folly

One need only look at what happened under the previous administration to understand why. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a regular visitor to the Biden White House, always clad in his odd mixture of combat gear and activewear — and never leaving empty handed.

The engagement of U.S. and NATO military personnel alongside Ukrainian soldiers, as well as the use of American and British missiles to strike the Russian heartland, brought America perilously close to nuclear war with Russia. Seeing the horrible potential for a third world war, both Trump and then-Senator JD Vance urged caution and encouraged peace.

Incredibly, Canada seems not to have taken the hint.

Alone and outgunned

Even as Trump slowly but surely extricates the U.S. from supporting Ukraine and distances itself from NATO members who delusionally believe they can either take on Russia in a conventional war or somehow survive a nuclear one, Canadian political leaders talk about going it alone against Russia without America.

This is beyond ludicrous. Canada does not have a single operational tank left after giving all of its working Leopard models to Ukraine. It has yet to replenished the vast quantities of armaments it has given Ukraine; in fact, it is unable to do so. The U.K.’s military is also a shell of what it was, say, in 1982, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher went to war over the Falkland Islands.

Besides, the war is effectively over. Ukraine cannot continue to furnish more troops for the battlefield even if it continues to abduct recruits from the streets and bars. Anyone who advocates the continuation of the war is, knowingly or not, arguing for the killing of an entire generation of Ukrainians. It is a consummation that might have already occurred.

Not up for debate?

Canadians should demand to know why all four party leaders at the English-language leaders’ debate in Montreal last Thursday stood foursquare behind that policy.

Yes, such painful pandering should be expected from Carney, as well as Bloc Quebecois (separatist) chief Yves-Francois Blanchet and New Democratic Party boss Jagmeet Singh. But Poilievre?

Despite his ostensible Canada-first outlook, the politician has been in lockstep with the Liberal government policy on Ukraine for over three years.

When asked how a Conservative government would respond to Zelenskyy’s continued demands for money and armaments, Poilievre responded, “I believe we should continue to support Ukraine. Our party supported donating missiles that the Canadian military was decommissioning. We supported funds and other armaments to back the Ukrainians in the defense of their sovereignty.”

Knowing full well how unpopular this view is with his conservative base, Poilievre quickly tried to change the subject, emphasizing the need “to rebuild our own Canadian military, because the Russians want to make incursions into our waters.”

“We’ll be buying four massive Arctic ice breakers,” Poilievre continued. “I’ll be opening the first Arctic base since the Cold War in Canada, CFB, Iqaluit.”

Fleshing it out

That wasn’t good enough for the debate moderator, who pressed Poilievre to “put a little more flesh on the bone of what you think Canada could do for Ukraine.” His response:

My answer is that we should continue to support Ukraine. We don’t need to follow the Americans in everything they do when they’re wrong, then we will stand on our own and with other allies and with respect to Ukraine, that includes support with intelligence equipment, armaments, but it also includes defunding Putin. Right now, Vladimir Putin has a monopoly on the European energy market because, frankly, the liberals blocked exports of Canadian natural gas off the Atlantic coast. They blocked multiple projects. I would rapidly approve those projects on national security grounds, so that we can, we can actually ship Canadian natural gas over to Europe, break European dependence on Putin, defund the war, and turn dollars for dictators back into paychecks for our people.

Nice try, but it still adds up to flaky policy based on a perceived need to appease the Ukrainian-Canadian vote that is preponderant in many key constituencies across Canada — a vote that generally goes to the Liberals.

Poilievre’s words may also alienate Conservatives to the point that they decide not to vote at all — or to give their vote to the one Canadian party that opposes aid to Ukraine: Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada.

Maxime effort

People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier campaigns in Edmonton April 18. NurPhoto/Getty Images

A libertarian alternative that has fielded candidates in every Canadian riding and could actually capture one or two this election, the PPC lacked the 5% share of national voters necessary to participate in the debate.

Nevertheless, Bernier continues to speak for all Canadians fed up with their country’s involvement in this endless and expensive quagmire.

As he told Align:

The war in Ukraine is not a conflict between good and evil, or autocracy versus democracy. It’s a longstanding conflict over border territories between these two countries that has been amplified and turned into a proxy war by NATO and the imperialist warmongers in Washington and other western capitals.

It doesn’t concern Canada and we should have nothing to do with it. Russia is not our enemy. The only reason Canada is so involved is that the establishment parties are pandering to Canadians of Ukrainian descent.

It’s a message that deserves a wider hearing and could resonate with Canadians fed up with the endless and expensive quagmire.

​Donald trump, Justin trudeau, Canadian election, Pierre poilievre, Mark carney, Culture, Vladimir zelensky, Ukraine, Ukraine war, Letter from canada 

The world collectively gasped last July when Donald Trump — a then-candidate vying for a historic second presidential term — was nearly assassinated on live television.

In a series of events too shocking to seem impromptu, Trump turned his head just slightly, enough to inadvertently prevent a bullet from entering his skull.

One of the most remarkable facets of miracles is the corroborative proof they provide for the existence of a loving God.

The bizarre incident took place while he was speaking at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. It was a moment that left many pondering whether the hand of God had protected Trump, a boisterous billionaire who suffered little more than a surface injury when the bullet merely grazed his ear.

“The world saw a miracle before their eyes,” conservative activist Rocío Cleveland
said at the time — and other spectators agreed. Then, when a second purported assassination attempt was thwarted not long after, miracle claims once again mounted.

Even first lady Melania Trump jumped into the mix,
telling Fox News that “both of the events, they were really miracles, if you really think about it.”

“July 13th, it was a miracle like that much,” she added. “And he could, you know, he could not be with us.”

Not everyone bought in to the miracle narrative, though. Media outlets quickly seized upon those making such claims, with the Guardian publishing a essay
titled “Christian right see God’s hand in Trump rally shooting: ‘The world saw a miracle.’”

And Politico
added its own flare into the collective with this headline: “Republicans embrace ‘divine intervention’ for Trump’s near-miss into martyrdom.”

But while some headlines seemed to be near-mocking or at least dismissing the idea that Trump’s shocking survival somehow had divine elements, even the president’s former doctor felt the scenario qualified as a miracle.

Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, who served as a White House doctor for Trump and other presidents, stressed in a statement that the would-be assassin’s bullet came less than a quarter of an inch from entering Trump’s head.

“I am extremely thankful his life was spared,” Jackson
said. “It is an absolute miracle he wasn’t killed.”

Regardless of whether Americans believe Trump’s survival was God-ordained or contend the claim is an absurdity, there are some factors worth unpacking. The moment came during a contentious and confounding time in America — an era during which moral confusion and a stunning turn back to faith seem to be coexisting.

At a time when people increasingly realize moral relativism is nonsensical and that something eternal is worthy of consideration, Trump’s Butler moment offered fodder for those who believe miracles are real and that God is still operating in the world.

And it provided something worthwhile to contemplate for those open to the eternal.

Even if people reject this miracle narrative in Trump’s case, there are other examples of healing and radical lifesaving events that simply can’t be ignored.

I’ve spent the past year and a half working on my new Christian Broadcasting Network documentary,
“Investigating the Supernatural: Miracles,” a film exploring miraculous claims that would leave even the most skeptical among us questioning if something more might be afoot.

Here’s why all of this matters: One of the most remarkable facets of miracles is the corroborative proof they provide for the existence of a loving God. If it’s true that people are being healed in inexplicable ways — and if those healings are being guided by the Lord — then that evidence must be taken into account.

Of course, most Americans have no problem with miracles. A Pew Research Center poll from 2010 found that 80% of adults believe in miracles, with other subsequent polls coming to similar conclusions. In 2016, a Barna poll found that 66% of Americans “believe people can be physically healed supernaturally by God.”

So miracles are widely accepted, yet many of us still want provable evidence that they’re real. That’s why I’ve traveled the nation exploring stunning claims of miraculous medical healings for
“Investigating the Supernatural: Miracles.”

The Trump debate aside, I discovered many ironclad cases of medical healings that leave little room for doubt that God is more than active in our world today.

Take Dr. Chauncey Crandall, for example — a respected cardiologist and internist who has witnessed extraordinary recoveries in his medical work. One of the most jaw-dropping? A man who was declared clinically dead for 40 minutes — only to come back to life.

As wild as it sounds, the case is thoroughly recorded and backed by evidence.

Then there’s Bryan Lapooh, a former police officer from New Jersey who spent 10 years paralyzed following a freak fall on ice. But after attending a prayer gathering, something inexplicable happened: He walked out of the building and has been fine ever since.

Those are just two examples. The accounts featured in “Investigating the Supernatural: Miracles” aren’t flimsy or hearsay — they’re medically documented, rigorously defended, and absolutely astonishing.

But just like Trump’s case — one in which innocent victim Corey Comperatore was tragically killed — there are tough questions that must be explored: Why do some get miracles and not others? How do miracles work in the modern era? And what, if anything, dictates who receives a miracle and who doesn’t?

We were forced to grapple with these queries as we traveled the nation to analyze and examine these remarkable stories, and what we found transformed us.

Watch
“Investigating the Supernatural: Miracles” today to discover a truly powerful narrative that will leave you thinking differently about faith, prayer, and the meaning of modern-day miracles.

​God, Christianity, Miracles, Donald trump, Trump assassination attempt, Faith 

Glenn Beck just got back from Washington, D.C., where he became the first member of the media to interview President Trump about his first 100 days in office. Their conversation was expansive, jumping from one hot topic to the next.

However, off camera, there were just as many exciting things going on. On a recent episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn shared the best behind-the-scenes moments he shared with President Trump.

1. Solo in the Oval Office

“[President Trump] left me alone with my wife in the Oval Office for like five minutes,” he tells co-host Stu Burguiere. “I was alone with the Declaration of Independence. I mean it was incredible.”

“He said, ‘Nobody sits in here without the president,’” and “I said, ‘I’m aware of that,’ and he said, ‘But I knew you’d want to look at everything, so I thought you’d be more comfortable if you were here by yourself,”’ Glenn recounts, calling the experience “fantastic.”

2. Personal White House tour

Even though Glenn was allotted a strict 40 minutes for the interview, as President Trump had a meeting with the National Security Council to get to, that didn’t stop the president from taking Glenn on a personal tour of the White House.

Just as White House aides were trying to usher Trump out of the interview and into the meeting, where high-ranking officials were waiting for him, he said, “Let them wait.”

“He takes us through the entire White House room by room, shows us all of the meanings behind things — all the amazing things that nobody knows about the White House,” says Glenn.

The tour even included a trip to the Lincoln Bedroom, which can only be given by the president of the United States.

Glenn says the room was “a time capsule,” complete with the famous massive rosewood bed, a spooky painting of Lincoln said to be his favorite portrait of himself, an enormous mirror, eight feet by four feet, and a writing desk where one of four copies of the Gettysburg Address resides.

3. The REAL Trump

While the media goes to great lengths to paint him in every negative light it can conjure up, the truth is that Donald Trump is “always energized,” personable and caring, a brilliant historian, and, most importantly, “still humble,” says Glenn.

At one point, President Trump said to him, “Every day, Glenn, I wake up and I say to myself, ‘I can’t believe I’m in this house.'”

To hear more of Glenn’s behind-the-scenes stories from his time at the White House with President Trump, including a story about Hillary Clinton allegedly stealing doorknobs, watch the clip above.

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.

​The glenn beck program, Glenn beck, Trump interview, White house, Blazetv, Blaze media 

After a week of dealing with service calls to my internet company and having to go to many more stores than usual, I suspect there’s a coordinated campaign to prevent humans from talking to each other.

I’m not entirely kidding. Have you noticed, especially since the “pandemic,” that it’s becoming the new-normal to be stopped from speaking to other people? We’re now directed to “interface” with machines. It happens on the phone, at gas stations, at grocery stores, at restaurants.

There’s something so off about walking up to the register while one lone employee stands in front of the cigarette case and monitors you while you do his job.

Have you been handed a piece of paper with a QR code on it when you’re seated at a restaurant and told to “scan this for the menu”? Have you been told (not “asked”) to scan your own groceries, bag them, and punch your payment into the register?

How about the robotic phone tree lady that prevents you from speaking to a person at the gas company, the bank, or any other business you call?

Phoning it in

People have been complaining about the decline in customer service since at least as far back as the 1980s. The worst of it was the then-recently invented phone tree.

Phone trees have always been irritating, but they’re out of control now: There is no human staffed department to which you can be directed. Worse, companies deliberately restrict the subjects you can “ask” about by leaving them off the menu options, and the systems hang up on you if you try to get a human agent.

It’s getting infinitely worse with the overnight adoption of shiny, glittery-new AI technology. In the past month, I finally stopped doing business with my old internet company — a huge multinational company that you have heard of and not in fond terms — because it has programmed its AI “customer service rep” to blatantly refuse to connect customers with a human.

Call waiting (and waiting)

Here’s how these online chats go:

AI agent: Please choose from billing, technical support, or new sales.

Me: Need more options. Need agent.

AI: Please choose from billing, technical support, or new sales.

Me: Agent.

AI: I’m sorry, please choose from …

Me: Agent! I need an agent! My question is not listed!

AI: I’m sorry, but I cannot connect you to an agent until you follow the suggested steps above. Goodbye.

And then the chat window closes, or the call disconnects.

Yes, I’m serious. The robots now brazenly hang up on you if you don’t obey their commands. How did customers suddenly end up having to take orders from company devices instead of the other way around?

Inconvenience store

It’s no better in person, and I’m sorry to say that human behavior is just as bad as robotic misconduct. This week, I needed a five-gallon jug of kerosene. I heat and light my home in cold weather with restored antique kerosene lamps. These aren’t the small “Little House on the Prairie” oil lamps you’re thinking of; they’re big thirsty bad boys that put out major light and heat.

So I go to the farm store, where they sell kerosene in large jugs at 40% less than other stores. When I walk over to the shelf, there’s nothing there. Damn. Now, I have to weigh whether or not to talk to a staff member.

Fifteen years ago, this wasn’t a hard decision — in fact, it wasn’t a decision at all. But today? The most common response I get from store staff when asking for help is a facial expression that communicates irritation and an attitude meant to express, “You, customer, are inconveniencing me.”

It’s most pronounced in anyone under 40, as Millennials and Gen Zers were not taught things like “doing your job” or “not being awful to the people who pay your wage through their customers.”

I chance it and ask the frazzled 22-year-old at the register. He won’t make eye contact with me, of course. “Hi there. I see that the kerosene isn’t in its usual spot. Could you please tell me if you have it in stock, or when you will have it in stock again?”

Without looking at me, he replies, “I don’t know.” What am I supposed to say to this? Wouldn’t you take that as another way of saying, “I’m not going to answer your question, and I want you to go away?”

So I say, “Right. Could you please tell me who might know or how I will be able to find out whether I will be able to buy kerosene here and when that might be?”

Annoyed, the cashier makes an exasperated noise and says, “They don’t tell us what’s coming on the truck. All I know is that it comes on Tuesdays and Thursdays — check back then.”

When I worked retail, had my boss observed me speak to a patron like this, I would have been fired on the spot.

No talking

My last stop on this outing is to grab some lunch. There’s a brand-new gas station/convenience store/truck stop that just opened two miles up the road from where I live in Vermont. It’s sort of like a northern version of the famous Bucc-ee’s truck stop “malls” you see in the South. You can get hot and cold food, soft drinks, beer, liquor, small electronics accessories, motor oil, and toys to keep the kids quiet.

Sadly, “make the customer do the store’s job” has metastasized to the corner store, too.

This place is all self-checkout. There’s something so off about walking up to the register, while one lone employee stands in front of the cigarette case and monitors you while you do his job. There’s no etiquette for it. The employees don’t greet you, leaving you wondering if they’re afraid you’ll ask them to do something if they signal that they’re aware of your presence.

I am prepared for that. I am not prepared for having to do the same thing for a sandwich.

I stand at the deli counter for about two minutes, while two employees stand behind the counter 20 feet away chatting with each other as if I were not there. Then, it dawns on me. There is that bank of iPads blazing out saturated color. I, the customer, am forced to punch a touchscreen on the machine to put in my order. There is to be no talking to other humans.

The device has every annoyance, starting with the fact that the customer is forced to learn a new, company-bespoke set of “buttons” and software, adding frustration and time to what ought to be a simple request.

Employees won’t talk to you, of course, even when they know you’re having trouble. After finally (I think) placing my order, dramatic pipe organ music starts blaring from a hidden speaker. It’s playing a plagal cadence, the part at the end of a church hymn that goes “aaaaa-men.” Apparently, this signals that one’s order has been sent to St. Peter and will be delivered shortly.

The younger of the two counter staffers looks at me briefly while the fanfare echoes against the tile walls. I say, “Am I allowed to talk to you?”

She just stares at me.

​Josh slocum, Etiquette, Etiquette intervention, Customer service, Phone trees, Ai, Lifestyle, Rants, Intervention 

On Monday, April 21, Pope Francis passed away at his residence in the Vatican.

Formerly the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio ascended to the papal throne on March 13, 2013. He took the name Francis after St. Francis of Assisi, the medieval founder of the Franciscan Order. Francis’s reign as supreme pontif lasted 12 years.

The Catholic Church is far older than the liberal notion of egalitarianism, just as it is far older than the modern conception of a political ‘left’ and ‘right.’

Before we move on to speculating about the next pope, I think it is appropriate to reflect on Pope Francis and the nature of his office.

A hard time for traditionalists

As an American conservative and a traditionalist Catholic, I asked myself how I felt inclined to reflect on the legacy of a pope regarded by many in my circles to have been a staunch liberal.

Pope Francis’ reign — particularly the last four years — was a hard time for my community. I grew up attending the Traditional Latin Mass. My love for the traditional Mass and Sacraments was a deciding factor in my decision to abandon my career plans and spend a year in seminary discerning the priesthood.

When Francis imposed severe restrictions on the celebration of the Latin Mass, I was, like many others, deeply hurt. Many of my friends and fellow community members felt that the Holy Father had joined the outside world in persecuting faithful Catholics who were drawn to the ancient liturgies of our ancestors.

Unquestioned loyalty

I agreed with them. I felt (and still feel) that the Vatican chose mistakenly and unfairly to persecute some of the most faithful, devoted communities in the Church. I also agreed with them that these persecutions — no matter how severe they might become — would never cause us to question our obedience and loyalty to the pope responsible for them.

Similarly, my disagreements with Pope Francis on political issues such as mass migration, capital punishment, incarceration, policies surrounding COVID-19, and his openness to globalism (to say nothing of the more Catholic insider issues such as fiducia supplicans and fratelli tutti) never caused me to question my obedience to him.

I loved Pope Francis as a son loves his father, and I never questioned my fidelity and loyalty to him as pope. The reasons for this loyalty are very simple: I am a Catholic, and he was the pope. No other reason is needed.

Beyond left and right

For a Catholic, his relationship to the pope and to the Church is in no way contingent upon the modern concepts of left and right, liberal and conservative. It is far more integral to his person than such labels can possibly be.

It does not surprise me that this sort of relationship seems odd to many people. In this country, we tend to have an egalitarian view of leadership. We believe (rightly, in the case of the United State government) that our leaders represent us; they work for us. If they act badly or make a mistake, they ought to be criticized or ridiculed in the same way anyone else would be.

The Catholic Church is far older than the liberal notion of egalitarianism, just as it is far older than the modern conception of a political “left” and “right.”

Christ’s man on Earth

Our populist view of government simply does not apply to the papacy. The pope does not represent us; he represents Christ. He does not work for us; he works for God. To allow our loyalty to a pope to be determined by the alignment of his political views with our own is to treat God as our elected representative.

The office of the pope as Vicar of Christ does not mean, of course, that Catholics cannot voice concerns or offer respectful critiques of a pope. For a Catholic, such concerns or criticisms must always be respectful and coming from a place of charity toward the person of the pope and concern for the well-being of the Church. The pope’s role means that he must be obeyed and respected, but it does not mean that he does not make mistakes. He is human, after all.

‘Knavish imbecility’

The Church has never claimed that its servants are faultless. Many leaders — and even popes — in the history of the Church have made mistakes and behaved badly. To point out such behavior is entirely appropriate, but to claim that a bad pope disproves the claims of the Church is akin to claiming the U.S. Constitution cannot be a workable system of government because Woodrow Wilson was a terrible president.

Hilaire Belloc summed up the matter well when he wrote, “The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine, but for unbelievers, a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.”

For Catholics, our relationship to our Holy Father goes far beyond the policies we may or may not agree on, just as our Church goes far beyond our political alignment with those in the pews around us.

To a Catholic, our Church is the one true Christian religion. Our membership in it is just as much a part of us as our arms and legs. Such is our loyalty to the Holy Father.

Whatever we may think of him, however he may treat us, we know that Christ, who founded our Church, remains with us, “Even to the consummation of the world.” Taking the advice of St. Padre Pio, American Catholic conservatives such as myself will pray, we will hope, and we will not worry.

​Abide, Catholicism, Pope francis, Christianity, Faith, The vatican, Latin mass, Lifestyle, Culture, In memoriam 

Michelle Obama has taken the uncommon path of a former first lady and started a podcast where she talks about the important issues like how black women think they need permission to express pain.

And it’s every bit as insufferable as one might expect.

“We grew up with women who weren’t voicing the pain and the burden,” Obama told her brother, Craig Robinson, and Taraji P. Henson. “They made it look easy. And when you make stuff look easy, people assume that you must like this, it’s okay with you.”

“We don’t articulate as black women — our pain — because it’s almost like nobody ever gave us permission to do that,” she continued, before Henson interrupted, asking, “And does anyone care?”

“If we knew, I think we would care,” Robinson answered, before Obama continued waxing poetic.

“We have to ask ourselves, the men in our lives, is ‘Why wait to be asked?’ It seems like what we go through is pretty obvious. I mean, maybe we’re not complaining, but we’re actually living life out loud.”

Obama went on to lament that black women are “so easily labeled as angry and bitter” while white women are viewed as “lightness” and have “an ability to be in this world and see what’s going on.”

“Are black women struggling to talk about their pain? Are they not free to do that in America?” Jason Whitlock of “Jason Whitlock Harmony” asks co-host Shemeka Michelle.

“Initially I thought, ‘This is so stupid,’ because that’s all we hear and see is the pain of black women. That’s all they talk about. And I found it ironic that she was sitting there talking to Taraji P. Henson, who has complained over and over again. She pretty much tanked ‘The Color Purple’ because all she was doing was complaining,” Michelle says.

“Maybe black women aren’t articulating ‘their pain’ in the correct way, because everytime I turn around I’m seeing some type of video where they’re tearing up the McDonald’s, or trying to run over their baby daddy, or fighting in a Walmart in their pajama pants and their bonnets,” Michelle continues.

“So maybe she has a point that they don’t ‘articulate’ their pain, because they’re busy showing out and acting like untamed gorillas,” she adds.

Want more from Jason Whitlock?

To enjoy more fearless conversations at the crossroads of culture, faith, sports, and comedy with Jason Whitlock, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Camera phone, Free, Sharing, Upload, Video, Video phone, Youtube.com, Fearless, Jason whitlock, Jason whitlock harmony, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Michelle obama, Michelle obama podcast, Black women, Anti racist, Color blind, Shemeka michelle, Fearless with jason whitlock 

As Christians, we should know what we owe to our fellow Jesus followers — “one another” as the Bible calls us.

Before we can effectively love our neighbor — “neighbor” in this context meaning those not yet a part of the family of God — we need to understand the importance of how we interact with our brethren in Christ.

Paul’s prayers center on one thing: that believers may become more and more like Christ, growing into spiritual powerhouses.

Obviously, we are to love one another. We are to model the early church as it is described to us in Acts. We are to mindfully learn and apply all the “one anothers” the Bible gives us. We are to speak truth in love to one another (and others, as well).

One of the most powerful ways to love one another is to diligently pray for one another (James 5:16). And one of the most powerful ways to accomplish that is to pray scripture for them.

This is nothing new. After all, many of us have been praying the Lord’s Prayer, which is straight out of scripture, for much of our lives. Many psalms also lend themselves to prayer and worship. Much scripture has been set to music so that we can pray in song, as well.

But when it comes to powerfully praying for our brethren, the apostle Paul was a master. In God-breathed letters to at least three churches — the Colossians, the Philippians, and the Ephesians — he tells his flock exactly how he’s praying for them.

Paul’s prayer for the Colossians

Colossians 1:9-12:

For this reason also, since the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you may be filled with the full knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you may walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please Him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and multiplying in the full knowledge of God; being strengthened with all power, according to His glorious might, for the attaining of all steadfastness and patience; joyously giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.

What a magnificent prayer! In a few short lines, Paul asked God that the Colossians might:

Be filled with the knowledge of God’s will, in all spiritual wisdom and understanding: This is a wonderful starting place for praying for your fellow believers — that they understand and wisely follow God’s will for their lives.Walk worthy of God, pleasing Him in every way

And then he prayed specifically for how they could do that:

Bear fruit in every good work and increase in the knowledge of God: These two categories are what should comprise our day-to-day existence! Knowing Him and making Him known. Sitting at His feet daily, and serving Him wholeheartedly.Be strengthened with all power, according to God’s glorious might, to attain perseverance and patience: Paul recognized that persevering and being patient only come through the mighty power of the Holy Spirit within us and are important enough to merit their own mention in his prayer.Joyously thank the Father, who has qualified us to share in His inheritance of our fellow saints in light: Here, he prays for his fellow believers to be filled with joy and gratitude, looking up to what lies ahead.

If you’re praying for the believers in your life to understand God’s will, walk worthy and please Him, bear fruit and know Him better, be strengthened In God’s power, and joyously give thanks — you’re on target.

Again, this was a prayer for a specific group of people from Paul. But because it is recorded in holy scripture, we know this prayer is God-breathed. What a privilege to be able to pray this exact prayer for our brothers and sisters in Christ. We can do that in general, praying for all our fellow disciples this way.

But it is perhaps more meaningful to actually write out this prayer for a specific brother or sister, by name.

For example:

Lord, I continually ask You to fill Anna with the knowledge of Your will in spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that she will walk worthy of You and please You in every way — bearing fruit in every good work and growing in her knowledge of You. Please strengthen her with all power, according to Your glorious might, so she may obtain great perseverance and patience. And help her joyfully thank You, who has qualified us both to share in the inheritance of Your saints in the kingdom of light.

Praying this way ignites my spirit. We know that when we pray in alignment with God’s will, He acts. How amazing that He’s given us scripture like this that demonstrates, in a very practical way, how He would have us pray for the “one anothers” with whom He has blessed us.

Bonus question: How might you adapt this prayer for your unbelieving friends?

Paul’s prayer for the Philippians

Another rich prayer is recorded for us in Philippians 1:3-6:

I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always offering prayer with joy in my every prayer for you all, in view of your participation in the gospel from the first day until now. For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work among you will complete it by the day of Christ Jesus.

This is a good reminder to thank God for the Jesus followers He’s brought into our lives — and to start any prayer for them by expressing our gratitude for the blessings they bring to us.

Note also the attitude he brings to his prayer time for them. He is mindful of their “participation in the gospel” — he is mindful that they are walking the same path as he is — and this brings him joy.

His next thought is a verse we often quote as a reminder that “God isn’t finished with us yet.” Isn’t it interesting that he put it right here in a prayer for them? Almost like he wanted to remind himself that no matter what mistakes and stumbles he might have to address, these beloved friends were a work in progress, in the process of being sanctified.

In other words, they were people deserving of his grace, too. Another good reminder.

But the real meat of his prayer for them is found in verses 9-11:

And this I pray, that your love may overflow still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment, so that you may discover the things that are excellent, that you may be sincere and blameless for the day of Christ; having been filled with the fruit of righteousness which comes through Jesus Christ, for the glory and praise of God.

That our love may overflow … in real knowledge and discernment. What do those two things have to do with love?

As for knowledge: Our agape love for our brothers and sisters does not spring from some sort of flowery sentimentality. It springs from scriptural truth. Scripture is what defines love, so we can’t love well without that knowledge. Again, we speak the truth in love and love others well with truth — always.

As for discernment: It turns out love is not blind, after all. The Greek word used here for “discernment” is where we get our English word “aesthetic,” which as John MacArthur notes, speaks of moral perception, insight, and practical application of knowledge. “Love is not blind,” he says, “but perceptive, and it carefully scrutinizes to distinguish between right and wrong.”

That biblical, perceptive love is what Paul wants overflowing in believers. Why?

So that we can discover what things are excellent. This is about developing keen perception, distinguishing between which things are worthy of our time and which are hindrances. And what does this pursuit of excellent things net us?

It means we are sincere and blameless as we transition out of this world and into our heavenly reward in glory with Jesus. It means that in this life, we are filled with the fruit of righteousness, again as a result of Jesus’ work. And what is the purpose of those results? The glory and praise of God.

Don’t we all want someone praying these things for us? So let us pray them for one another — wholeheartedly and personally.

Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians

Ephesians 1 is a magnificent chapter, and I encourage you to read it right now. Paul’s first prayer for the Ephesians comes toward the end of that chapter:

Ephesians 1:15-19a:

For this reason I too, having heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which exists among you and your love for all the saints, do not cease giving thanks for you, while making mention of you in my prayers; that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the boundless greatness of His power toward us who believe.

This is such a rich passage. Paul is telling the Ephesians that when he mentions them in his prayers, he does so with continuous gratitude for them — due to their exemplary faith, evidenced by their love for one another.

And then he goes on to tell them what he asks God for, on their behalf:

Wisdom: The ability to take knowledge and put it into action, or in other words, how to live well in God’s world. This is an attribute we should diligently seek always. The first nine chapters of Proverbs make a powerful argument for this pursuit.Revelation in the knowledge of Him: This is the continuing learning process (“revelation”) that we undergo as we learn more about God through immersion in His Word.Enlightened “eyes of the heart”

That last one means seeing God clearly with a spiritually enlightened mind, which results in knowledge of three life-changing truths:

The truth of the hope of His calling: a confident understanding of the hope He provides His children, and a grasp of what awaits us.The truth of the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints: again, starting to grasp the immense and glorious riches that are ours as His saints.The truth of the boundless power of His greatness toward us who believe.

I love what John MacArthur says about this last point:

God’s great power, that very power which raised Jesus from the dead and lifted Him by ascension back to glory to take His seat at God’s right hand, is given to every believer at the time of salvation and is always available. Paul therefore did not pray that God’s power be given to believers, but that they be aware of the power they already possessed in Christ and use it. — MacArthur Study Bible (notes)

That’s really the point of Paul’s prayer for enlightened eyes of the heart: that we be aware of what God in Christ has already given us — and then we use it.

This is indeed an immensely powerful prayer that we can personalize for our brothers and sisters. And there’s nothing wrong with asking our brothers and sisters to pray this for us, too.

But Paul had one more spectacular prayer for his beloved Ephesian church. It is one of the most beautiful passages in all his letters (and there are a lot of beautiful passages, to be sure):

Ephesians 3:14-19:

For this reason I bend my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner self, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to all the fullness of God.

Praying this sublime language is an act of worship in itself, since it includes such a marvelous depiction of God’s unquestioned authority.

But let’s look at what Paul is asking God to grant the Ephesians here “according to the riches of His glory,” which again are available to every Christ-follower:

That God would grant them strength, derived from the power of the Holy Spirit within each individual, so that Christ dwells in their hearts through faith. In other words, that we would please Him by keeping our hearts clean through the power of His Spirit as we submit to His lordship.That God would grant them the state of being rooted and grounded in love — the self-sacrificial agape love given for us by Him, that we are to freely share.That God would grant them comprehension (awareness and understanding), along with all the other saints, of the vast immensity of the love of Christ, which surpasses simple head knowledge. We can’t know this kind of love without being His children.

Knowing all of this leads to being filled with the fullness of God. It leads to spiritual strength as we discipline our minds and spirits to study, understand, and live by God’s word through His Spirit’s power — increasingly, as we mature in Him.

Quoting my friend Dr. MacArthur one more time:

Although the outer, physical person becomes weaker with age, the inner, spiritual person should grow stronger through the Holy Spirit, who will energize, revitalize, and empower the obedient, committed Christian.

But wait — there’s more

Here are a few more of Paul’s prayers that you can personalize for those you are bringing to God’s throne room:

1 Corinthians 4:1-91 Thessalonians 1:2-31 Thessalonians 5:23 (brief but such a good one)2 Thessalonians 1:11-12Philemon 4–7

Paul’s prayers center on one thing: that believers may become more and more like Christ, growing into spiritual powerhouses. That is why these passages are so powerful when we pray them for each other, by name, specifically.

Let’s love one another by praying this way.

This article was adapted from an essay originally published on Diane Schrader’s Substack, She Speaks Truth.

​Apostle paul, Christianity, Christians, Prayer, God, Jesus, Faith 

I grew up around the evangelical Christian subculture. My sister and I were the only kids our age at our church, so I ended up visiting various other youth groups, going to the pizza parties, lock-ins, concerts, and mission trips.

My first-ever concert was Amy Grant with Michael W. Smith as the opener. A few years later, Smith was the headliner with a dynamic up-and-coming opening act called DC Talk that electrified a crowd of teenage Christian kids. Hearing “Flood” by Jars of Clay on secular radio was so exciting that I almost thought the millennial reign of Christ had arrived. I remember seeing my first episode of “VeggieTales” while on a retreat, which is also where I heard “Big House” by Audio Adrenaline for the first time. I was a big fan of Caedmon’s Call in college, particularly enjoying Derek Webb’s gravelly vocals and edgy songwriting.

We are not faced with a binary choice between authenticity and hypocrisy.

As the years have gone by, some of these people have turned out to be hypocrites. Lots of kids looked to them as spiritual role models, not knowing they weren’t who they seemed to be. I hear reports that the contemporary Christian music industry is pretty messed up. Artists whose CDs I purchased now identify as LGBTQ in some way. Some have abandoned all semblance of orthodox Christianity, while others have rejected Christ outright.

The fallout caused by all these defections from the true faith is often blamed on cultural Christianity, which enabled talented people to get paid for entertaining Christian kids. Now that their hypocrisy has been exposed, some have become openly hostile to cultural Christianity altogether.

What a difference a year makes

Here’s a recent example from the last two Easter Holidays.

Last week, the White House issued a number of pro-Christian, Easter-themed posts and videos from President Donald Trump, who openly celebrated the “Resurrection of Jesus Christ” and proclaimed in his hallmark all-caps style, “HE IS RISEN!!”

Last year, Easter happened to coincide with “Transgender Day of Visibility,” which was celebrated by a White House press release. The White House’s Easter acknowledgement was quite muted in comparison.

The administration denied any deliberate attempt to subvert Easter with transgenderism, but the graphic design department must not have gotten the memo. The transgender statement had an Easter bunny in the White House logo.

Two Easters, one year apart. What a difference a year makes.

This Easter felt like living in another world compared to last year. Why? Because last year, it felt like the entire culture and our government were hostile to Christianity. This year, Trump proclaimed the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ through the world’s biggest microphone.

Two different White House occupants were leveraging their influence to promote two different visions of “the good” for our society. Whichever vision of “the good” our society adopts can have a great impact on the church and her mission.

Simply put: A society that broadly believes “Transgender Day of Visibility” is worth celebrating will inevitably persecute the faith that condemns it as sin. A society that broadly believes “HE IS RISEN!!” will not.

The hypocrisy of cultural Christianity

I’m sure some people would object that Trump didn’t really mean what he said and was just pandering to his Christian base. They’d say, “He’s not a real Christian! That’s just cultural Christianity! It encourages nominal Christianity and hypocrisy!” For this reason, some say, cultural Christianity is just a celebration of hypocrisy. Thus, insincere overtures celebrating Christianity are wrong and harmful.

Pastor Ray Ortlund, for example, openly celebrated the decline of cultural Christianity in a since-deleted tweet which said, “I rejoice at the decline of Bible Belt Religion. It made bad people worse — in the name of Jesus. Now may we actually believe in Him, so that our churches stand out with both the truth of gospel doctrine and the beauty of gospel culture. To that end, I gladly devote my life.”

In other words, Ortlund presented the issue as a binary choice: You can either have the hypocrisy of “Bible Belt Religion” or you can have “the truth of gospel doctrine.”

Given these options, the choice is clear: We must “rejoice at the decline” of cultural Christianity because that gives rise to “the beauty of gospel culture.”

Hypocrisy vs. persecution

This is a false dichotomy. We are not faced with a binary choice between authenticity or hypocrisy. Rather, we are faced with a different kind of binary: hypocrisy or persecution.

True Christianity can thrive in either condition, but one is better than the other. Let me explain.

Have you noticed that Jesus condemned the sin of hypocrisy far more frequently than the rest of the New Testament? Why is this? The disparity can be explained by the divergent contexts of Jesus’ Jewish-focused ministry and the later church’s Gentile-focused ministry.

The Pharisees feigned godliness as a kind of insincere performance. Hypocrisy is playacting for an audience, and Jesus called them out for it. They were fake. Posers. Insincere. They didn’t really follow God; they had their own agenda. But their personal agendas were enabled by the expectations of the Jewish community they belonged to. They wanted to enjoy the benefits of being Jewish leaders within the Jewish subculture that rewarded them and gave them power.

In other words, hypocrisy only works when there’s an audience that values the genuine faith you’re counterfeiting. Said in another way: Hypocrisy is a byproduct of gospel influence.

When persecution broke out in the early church, Christians fled Jerusalem and scattered into pagan, idol-filled Gentile areas that were more hostile to the gospel (Acts 16:16-23, Acts 19:21-41). Thus, persecution became a major concern that moved more prominently into focus of apostolic teaching.

In other words, persecution is a byproduct of gospel decline.

When Christians are constantly harassed and threatened by hostile forces, faithfulness under persecution replaces hypocrisy as the greater discipleship concern (1 Peter 4:12-14). When everyone hates Christianity, there is no reward for being a fake one. God uses persecution to purify and strengthen his church.

Persecution is not a sacrament

This brings me to a modern tension. Christians are divided as to which is the preferred state of affairs.

Is it better for us to adopt a strict “exile” mentality, where we prefer being a persecuted yet faithful minority? Or is it better to assume Christianity and the culture it produces as a normative good, despite the hypocrisy that inevitably accompanies it?

The “victorious Christian” favors strong, public assertions of Christian truth and morality, knowing that some will parrot the pro-Jesus talking points insincerely.

The “Christian in exile” favors persecution as a purifying agent to rid the church of hypocrisy and all other vestiges of insincerity.

Here’s the thing: Hypocrisy is a sin, but it’s not so uniquely intractable that it demands dismantling cultural Christianity and embracing secular hostility as the sole remedy. Put another way, persecution is not a sacrament. We need not seek it as a good in and of itself.

Christians
can thrive under persecution, but scripture does not require persecution in order to thrive. That’s a big difference.

Some Christians are afraid that the inevitable hypocrisy that would result from a victorious Christianity is so bad as to spoil any positive good that might come from cultural Christianity. Thus, the church should adopt an embattled minority posture, in which believers are few but true. Persecution is a necessary condition to prove their devotion. Christianity on the whole must lose to prove they’re the ones who really mean it.

I’ve known many people who romanticize the genuineness of the early church that faithfully endured great persecution, or the hardships of third-world missionaries in faraway hostile lands. Those are the
real Christians.

What a miserable way to live!

Many Christians face this conundrum with tortured consciences and irrational moral standards while consoling themselves with gospel platitudes. They tell themselves “this is the way of the cross,” “true Christian power often looks like defeat,” and “this is the power and wisdom of God.” Of course, when we lose, we can take comfort in those truths.

But the Bible does not require that we live this way.

Persecution is intended to slow, stop, or reverse the advance of the gospel. It happens because it works. It is very difficult for the gospel seed to bear fruit when it is constantly being choked by thorny soil. People don’t seem to realize that many of our pioneering missionary heroes labored under grueling conditions for
years before winning a single convert.

Celebrating persecution as a cure for hypocrisy is like gargling bleach to cure bad breath. Less extreme remedies are preferable.

The blessing of cultural Christianity

Hypocrisy is a sin “in the camp,” so to speak. It is the kind of sin that arises when Christianity is culturally dominant, forming everyone’s expectations, norms, and behaviors, such that it exerts social pressure to conform to Christian standards. The exhortation to a hypocritical person is to be
more Christian, not less. Jesus corrected the hypocritical Pharisees by calling them to live more in line with the faith they outwardly professed.

Any gospel field will yield wheat and tares. The most fertile soil for gospel seed is a field already pre-tilled with cultural Christianity. As we have seen in recent decades, some people will present the “appearance of godliness but denying its power” (2 Timothy 3:5), but others will authentically accept Christ as savior and Lord. When insincere people want to enjoy the social benefits of pretending to be Christian, they can be corrected of their hypocrisy and called to live more gospel-aligned lives (Galatian 2:11-14).

Cultural Christianity creates upward pressure that encourages people to outwardly conform to Christian expectations, which is a way of preaching law through social standards that can highlight their sin and need for Christ. Like a zero-entry pool, cultural Christianity helps newer believers observe the Christian life within a community, framing spiritual realities in familiar terms, and pre-evangelizing them in ways that may later produce true faith.

Don’t get me wrong: Cultural Christianity doesn’t save anyone. It can even produce false converts. But many false converts are simply pre-converts who have yet to fully apprehend and apply, by faith, the teaching they’ve received. The Bible Belt religion of the American South, for example, has produced both hypocrisy and spiritual fruit.

In other words, persecution is not the only remedy for hypocrisy. Christianized cultures can amplify gospel impact, and hypocrisy will always be a fruit of thriving Christian communities.

Hypocrisy is inevitable. It will always exist anywhere authentic faith thrives. However, persecution is
not inevitable. Cultural Christianity may even be the means God uses to prevent persecution from arising in our society that would threaten to destroy our faithful churches.

Conclusion

As I’ve reflected on the vivid contrast between Biden and Trump’s Easter Week statements the past two years, I’ve found myself being grateful for the political cover of having a president openly celebrating the “crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.” It’s good to see the faith that I teach and uphold as a pastor being loudly affirmed in our nation’s highest office.

Ultimately, cultural Christianity is a double-edged sword. It can breed hypocrisy when one’s faith turns performative, yet it can also lay a foundation for the gospel to flourish.

Persecution may be a refining fire, but Christians never celebrate it as an opportunity to demonstrate our Christian sincerity. Persecution is not God’s only tool to correct hypocrisy. Christianity has its own tools of ongoing reform, such as teaching, reproof, correction, and training in the word of God (2 Timothy 3:16-17).

We need not wring our hands about hypocrisy evident in cultural Christianity. We certainly need not pine after persecution as the sole remedy. We faithfully endure persecution, if it comes. Otherwise, we work like crazy to prevent it as much as possible.

​Christianity, Christians, Hypocrisy, God, Cultural christianity, Culture war, Faith 

President Donald Trump is taking more action on behalf of Christians, making good on his promise to defend the faith.

On Tuesday, prominent Christians and members of the Trump administration convened for the first meeting of the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias. Trump established the task force to correct the “egregious pattern of targeting peaceful Christians, while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses” that he said occurred in the Biden administration.

The Trump administration is exposing the rotten fruit of the negative world.

Shocking evidence to prove those allegations was presented at this week’s meeting.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for example, presented evidence of bias against Christian foreign service officers who homeschool their children. Rubio said the Biden administration threatened the officers with allegations of child abuse or IRS investigations if they insisted on homeschooling. He also said Christians in the Biden administration were discriminated against for opposing DEI and LGBTQ ideology, stigmatized for opposing the COVID-19 shot, and had their religious holidays downplayed while non-Christian holidays were openly celebrated.

This is what other officials testified to:

FBI Director Kash Patel spoke about the anti-Catholic memo the FBI, under then-President Joe Biden, issued.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke about how the Biden administration targeted a Catholic hospital and exposed “progressive rules” the administration enacted against Christians hoping to become foster parents.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon spoke about discrimination against Christians who oppose the LGBTQ agenda in education policy.
Deputy Treasury Secretary Michael Faulkender discussed “financial surveillance” of Christian organizations under the Biden administration, which allegedly included weaponization of tax classification statuses, de-banking, and labeling certain organizations as “hate groups.”
Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins revealed how the Biden administration allegedly punished a chaplain for preaching from the Bible.Domestic Policy Council Director Vince Haley spoke about the Biden administration’s campaign to advance anti-Christian gender ideology on children.

The task force also heard allegations that the IRS under Biden targeted churches under the guise of the Johnson Amendment and claims that Liberty University and Grand Canyon University were targeted for fines over their Christian worldview.

“As shown by our victims’ stories today, Biden’s Department of Justice abused and targeted peaceful Christians while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said.

Michael Farris, a celebrated attorney, said he thought the meeting would be “small” and “informal.” But he was surprised when he learned just how serious the Trump administration is about defending Christians.

“I have been in a lot of high ranking meetings in my 40+ years in DC but this was over the top,” Farris said.

“I was absolutely blown away. We heard frank stories of terrible treatment of Christians by the prior administration. In the military, by the FBI, by the State Department, by the Justice Department, the Education Department and more. And the solutions were swift, real, and incredibly inspiring,” he continued.

“I have chaired meetings in the past where the top Christian litigators shared our most outrageous cases and where we were making plans to fight back,” Farris explained. “Today’s meeting had that same spirit but with one major difference. These people actually run our government and were swiftly taken the kind of action that for a long time Christians have believed were demanded by justice. I was amazed and encouraged deeply in my soul.”

The task force, Farris added, is proof that the Trump administration is following through on campaign promises “quickly” and “vigorously.”

“If every believer could have seen this in person their hearts would be overflowing tonight,” Farris said.

Not only is the Trump administration exposing instances of anti-Christian bias that happened in the Biden administration, but it is taking proactive measures to prevent such discrimination from continuing.

Earlier this month, the State Department and VA deployed memos to employees asking them to report incidents of anti-Christian bias. The goal is to completely eliminate all forms of anti-Christian discrimination from the federal government.

For a generation, American Christians have existed in a “negative world.” Aaron Renn, who coined the phrase, explains:

Society has come to have a negative view of Christianity. Being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of society. Christian morality is expressly repudiated and seen as a threat to the public good and the new public moral order. Subscribing to Christian moral views or violating the secular moral order brings negative consequences.

Our faith has been mocked. Our values have been eroded and stigmatized. In a progressive world, faithful Christians have increasingly become an “other,” the target of scorn and public ridicule.

But now, the Trump administration is exposing the rotten fruit of the negative world.

Clearly, Trump means business. The task force is more than a nod or gesture; it’s a signal that anti-Christian bias will no longer be tolerated in the federal government. More importantly, Trump is sending a message to Christians everywhere: I see you. I hear you. I am willing to fight and to defend you.

Christians should celebrate this moment. Not because our hope is found in Washington, but because faithful Christians and biblical values have increasingly become stigmatized in the halls of powerful institutions. And now, that is changing.

Perhaps we are finally witnessing a reversal of the negative world.

​Donald trump, Anti-christian bias, Trump administration, Christianity, Jesus, Christians, God, Faith 

Like the “Free Tibet” campaign of the late 1990s, concern for China’s Uyghur population has faded into the background. In the mid-2010s, Beijing faced a short-lived wave of international criticism after General Secretary Xi Jinping created a vast network of internment camps. Nearly three million Uyghurs have been detained and subjected to brutal conditions.

Republicans looking to push back against anti-tariff Democrats should take note. This humanitarian catastrophe continues today, yet receives little sustained attention. It ranks among the most severe human-rights abuses on the planet — and American free-trade policies may have helped enable it. For decades, U.S. leaders embraced open commerce with China while ignoring the costs. That strategic blindness now carries a moral price.

Has our refusal to implement strong tariffs created a monster?

Beijing has long portrayed Xinjiang separatists as Islamic terrorists. This year marks a decade since their last major act of violence — a brutal knife attack at a coal mine that left 50 people dead, mostly Han Chinese workers and police. Horrific as it was, critics argue the assault, like previous incidents, reflected a desperate backlash against the Chinese state’s colonial-style repression.

Since Xi Jinping’s crackdown, no similar attacks have occurred. But the sheer scale of the regime’s response pushes China into apartheid territory — arguably beyond.

Reports estimate that up to three million of China’s 10-million-strong Uyghur population are now detained in so-called re-education camps. These camps aim to strip the Sunni Muslim minority of its identity and recast them as loyal subjects of the Chinese Communist Party.

Other reports indicate that many Uyghurs held in China’s re-education camps are forced to work in factories under conditions tantamount to slavery. Even more disturbing, some evidence suggests that, after “re-education,” Uyghurs are sold online in batches to employers across the country. Xinjiang produces one-fifth of the world’s cotton, and estimates say half a million Uyghurs are forced to pick it. That “free labor” gives Chinese manufacturers a competitive edge — one reportedly tied to the bankruptcy of major U.S. retailer Forever 21.

Democrats may oppose forced labor in theory, but where is the push to penalize what amounts to a 21st-century plantation economy? Would they stay silent if Russia did the same?

One of the most chilling aspects of Beijing’s ethnic campaign is its attempt to re-engineer Xinjiang’s population. This isn’t new. Seventy years ago, Mao Zedong launched a mass migration project to dilute the region’s Uyghur majority. The “Great Leap West,” introduced in 2000, revived the strategy — this time using financial incentives to bring Han Chinese into Xinjiang and offering jobs reserved for Han applicants outside the region. The policy remains in effect, along with forced out-migration of Uyghurs to other parts of China.

Even Western media outlets — usually quick to denounce any effort to reduce immigration — have expressed alarm over Beijing’s demographic engineering in Xinjiang. Many now acknowledge the regime’s mass Han migration into the region as a deliberate attempt to dilute the Uyghur population and strip the minority of any political influence.

More disturbing still are reports of mass sterilization campaigns. Chinese authorities have allegedly targeted Uyghur women to suppress birth rates. In 1990, hundreds of Uyghur men stormed a government building to protest forced abortions — a clash that ended with nearly 20 people dead.

The demographic consequences are staggering. In 1955, Uyghurs made up 90% of Xinjiang’s population. Today, they account for less than half.

Pro-Trump conservatives should grasp the strategic value of highlighting China’s use of migration as a political weapon. Doing so forces the left to confront a reality it usually denies: replacement-level immigration exists, and it carries consequences. Group identity rights don’t just apply to favored minorities — they apply to everyone, including the West.

Consider the demographic parallels. America’s historic, European-descended majority has dropped from 90% after World War II to 57% today. The left has openly — and at times grotesquely — celebrated that decline.

Like Beijing, the Democratic Party understands that demography is destiny. China aims to dominate its non-Han regions. Democrats aim to secure permanent political dominance over what they call “our democracy.”

By exposing the left’s selective outrage — condemning China’s demographic manipulation while applauding similar trends in the West — conservatives can force a reckoning. If it’s wrong in Xinjiang, it’s wrong here, too. And no amount of rhetorical gymnastics can cover up the left’s inconsistency, arbitrariness, and odious bigotry.

China’s mass enslavement of millions should spark outrage at least equal to what the West once directed at apartheid South Africa. That regime was boycotted into submission. Why shouldn’t the same standard apply to Beijing?

As President Trump has rightly asked: Why did we admit China into the World Trade Organization in 2001? What made anyone believe it would ever play by WTO rules — rules it had already vowed to ignore behind closed doors? Was George W. Bush’s administration, along with the now-defunct neoconservative GOP, truly naïve enough to think trade would transform China into a democracy?

More to the point, have we — not just our leaders, but the American people — enabled this? By enriching China through free trade, have we given it the means to carry out apartheid-level abuses against its Turkic Muslim minority?

And has our refusal to implement strong tariffs created a monster?

The anti-Trump, anti-tariff chorus must answer these questions. Its blind faith in globalization didn’t just cost us factories and jobs. It helped fund a regime that builds camps, crushes dissent, and rewrites humanity in its own image.

​China, Uighur muslims, Concentration camps, Genocide, Forced labor, Slavery, Organ harvesting, United states, Free trade, World trade organization, Wto, Xinjiang, East turkistan, Human rights, Apartheid, Great leap west, Replacement migration, South africa, George w. bush, Globalization, Globalism, Opinion & analysis 

Your new car has all the usual shiny new entertainment tech, but you’re in the mood for an old favorite. You skip past the buttons for satellite radio and Bluetooth connectivity to tune in to your ever-reliable source of news, sports, and even lifesaving alerts in a crisis.

That’s when it hits you: There’s no AM radio.

Think back to the 1960s, when seatbelts weren’t standard. Automakers fought mandates then, too, calling them costly and unnecessary — until lives saved proved them wrong.

As I’ve reported here before, carmakers like Tesla, Ford, and BMW have been quietly dropping in-vehicle AM radios for years, claiming it’s no longer practical or financially viable to include it.

But don’t turn that dial just yet.

Poor reception

The AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act is heading toward a Senate vote after clearing the Commerce Committee back on February 5. With bipartisan support and an endorsement from FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, this bill could ensure that AM radio stays in every new car.

But why is this even a fight?

It starts with cost. Adding an AM receiver might only run a few dollars per vehicle, but multiply that by millions of cars and it’s a hit to the bottom line.

Then there’s the tech angle — electric vehicles dominate the future (for now), and AM signals can get scrambled by the electromagnetic hum of EV batteries and motors, creating annoying static.

Plus, with dashboards turning into touchscreens and younger buyers streaming music or podcasts via Bluetooth, they argue that AM is outdated and unnecessary.

Automakers would rather upsell you on satellite radio subscriptions or internet-connected infotainment systems — options that pad their profits but leave you without an AM signal when you want or need it.

The trouble is that rural roads and disaster zones don’t care about your Wi-Fi plan, and that’s where AM comes in.

Last resort

I’ve been tracking this on Congress.gov. Senate Bill 315 moved out of committee for a floor vote this month. It’s described as a push “to require the Secretary of Transportation to issue a rule ensuring access to AM broadcast stations in passenger motor vehicles.”

If passed, it would mandate that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to require automakers to include AM radio in all vehicles sold in the U.S. — at no extra cost. Until that rule kicks in, any cars without it must be clearly labeled.

The National Association of Broadcasters cheered the progress, pointing to disasters like the Los Angeles wildfires and Hurricane Helene, where AM’s reach delivered evacuation orders and recovery info when cell networks crumbled. Over 125 groups, from the American Farm Bureau to the AARP, back it, citing safety and community access.

Senators Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) of the Commerce Committee teamed up across the aisle, saying, “Today’s vote broadcasts a clear message to car manufacturers that AM radio is an essential tool for millions. From emergency response to entertainment and news, it’s a lifeline we must protect.”

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr added, “I saw it firsthand after Hurricane Helene — people relied on AM for lifesaving updates when everything else was down. Unlike streaming apps that need a signal or a subscription, AM is free, far-reaching, and works when nothing else does.”

Audio seatbelt

This bill is bigger than just radios — it’s about innovation, safety, and government’s role in the auto industry. Think back to the 1960s when seatbelts weren’t standard. Automakers fought mandates then, too, calling them costly and unnecessary — until lives saved proved them wrong. Today, AM radio is the seatbelt of communication: low-tech, sure, but a proven lifesaver.

If it passes the Senate, it could set a precedent for regulators to prioritize public good over corporate trends, maybe even nudging carmakers to rethink other cuts — like physical buttons that were swapped for slow screens.

It’s a signal that tech’s march forward doesn’t have to leave reliability behind, especially as disasters make resilient tools more crucial than ever.

Static from lobbyists

Unfortunately, this bill has some hurdles to get over. Automakers aren’t accepting this quietly; they’ve got deep pockets and powerful lobbyists, and groups like the Alliance for Automotive Innovation could lean on senators to water it down or kill it. They might argue it’s unfair to force a feature not every buyer wants or that EVs need exemptions for technical reasons.

Then there’s the Senate itself — gridlock is normal, and with budget battles and post-election-year posturing, a floor vote could easily be delayed. Even supporters admit it’s faced delays before; earlier versions never passed in Congress despite broad support. The difference now? High-profile disasters and bipartisan unity might just tip the scales.

AM remains the backbone of the Emergency Alert System, a resilient lifeline delivering local news, diverse voices, and critical info when it counts. Now that this bill’s racing through, it’s a sign that it could soon be law — unless the opposition shifts gears.

​Lauren fix, Am radio, Lifestyle, Safety, Emergency, Auto industry, Fcc, Emergency preparedness, Align cars 

California’s economic, academic, media, and political establishment still embraces the notion of the state’s inevitable supremacy. “The future depends on us,” Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) said at his first inauguration, “and we will seize this moment.” Others see California as deserving and capable of nationhood — a topic that has resurfaced with President Donald Trump’s presidency, as it reflects, in the words of one New York Times columnist, “the shared values of our increasingly tolerant and pluralistic society.”

Critics say this vision is at odds with the facts on the ground. Rather than the exemplar of a new “progressive capitalism” and a model for social justice, California both accommodates the highest number of billionaires and the highest cost-adjusted poverty rate. It has the third-highest gap, behind just Washington, D.C., and Louisiana, between middle- and upper-middle-income earners of any state. Nearly one in five Californians — many working — live in poverty (using a cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate); the Public Policy Institute of California estimates another one in five live in near-poverty — roughly 15 million people in total.

Barely one in three state residents consider California a good place to achieve the American dream. Increasingly, California is where this dream goes to die.

“California” is a model that no longer delivers. Sure, California has a huge gross domestic product, paced largely by high real estate prices and the stock value of a handful of huge tech firms. It retains the inertia from its glory days, particularly in technology and entertainment, but that edge is evaporating as tech firms flee the state and Hollywood productions are shot around the world. For all its strengths, California has the nation’s second-highest rate of unemployment, with lagging job growth, particularly in comparison to its neighbors and chief rivals — notably Texas, Arizona, and Nevada.

The signs of failure are evident on the streets. Roughly half the nation’s homeless population lives in the Golden State, many concentrated in disease- and crime-ridden tent cities in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Barely one in three state residents — and only one in four younger voters — now consider California a good place to achieve the American dream. Increasingly, California is where this dream goes to die.

‘San Francisco gentry liberalism’

The roots of California are long and deep. In August, for example, the New York Times reported how its development into a one-party state controlled by progressive Democrats has made it the country’s center of political corruption.

“Over the last 10 years,” the Times reported, “576 public officials in California have been convicted on federal corruption charges, according to Justice Department reports, exceeding the number of cases in states better known for public corruption, including New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.”

Ironically, the state’s corruption and decline have been expressed through policies long touted as symbols of progressive enlightenment and virtue — the odd marriage of oligarchal wealth and woke political consciousness some describe as “San Francisco gentry liberalism.”

Under this regime, personified by Newsom and former Vice President Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), progressivism has lost its historic embrace of upward mobility and replaced it with an ideology obsessed with race, gender, and climate. It has produced a political leadership class that, for the most part, is largely made up of longtime government or union operatives. In the legislature, the vast majority of Democrats have little to no experience in the private sector. The failure may have been accelerated by the secular decline of the once-powerful Republican Party over the past two decades. This decline removed the incentives for Democrats to concern themselves with moderate voters of either party.

This development represents a distinct break even with California’s pro-growth progressive past, which helped make the Golden State a symbol of American opportunity, innovation, and prosperity. The late historian and one-time state librarian Kevin Starr observed that under the governorship of Democrat Pat Brown in the late 1950s and early 1960s, California enjoyed “a golden age of consensus and achievement, a founding era in which California fashioned and celebrated itself as an emergent nation-state.” In 1971, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith described the state government as run by “a proud, competent civil service,” enjoying some of “the best school systems in the country.”

This may seem something like ancient mythology to most Californians today. If the builder Pat Brown was an exemplar of “Responsible Liberalism,” California’s government today has been ranked by Wallet Hub as the least efficient in delivering services relative to the tax burden. Pat Brown’s son, Jerry, the Democratic governor from 1975 to 1983 and then again from 2011 to 2019, and his successor, Gavin Newsom, epitomize the triumph of ideology over effectiveness. Theirs is a kind of performative progressivism that shrugs about things like roads that are now among the nation’s worst, a high-speed bullet train plagued with endless delays and massive cost overruns, and a failure to boost critical water systems in a perennially drought-threatened state.

In exchange for all this, the progressive regime has stuck ordinary Californians and businesses with some of the nation’s highest taxes and greatest regulatory burdens. California’s business climate is rated at or near the bottom in most business surveys. The Tax Foundation’s 2019 State Business Tax Climate Index, which evaluates taxes in five categories, also lists California at No. 49, with only New Jersey trailing.

These policies have made California exceptionally expensive for both businesses and households. Indeed, according to current estimates, only Hawaii and Massachusetts have a higher cost of living. California has the highest average housing costs, the second-highest transportation costs, and the third-highest food expenses in the country. Much of this is invisible to the top 20% and 5% of California households, who enjoy median incomes of $72,500 and $129,000 — greater than their national counterparts — but is widely felt in the state’s less affluent areas.

Pell-mell into climatism

California progressivism today embraces many causes — undocumented immigrants, transgender kids, reparations for slavery — but nothing has shaped the state’s contemporary politics more in recent years than a commitment to what Newsom described in 2018 as “climate leadership.”

In embracing the catastrophism that defines climate change as an existential threat to life on the planet, Newsom has left behind the old progressive notion of focusing on materially improving people’s lives by embracing inherently uncertain computer models predicting danger.

In California, experts from what Bjorn Lomborg, a leading skeptic of climate catastrophism, calls “the climate industrial complex” provide the justification for staggeringly expensive, socially regressive mandates based on the conjured models. The state mandates greenhouse gas reductions but leaves implementation in the hands of state agencies closely aligned with the green lobby.

This allows the legislature to look the other way as state climate policies knowingly increase poor and working family costs and shift billions of dollars to the wealthy in the relentless pursuit of unilaterally modeled carbon emission targets that even advocates admit cannot possibly “fix” the global climate. Indeed, in 2023, the California Air Resources Board belatedly disclosed that current state climate policies would disproportionately harm households earning less than $100,000 per year while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.

Newsom’s dogged emphasis on climate change — and achieving “carbon neutrality” by 2045 — has meant massive subsidies for wind and solar, mandates to reduce personal car use by nearly three times the temporary cuts caused by pandemic lockdowns, electrification of home appliances at a cost of many thousands of dollars per household, and even cuts to dairy and livestock emissions with technology mandates, accelerating the relocation of these food producers to other states and increasing food prices.

To justify the pain, state regulators estimated that paying for these changes today would prevent future climate damage, all of which depends on highly uncertain projections spanning, in some cases, hundreds of years in the future. The problem is that even if damage projections are remotely accurate, California’s climate law recognizes that the state cannot affect the global climate unless everyone else in the world follows suit. In fact, global emissions are rising, especially from China, which exported over $120 billion in goods and services, notably manufactured goods, often produced with coal, to California in 2023.

Also based on “expert” opinion, the state has embraced a policy to force people to buy electric vehicles by 2035 — a policy increasingly questionable amid slowing demand for these vehicles. Once again, state officials relying on speculative projections proclaim that the policy will benefit the state’s consumers and the environment — although this seems questionable, given, as Volvo suggests, the energy demands of building such cars may take years to have a positive impact.

Photo by David McNew/Getty Images

The price of climate delusion

The recent fires that incinerated a swath of Los Angeles revealed the shortcomings of the current climate-obsessed regime. To be sure, Trump’s claim that water policies created the conflagration is largely false, but the lack of attention to water delivery and forest maintenance, a consistent aspect of the Brown-Newsom era, clearly contributed to the intensity of the blaze.

In 2014, California voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure allocating $2.7 billion to increase state water storage capacity, including the building of new reservoirs. These facilities would not only improve an aging water system neglected for decades but also capture and store precipitation that may occur in less frequent, more intense storms. Yet even government apologists concede that 10 years later, progress has been too slow, with deeply entrenched bureaucracies issuing permits only at a “glacial” pace.

Rather than building on the achievements of Pat Brown, state officials spent a quarter of a billion dollars helping environmental groups destroy dams and hydroelectric generation along the Klamath River in Northern California. While this effort may yet improve fish habitat as intended, its initial results are sobering. Most of the river’s existing fish, crustaceans, and other organisms were killed by toxic sediment as the dams were removed, and unanticipated tar-pit-like mud exposure trapped large mammals, including protected wild horses. In March 2024, fish that state biologists confidently released into the restored river perished in a mass “die-off” within two days.

These misplaced priorities are also mirrored in Los Angeles, where reservoirs were left empty, leaving water unavailable and water hydrants without pressure. Both the state and local governments have failed to sufficiently fund fire-fighting operations — except for approving lavish pensions.

The climate catastrophists may promote fires as a sign of the coming apocalypse, but still consistently oppose effective fire management, as the Little Hoover Commission found as far back as 2018, discouraging such things as controlled burns and brush clearance. Policies of controlled burns, practiced by Native Americans and in areas like Western Australia, have been largely ignored.

Even as he rails against “misinformation,” Newsom blamed the recent Los Angeles fires, as he has regarding earlier blazes, on climate change. This claim has been widely debunked by scientists like Steve Koonin, Roger Pielke, and the U.S. Geological Service. Undaunted, Newsom’s neat solution appears to be to sue the oil companies for fires made far worse by Newsom’s own policies.

The greening of decline

Charred landscapes and burned houses reflect one legacy of California’s progressive obsessions. The impact of taxes and climate regulations on the overall economy has been more widespread, particularly for minorities and working- and middle-class households, who were once the focus of traditional liberalism.

This shift has been bolstered by the ascendancy of public employee unions and the remarkable growth of the state bureaucracy. California, under Pat Brown, largely avoided public employee unions, but Jerry Brown and other governors reversed this policy. Since 2022, even with budget shortfalls, California has among the highest rates of government sector growth in the country. Today, they are widely seen as a dominant force in Sacramento. Particularly powerful has been the 310,000-member California Teachers Association. Their numbers have continued to swell, even amid budget shortfalls, at a faster rate than private-sector employment.

Public employees, or their union representatives, constitute a powerful part of California’s emerging class hierarchy. Increasingly, their livelihoods are tied to an agenda of ever more regulation and taxes. Public workers, of course, also share these costs, but more regulation also engenders more jobs for the bureaucracy.

Ultimately, California, the birthplace of youth culture, is getting old — with some places more resembling Hawaii than the entrepreneurial powerhouse of the past.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Californians, particularly the working class, do not enjoy such benefits. In assessing the impacts of climate policies, environmental and civil rights attorney Jennifer Hernandez has dubbed these policies “the Green Jim Crow,” linking the state’s climate regulatory effort to the impoverishment of millions. California has the highest energy prices in the continental U.S., double the national average, which has exacerbated “energy poverty,” particularly among the poor and those in the less temperate interior.

In 2023, Chapman University researcher Bheki Mahalo found that the tech and information sector accounted for close to two-thirds of state GDP, compared to 8.5% in 1985. Virtually every sector associated with blue-collar employment — manufacturing, construction, transportation, and agriculture — has declined while most others have stagnated.

Consider California’s once-vibrant fossil fuel industry. The state’s last major oil firm, Chevron, recently moved to Houston. In 1996, California imported less than 10% of its crude oil from foreign sources. In 2023, foreign suppliers such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia accounted for over 60% of the state’s supplies. This continued shuttering of the state’s fossil fuel industry will cost California as many as 300,000 generally high-paying jobs, roughly half held by minorities, and will devastate, in particular, the San Joaquin Valley, where 40,000 jobs depend on the oil industry.

Other blue-collar industries — construction, manufacturing, logistics, and agriculture — are also suffering under California’s climate policies. Over the past decade, it has fallen into the bottom half of states in manufacturing sector employment, ranking 44th in 2023. Its industrial new job creation has paled in comparison to gains from competitors such as Nevada, Kentucky, Michigan, and Florida. Even without adjusting for costs, no California metro area ranks in the U.S. top 10 in terms of well-paying blue-collar jobs. But four — Ventura, Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego — sit among the bottom 10.

But not all the damage has been limited to “the carbon economy.” Progressive climate, labor, and tax policies have chased a broad range of companies out of the state, including an array of leading companies tied to professional services and engineering: Jacobs Engineering, Parsons, Bechtel, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Charles Schwab, and McKesson. Even Hollywood is hemorrhaging jobs, and recently, In-N-Out Burger — the state’s widely beloved fast food chain — announced it is planning a move to Tennessee. California is increasingly losing ground both in tech and high-end business services to sprawling, low-density metro areas like Austin, Nashville, Orlando, Charlotte, Salt Lake City, and Raleigh.

California, once the land of opportunity, is the single worst state in the nation when it comes to creating jobs that pay above average, while it is at the top of the heap in creating below-average and low-paying jobs. The state hemorrhaged 1.6 million above-average-paying jobs in the past decade, more than twice as many as any other state. Since 2008, the state has created five times as many low-wage jobs as high-wage jobs. In the past three years, the situation worsened, with 78.1% of all jobs added in California from lower-than-average-paying industries versus 61% for the nation as a whole.

The only sector that has seen big growth in higher-wage jobs has been the government, which is funded by tax receipts from the struggling private sector. Public sector employment is growing at about the same pace as jobs overall in California, but over the decade at twice the national pace. The average annual pay for those public sector government jobs is now almost double that of private sector jobs.

The housing crisis: Middle-class kill shot

The lack of well-paying jobs meshes poorly with high living costs, notably in terms of housing. Here again, climate politics play a critical role in driving high housing prices in California. In the late 1960s, the value of the typical California home was more than four times the average household’s income. Today, it’s worth more than 11 times. The median California home is priced nearly 2.5 times higher than the median national home, according to 2022 census data.

A key driver of this price hike is climate policy restraints on suburban development and single-family housing, supposedly to cut residential emissions. These restrictions push putting new housing close to transit in a state where barely 3% of employees use it to get to work, according to the American Community Survey. Perhaps more to the point, these policies are not what most Californians want. One recent Public Policy Institute of California survey has found that 70% of Californians prefer single-family residences, according to a poll by former Obama campaign pollster David Binder, and oppose legislation, written by state Senator Scott Wiener (D), that banned single-family zoning in much of the state.

The state has tried to sell its density dream as a means to boost production as well as lower prices. It has not worked out. From 2010 to 2023, California’s housing stock rose by just 7.9%, lower than the national increase of 10.3% and well below housing growth in Arizona (13.8%), Nevada (14.7%), Texas (24%), and Florida (16.2%). These states are also the primary beneficiaries of California’s out-migration. An unusually large pool of affluent households is “stuck” and bids up prices in urban rental markets.

Today, home ownership is becoming rarer among California residents. The state now has the nation’s second-lowest home ownership rate, at 55.9%, slightly above New York (55.4%). High prices impact young people, particularly on the home ownership rate.

Home ownership for Californians under 35 has fallen by more than half since 1980 and is plummeting even among people in their 40s and 50s. These initiatives particularly impact minorities. Based on census data analyzed by demographer Wendell Cox, the state’s African-American home ownership rate is 35.5% — well below the national rate of 44% — and the state’s Latino home ownership rate ranked 41st nationwide.

Alessandro Biascioli via iStock/Getty Images

From surfboard to walker?

If you think of California’s wealth-creation machine as a conveyor belt, continually providing generations with a stake in society through their homes, that belt has now stalled. Reduced economic opportunity and lack of affordable housing have created something once thought impossible — population growth well below the national average. In virtually every survey exploring why residents are leaving the state, housing costs are at the top of the list.

Increasingly, California’s demographics resemble the pattern of out-migration long associated with Northeastern and Midwestern states. Since 2000, more than 4 million net domestic migrants, a population about the same as the Seattle metropolitan area, have moved to other parts of the nation from California. Since 2020, the pace has picked up, with almost 1.5 million domestic migrants in just four years.

Many leaving the state are in their 30s and 40s, precisely the group that tends to buy houses and start businesses. In 2022, California lost over 200,000 net migrants older than 25, the bulk of whom had either four-year or associate degrees. The groups showing the biggest tendency to leave, according to IRS numbers, are those in their late 30s to late 50s, which includes people who tend to have families.

At the same time, international migration, long a source of demographic vitality, has lagged behind other key states, notably Texas. As the Brookings Institution has noted, from 2010 to 2018, the foreign-born population of Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, Columbus, Charlotte, Nashville, and Orlando increased by more than 20%, while San Francisco’s foreign-born population grew only 11% and New York’s by 5%.

The state retains by far the nation’s largest foreign-born population, but even the massive movement allowed under Biden’s open-border policy since 2021 failed to reverse population declines in big California cities. With the border now effectively closed, this last source of population growth is likely to decline.

By losing immigrants and younger people, the state is effectively consuming its “seed corn.” The state’s total fertility rate, long above the national average, is now the nation’s 10th lowest and falling faster than the national average and than its key competitors. Los Angeles and San Francisco rank last and second to last in birth rates among the 53 major U.S. metropolitan areas. In California, only the Riverside and San Bernardino metroplex exceeds the national average for births among women between ages 15 and 50, according to the American Community Survey.

Ultimately, California, the birthplace of youth culture, is getting old — with some places more resembling Hawaii than the entrepreneurial powerhouse of the past. From 2010 to 2018, California aged 50% more rapidly than the rest of the country, according to the American Community Survey. As of 2022, 21% — or 8.3 million people — were over the age of 60 in California, and according to the California Department of Aging, this population is expected to grow by 40% in the next 10 years.By 2036, seniors will be a larger share of the population than kids under the age of 18. California is gradually ditching the surfboard and adopting the walker.

Needed: A new California agenda

Newsom’s response to the state’s decline, rather than a call for major reform, has been for “Trump-proofing” the state, spending tens of millions on lawsuits. Such gestures do not address how California can maintain its status as the epicenter of “the new economy” and address the vast divides between the elite and highly educated and the vast mass of our residents.

Rather than fight the president at every turn, California can find ways to take advantage of the new regime. After all, hanging on to the climate agenda is doing very little good for Californians or the planet. California has reduced its emissions since 2006 at roughly the same rate as the rest of the country. The fires have largely erased even these gains, as does the fact that when people or companies flee the state, their carbon signature tends to increase.

Oddly, Trump could force needed policy changes in order to bring in federal help — something Newsom has already done in regard to water policy. The notion that California has a better model — the rationale for the Newsom-led “resistance” — does not sell in the rest of the country, much less at the White House. In a national 2024 survey conducted for the Los Angeles Times, only 15% of respondents felt that California is a model other states should copy; 39% said the state was not a model and should not be emulated; 87% said the state was too expensive; and 77% would not consider moving to California.

Yet for all its problems, California is far from hopeless, and its promise is not extinguished. It remains uniquely gifted in terms of climate, innovation, and entrepreneurial verve. Sitting at the juncture of Asia, Latin America, and North America, it can once again become, as Kevin Starr noted, America’s “final frontier: of geography and of expectation.”

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.

​Opinion & analysis, California, Golden state, Gavin newsom, Pat brown, Jerry brown, Environmentalism, Climate change, Growth, Housing, Population decline, Liberalism, Progressivism, Birth rates, San francisco, Los angeles, Crime, Democratic party, Donald trump, Immigration, Demographics, Scott wiener, Cities, Job creation, Wildfires, Water, Drought 

The media collectively clutched its pearls when Elon Musk showed up at the Senate with his young son, X, perched on his shoulders. He was headed to meetings on the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency. Critics pounced. The BBC quoted American University professor Kurt Braddock, who called it “a political move to make him seem more personable.” Harvard professor and political strategist Jon Haber dismissed it as inviting “chaos” and distraction.

But strip away the media’s reflexive cynicism, and Musk’s decision makes perfect sense. After publicly condemning gender ideology for destroying another one of his children, it’s hardly surprising that he wants to keep his family close.

Elon Musk knows firsthand what happens when the culture takes too much control. He lost a child to the woke mind virus and now seeks to eradicate it.

Maybe Musk recognizes that protecting one’s children — not outsourcing their values to a broken system — is a fundamental duty. Maybe he sees the cultural rot in American schools and wants no part of it. Or maybe he just loves his kids, which used to be considered normal.

Musk bringing his children to work — even to meetings with world leaders like the prime minister of India — doesn’t signal chaos. It signals commitment. It embodies the essence of home education: personal, practical, and profoundly traditional.

Education vs. schooling

Education trains the mind to recognize truth, emulate goodness, and appreciate beauty. It equips children to think independently, search for meaning, and pursue wisdom. Schooling does the opposite. It programs children to conform, accept whatever “experts” tell them, and obey the dominant ideology without question.

Education liberates. Schooling enslaves. Today’s school systems manipulate children into believing that self-harm is self-care — gaslighting rebranded as guidance.

That institutional hostility toward children now stands fully exposed. Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, abortion numbers have surged, fueled by the widespread availability of abortion pills and Planned Parenthood’s marketing campaign assuring the public they’re “safe” and “effective.” They’re safe for no one. They end lives. Meanwhile, activists now push for legal protection of gender-transition surgeries for minors — procedures that mutilate healthy bodies and bind children to pharmaceutical dependency for life.

The rot runs deeper. According to the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, the American Federation of Teachers, led by Randi Weingarten, played a central role in shaping harmful COVID-era school policies. The AFT lobbied the CDC to keep schools closed, not based on science or evidence, but to strengthen bargaining leverage. The union’s aim wasn’t safety — it was higher compensation. The result: long-term psychological, developmental, academic, and economic damage to millions of children.

Teachers’ unions, long portrayed as champions of children, proved themselves anything but. The report makes it plain: “Any public health response that warrants closing schools should face the highest levels of scrutiny. School closure policy should be informed by science and data, not fear and politics.” Yet no one in power will face consequences.

Homeschooling is better

Does a system that gets worse for children every year while bleeding taxpayers dry deserve the label “education”?

No serious evidence suggests it benefits kids. With their well-being on the line, we should return to what worked for millennia before the 20th century’s great school experiment: parent-led education.

After generations of institutional schooling, we’ve forgotten a basic truth: Children need parents to become healthy, capable adults. In outsourcing education to the state, we’ve sacrificed much. Home education introduces children to more than rote academics. It builds life skills, strengthens family ties, and helps children understand their place in the world.

Compare that with schools today. Age-segregated classrooms teach narrow content in isolated bubbles, infantilizing students while cutting them off from meaningful interaction with older generations. The results speak for themselves: young adults who now need a word — “adulting” — to describe basic responsibilities.

Would anyone argue that Elon Musk has less to offer a child than a Harvard graduate who took a seminar titled “Queering Education”? That class, by the way, trains future teachers to combat “heteronormativity” and “cisnormativity” in the classroom. These so-called experts claim that “negotiating gender and sexuality norms,” including transitioning minors, boosts academic performance.

Musk wouldn’t buy it. No sane person should.

Retaking control

Mocking gender theory isn’t just common sense — it’s starting to look a lot like home education.

Elon Musk made a statement: World leaders matter, but his children matter more. He showed that balancing both is not only possible — it’s commendable. Rather than scoffing, we should applaud it.

Maybe Musk could redefine the DOGE as the “Department of Good Education” and revive a “take your child to work” ethic in American life. Pair that with some math and classic literature, and we’d raise better students — and make better citizens.

Musk knows firsthand what happens when the culture takes too much control. He lost a child to the “woke mind virus” and now seeks to eradicate it. The man who carried a sink into Twitter headquarters on day one understands symbolism. “Let that sink in,” he said.

Then he hoisted his young son onto his shoulders and onto his list of priorities. It’s time we let that sink in, too — and follow his lead.

​Opinion & analysis, Elon musk, X musk, Doge, Donald trump, Diplomacy, Woke mind virus, Transgenderism, Queer theory, Homeschooling, Education, Administrative state, Family, Covid-19 tyranny, Randi weingarten, American federation of teachers, Pandemic, Adulting 

Prominent voices on the left and within movement conservatism have argued that President Trump’s approach to foreign trade is strange, unorthodox, and even un-American. This is not surprising. After all, doctrinaire commitment to free trade — and doctrinaire distaste for protecting American industry — has been the dominant view among elites of both major political parties for at least a generation.

Against this backdrop, it is no wonder that Trump’s actions on trade appear as a wholly irrational disruption of a system that, according to our political elites, does not need to be discarded.

Hamilton would find it perfectly sensible of Trump to hold that other nations should give America something of value in exchange for access to our vast market.

This view of the matter, however, is based on an incomplete understanding of the American political tradition. Trump’s approach to trade policy has deep roots in American history, as we can see if we cast our gaze further back than we are accustomed to doing. It does not go too far to say that America’s founders would find Trump’s approach to international commerce perfectly intelligible and respectable.

The most obvious way to link President Trump to the founders is to invoke the justly celebrated name of Alexander Hamilton. The “Report on Manufactures,” Hamilton’s most famous state paper during his tenure as George Washington’s treasury secretary, laid out policy objectives that are essentially the same as those being defended by Trump and the members of his Cabinet who are responsible for trade policy.

It was necessary, Hamilton contended, to exert the government’s authority to promote American manufacturing to counteract the “artificial policy” of other nations that sought to exclude or disadvantage American goods. The ultimate aim of such a policy, he explained, was not the “vain project of selling everything and buying nothing” — it was instead to secure America’s vital national interests.

Hamilton argued that national “independence and security” are the “great objects” of all governments, thus requiring each country to “possess within itself all the essentials of national supply,” especially “the means of subsistence, habitation, clothing, and defense.” Having such goods available within one’s own country, he continued, “is necessary to the perfection of the body politic, to the safety as well as the welfare of the society.”

No strange departure

It is hard to see much daylight between Hamiltonian trade principles and President Trump’s desire to have the products necessary to American security and prosperity built in the United States.

The nationalist character of Hamilton’s thinking about trade policy, moreover, did not emerge after the founding as some strange departure from its essential principles. Rather, such nationalism was evident earlier, especially in the prominent part Hamilton played in the debates over the ratification of the Constitution.

Writing in “The Federalist Papers,” Hamilton observed that one of the great advantages of a union of states under one government was the power it would confer on the nation to “oblige foreign countries to bid against each other for the privileges of our markets.” Elsewhere in “The Federalist Papers,” Hamilton suggested that the restrictive trade policies nations sometimes pursue are not properly viewed as “injuries” but simply as “justifiable acts of independent sovereignties consulting a distinct interest.”

Hamilton, then, would find it perfectly sensible of President Trump to hold that other nations should be willing to give America something of value in exchange for access to our vast market. His arguments similarly anticipated Trump’s frequent remarks that while other nations will inevitably act in their own interest, they likewise must understand that we intend to act in our own interest as well.

The preceding argument is enough to show that Trump’s thinking about trade policy has venerable roots in the American political tradition. After all, who is more American than Alexander Hamilton?

We can go further, however. Trump’s approach broadly represents not just the Hamiltonian strain of American economic nationalism but the common sense of the founding-era generation itself. Indeed (and as I have observed elsewhere at greater length) the authority to regulate trade with foreign nations was included in the Constitution precisely for the purposes for which the Trump administration is now wielding it.

Regulating commerce was uncontroversial

In his massive and highly regarded “Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States,” Joseph Story — John Marshall’s great colleague on the early Supreme Court — observed that the power to regulate foreign commerce was so obviously necessary in a complete and effective government that it was hardly even a matter of controversy at the Constitutional Convention.

Commerce, Story suggested, is important to “the prosperity of nations.” Nevertheless, the prosperity of American commerce had been thwarted by the restrictive policies of other nations during the time America was governed by the Articles of Confederation, which conferred on the government no authority to regulate America’s foreign trade.

On Story’s telling, before the Constitution was adopted, American commerce “was regulated by foreign nations with a single view to their own interests; and our disunited efforts to counteract their restrictions were rendered impotent by a want of combination.” Under the Constitution, however, the government of the United States has the power to control access to the entire American market and hence has the ability to retaliate against the excessively self-regarding trade policies of other nations.

The Trump administration is simply using this constitutional power in an attempt to secure an arrangement that is more mutually beneficial for the United States and our trading partners.

Just as the founders anticipated

Story’s understanding of these matters was by no means idiosyncratic or partisan. On the contrary, essentially the same views were expressed by James Madison, the “father of the Constitution.”

Writing to James Monroe in 1785, Madison expressed his personal wish that “no regulations of trade, that is to say, no restrictions or imposts whatever, were necessary.” “A perfect freedom” of trade, he continued, “is the system which would be my choice.” Nevertheless, he immediately added, for such a system to be “attainable, all other nations must concur in it.” And if any other nation imposed restrictions on American trade, Madison continued, it would be appropriate for America to “retort the distinction” — in other words, to impose retaliatory restrictions of its own. Indeed, Madison held that to question the propriety of such economic retaliation would be “an affront to every citizen who loves his country.”

Similarly, in the preface to his notes on the Constitutional Convention, Madison observed that the lack of a commerce power under the Articles of Confederation had “produced in foreign nations … a monopolizing policy injurious to the trade of the U.S.” and further suggested that the appropriate response would be a “countervailing policy on the part of the U. States.” Such a policy became possible because the new Constitution included a power to regulate trade with foreign nations — the power the Trump administration is wielding to secure more advantageous trade relations for America, just as the founders anticipated.

None of this is to say that the founders would have approved of the specific steps the Trump administration has taken in the last several weeks. No one can pretend to know how they would apply their principles to the changed circumstances of the present. Nor is it to say that the founders would approve the extent to which the Congress has delegated its foreign commerce power to the president. It is to say, however, that Trump’s aims, and the kind of tools he is using to achieve them, would be unobjectionable to those who founded our nation and established our form of government.

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

​Donald trump, Trade, Trade war, Tariffs, Alexander hamilton, Report on manufactures, The federalist, James madison, Joseph story, Free trade, Constitution, Manufacturing, Protectionist policies, John marshall, American founding, American history, Opinion & analysis 

Modern medications have transformed health care, turning once-fatal diseases into manageable conditions. Statins have significantly reduced heart disease deaths. GLP-1 drugs are revolutionizing obesity treatment.

But the path to these breakthroughs has come at a callous cost — thanks to outdated, unnecessary regulations from the Food and Drug Administration.

Images of week-old puppies convulsing from drug overdoses may finally become a thing of the past.

Each year, U.S. labs use roughly 50 million animals in drug testing, including rodents, monkeys, dogs, and cats. Much of this often cruel experimentation stems from FDA mandates that require animal testing for drug approval.

At last, that’s beginning to change.

Thanks to the bipartisan efforts of Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Congress passed the FDA Modernization Act 3.0 in December. The bill allows sponsors to use alternative testing methods that don’t harm living things. The FDA has proven remarkably receptive to these efforts, recently announcing measures to phase out animal testing requirements. With continued momentum, animal testing may soon be gone for good.

Recent reforms have reignited a fierce and emotional debate over the role of animal testing in medical innovation. Many researchers still defend the practice. Jim Newman, communications director for Americans for Medical Progress, argues that alternatives remain in their infancy and won’t become fully reliable “for many, many years.”

While some animal testing may still serve a purpose, the FDA has long abused the practice, imposing requirements that are often cruel, costly, and slow-moving.

Take the case of Vanda Pharmaceuticals. The company pushed back when the FDA ordered it to euthanize dogs after testing its gastroparesis drug, Tradipitant. Vanda had already run extensive tests on rats and dogs, including prolonged exposure at doses up to 300 times higher than those intended for humans. No safety concerns emerged. The FDA had even approved human trials.

But when Vanda sought to extend treatment beyond three months, regulators demanded yet another round of dog testing — this time with mandatory euthanasia. The agency offered no scientific rationale, no public justification — only a bureaucratic decree.

The real cost wasn’t just animal lives. An estimated 1.5 million Americans suffer from gastroparesis and face delayed access to treatment. Yet the FDA prevailed in court, thanks to its unchecked power to require animal testing with no meaningful oversight.

Paul and Booker aim to disrupt the FDA’s outdated, inhumane testing regime. Their bipartisan reform would give companies like Vanda the power to reject animal testing when safer, more advanced alternatives exist.

One such alternative uses microchips that simulate the human body’s biological systems. These “organ-on-a-chip” technologies allow researchers to see how drugs affect human tissue — without harming a single animal.

Wider adoption of chip-based testing could cut research and development costs between 10% and 26%, while sparing countless animals from needless pain and death. Images of week-old puppies convulsing from drug overdoses may finally become a thing of the past.

These alternatives may also produce better science. A report from the National Institutes of Health found that animal models often fail to accurately replicate human disease or predict drug responses — delaying breakthroughs and wasting money while patients wait.

With the right pressure from Congress, the FDA can move away from a system rooted in cruelty and toward one grounded in modern science. The status quo is not just outdated. It’s indefensible.

​Congress, Food and drug administration, Fda, Animal experimentation, Medical research, Senate, Rand paul, Corey booker, Fda modernization act 3.0, Drug testing, Big pharma, Regulation, Opinion & analysis, Heart disease, Obesity epidemic, Innovation, Animal cruelty, Science, Research, National institutes of health 

Four Republican senators have taken an unexpected but welcome stand for American energy independence. They sent a letter to Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) urging him to protect the investment tax credit, a key program that helps American families install rooftop solar panels and battery storage systems. They join 21 House Republicans who signed a similar letter defending energy freedom for U.S. homeowners.

As a lifelong conservative, I’m glad to see it. The ITC isn’t a government handout. It’s a tax credit that helps homeowners cover the up-front cost of installing solar panels and battery backups. It empowers Americans to generate their own power, lower their energy bills, and reduce reliance on bloated utilities. Since its creation nearly two decades ago, every president — Democrat and Republican, including Donald Trump — has supported it.

The investment tax credit puts power — literally and figuratively — back in the hands of individuals while reducing America’s dependence on foreign energy.

But some in Congress want to kill the ITC. That would be a costly mistake, especially as tariffs and other pressures push prices higher. Eliminating the ITC would put rooftop solar and home batteries out of reach for most families.

Without these tools, more Americans will remain tied to an aging, overburdened electric grid — just as demand surges and threats like wildfires, blackouts, and cyberattacks multiply. It would also expose families to the unchecked rate hikes of monopoly utilities and weaken a policy that has fueled job growth in red states like Texas and Florida, where home solar is booming.

The conservative case for the ITC is straightforward. Conservatives believe the tax code should reward behavior that strengthens the country — buying a home, raising a family, investing in a small business. Generating your own electricity during a grid failure should be no different.

During blackouts in Texas, wildfires in California, and hurricanes in Florida, families with solar and batteries kept the lights on when it mattered most. They didn’t wait on utility companies or FEMA. They had peace of mind because they had power.

And as we saw after Hurricane Milton, it’s often conservative, Trump-voting communities that land last on the disaster recovery list.

Monopoly utilities, backed by state regulators, have no incentive to treat customers fairly. At best, they see us as ATM machines. Last year, Pacific Gas and Electric hiked rates, tacked on new fees, and raked in $2.2 billion in profits. Millions of Californians have no choice but to pay up — unless they generate their own power.

Backing the ITC isn’t a betrayal of conservative values. It’s a reaffirmation of them. It puts power — literally and figuratively — back in the hands of individuals while reducing America’s dependence on foreign energy.

I applaud the Republicans in Congress who have taken a stand for the ITC. More should join them. Because defending the ITC isn’t just good policy.

It’s good for America.

​Opinion & analysis, Green energy, Solar panels, Investment tax credit, Congress, Senate, John thune, Tax reform, Donald trump, Homeowners 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s latest crusade as the Health and Human Services secretary includes a proposed ban on eight FDA-approved artificial food dyes across the United States.

While most conservatives are cheering on the crackdown, Stu Burguiere of “Stu Does America” isn’t so sure it’s as necessary as RFK Jr. claims it is.

“Obviously, as a conservative not really liking government intervention all that much, I’m much more comfortable with working with the food industry and letting them make their choices rather than revoking authorization for particular dyes,” Stu says.

An article in the Washington Post details what “the science says” about these artificial food dyes and their effect on children — and Stu isn’t so sure it’s as bad as we’ve been led to believe.

“Consumer advocacy groups said there is sufficient evidence that the dyes may cause some harm to some children,” Stu reads, noting that “consumer advocacy groups” are “not scientists.”

“Some may cause some harm to some children, which basically tells you pretty clearly, a lot of the studies show no harm. Some of the studies show a little bitty, tiny bit of harm, as it’s mostly associated with behavioral disorders,” he continues. “And then, finally, never in any of these studies does it hit all children. It’s a small percentage of children that it hits, even when it shows up in studies, which is not always.”

However, because artificial dyes contain no nutritional value, it doesn’t seem to be worth the risk to most parents.

“No one’s saying that you should be forced to eat artificial dyes. That would be insane,” Stu says, adding that if these dyes do get banned, there are alternatives that can be used — but they come at a price.

“They don’t use artificial dyes because they just love artificial dyes,” he says. “They use artificial dyes because they’re cheaper, they cost less money, and they are able to make a higher profit margin or charge you less.”

Want more from Stu?

To enjoy more of Stu’s lethal wit, wisdom, and mockery, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Upload, Free, Video phone, Camera phone, Video, Sharing, Youtube.com, Stu does america, Stu burguiere, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Rfk jr, Artificial food dyes, Fda, Food and drug administration, Food dye ban 

NFL Hall of Famer and ESPN football analyst Shannon Sharpe was recently hit with a $50 million lawsuit accusing him of rape, battery, and emotional abuse. The plaintiff, whom Sharpe has identified as OnlyFans model Gabbi Zuniga, has accused Sharpe of raping her twice, recording sexual encounters without consent, and threatening her.

Zuniga’s attorney, Tony Buzbee, who’s litigated against several high-profile black celebrities — including Jay Z, Sean “Diddy” Combs, and Deshaun Watson — released a short audio clip to TMZ, in which Sharpe can be heard telling Zuniga, “I’m going to f**king choke the s**t out of you when I see you.” Sharpe has vehemently denied all allegations, claiming the relationship was consensual and that the audio clip was intentionally edited to misrepresent a consensual interaction.

Now another audio clip has been leaked, pouring even more gasoline on the controversy. This clip from March 2025 allegedly captures former NBA player Matt Barnes claiming that Shaquille O’Neal was offering “top dollar” for incriminating information on Shannon Sharpe.

– YouTube

“He said that Shannon did some s**t back to him a while back, and he’s been awful, so that’s why he’s doing this. But please, please, please keep his name quiet,” Barnes allegedly says.

Barnes has denied the authenticity of the audio clip, claiming it was AI-generated.

Despite his denial, Jason Whitlock says high-profile celebrities putting a “financial bounty” on those they don’t like is sadly very common.

“Shaq’s a billionaire, and he’s got a problem with Shannon Sharpe. He can put money out and say, ‘Anybody – I got 500,000 bucks or 50,000 bucks or 100,000 bucks or a million bucks if you got dirt on Shannon Sharpe,'” he says.

He recalls a conversation he had with his friend, former NFL player Derrick Thomas, in the “late 1990s,” during which Thomas told him there was “animus and beef” between Shaq and Sharpe over a woman.

Jason doesn’t know if this age-old rivalry has anything to do with Shaq allegedly offering a high price for dirt on Sharpe, nor does he know if the Zuniga lawsuit is connected in any way to Shaq’s alleged vendetta.

“I’m not saying Shaq is involved in the downfall of Shannon Sharpe here, but what I’m saying is, like, these guys at this level, when … you live as unrighteously as [Sharpe] has, you’ve left dirt out there for people to use to compromise and embarrass you and take you down,” says Jason.

“Shaq makes it no secret he’s some sort of mason,” he explains. He and those like him “make it no secret that they feel like they’re power players in control of the culture.”

This scandal, he says, shouldn’t surprise anyone.

“We love to celebrate these athletic billionaires without reflecting on how much power we’re granting them and then what cultures are they attached to,” Jason says. “When they all attach themselves to hip-hop — that degenerate, pagan, demonic culture … we should not be shocked at the ramifications of that and where that ends up leading.”

To hear more of Jason’s commentary, watch the clip above.

Want more from Jason Whitlock?

To enjoy more fearless conversations at the crossroads of culture, faith, sports, and comedy with Jason Whitlock, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Fearless, Fearless with jason whitlock, Jason whitlock, Tony buzbee, Shaq, Shannon sharpe, Blazetv, Blaze media, Derrick thomas, Matt barnes