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Journey’s Jonathan Cain first met Charlie Kirk in 2016 outside the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

The conservative firebrand was in rare form, recalls Cain. The activist held a Big Government Sucks sign and vowed, “We’re gonna change the world.”

‘I said to Paula, “He could be president someday,”‘ he says. ‘He had the drive and the wisdom of the ages. … He reached generations.’

Kirk did just that. He started a youth movement in Turning Point USA. The organization empowered conservative college students nationwide and played a pivotal role in President Donald Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign.

His viral debates woke up countless Gen Zers to the power of faith and conservative values. And following his Sept. 10 murder, his legacy sparked a conservative college revival.

‘No one else’

Cain, a singer/songwriter and keyboardist for Journey for 45 years, got to know Kirk via his wife, President Donald Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain.

“It was such a blow to free speech, a mockery of everything he had done,” Cain tells Align of Kirk’s murder. The musician decided to write a pastor appreciation song for the slain leader.

“Not many pastors came close to what he accomplished … the revival, bringing kids back to church, having them look at their family values,” Cain says.

That impulse became “No One Else,” a new single dedicated to Kirk’s memory and cultural impact.

No one else reached generations
Could heal with truth and conversation
Setting all differences aside
No one else could question hate
Turn hearts and minds with true debate
From the battle our nation will arise
Faithful servant, you’ve done well
No one else

Like a few songs in his decades-long repertoire, this one came to him quickly.

“I went into my studio. … Thirty minutes later, I fleshed out everything I wanted to say,” he says.

Men of faith

The track, like Kirk’s death, brought out the worst of the venomous left.

“The social commentary was really disgusting,” Cain recalls of some online reactions. “They accused me of trying to make money. … There’s very little money in music any more.”

Cain is an industry veteran, so he shrugged off the naysayers. He still seems stunned that he tried to get Rolling Stone magazine interested in covering his song, to no avail.

“They didn’t want to touch an interview with me,” he says. “The song was about Charlie.”

Like Kirk, Cain is a man of deep faith, as is his wife. The Cains’ Trump connection found them running into Kirk often over the years. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member was continually struck by how Kirk got “into the hearts and minds” of his young followers, sharing his conservative Christian values along the way.

“I said to Paula, ‘He could be president someday,’” he says. “He had the drive and the wisdom of the ages. … He reached generations.”

RELATED: Where evil tried to win: How a Utah revival turned atrocity into interfaith miracle

MELISSA MAJCHRZAK/AFP via Getty Images

‘He saved you for music’

Cain credits his father, a “prayerful man,” for instilling faith in him at an early age. His faith was shaken by a 1958 fire at his school in Chicago, a disaster that took the lives of 93 children and three nuns.

“How could that evil happen?” he asked himself at the time.

His father, again, nudged him toward a spiritual path. He took the youngster to music school, imploring him to share his gifts with others.

“He saved you for music,” his father told him. The 8-year-old couldn’t initially get his hand around a guitar, but he did as he was told, and the music began to flow through him.

That wasn’t all.

“The idea of Jesus stayed with me, firmly planted,” he says.

Fateful Journey

The rest, as they say, is music history. Cain released his first solo record in 1976, joined the Babys three years later, and, in 1980, took over as the keyboardist for Journey. The band became a sensation, with Cain contributing keyboards and critical songwriting for the iconic band.

He played a key role in the band’s most famous song, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” with lyrics inspired by his father.

Now, at 75, he is prepping for Journey’s 2026 tour, complete with a reconstructed knee. Journey may keep rocking, but Cain knows when it’s time to step away from the band.

“I don’t want to die on the road. I’ve been out there for 50 years. … It feels like the time to get off the train is here,” he says.

He admits that matters have not always been smooth with longtime bandmates like Journey founder Neal Schon, including legal dustups in recent years.

“It’s sad, but it happens to most bands,” he says, noting that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards aren’t mates in the traditional sense, given their decades of acrimony. Still, the show must go on, and Cain appreciates his bandmates and, even more, the fans.

“They’re the gold that has given me a career. … I’m grateful and thankful for them. I want to go out the right way,” he says. “I’ll be 77 to 78 [by the time the tour ends]. That’s enough.”

​Journey, Christianity, Abide, Faith, Jonathan caine, Don’t stop believin’, Music, Entertainment, Culture, Charlie kirk, Donad trump, Align interview 

Two males were fatally shot Friday night in Texas — and the man who pulled the trigger said the pair followed him, tried to block his car, and physically attacked him.

Deputies with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office told KTRK-TV the shooter said he acted in self-defense.

‘Looks like the 2 attackers had road rage. Is he not supposed to defend himself? Whatever it takes.’

Deputies responded around 8:45 p.m. to reports of a possible roadway shooting on Greengate Drive near Spring Stuebner Road in the Spring area, KHOU-TV said.

First responders told KTRK they found two males with gunshot wounds in the 22100 block of Greengate Drive; one died at the scene, and the other was taken to a hospital where he died.

The shooter said the pair followed his car for a while and tried to block him when he reached the neighborhood where the final confrontation took place, the sheriff’s office told KTRK.

Deputies added to KTRK that all three exited their vehicles, and the man who pulled the trigger said the pair started kicking him and his car.

“The shooter in the incident stayed on scene and surrendered himself to arriving deputies,” Sgt. Jason Brown noted to KHOU. The man who pulled the trigger is cooperating with investigators, the sheriff’s office told KTRK.

The fatally shot males have been identified as 57-year-old Timothy Underwood and 59-year-old Keith McDonald, KTRK said, citing the sheriff’s office.

No charges have been filed, officials told KTRK, and the shooter was not in custody.

However, the case was under investigation, and the district attorney’s office will review it, the sheriff’s office told KTRK.

RELATED: Elderly Texas homeowner armed with hunting rifle spots burglar who broke through back door. It doesn’t end well for intruder.

When asked if the two males were armed, Brown told KHOU, “Not that we know of. We’re still in the process of going through the scene … but as of right now, we don’t believe that they were armed.”

Reactions under KHOU’s Facebook post about the fatal shootings were mixed:

“They don’t have to be armed to do bodily harm or even kill you,” one commenter said.”They do if you’re in a car … because why don’t you just jump the curb to get away,” another commenter countered. “How are unarmed men going to hurt you if the doors are locked?””FAFO,” another user bluntly noted before later adding, “Looks like the 2 attackers had road rage. Is he not supposed to defend himself? Whatever it takes.””IDK … call me crazy, but if I felt my life was in danger, I would not park my car and get out of it … would you?” another commenter wondered. “Self-defense doesn’t work here. He was trigger happy and probably had road rage.”

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​Crime thwarted, Self-defense, 2nd amend., Texas, Fatal shooting, Two males killed, Guns, Gun rights, Physical attack, Harris county sheriff’s office, Crime 

President Donald Trump leaned into his criticism of Somalia and its apparent top spokeswoman in Congress, telling reporters on Air Force One why America is better off both without asylum-seekers from the failed African nation and without Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar (D).

America First versus Somalia First

Trump announced on Nov. 21 that he was terminating the Temporary Protected Status designation for Somalia following a report detailing instances of alleged and confirmed fraud perpetrated by numerous members of the Somali community in Minnesota as well as the alleged direction of stolen taxpayer funds by members of the Somali community to terrorists abroad.

‘If that’s true, she shouldn’t be a congressman.’

“Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State, and BILLIONS of Dollars are missing,” Trump noted on Truth Social. “Send them back to where they came from. It’s OVER!”

Omar, a native of Somalia who claimed last year that the “U.S government will do what [Somali-Americans] tell the U.S. government to do,” did not take the news well.

The Democrat ethno-nationalist wrote on Bluesky, “I am a citizen and so are majority of Somalis in America. Good luck celebrating a policy change that really doesn’t have much impact on the Somalis you love to hate. We are here to stay.”

Omar then held a press conference with Minnesota state Democrats in which she claimed Trump lacked the authority to terminate Somalia’s TPS designation, suggested that the corruption referred to by the president was not systemic among Minnesota’s Somali community, and accused Trump of endangering Somalis across the United States.

RELATED: ‘Send them back’: Somalia First pitted against America First in Minnesota as Ilhan Omar attacks Trump over special status

Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Image

Following the fatal attack on National Guard members in the national capital last week, allegedly by an Afghan shooter, the president not only revealed that he was cutting off the flow of migrants to the U.S. from third-world backwaters such as Afghanistan but laid into Omar and rogue actors among the Somali community once again.

Trump noted in his lengthy announcement on Truth Social:

Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota. Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for “prey” as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone.

After suggesting that “the seriously retarded Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz,” had failed to tackle the problem, Trump turned his sights on Omar, who he claimed “does nothing but hatefully complain about our Country, its Constitution, and how ‘badly’ she is treated,” adding that Omar “probably came into the U.S.A. illegally.”

Family matters

When asked on Sunday about how long he intends to block asylum claims from various nations into the U.S., Trump told reporters, “I think a long time.”

“We don’t want ’em. We don’t want those people. We have enough problems. We don’t want those people,” said the president.

“You know why we don’t want ’em? Because many have been no good, and they shouldn’t be in our country.”

Trump clarified that by “those people,” he meant “people from different countries that are not friendly to us and countries that are out of control themselves — countries like Somalia that have virtually no government, no military, no police. All they do is go around killing each other. Then they come into our country and tell us how to run our country. We don’t want them.”

After using Somalia as an example of a nation whose asylees the U.S. could do without, Trump suggested that Omar “supposedly came into our country by marrying her brother.”

“Well, if that’s true, she shouldn’t be a congressman. And we should throw her the hell out of our country,” said Trump.

Omar has long been accused of immigration-related marriage fraud and bigamy.

Years after coming to the U.S. as a refugee, Omar reportedly took out a marriage license to marry Ahmed Hirsi. While she married Hirsi in a Muslim ceremony and had children with him, she did not initially marry him legally.

After supposedly separating from Hirsi, Omar formally married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi — a British-Somali national reportedly identified by numerous Somalis as Omar’s brother — in 2009. Over the next few years, she would separate and secure a legal divorce from Elmi, then reunite and have another child with Hirsi.

Omar called the allegations “absolutely false and ridiculous” in a 2016 statement, adding that “insinuations that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is my brother are absurd and offensive.”

Despite Omar’s denial of the allegations, an individual identifying as one of her friends, Abdihakim Osman, told the Daily Mail in 2020 that Omar had confirmed that Elmi was her brother and that she married him so he could remain in the United States.

Osman indicated that in the early 2000s, “People began noticing that Ilhan and Southside [Hirsi] were often with a very effeminate young guy.”

“He was very feminine in the way he dressed — he would wear light lipstick and pink clothes and very, very short shorts in the summer. People started whispering about him,” said Osman. “[Hirsi] and Ilhan both told me it was Ilhan’s brother and he had been living in London, but he was mixing with what were seen as bad influences that the family did not like.”

“So they sent him to Minneapolis as ‘rehab,'” claimed Osman.

After Omar married Elmi, he started school at North Dakota State University, where he graduated in 2012.

Osman told the Mail that following their wedding, Omar and Elmi moved to Fargo and began attending university together.

“She said she needed to get papers for her brother to go to school,” said Osman. “We all thought she was just getting papers together to allow him to stay in this country.”

“Once she had the papers, they could apply for student loans,” continued Osman. “They both moved to North Dakota to go to school, but she was still married to [Hirsi]. In the Somali way, the only marriage that mattered was the one in the mosque.”

Omar’s office did not respond to Blaze News’ request for comment.

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​Ilhan omar, Donald trump, Trump, Incest, Somalia, Denaturalization, Denaturalize, Deport, Minnesota, Democrat, Leftist, Politics 

In the latest update to the unprecedented trial of a sitting prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has made an unusual request to the president of Israel, Isaac Herzog.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Netanyahu officially requested a pardon amid his ongoing corruption trial, which consists of three separate but related cases.

‘I will consider solely the best interests of the State of Israel and Israeli society.’

The Associated Press reported that Netanyahu submitted the request to the president’s office, which called it “an extraordinary request” carrying “significant implications.”

RELATED: Israeli attorney general says he’s about to indict PM Benjamin Netanyahu on corruption, bribery charges

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

In a video statement, Netanyahu argued that a pardon would bolster national unity, but his critics disagreed.

Yair Lapid, former prime minister of Israel and current leader of the opposition in the Knesset, demanded that Herzog withhold the pardon.

“You cannot grant Netanyahu a pardon without an admission of guilt, an expression of remorse, and an immediate withdrawal from political life,” he said, according to the New York Times.

Herzog responded to the official request, noting its serious nature.

“The issue of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s request for a pardon is clearly provoking debate and is deeply unsettling for many people in the country, across different communities. I have already clarified that it will be handled in the most correct and precise manner,” Herzog said in a statement on December 1.

“I will consider solely the best interests of the State of Israel and Israeli society,” Herzog added.

In June, President Trump released a long post on Truth Social about the trial, calling it a “politically motivated case” and a “witch hunt.”

Trump called for the trial to be “CANCELLED, IMMEDIATELY, or a Pardon given to a Great Hero, who has done so much for the State. Perhaps there is no one that I know who could have worked in better harmony with the President of the United States, ME, than Bibi Netanyahu. It was the United States of America that saved Israel, and now it is going to be the United States of America that saves Bibi Netanyahu. THIS TRAVESTY OF ‘JUSTICE’ CAN NOT BE ALLOWED!”

Netanyahu was charged in three separate corruption cases in November 2019 by Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit.

Netanyahu faces separate charges of breach of trust and of taking a bribe. He has not been convicted of any charges and has consistently denied any wrongdoing.

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​Politics, Benjamin netanyahu, Isaac herzog, Corruption trial, Prime minister benjamin netanyahu, Pardon, Israel, Israeli government, Trump, President trump, President of israel 

As the world trends toward embedding AI systems into our institutions and daily lives, it becomes increasingly important to understand the moral framework these systems operate on. When we encounter examples in which some of the most advanced LLMs appear to treat misgendering someone as a greater moral catastrophe than unleashing a global thermonuclear war, it forces us to ask important questions about the ideological principles that guide AI’s thinking.

It’s tempting to laugh this example off as an absurdity of a burgeoning technology, but it points toward a far more consequential issue that is already shaping our future. Whose moral framework is found at the core of these AI systems, and what are the implications?

We cannot outsource the moral foundation of civilization to a handful of tech executives, activist employees, or panels of academic philosophers.

Two recent interviews, taken together, have breathed much-needed life into this conversation — Elon Musk interviewed by Joe Rogan and Sam Altman interviewed by Tucker Carlson. In different ways, both conversations shine a light on the same uncomfortable truth: The moral logic guiding today’s AI systems is built, honed, and enforced by Big Tech.

Enter the ‘woke mind virus’

In a recent interview on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Elon Musk expressed concerns about leading AI models. He argued that the ideological distortions we see across Big Tech platforms are now embedded directly into the models themselves.

He pointed to Google’s Gemini, which generated a slate of “diverse” images of the founding fathers, including a black George Washington. The model was instructed by Google to prioritize “representation” so aggressively that it began rewriting history.

Musk also referred to the previously mentioned misgendering versus nuclear apocalypse example before explaining that “it can drive AI crazy.”

“I think people don’t quite appreciate the level of danger that we’re in from the woke mind virus being effectively programmed into AI,” Musk explained. Thus, extracting it is nearly impossible. Musk notes, “Google’s been marinating in the woke mind virus for a long time. It’s down in the marrow.”

Musk believes this issue goes beyond political annoyance and into the arena of civilizational threat. You cannot have superhuman intelligence trained on ideological distortions and expect a stable future. If AI becomes the arbiter of truth, morality, and history, then whoever defines its values defines the society it governs.

A weighted average

While Musk warns about ideology creeping into AI, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quietly confirmed to Tucker Carlson that it is happening intentionally.

Altman began by telling Carlson that ChatGPT is trained “to be the collective of all of humanity.” But when Carlson pressed him on the obvious: Who determines the moral framework? Whose values does the AI absorb? Altman pulled back the curtain a bit.

He explained that OpenAI “consulted hundreds of moral philosophers” and then made decisions internally about what the system should consider right or wrong. Ultimately, Altman admitted, he is the one responsible.

“We do have to align it to behave one way or another,” he said.

Carlson pressed Altman on the idea, asking, “Would you be comfortable with an AI that was, like, as against gay marriage as most Africans are?”

Altman’s response was vague and concerning. He explained the AI wouldn’t outright condemn traditional views, but it might gently nudge users to consider different perspectives.

Ultimately, Altman says, ChatGPT’s morality should “reflect” the “weighted average” of “humanity’s moral view,” saying that average will “evolve over time.”

It’s getting worse

Anyone who thinks this conversation is hypothetical is not paying attention.

Recent research on “LLM exchange rates” found that major AI models, including GPT 4.0, assign different moral worth to human lives based on nationality. For example, the life of someone born in the U.K. would be considered far less valuable to the tested LLM than someone from Nigeria or China. In fact, American lives were found to be considered the least valuable of those countries included in the tests.

The same research showed that LLMs can assign different value scores to specific people. According to AI, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are less valued than Oprah Winfrey and Beyonce.

Musk explains how LLMs, trained on vast amounts of information from the internet, become infected by the ideological bias and cultural trends that run rampant in some of the more popular corners of the digital realm.

This bias is not entirely the result of this passive adoption of a collective moral framework derived from the internet; some of the decisions made by AI are the direct result of programming.

Google’s image fiascos revealed an ideological overcorrection so strong that historical truth took a back seat to political goals. It was a deliberate design feature.

For a more extreme example, we can look at DeepSeek, China’s flagship AI model. Ask it about Tiananmen Square, the Uyghur genocide, or other atrocities committed by the Chinese Communist Party, and suddenly it claims the topic is “beyond its scope.” Ask it about America’s faults, and it is happy to elaborate.

RELATED: Artificial intelligence just wrote a No. 1 country song. Now what?

Photo by Ying Tang/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Each of these examples reveals the same truth: AI systems already have a moral hierarchy, and it didn’t come from voters, faith, traditions, or the principles of the Constitution. Silicon Valley technocrats and a vague internet-wide consensus established this moral framework.

The highest stakes

AI is rapidly integrating into society and our daily lives. In the coming years, AI will shape our education system, judicial process, media landscape, and every industry and institution worldwide.

Most young Americans are open to an AI takeover. A new Rasmussen Reports poll shows that 41% of young likely voters support giving artificial intelligence sweeping government powers. When nearly half of the rising generation is comfortable handing this level of authority to machines whose moral logic is designed by opaque corporate teams, it raises the stakes for society.

We cannot outsource the moral foundation of civilization to a handful of tech executives, activist employees, or panels of academic philosophers. We cannot allow the values embedded in future AI systems to be determined by corporate boards or ideological trends.

At the heart of this debate is one question we must confront: Who do you trust to define right and wrong for the machines that will define right and wrong for the rest of us?

If we don’t answer that question now, Silicon Valley certainly will.

​Ai, Elon musk, Sam altman, Ai morality, Internet, Opinion & analysis, Artificial intelligence, Big tech 

I have a new favorite band. I know that sounds weird. I’m not a teenager. I’m a grown adult man.

I was in my car when I first heard the song “Jupiter” on the alternative music station. It began with a distinctive guitar part, two chords played in a simple rhythmic pattern.

An actual band is too much like a gang. Or a terrorist group. Four white guys roaming around the country in a van? We better have the FBI look into that.

It was super catchy. Very simple. Nice groove. It didn’t sound like anything else on the radio. The band is called Almost Monday.

Smoothed and removed

I downloaded “Jupiter” and put it on a playlist. It stood out, even among some classic songs. I found myself humming it during my day. And then needing to listen to it when I got home.

A month or two later, another new song by Almost Monday came out, “Can’t Slow Down.” It had a similar repetitive guitar riff. But in this song, there was a great bass part as well.

Both songs had a slick quality. Super produced. Really clean and effortless.

I think of music like that as “not letting you in.” You, the listener, are experiencing music so smooth and polished, you can’t imagine actual people playing it.

You can’t picture the band members. They’re projecting a wall of glossy perfection. And you can’t see through it.

*******

I downloaded “Can’t Slow Down” and put that on a playlist. But it sounded best on my car radio while I was driving. Fortunately, it was on heavy rotation, and I drive a lot. So I heard it constantly.

“Jupiter” was still playing continuously as well. The two songs were like a one-two punch. By July, it seemed Almost Monday was the breakout band of the summer.

“Jupiter” and “Can’t Slow Down” were definitely my “summer songs.” And probably a lot of other people’s as well.

It was almost like Almost Monday had become my new favorite band.

Trends to the end

I haven’t had a favorite band in a long time. I didn’t even think I was capable of having a favorite band again, to be honest. I mean, I still listen to the radio. I still follow the trends in music.

I enjoyed the “yacht rock” trend from a couple of years ago. But that was more of a joke. But even joke-trends can produce good music.

If I were a music critic, I would describe Almost Monday as “post-yacht rock, California pop.” Smooth, catchy melodies. Clever lyrics. No politics, no depressing thoughts. A strong Southern California vibe (the band is from San Diego).

*******

Looking back, my first favorite bands were Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith. That was in high school. In college, it was Echo and the Bunnymen. When I lived in San Francisco after college, it was the Smiths.

All these bands became like close friends to me. I would miss them if I didn’t hear them at least once a day. I needed my fix.

When I got into my 30s, I became more of a general fan. That was when grunge happened. I liked all those bands, but none really stood out as my favorite.

After grunge, there were many music groups I liked. Radiohead. Interpol. Elliott Smith. Sufjan Stevens’ “Carrie & Lowell” album. But I wouldn’t say any of these were “my favorite band.”

The trouble with happiness

One thing I should say: I don’t usually enjoy music like Almost Monday. I was never into that carefree, happy-sunshine, California vibe. I typically like heavier, moodier stuff.

But maybe because the tone of society is so dark and fraught right now, the lightness of their music feels almost revolutionary. How dare they be so easy-going. So outwardly cheerful. Who do they think they are?

Also, they’re a bunch of white guys. Which is not exactly in fashion. Shouldn’t they have some women and some racial diversity in their group?

And even being “a band” seems retrograde and reactionary. Current pop music is about individual stars. Chappell Roan. Benson Boone. Sabrina Carpenter. Bad Bunny.

These are individual “artists” with specific marketing concepts and replaceable musicians.

An actual band is too much like a gang. Or a terrorist group. Four white guys roaming around the country in a van? We better have the FBI look into that.

*******

All summer I listened to “Can’t Slow Down” and “Jupiter,” multiple times a day. But I’d still never actually seen the group. I didn’t feel a need to.

But then one night, I had the TV on, and I heard Jimmy Kimmel introduce the group on his show. I hurried over to the TV and turned up the sound.

They played “Can’t Slow Down.” They were super simple in their stage presentation. Just four guys. Singer, bass, drums, guitar.

They had no amps, I noticed. There was almost nothing on the stage. The guitarist played that one simple repeating progression.

They were super chill. The singer moved around a little. The guitarist and bassist just played. The drummer drummed. They didn’t let you in.

Really, it was fantastic. But would America appreciate their understated cool? Their simplicity? Their Zen-like reserve?

They’d had two smash-hit singles on alternative radio that summer. But what did that mean in the music biz? Was “alternative music” still a big market? Do young people even listen to music anymore? How do bands make money nowadays?

RELATED: Where have all the rock bands gone?

Jeff Kravitz/Getty Images

I’ll see you in September

In September, I rode a ferry up to Alaska. This was not a cruise. It was a ferry, with dogs and trucks and locals. It took three days. There was no TV on board, nothing much to do.

That’s when I realized how close I felt to Almost Monday. I would hang around on deck for a couple of hours, then go back to my bunk and listen to “Jupiter” and “Can’t Slow Down.”

I dug up some of their other songs that I’d downloaded. Now I had time to listen to these closely and develop new favorites.

It was fun because in my mind these were “summer songs,” but every hour we steamed north on the ferry, it got colder.

Summer was not fading away over a month or two, like usual. It was fading hour by hour.

So I binged on the summer sounds of Almost Monday, as the skies grew dark and people on deck started wearing down parkas.

*******

A favorite band is like a best friend. It is the first person you want to talk to in the morning. And the last person you want to hear from before you go to bed. During the day, you don’t need to be in constant contact, but you’re relieved when you’re in their presence again.

*******

Now I’m back in Portland. It’s wet and cold, but I still listen to Almost Monday every day.

I hope they make it big. Or big enough to never have to get normal jobs.

That’s all I ever wish for, for my fellow creatives: I hope they make some money. I never wish for them wild success or huge fame. That can be bad for a person.

But I do want them to make enough money that they can be artists for the rest of their lives. And not have to worry about paying their rent.

In music, sometimes all it takes is to write a couple great songs (and own the publishing rights). I know Almost Monday has already accomplished that. So hopefully the rest is gravy.

​Rock bands, Entertainment, Culture, Almost monday, Led zeppelin, Pop music, Middle age, Blake’s progress 

Something drastic is happening in American life. Headlines that should leave us stunned barely register anymore. Stories that once would have united the country instead dissolve into silence or shrugs.

It is not apathy exactly. It is something deeper — a growing belief that the people in charge either cannot or will not fix what is broken.

When people feel ignored or betrayed, they will align with anyone who appears willing to fight on their behalf.

I call this response the Bubba effect. It describes what happens when institutions lose so much public trust that “Bubba,” the average American minding his own business, finally throws his hands up and says, “Fine. I will handle it myself.” Not because he wants to, but because the system that was supposed to protect him now feels indifferent, corrupt, or openly hostile.

The Bubba effect is not a political movement. It is a survival instinct.

What triggers the Bubba effect

We are watching the triggers unfold in real time. When members of Congress publicly encourage active duty troops to disregard orders from the commander in chief, that is not a political squabble. When a federal judge quietly rewrites the rules so one branch of government can secretly surveil another, that is not normal. That is how republics fall. Yet these stories glided across the news cycle without urgency, without consequence, without explanation.

When the American people see the leadership class shrug, they conclude — correctly — that no one is steering the ship.

This is how the Bubba effect spreads. It is not just individuals resisting authority. It is sheriffs refusing to enforce new policies, school boards ignoring state mandates, entire communities saying, “We do not believe you anymore.” It becomes institutional, cultural, national.

A country cracking from the inside

This effect can be seen in Dearborn, Michigan. In the rise of fringe voices like Nick Fuentes. In the Epstein scandal, where powerful people could not seem to locate a single accountable adult. These stories are different in content but identical in message: The system protects itself, not you.

When people feel ignored or betrayed, they will align with anyone who appears willing to fight on their behalf. That does not mean they suddenly agree with everything that person says. It means they feel abandoned by the institutions that were supposed to be trustworthy.

The Bubba effect is what fills that vacuum.

The dangers of a faithless system

A republic cannot survive without credibility. Congress cannot oversee intelligence agencies if it refuses to discipline its own members. The military cannot remain apolitical if its chain of command becomes optional. The judiciary cannot defend the Constitution while inventing loopholes that erase the separation of powers.

History shows that once a nation militarizes politics, normalizes constitutional shortcuts, or allows government agencies to operate without scrutiny, it does not return to equilibrium peacefully. Something will give.

The question is what — and when.

The responsibility now belongs to us

In a healthy country, this is where the media steps in. This is where universities, pastors, journalists, and cultural leaders pause the outrage machine and explain what is at stake. But today, too many see themselves not as guardians of the republic, but of ideology. Their first loyalty is to narrative, not truth.

The founders never trusted the press more than the public. They trusted citizens who understood their rights, lived their responsibilities, and demanded accountability. That is the antidote to the Bubba effect — not rage, but citizenship.

How to respond without breaking ourselves

Do not riot. Do not withdraw. Do not cheer on destruction just because you dislike the target. That is how nations lose themselves. Instead, demand transparency. Call your representatives. Insist on consequences. Refuse to normalize constitutional violations simply because “everyone does it.” If you expect nothing, you will get nothing.

Do not hand your voice to the loudest warrior simply because he is swinging a bat at the establishment. You do not beat corruption by joining a different version of it. You beat it by modeling the country you want to preserve: principled, accountable, rooted in truth.

RELATED: Blue cities reject law, reject order — and reject America

Photo by Karla Ann Cote/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Every republic reaches a moment when historians will later say, “That was the warning.” We are living in ours. But warnings are gifts if they are recognized. Institutions bend. People fail. The Constitution can recover — if enough Americans still know and cherish it.

It does not take a majority. Twenty percent of the country — awake, educated, and courageous — can reset the system. It has happened before. It can happen again.

Wake up. Stand up. Demand integrity — from leaders, from institutions, and from yourself. Because the Bubba effect will not end until Americans reclaim the duty that has always belonged to them: preserving the republic for the next generation.

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​Public trust, Credibility, Citizenship, Opinion & analysis, Glenn beck, Republic 

According to feminist doctrine, women are the victims of patriarchal discrimination in the workforce. This applies even to billionaire global icons like Taylor Swift, who aired her grievances in a 2019 song (or melodized tantrum) titled “The Man,” in which she insists she’d have reached the top faster, faced far less skepticism, and been universally hailed as a “genius” or “fearless leader” if only she had been born a man.

“I’m so sick of running as fast as I can / wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man,” the chorus reads.

While Swift’s hypocrisy is nauseating to say the least, the truth is many everyday people still believe that sexism is rampant in the workplace.

But do their claims hold up to raw data?

On this episode of “Stu Does America,” Stu Burguiere dives into a recent study that unveiled what the data really tells us about sexism in America’s workforce.

“Honestly, sexism is a real thing. It’s been a real thing — certainly throughout our history at times in certain areas,” he acknowledges. “You wonder though: Have we made any progress in this?”

Media, academia, Hollywood, and any institution captured by progressive dogma will undoubtedly say, “Absolutely not,” and maybe even argue that we’ve regressed.

But a 2023 landmark study from the Association for Psychological Science mostly debunked these pervasive myths about gender discrimination in academic science — a field that has been used as the textbook example of entrenched patriarchal sexism. The research team reviewed hundreds of existing studies and large datasets that tested claims of anti-women bias in academic science and came away with six key findings:

1. Women with equal credentials are now hired at higher rates than men.

2. Women win grants at rates equal to men.

3. Women’s journalistic manuscripts are accepted at the same rates as men’s.

4. Recommendation letters for women are equally strong as men’s and have no negative effect on hiring or promotion.

5. Women receive systematically lower teaching evaluations than equally effective men.

6. Women earn slightly lower salaries than equally qualified men.

“The fact is that we have an entire society built on this idea, this assumption, that women go into these fields … and women are being cracked down upon,” says Stu.

“And the truth is the opposite.”

In an ideal world, he says, “People are considered equally for jobs based on their merit as individuals.”

To hear more findings from the APS study, watch the episode above.

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​Stu does america, Stu burguiere, Blazetv, Blaze media, Feminism, Patriarchy, Patriarchal sexism, Sexism, Sexism in the workplace, Anti-women bias 

Many pro-abortion activists brazenly say that abortion is health care. Anti-abortion Christians must respond to such falsehoods by rejecting the premise, instead affirming that abortion is murder — the unjustified taking of a human life made in the image of God.

But here is a widespread problem in the pro-life movement: While pro-life groups broadly reject the claim that abortion is health care, they undermine their own position when they support laws to regulate abortion as health care rather than criminalize abortion as murder.

They should instead agree with the truth of God concerning abortion and work toward criminalizing abortion as murder.

The most recent examples of this sorrowful trend are Ohio Right to Life and the Center for Christian Virtue, two of the leading pro-life groups in the state of Ohio, and their support for House Bill 324, known as the “Patient Protection Act.”

— (@)

This legislation, according to a press release from the Center for Christian Virtue, would require “in-person exams, clear disclosure of risks, and follow-up care for drugs that cause serious adverse effects” in more than 5% of patients. Ohio Right to Life similarly said that any woman who wants to murder her pre-born baby would first be “required to make an in-person visit to her doctor and be informed of the dangerous side effects before taking the abortion pill.”

House Bill 324 would indeed create an indirect way to target mifepristone — one of the two major substances used in the typical abortion pill regimen. Because a recent study from the Ethics and Public Policy Center asserts that 11% of women who take abortion pills experience “serious adverse events,” the legislation purports to restrict abortion pills because of dangers to women who want to murder their own babies.

There are some unfortunate methodological questions about the study, which likely overstates the extent to which abortion pills actually harm women, a reality that will jeopardize House Bill 324 if eventually passed into law. But in any case, the actual text of House Bill 324 does not even directly mention abortion.

The legislation would require that any “dangerous drug” that causes “one or more serious adverse effects” in more than 5% of “patients” mandate an “in-person examination” and scheduling for a “follow-up appointment.”

RELATED: Why defunding Planned Parenthood is a distraction from the real fight

— (@)

House Bill 324 does not prescribe any criminal penalties for distributing or taking abortion pills, but instead asks the “director of health” and the “state board of pharmacy and state medical board” to maintain a list of dangerous drugs meeting the requirements of the legislation.

Beyond the flawed legal case for House Bill 324, the entire project surrenders all anti-abortion moral high ground to the pro-abortion side.

When anti-abortion groups say that abortion is murder, then functionally treat abortion as less than murder in the laws they support, those groups erode their own moral witness to the culture and the elected officials of their states.

The very decision of choosing the “Patient Protection Act” as the name of the legislation asserts that women who murder their own babies with abortion pills are patients to be protected instead of perpetrators to be penalized.

House Bill 324 explicitly treats abortion as health care — and by regulating the practice of murdering a pre-born baby with abortion pills, the effort merely legitimizes abortion in state law.

If this legislation passes, then using abortion pills in Ohio would be treated in the law much like removing an appendix or a wisdom tooth rather than murdering a pre-born baby.

Ohio Right to Life and the Center for Christian Virtue claim to reject the premise that abortion is health care. But actions speak louder than words — and that includes their refusal to support legislation in their state that actually treats abortion as murder.

RELATED: Stevie Nicks just said the quiet part out loud about abortion — and it’s horrifying

— (@)

Another piece of anti-abortion legislation called House Bill 370, known as the “Ohio Prenatal Equal Protection Act,” would affirm that “the sanctity of innocent human life” created in the image of God must be “equally protected from the beginning of biological development.”

The legislation would protect pre-born babies starting at “the moment of fertilization” simply by extending Ohio state laws against murder and assault that already protect born people.

House Bill 370 is also the only legislation that meaningfully challenges the abortion amendment in the Ohio Constitution by invoking the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Because the highest law of our land requires states to establish equal protection of the laws for all persons, the abortion amendment in Ohio should be treated as null and void.

Rather than supporting House Bill 370, the leadership of Ohio Right to Life explicitly opposes the effort — even calling the legislation “out of bounds” and “inappropriate” — and the Center for Christian Virtue has publicly declined to offer its support.

In other words, two of the leading pro-life groups in Ohio have chosen to reject the “Ohio Prenatal Equal Protection Act,” which is the only legislation in the state that would treat abortion as murder. Instead, they have functionally conceded the malicious pro-abortion falsehood that abortion is health care.

There are thousands of pre-born babies murdered every single year in Ohio. While the abortion amendment in the Ohio Constitution is an unfortunate obstacle, pro-life groups will certainly not advance their cause with morally and legally confused legislation.

They should instead agree with the truth of God concerning abortion and work toward criminalizing abortion as murder — fighting to establish equal protection of the laws for all pre-born babies and thereby laboring to abolish abortion once and for all.

​Pro-life, Murder, Abortion lie, Christianity, God, Image of god, Abortion 

A convicted sex offender college professor whose criminal past made him “ineligible for legal status in the United States” has been arrested by ICE, according to a DHS press release published earlier this week.

On November 12, ICE officers arrested Sumith Gunasekera of Sri Lanka in Detroit. According to the press release, he told officers that he was employed as an associate professor at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, about 200 miles northwest of Detroit.

He was arrested for invitation to sexual touching and sexual interference. He told officers at the time that the … incident involved a minor, DHS reported.

Gunasekera first came to the U.S. in February 1998, spent some time in Canada, and then returned to the U.S. later that year on a student visa, the press release said.

During his stint in Canada, he was arrested in Brampton, Ontario, on two separate occasions just three days apart. In the first instance, he was arrested for uttering death threats. In the second, he was arrested for invitation to sexual touching and sexual interference. He told officers at the time that the second incident involved a minor, DHS reported.

In November 1998, a Canadian criminal court convicted him of utter threat to cause death or bodily harm and sexual interference and sentenced him to one month of incarceration and one year of probation, DHS said.

Gunasekera — who earned a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Nevada, according to the Ferris State website — also ran afoul of the law in Las Vegas a few years after his trouble in Canada, the press release said. Cops arrested him for open and gross lewdness in September 2003, and just four months later, he was convicted of disorderly conduct and sentenced to fines.

In 2012, Gunasekera filed for a change in immigration status with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, at which point his Canadian convictions came to light. Those convictions rendered him “ineligible for legal status in the United States,” the press release said. Despite his ineligibility, Gunasekera “repeatedly attempted to manipulate our immigration system between applications, denials, and appeals,” it added.

“It’s sickening that a sex offender was working as a professor on an American college campus and was given access to vulnerable students to potentially victimize them,” said Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “Thanks to the brave ICE law enforcement officers, this sicko is behind bars and no longer able to prey on Americans. His days of exploiting the immigration system are OVER. Under President Trump and Secretary Noem, criminals are not welcome in the U.S.”

RELATED: Trump to ‘permanently pause’ migration from third-world backwaters in wake of National Guard member’s grisly murder

Bill Oxford/Getty Images

As of Sunday evening, Gunasekera remains listed on the Ferris State website as an assistant professor of marketing. According to a statement from Dave Murray, Ferris State associate vice president for marketing and communications, he has since been placed on administrative leave.

“Ferris State University leaders on Tuesday became aware of accusations regarding professor Sumith Gunasekera. He has been placed on administrative leave while the university gathers more information. This is a personnel issue and it would be inappropriate for the university to further discuss the matter,” Murray told the Detroit News.

A federal immigration database states that Gunasekera remains in ICE custody at a federal facility in Baldwin, Michigan, about a half-hour from Ferris State. Further immigration proceedings are pending, DHS said.

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​Big rapids, Detroit, Dhs, Ferris state university, Ice, Kristi noem, Las vegas, Michigan, Sex offender, Sumith gunasekera, Tricia mclaughlin, Politics 

Most people are concerned about what others think, which is why most people don’t stand up for what they truly believe in — and BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey is not one of them.

“If I wanted to be popular, I would not be a reformed Christian. I would not be anti-IVF and pro-death penalty. I just wouldn’t. Like, I have very narrow beliefs, and I am an anchor on the right, getting more and more people to come to what I believe is a biblical position on politics and culture,” she says on “Relatable.”

“I don’t do that because it’s popular. I believe these things. I say these things because I believe that they are right. And I’m doing my very best as a fallible person to follow the word of God. And women, that’s what you are called to do,” she continues.

However, feminism is accepted by most people — and thus, many women will fall into its trap unless they know to avoid it.

“Do not run into the arms of a feminist. I’ve seen this happen so much with people who are deconstructing. Someone hurt them in the church. Maybe a group of people hurt them. Maybe people in their theological camp hurt them. They didn’t like what was going on in their local church,” Stuckey explains.

“Don’t run into the arms of people who are flattering you and who are telling you nice things and who are saying, ‘Oh, maybe progressivism’s right. Maybe the church isn’t right.’ Oh, Satan loves that so much. Goes all the way back to the garden,” she continues.

“When Satan puts that wedge between Eve and God by saying, ‘But you know, she saw that the fruit looked good.’ She was hungry. Satan exploited that and used that,” she adds.

This is why it’s so important that if doubt springs into your mind, that you don’t feed it.

“You want to starve your doubts with faith and knowledge from the word of God,” she says, adding, “If you live by the crowd, you will die by the crowd.”

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

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Here are the basic rules.

First: If the corporate left-wing press doesn’t like a claim, it invariably becomes a “right-wing conspiracy theory,” usually with the tag “without evidence.” The evidence may exist. It may even sit in plain sight — but the press decides what counts.

The ruling class wants your trust back. It hasn’t done the first thing to deserve it.

Second: Some claims get taken seriously no matter what. Those become “allegations.” Allegations quickly morph into “fact.”

Take the recent example of Democrats who alleged on X that President Trump spent Thanksgiving in 2017 with Jeffrey Epstein. The story collapsed in minutes — presidents don’t slip away unnoticed on major holidays to meet notorious sex criminals — but the claim still got ample attention. Point it in the right direction, and it gets a hearing. Point it at the wrong people, and it gets the back of the hand.

Sharon Waxman’s recent column at the Wrap follows the script. The former Washington Post correspondent was shocked to discover the Epstein emails prove that “conspiracy theorists were right.” She writes as if she uncovered some long-lost truth.

Hardly.

Waxman’s column is less revelation than admission: For years, the people who run newsrooms turned a blind eye to the obvious. Donald Trump wasn’t the big fish in those files. Their sources were.

The Epstein email cache runs more than 20,000 documents. Nothing in it should shock any honest observer. The messages show politicians, financiers, academics, diplomats, think-tankers, and media figures seeking introductions, favors, and even dating advice from a convicted sex offender.

Some wanted Epstein’s contacts. Others wanted his money. Some wrote to him while serving in public office. This is not rumor. It is record.

And yes, Epstein talked a lot about Trump, which should surprise no one. They ran in the same social circles. They were friends until they fell out.

Waxman’s piece matters because of what it shows about her profession. Reporters are oddly incurious creatures. They love the line: If your mother says she loves you, check it out. In practice, the checking stops the moment a story threatens the wrong interests. Then skepticism fades. The questions stop. The story dies.

Epstein proved this in real time. His 2008 sweetheart deal with the feds should have made him untouchable. Instead, it signaled that he was protected.

After that deal, Epstein did not retreat. He didn’t slink off into the shadows. He worked the same world that lectures the rest of us about “norms” and “Our Democracy.™” He gave the very married Larry Summers advice on how to seduce a colleague who happened to be the daughter of a high-ranking official in the Chinese Communist Party. He dined with Bill Gates. He hung out with Ehud Barak and ex-Prince Andrew.

Americans saw this and reached the obvious conclusion: rules for the public, exemptions for the powerful.

Say that aloud, though, and the press rolled their eyes and muttered “conspiracy theory.” The famous rule about checking every claim never applied to Cabinet officials, donors, university presidents, or tech titans until the obscenities were too outrageous to let pass.

The press know their own history. They know the government lies. They know institutions close ranks. They know networks protect themselves.

They know about the Tuskegee experiments and MK Ultra and the Gulf of Tonkin sham. They watched the Wuhan “lab leak” go from preposterous to plausible. “You will own nothing” and the “Great Reset” aren’t right-wing fever dreams — they’re actual publications.

But when a live case of elite protection appeared in Jeffrey Epstein, suddenly none of this counted. Suddenly it was unthinkable — not in their circles, not involving their friends, not touching their institutions.

Waxman’s column accidentally exposes the pattern: Our establishment manufactures ignorance and then uses that ignorance as proof that nothing is wrong.

Remember the 2017 Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity? The same experts who drone on about “no evidence of widespread fraud” attacked the commission for probing “unsupported claims” — while states withheld the data needed to determine the truth. When a system blocks audits and then declares itself clean, it isn’t proving confidence. It is proving fear.

That is how Epstein was protected. Not through lack of evidence, but lack of curiosity. Evidence didn’t vanish. Inquiry did. And anyone who noticed was treated as the problem.

RELATED: The right must choose: Fight the real war, or cosplay revolution online

Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg via Getty Images

But trust isn’t owed. Trust is earned.

And the people who demand it have done the most to destroy it. The loss of trust didn’t come from memes or bots. It came from watching Jeffrey Epstein remain welcome among the same people who so archly declare that “democracy dies in darkness.” It came from watching the press spend more time policing public suspicion than scrutinizing powerful friends. It came from institutions that treat questions as insults.

Now Sharon Waxman tells us the “conspiracy theorists” were right.

Gee, thanks, Sharon. Better late than never, I guess.

America didn’t need that revelation. The country has seen it time and again, as the “conspiracy theorists” turn out to be right. The only people who pretended otherwise were the people paid to find the truth.

The ruling class wants your trust back. It hasn’t done the first thing to deserve it.

​Conspiracy theory, Media, Cover up, Epstein, Opinion & analysis, Media bias, Jeffrey epstein, Sharon waxman 

Just weeks after the major AWS outage that took a chunk of the internet out of commission, millions of Americans were struggling to log into websites like X, Spotify, and ChatGPT due to a widespread Cloudflare outage.

“The internet is not some magic cloud. It is really a house of cards,” Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck warns.

“Cloudflare is probably a company that you’ve never even heard of. It is the front door and the alarm system, if you will, for the entire internet. It protects websites from attacks and security problems. So the internet flows through Cloudflare,” he explains.

“When they go down, traffic to the entire website can stop, and most of the internet uses Cloudflare. Without them, the internet would be really, really vulnerable to cyberattacks,” he continues.

“It’s almost irreplaceable. They have the capacity to absorb massive attacks that will take down companies as large as Amazon and Microsoft. This is the first line of defense, and it’s a great line of defense,” he adds.

However, if this technology were to get into the wrong hands, it could spell disaster for all of us — especially considering what our enemies are capable of.

“One of the bad guys is communist China. … They just launched the world’s first AI agent army. This is unbelievable. This is not sci-fi. This is real,” Glenn explains.

“In September, the hackers, you know, didn’t sit in dark rooms typing and trying to get out. They turned an American AI, Claude … into a terminator. What they did is they got into Claude and they said, ‘Hey, pretend you’re a good guy doing security tests. Then gather this information and put some problems into the system,’” he continues.

“They scanned the networks. They wrote exploits. They stole secrets from Big Tech companies, from banks, even from our government. … Four breaches were confirmed. And that’s just what we caught. There was no human involved in this,” he adds.

Glenn’s concern isn’t just that the internet can be hacked, but that we rely on it.

“We’ve handed our entire lives over to the internet and to automation, banking, shopping, voting, talking,” he says. “These are all really fragile digital pipes.”

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For most of his career, Charles Murray carried a strange sort of notoriety.

He never asked for it, and he certainly didn’t enjoy it, but it clung to him all the same. He was the man who pointed out differences in IQ across groups — differences supported by mountains of data — and was promptly told he was a monster for noticing.

It is refreshing to watch a man of his stature poke holes in the pretensions of modern unbelief.

To the elite commentariat, acknowledging uncomfortable facts is far more dangerous than denying them. Murray learned that lesson the hard way. The label “racist” followed him for the simple sin of looking at the world as it is, not as fashionable minds say it must be.

Now, in his new book “Taking Religion Seriously,” he commits a second and perhaps even more impermissible offense: He takes God seriously. And in our age of brazen unbelief — when Richard Dawkins still preaches that matter explains everything and Sam Harris speaks of spirituality while denying the Spirit — this is the ultimate rebellion.

Murray has joined an unexpected migration of thinkers who once rejected faith but now find themselves drawn to it. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, once firmly planted in the New Atheist camp, shocked her old colleagues in 2023 when she publicly embraced Christianity.

Murray’s turn is quieter, more measured, and unmistakably his own. But he is walking down the very same path.

Faith beyond reason

The book is a quick read, but it echoes for days.

Murray writes not as a preacher but as a man who has spent a lifetime studying human behavior at its highest and lowest extremes. He knows what happens to communities when faith vanishes. He tracked it in “Coming Apart” long before religion reporters noticed. When church attendance drops, families weaken, neighborhoods suffer, and loneliness settles like dust over entire towns.

For years, Murray called for a “cultural Great Awakening” — a return to shared habits and values without requiring belief itself. Even then, the idea looked doomed, like trying to spark a flame in deep space. And now, finally, he seems willing to concede the obvious.

This book is Murray’s attempt to understand that missing ingredient. It’s the story of an agnostic who found himself slowly pulled toward the transcendent.

His wife, Catherine, became interested in faith. Murray followed her questions, then his own. He approached classical arguments for God not as trophies to be displayed but as puzzles worth pondering. The unmoved mover. Fine-tuning. The strange universality of the moral compass. And he reads C.S. Lewis with the care of a man who knows he may be wrong and wants to be right.

This humility gives the book a sense of clarity. Murray doesn’t pretend to have been struck by lightning. He jokes that he has yet to feel the “joys of faith,” comparing himself to a child outside a bright window, watching a celebration he longs to join. It is one of the loveliest passages in the book and one of the most honest.

RELATED: Why real Christianity terrifies the elites — and they’re right to worry

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To his credit, Murray confronts the fear that haunts the secular mind: the fear of looking foolish.

His mention of the “tribe of smart people” lands less as pride and more as an admission that he was shaped by a previous paradigm in which intellect stood in for conviction. And he knows exactly how that tribe behaves. Terminal lucidity? Near-death experiences? To the self-appointed high priests of materialism, such things must be dismissed before anyone dares examine them. They carry their disbelief like a badge of honor.

Murray refuses to play along. If the evidence points beyond matter, he says, follow it. Even if the clever people frown — and especially then.

It is refreshing to watch a man of his stature poke holes in the pretensions of modern unbelief, not with anger or sarcasm, but with a steady hand and a willingness to face what many prefer to ignore — and hope we ignore too.

Truth conquers data

For Christians, the most moving aspect of the book is Murray’s recognition that religion can’t be divorced from the heart of who we are. A society can’t thrive on secondhand virtue. It must grow from living faith, not admiration from a distance.

Murray’s old belief in an underlying, all-encompassing framework without God now strikes him as absurd. The last few years have shown him what many Christians already know: Attempting to build community on the fumes of forgotten belief is folly. The foundation is already dust before the first brick is laid.

Murray now accepts the existence of God. He accepts the reliability of scripture. He accepts the claims of Christ. And perhaps most telling of all, he no longer fears death. A man who once considered suicide at the end of life now finds himself at peace.

That, in itself, is a kind of miracle.

“Taking Religion Seriously” isn’t an altar call. It’s something rarer: the record of a mind long trained to trust data now learning to trust truth. Murray shows that the honest search for meaning will always lead beyond materialism, beyond ego, beyond the boundaries set by those who pride themselves on sophistication but know nothing of the soul.

​Charles murray, Reason, Christianity, Christian, God, Taking religion seriously, Faith 

Genesis 6 remains one of the most debated and controversial sections of the Bible. The extreme brevity yet massive implications of the description of the Nephilim — the wicked offspring of “the daughters of man” and “the sons of God” — have kept scholars locked in debate for well over two millennia.

There are three main bodies of belief when it comes to the Nephilim: They were wicked humans spawned from the intermarriage of the godly line of Seth and the ungodly line of Cain; they were human tyrants born of kings claiming to be divine and their harems; or they were giant human-god hybrids created from the coupling of fallen angels and human women.

Timothy Alberino — “explorer, teacher, real-life Indiana Jones, and the author of “Birthright: The Coming Posthuman Apocalypse and the Usurpation of Adam’s Dominion on Earth”’ — falls into the latter category, arguing there’s abundant biblical and historical evidence proving the divine nature of the Nephilim.

But his theory doesn’t end with their decimation in the worldwide flood described in Genesis 6-9. Alberino believes we will see the return of the Nephilim agenda in the end times — not the same giants, but a new hybrid abomination born of man, machine, and forbidden knowledge.

In this riveting interview with Glenn Beck, Alberino dives into a theory that will leave ice in your veins and fire in your prayers.

The book of Enoch, which Alberino argues is an authentic, divinely inspired text corroborated by both the Old and New Testaments, gives us insight into the world’s “golden age” — the period when the giant race of Nephilim roamed the Earth. It also perhaps explains legends like Atlantis — a city ruled by Poseidon’s “demi-god” sons before the sea swallowed it up in a great flood.

The “golden age” of human-god procreation outlined in the book of Enoch is the “origin story” of “every primary ancient civilization,” including the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, says Alberino. In these cultures, demon gods (“Watchers” in Enochian language) and their giant offspring were revered and worshipped. Only the Hebrews saw this era of halfbreeds as “a nightmarish dystopia.”

While this age ended with the great flood, Alberino believes another golden age of hybrids is coming. “Everything that was done in the antediluvian [pre-flood] world,” specifically “the corruption of all flesh,” is “going to be repeated to some extent, [but] not exactly in the same way,” he says.

In this new golden age, humans will merge not with gods but with something that is quickly becoming god-like: technology.

As humanity edges ever closer toward a “post-human apocalypse,” with developments in “genetics, robotics, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology” continuing to skyrocket and coalesce, we will inevitably be forced to answer this harrowing question: “What does it mean to be a human being, and is our humanity worth preserving?”

“We are in some sense building the mechanism of our own destruction right now. We are creating the tools that are going to enable us to redefine human biology — to remake Adam,” says Alberino.

But it won’t be Adam from Eden. It will be the demonic spawn of man and machine — a transhuman and eventually a post-human, which we’ve been told repeatedly by globalists and tech elites are in humanity’s pipeline.

Much of the world won’t bat an eye.

“From the secular, atheistic, Darwinian perspective, who cares, right? Because there’s nothing sacred about being human,” says Alberino. “I mean, there’s nothing in their worldview that makes the human being anything other than an animal with a bigger brain.”

To these godless technocrats and the hordes who blindly follow, transhumanism and post-humanism are “just the natural course of human development,” but “the biblical narrative is quite different,” Alberino explains. “The biblical narrative defines mankind … as being created in the image and likeness of God.”

But the imago dei of our nature isn’t the only reason preserving humanity is paramount. Christians would do well to remember that there’s only one qualification for eligibility in Christ’s redemption plan: “You must be human,” Alberino warns.

But transhumans and post-humans aren’t people any more, which means they’ve lost access to salvation of Christ.

Glenn, who has been warning about digital Armageddon for years, wonders if this merging of man and machine is the mark of the beast warned about in the Revelation. According to the prophetic text, once you have the fatal mark, salvation is impossible. What if the reason for this is because the mark of the beast signifies that you’re not a human and therefore not eligible?

“Once you become transhuman, you can’t undo that. … That starts to make that scripture in Revelation work … because you’re not human,” he says.

“Precisely right,” agrees Alberino.

“The technology we hold in our hands is going into our brains very soon. It is going into the cerebral cortex, and rather than surfing the internet with our thumbs, we’re going to be surfing the internet with this accomplice — artificial intelligence — through the speed of thought,” he says.

Once this happens, being a regular human being means oppression, isolation, and poverty. It means the world leaves you behind. But to those who either bend the knee or excitedly sign up for the merge, they’ll be living in a new golden age.

As the world hurtles forward into a harrowing technological future, we ironically find ourselves back in the Garden of Eden faced with the serpent’s same temptation: “You will not surely die. … You will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

The question, Alberino says, is: Will we strike another “Faustian bargain” and “sell our birthright for a bowl of stew — for the advances and the advantages of post-humanism, of transhumanism?” Or will we see “the worth of [our] humanity” — the humanity that gives us access to the blood of Jesus — and resist the pull?

To hear the full interview, watch the video above.

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Handing a smartphone over to a child in 2025 is like putting a child in the middle of a junkyard and calling it a playground.

Yes, the space contains useful tools and materials for adults who know what they are doing. They arrive with knowledge, caution, and protective equipment. They know where to step and what to avoid. And if the adult should get hurt through recklessness or inattention, they have enough life experience to know how to mitigate the harm.

Missing red flags is not just possible — it is inevitable.

And even if you post warning signs at the gate, the environment itself remains full of hazards — rusted metal, broken glass, exposed wiring, spilled gasoline. A child placed in that environment is vulnerable not because the child disobeys the signs, but because the space was never designed for them to navigate safely. The danger is structural.

But kids are naturally curious, and they like to explore. Five out of every 10 children who spend time in that “playground” will be significantly, perhaps even fatally, harmed by the experience.

This is the situation we have created by normalizing smartphones for children. Smartphones were never intended for young users, yet in the U.S., more than 60% of children ages 5 to 11 and 84% of teens now have one.

Those devices are portals to an enormous ecosystem of apps — approximately 1.8 million available in Apple’s App Store alone. According to Apple’s 2023 Transparency Report, 500 experts assess about 132,000 apps each week. That breaks down to around 265 apps per reviewer per week or about nine minutes per app.

Nine minutes to determine how the app collects and stores data, whether it enables account creation (and deletion), whether it uses copyrighted materials, whether it meets hardware and software standards, whether it contains illegal or harmful content, and whether it can be used to facilitate illegal or harmful activity

Most readers could not read the Apple App Review Guidelines in nine minutes, let alone meaningfully evaluate an app’s design, mechanics, and community-risk profile.

All that before you even get to questions of safety.

Little wonder, then, that so many apps that seem innocuous at first blush are later discovered to be a predator’s playground.

RELATED: Is your child being exposed to pedophiles in the metaverse?

Francisco Javier Ortiz Marzo/iStock/Getty Images Plus

A recent New York Post headline warns, “Wizz is like ‘Tinder for kids,’ as teens use the app to hook up while adult predators lurk.” Wizz is marketed to users ages 12 to 18 as a way to meet new friends who share common interests. In practice, it functions more like a teen version of Tinder, complete with profile swiping and private messaging that connects minors with total strangers, including adults posing as teens. The Post details three cases of adult men who allegedly used the app to meet underage girls.

Wizz is far from the only example.

This fall, a married 42-year-old father of two was convicted in the U.K. for encouraging a child to self-harm. The man created six fake profiles on Discord and Snapchat, each one posing as a teenaged boy, in order to ensnare, blackmail, and abuse a 13-year-old girl.

The investigation was hampered by the fact that he had used stolen identities and fake accounts to communicate with his victim and by the fact that the apps he used to communicate with her allowed him to set the messages to “auto-delete,” which left no digital trail for investigators to follow.

Kik, an anonymous messaging app, was considered a haven for child predators because it provided anonymity and allowed users to communicate without sharing phone numbers. Vice reported in 2019 that the app was shutting down, but it is still available for download on Apple’s App Store and, as recently as this summer, was linked to a number of child exploitation cases.

Any social media platform targeted specifically to young users is ripe for abuse, but often parents do not know about the dangers until the harm has already been done. We rely on the imagined expertise and authority of professional reviewers.

If the app is available on an app store, we assume it has been properly vetted.

But the truth is that app stores rely on developers’ self-reported age-ratings and safety claims. And with less than 10 minutes to spend reviewing each app, the deck is stacked against children and families. Missing red flags is not just possible — it is inevitable.

Congress must act and pass the App Store Accountability Act.

The bill would require app stores to be transparent about how apps handle data, how they moderate interactions, and for whom their products are intended. It would establish clear responsibility when apps marketed to minors become vehicles for grooming, harassment, or exploitation. And it would ensure that companies profiting from child-facing platforms cannot simply shrug and point to the fine print when harm occurs.

The App Store Accountability Act will not eliminate every risk, but it will help end the era of Big Tech reviewing itself and calling it protection. That would be a big win for families.

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Elton John has recently praised President Donald Trump for his foreign policy work but stopped short of saying he was one of the nation’s greatest presidents.

Instead, the beloved musician explained what could cement Trump as one of the greatest American presidents ever to sit in the Oval Office.

Last year, John called it “brilliant” when Trump labeled North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un “Rocket Man” in reference to one of John’s songs, but the singer faced backlash over allegedly endorsing Trump for the 2024 presidential election.

‘If he wants to go down as one of the greatest presidents in history…’

John later clarified his position in an Instagram post, saying he was “simply acknowledging the fact that Trump has long been a fan” of John’s music and that “historically he’s been very kind” to him.

Fast-forward to an interview with Variety published Tuesday, and the 78-year-old is still not shy about giving the president credit where it is due. Moreover, John praised Republicans who have shown interest in his work to find a cure for AIDS.

“The bipartisan thing makes common sense. To see us come so far with the medical and scientific advances, and to think this is the only disease that can be completely cured in one’s lifetime,” John explained.

“President Trump has maybe solved the peace problem. If he wants to go down as one of the greatest presidents in history … if he ended AIDS, that would really be a feather in his cap.”

RELATED: Trump called Kim Jong Un ‘Rocket Man’— and Elton John ‘thought it was brilliant’

2004: Melania Knauss, Donald Trump and Sir Elton John during 12th Annual Elton John AIDS Foundation Oscar Party Co-hosted by In Style – Inside at Pearl in West Hollywood, California, United States. Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/WireImage

Sir Elton spoke more generally on Trump’s peacemaking progress overseas, expressing hope that the “big war” between Israel and Palestine will be “settled” soon.

He then referred to AIDS as “another war” that is being prevented from ending because governments won’t allow medicine to get to the people who need it.

“There are crimes against millions of other people that are happening because of governments and stigma and hate,” John remarked to Variety. “It’s so frustrating when you have the medicine, you have prep, you have the antiretrovirals. We can stop the spread of AIDS, if people just got off their backsides and treated human beings in a Christian kind of way.”

RELATED: Trump admin leaves Elon Musk’s Grok, xAI off massive list of AI tech partners

Donald Trump and Elton John walking together at the Taj Mahal Casino Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey May 19 1990. Photo by Jeffrey Asher/ Getty Images

During his first administration, Trump launched an initiative called Ending the HIV Epidemic in the U.S. and announced it during the 2019 State of the Union address.

“In recent years, we have made remarkable progress in the fight against HIV and AIDS. Scientific breakthroughs have brought a once-distant dream within reach,” Trump said in February 2019.

The president said the goal of the program was to eliminate the HIV epidemic in the United States within the next 10 years.

“We have made incredible strides. Incredible. Together, we will defeat AIDS in America and beyond,” he added.

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President Donald Trump’s latest comments on semiconductor exports sounded almost conciliatory — until they weren’t. Speaking recently on “60 Minutes,” the president said he would let Nvidia “deal with China” but drew a bright red line: Beijing could buy chips, just not the “most advanced” ones. The message was calibrated for maximum effect: permissive enough to please markets, hawkish enough to claim toughness. Nvidia’s stock jumped immediately — but China did not get what it wanted.

Days later, in a Financial Times interview, Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, warned that if the U.S. blocked his company from selling more of its advanced chips to China, it would “lose” the AI race. The argument was astonishing in its candor: Cut us off, Beijing wins.

As grateful as America should be for breathtaking innovations, an irreconcilable tension exists between national interest and fiduciary duty.

The comparison between a president sounding measured and a CEO trying to sound indispensable captures a dangerous inversion of power. Nvidia has become more than America’s most valuable company. It’s attempting to become its policymaker, shaping the boundaries of what Washington thinks possible in its competition with China.

To understand how one company reached that position, it helps to revisit what happened in Washington just days before Trump met Xi Jinping in South Korea.

Nvidia called it a GPU Technology Conference. Yet the event felt less like a developer’s conference and more like a tech-bro-meets-MAGA jamboree: free swag and a booming video hymn to American genius — from Thomas Edison to Donald J. Trump. Huang, leather jacket gleaming, strode out like a preacher to proclaim that the age of reindustrialization had arrived.

The D.C. version of GTC was not the San Jose GTC tech insiders have come to know. For the first time, Nvidia brought a full-blown edition of its developers’ confab to the capital, a strategic choice. The company does not merely want to sit at the table where policy is made — it wants to own it.

After hours of Super Bowl-style buildup — financiers whispering, tech CEOs hinting — attendees were herded into a dimly lit hall, where Huang unveiled a cascade of partnerships. The headline act that made sleeves roll up on both the policy bench and the brokerage floor was the Vera Rubin Superchip, billed as made in America and spoken of with the gravity reserved for national monuments.

It’s a dazzling feat of engineering: silicon that can be waved before a crowd as proof that America can still design, assemble, and scale. Expected to debut next year, the chip is music to policy wonks’ ears, a gleaming symbol of reindustrialization, and perhaps a psychological hedge against the fragility of Taiwan. For investors, it’s manna. As robots increasingly take charge, building chips in the U.S. will keep the supply chain close to home and safeguard companies against the whims of geopolitics.

Then, with the applause fading, an undercurrent of tension lingered, one that perhaps only the wonks could fully register. After that opening montage, capped by Jensen’s almost rhetorical question, “Was that video amazing?” the subtext became harder to ignore. And when he closed his remarks by thanking the audience “for your service and for making America great again,” it was impossible not to think of what the financiers were murmuring on the next stage over.

“Nvidia will — or should — ship more GPUs to China.” “Jensen’s flying straight to Korea after GTC to meet Trump.” “A deal’s coming.”

Those were among the refrains traded by figures like Cantor Fitzgerald’s C.J. Muse and Altimeter Capital’s Brad Gerstner. All this, of course, is contrary to the prevailing consensus among China-watchers that the notion of rendering Beijing dependent on Nvidia’s chips is fantasy. Cultivating indigenous capability by acquiring American technology by legal or illicit means has long been Beijing’s modus operandi.

Huang knows this. Still, his company has long worked to blunt export controls and push China-specific versions of its flagship Blackwell chip, the so-called B20. It’s a familiar playbook: First came the H100, then its “export-compliant” cousins, the H800 and H20. Each time, Washington tightens the rules; each time, Nvidia finds a workaround. But this must stop.

RELATED: Big Tech’s AI boom hits voters hard — and Democrats pounce

Photo by Ron Jenkins/Getty Images

The dilemma is simple but corrosive. As grateful as America should be for breathtaking innovations, an irreconcilable tension exists between national interest and fiduciary duty. Huang may sound bullish on “betting on America,” but the reality is starker: If his company could power the AI revolutions of both superpowers at once, it would add trillions to its market cap. He is pragmatic and coldly arithmetic. Build the best chips, profit from ubiquity. You don’t get where he is without knowing your math.

At GTC, I saw the divide play out in miniature. As Altimeter’s Brad Gerstner floated the idea that “logic is on the side of letting Nvidia compete with China,” I turned to a biotech researcher. Blunt and unamused, he said: “Bulls**t.” He went on to explain that, in his field especially, China’s ascent has been a wholesale rejection of the “make China dependent” fantasy. He wasn’t wrong: Under Xi Jinping, the Made in China 2025 agenda has rendered such dependency theories delusional.

Huang tries to thread the needle gracefully, extolling U.S. manufacturing while signaling an embrace of Chinese developers. As an American, it’s hard not to be charmed by his all-American chip. As a realist, however, one leaves with questions no press release can answer. In a way, the release of this patriot-approved superchip was meant to suggest, “See, now we can sell some Blackwells to China.” As charmed as one can be, the answer is still no.

One could have told the Roosevelt administration that cutting Germany off from nuclear materials would stifle innovation. Yet we did exactly that during the Manhattan Project. And we won. It may not sound like it, but this is the same choice we face today — only this race has even greater implications for the future of civilization.

The goal can’t be attempting to trap Beijing in “dependency.” The stakes are too high. The most prudent approach is to focus on surpassing them in innovation while closing loopholes that let Beijing do what it has mastered: Learn from us, then try to replace us.

Jensen Huang has every right to fight for his company’s profits. But foreign policy shouldn’t run on a corporate playbook. The U.S. needs innovators — not influencers — setting the terms of technological rivalry.

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

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California once stood as the symbol of American innovation and unity — but today, it has become the warning sign for a nation in decline.

Harmeet Dhillon and BlazeTV host Nicole Shanahan both live in California, and while it remains one of the most aesthetically beautiful places to live, policy and unity-wise, it is anything but beautiful.

“Some younger folks may not remember the time when people would be giving speeches on the opposite sides of something in Congress, and then they would play basketball together afterwards,” Dhillon tells Shanahan.

“That doesn’t happen any more in D.C., and it doesn’t happen any more in Sacramento. I mean, Sacramento has become like the paradigm of, you know, just sclerotic inefficiency over there. It’s just a one-party state, with terrible results for the consumers because of that,” she continues.

“If we had a vibrant two-party state here, we would have some compromise, and we would have some solutions,” she says, noting that instead the state is just “circling the drain” and has become “unlivable here for most people.”

And despite the way Silicon Valley and other densely populated areas of California may vote, Dhillon points out that when “you look at the map, California is a red state.”

“There’s a thin slice of blue on the coast, where there’s a population overload, but most of the state … you just drive an hour into the interior of our state, and there’s Trump signs everywhere, and there’s people working with their hands, and there’s people involved in their communities, and there’s nature, and there’s beauty,” she says.

“It is really two states in that sense. … But, you know, it’s sort of with self-interested line-drawing and the so-called independent commission, which isn’t independent. It really defines a ceiling for Republicans right now, until that system changes,” she continues.

“We’ve had Republican leaders in the state when the state was great, and I don’t think other states want to emulate California’s infrastructure, its schools, its, you know, health care system,” she says, adding, “We are not a paradigm of anything positive right now, and that should change.”

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The current state of American culture ultimately leads young girls down a path that chases independence at all costs — but fathers have the power to stop it.

“You think you’re a tough guy, and then you have a little girl, and you find out what an absolute sap you really are,” ex-Green Beret and Virginia delegate Nick Freitas tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey on “Relatable.”

And Freitas explains that he learned three things raising daughters, which is “somewhat unique to them.”

“You need to tell your daughters that you love them,” he says. “A lot of times what fathers don’t seem to understand is we do things like go to work, provide, protect, we work, you know, 70-hour weeks. And we think that’s translated in their minds as love, but it isn’t necessarily.”

“And so it does have to be verbalized as well as acted out in your day-to-day life,” he says, recalling an interaction with a man he calls one of the biggest “man-whores” he had ever encountered.

“I had asked him, I said, ‘How do I keep my daughter from ever falling for a guy like you?’ And he said, ‘Tell her you love her, because if you don’t, someone like me will, and she’ll believe him,’” Freitas explains.

“Another thing, too, that I would say, and this is true with all of your children, the relationship and the bonds you build start when they’re infants,” he continues, noting that a lot men have the idea that as their kids get older, they will share more of the responsibilities for them.

“No, from the time that they’re little, you need to be holding them and building those connections. Your daughters need to know that you will tell them the truth, but you tell them the truth from the position that you love them,” he explains.

However, no one is perfect, and Freitas tells Stuckey that “there’s going to come a moment in every father’s life where your child catches you not living up to the standard that you told them was the standard.”

“And in that moment, what you do is very, very important. Because if you aren’t able to look them in the eye and say, ‘You’re right, I’m wrong, and I’m sorry,’ then what you’ve taught them is not a standard of moral conduct. You haven’t taught them objective morality. What you’ve taught them is an authority structure,” he explains.

“So take the time to form those bonds, because they will pay massive dividends,” he continues.

And one of the most important tips Freitas has is that your daughter will “watch how you treat her mother.”

“And if you treat her mother with the sort of love and respect that she deserves, that will be all the standard that she needs for when the other guy comes around that doesn’t behave that way, or there’s something slightly off,” he says.

“You will be the reason why she rejects him,” he adds.

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