Category: blaze media

Morbidly obese actress Chrissy Metz has lost 100 pounds after taking a GLP-1, but the left isn’t happy about it.

In an interview on “The Today Show,” Metz’s decision was shockingly met with concern by Savannah Guthrie — who pointed to the feelings of those in the “body positivity” movement.

And BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales isn’t surprised, commenting, “One of the things that just continues to be true about the left is that they just want to bring everyone else down.”

“They seemingly work to keep people fat via the body positivity movement where they’re cheering on obesity because somehow it makes you more strong and more powerful the fatter you are or something,” she adds.

In the interview, Guthrie pointed out that “a lot of people” have “admired” Metz because they “feel seen.”

“You’ve represented this whole community. And I don’t know if there are some people watching and have mixed feelings about it. And I don’t know that you have to provide an answer to them,” Guthrie said.

“But if there are people that are like, ‘Oh, Chrissy, I thought, you know,’ somehow they’re disappointed with this, what would you say?” Guthrie asked.

“Well, I think that it’s so important to put yourself first. And you know, as we age, sometimes we have health issues that we’re concerned about or want to get ahead of. And that certainly was my case. And I have to do what’s right for me,” Metz responded.

“You have to live your own life, and I have to do that for myself,” she added.

“Somehow, people are supposed to be disappointed that she’s actually trying to better herself,” Gonzales comments, before mocking Guthrie, “Let me explain to you why you’re letting people down by taking control of your health.”

And Gonzales, of course, doesn’t think Metz should worry about the “movement” she has disappointed, as she believes it’s just a way for unhealthy people to cope with their decisions.

“It’s just an insecurity thing where they’re like, ‘Actually, I’m proud that I’m morbidly obese,’” she says.

“I cannot be convinced that anyone actually thinks that way,” she adds.

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

To enjoy more of Sara’s no-holds-barred takes on news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Body positivity, Savannah guthrie, Today show, Weight loss, Sara gonzales, Chrissy metz, Glp1, Obesity, Blazetv show 

A night of drinking in Belfast gave Joe Rogan an epiphany: It’s never going to be that way again.

Joking with fellow comedians Shane Gillis, Mark Normand, and Ari Shaffir, the quartet were going through their usual roundtable of anecdotes when — as usual — some sage advice poked its head through.

‘Cameras have ruined young people.’

Just the flip

Rogan was recalling a night on the town in Northern Ireland, telling his friends about a literal drunken Irishman who was rambling about being willing to fight anyone. That experience, known only to him, is foregone history now thanks to modern technology.

“I miss those days where I could just go to a bar and just just pull up and just get lit. It was fun,” Rogan said on his podcast.

“It’s too hard” now, the comedian continued; it’s all about the phones.

“So this is like 2007 … there’s no cameras. There’s no phones. Nobody. There’s no iPhone yet. So it’s like people were just hanging out.”

Then even Normand, who is usually a sunglasses-wearing fly on the wall who provides inappropriate remarks, was in lock-step with how smartphones have caused generational issues for the youth.

“Cameras have ruined young people, [they] can’t cut loose.”

Rogan concurred, “Phones ruined everything in terms of like, people’s connection with each other.”

The 59-year-old has lived a long time in the spotlight; whether it was reporting from early UFC events, hosting “Fear Factor,” or doing stand-up tours, he feels confident pinpointing the exact place in time young people should be trying to replicate.

“The old phones, that was as far as we should have went. The flip phone that you could text on, and the texting sucked.”

RELATED: Move over, milk crates: Dorm rooms now come with interior designers — and five-figure price tags

Scroll models

Rogan’s message been clear over the years: Put the phone away or face being “stuck,” only if for a few days.

“I’ve pulled back considerably like I was saying, over the last three months. … I just decided enough is enough,” Rogan continued. “I don’t like how I feel when I just scroll through doom.”

Having previously stated that he doesn’t want his phone anywhere near him while driving, Rogan, along with Gillis, has been signaling to young men that being disconnected from one’s phone can not only serve as an advantage, it can be a relief.

The dreadful feeling was Gillis’ angle, who felt like his decision to disconnect was thrust upon him, as opposed to a conscious move like that of Rogan.

Mirroring lawsuits against popular social media companies, Gillis said his exodus from platforms isn’t a choice, instead he “got lucky enough that I can’t look at it anymore. I can’t. It’s just negative.”

“It’s not like I’m like making a disciplined choice to be like, ‘I don’t want to look at this anymore,'” Gillis added. He hasn’t looked at Reddit in years, and he can’t even bring himself to look at X.

“It genuinely makes me feel bad,” he stressed.

“I don’t want to click on it anymore.”

RELATED: ‘House’ star Hugh Laurie responds to claims he supports men in women’s sports: ‘Firstly, f**k off’

Anna Barclay/Getty Images

Bro breakthrough

The four horsemen of “Protect Our Parks” represent the advanced status of a group of friends from different backgrounds who made it big.

The reflection men see in them is obvious; it’s like bros in a basement. This is specifically present when Rogan says things like, “There’s a UFC in L.A. If you guys want to take over the Comedy Store for a weekend,” as if they’re heading to the bar.

But in that commentary comes lessons for the next generation of young men:

“You don’t want to live in their world,” Rogan said of influencers and phone addicts.

The truth bombs culminated:

“You don’t want to be in their head, and they don’t want it either. And the only way for them out is to not do that. And if they keep doing it and keep living in that f**king same swamp of ideas, they’re never going to change.”

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​Comedy, Joe rogan, Ari shaffir, Mark normand, Shane gillis, Cell phones, Entertainment 

As the buzz of summer winds down, back-to-school season offers families a fresh start. Kids return to routines and extracurriculars. Moms like me return to schedules, snacks, playdates, forms, and the peculiar relief of getting everyone back on a calendar.

Before we get buried in backpacks and lunch boxes, though, parents need to brace for something harder: our children’s mental health.

Our children need adults willing to talk with them, challenge them when necessary, and remain present when the conversation gets uncomfortable.

A recent Wall Street Journal investigation described Oregon as an epicenter of pediatric gender medicine, with diagnoses of gender dysphoria and use of cross-sex hormones among minors rising sharply in recent years. Oregon has only about 1% of the nation’s teenagers, yet its clinics reportedly accounted for roughly 7% of gender-related mastectomies performed on teenage girls from 2019 through 2023.

Those numbers are shocking. But behind every one is a child. I was one of those children not very long ago.

When I was 16, I found Tumblr communities full of girls who sounded just like me. They were uncomfortable in their bodies. They struggled with anxiety, depression, isolation, and the feeling that they did not fit. Their stories felt eerily familiar. We fed off one another’s pain until many of us came to believe that being transgender explained it — and that changing our bodies might cure our mental distress.

I was already battling anorexia. I hated myself and hated the body I saw in the mirror. That is why the contrast in how adults treated my two forms of distress still haunts me.

When I told doctors and therapists that I was starving myself because I saw myself as overweight, they did not affirm that perception. They treated it as something to question and work through. But when I said my breasts made me uncomfortable, my gender distress was not challenged in the same way. I was told that transition could be the answer. No questions, no pushback.

Looking back, I was not born in the wrong body. I was a hurting teenager looking for belonging, certainty, and an explanation for my pain.

The reality is that adolescence itself is full of unstable explanations. Teenagers are awkward, lonely, impulsive, anxious, obsessive, and desperate to belong. They compare themselves with peers, test identities, reject identities, and search for language that makes their discomfort intelligible. Sometimes the first explanation that feels coherent is not the right one.

RELATED: Detransitioner sues Oregon gender clinics for ‘abhorrent misdiagnosis’ that ‘mutilated’ her body

Image source: YouTube video screenshot

Across the country — consider states such as New Mexico, where schools have adopted policies accommodating students’ asserted gender identities — vulnerable children can encounter adults who treat social transition as an appropriate response before parents even understand what is happening.

That should terrify parents, especially when gender distress appears alongside trauma, autism, depression, eating disorders, or a simple discomfort with narrow stereotypes about what girls and boys are supposed to be. Those possibilities should be explored, not hurried past.

Previous generations of girls were told, directly and indirectly, that happiness required becoming impossibly thin. Today, some distressed girls encounter a different promise: Maybe the body itself is the problem. The common thread is not merely social media or “woke” politics. It is vulnerability.

That’s why therapy should help a young person untangle difficult emotions, not merely supply a label for them. “Why do you feel this way?” and “What name and pronouns would you like me to use?” are not interchangeable questions. One opens an inquiry. The other can foreclose it.

As another school year begins, parents should remember that adolescence has always been messy. Teenagers feel awkward and lonely. They try things, fail at things, discover new passions, abandon old ones, experiment with style and music, and slowly begin to understand who they are. That process can continue well beyond high school.

RELATED: The right has a blind spot about young women

Blaze Media Illustration

Our children do not need adults who immediately affirm every explanation they discover online. They need adults willing to talk with them, challenge them when necessary, and remain present when the conversation gets uncomfortable.

Use the dinner table. Talk about your own failures and insecurities. Tell them what helped and what you wish you had understood sooner. Get them outside. A scraped knee from the monkey bars is often healthier than another four hours alone with an algorithm.

Most of all, do not surrender the hard conversations to strangers, schools, influencers, or online communities. Do not let someone else take the reins of your child’s life while you are still trying to figure out what happened.

The best back-to-school supply we can give our kids is not another lesson in identity. It is the reassurance that they do not have to change their bodies, their appearance, or every uncomfortable feeling in order to belong.

​Anorexia, Autism, Depression, Gender dysphoria, Mental health, Stereotypes, Transgender, Social transition, Lgbtq, Opinion & analysis 

Do you wear shoes in the house?

Or do you remove them every time you open the front door, place them tidily next to the closet, and proceed into your humble abode with only a thin layer of sock between your foot and the floor?

What does it mean that most households in America today are shoes-off households? Why is there a change?

This question of indoor footwear, or lack thereof, is a surprisingly interesting one. You might think it doesn’t really matter that much whether or not your shoes stay on while inside, but it is a somewhat fascinating little debate for the acute observers of our perpetually evolving American culture.

Sole survivors

There are a few different ways to view the shoes-in-the-house debate. The first layer is that of personal preference. For lots of families in America, it comes down to a mundane choice. Mom and dads on a random weekday just sort of come to the conclusion that they are going to either be a shoes-on or shoes-off household, and that’s what they do for the rest of their lives together. For others the decision is an inherited one. They grew up keeping shoes on, so that’s what their kids grow up doing. We do what we are used to; it’s tradition.

Beyond the simple choice of personal taste, there are geographical ways of looking at the question of rubber soles on wood floors. There are regional factors at play. The U.S. is a big place with lots of different climates, and taking shoes off or keeping them on wavers a bit from region to region. For those in the sloshiest and snowiest ares of the U.S., keeping your boots on inside in the middle of February is a nonstarter. For others, in the drier regions, keeping shoes on isn’t particularly concerning whether it’s July or February.

There are also global differences in the answer to the question of shoes inside the house. I should say it’s a bit hard to get reliable data on global attitudes regarding this question. All the maps you find are slightly different, and the sources aren’t exactly clear. I mean, what’s this polling really like? But taking account of all the available maps, the very west end of Western Europe, North America, Central America, and South America tend to be shoes-on, and the rest of the world is generally shoes-off with a few exceptions.

Don’t tread on me

Last but not least, a final aspect to this discussion is one of American history. Have you ever seen a photo of a family gathering or party in America during the 1950s in which the majority of adults are sitting or standing around inside without their shoes on?

Probably not, and if you have, it’s an exceedingly rare photo of an equally rare occurrence. Back in old America — think 1800-1950 — people kept their shoes on inside. The thought of a group of adult men and women sitting around showing their dirty socks to one another would be very preposterous, extremely undignified, and generally rude. No one was asking people to take their shoes off at the door in 1958 America.

Though America is still considered a shoes-on country by many foreigners, things have changed. There is a trending line running toward socks on the floors and shoes by the doors.

What does it mean that most households in America today are shoes-off households? Why is there a change? And what has brought it about?

It’s hard to say. Some might argue that increased immigration from countries where shoes-off is the norm has changed attitudes in America without people realizing their attitudes are being changed. I think there could be truth to this. Immigration obviously brings unforeseen impacts, though I’m not sure many Midwesterners are really that influenced by Asiatic household footwear norms. Any influence due to immigration is probably minimal when it comes to this very narrow matter.

RELATED: Yes, groceries are more expensive. Now what?

Bloomberg/Getty Images

Footloose and fancy-free

I think any change toward an increase in more shoes-off households comes more broadly from an increasing informality that has spread through our culture over the past four decades. People are now comfortable showing their bare socks and requesting others do the same when visiting their home.

Is that a good thing? Is it a sign of a closer community or a more generally friendly and approachable disposition?

I don’t know. Maybe, but probably not. People are not closer today than they were in the past. They know their neighbors less, community bonds are weaker, and social satisfaction is down. Robert Putnam’s 2000 book “Bowling Alone” documents all this well. The fact that more people host parties and request that guests take off their shoes says more about increased informality and less about closeness.

Toeing the line

Changing opinions about cleanliness play a role in this evolution. For some reason today, people really do not want any dust or dirt tracked into the entryway to their house. It’s not unreasonable to want a clean house. We all do. I have three kids in a small home and know how messy it can get. But brooms and vacuums exist, and they work. People certainly seem more concerned about any possible dirt being tracked in than they did a few generations ago.

I don’t think there’s an objectively right or wrong way. Shoes-on houses are good, and so are shoes-off ones. Though I do think it’s worthwhile to wonder what cultural changes signify, because they often mean more than what meets the eye. And no matter how logical it might be to remove shoes so as to keep a house cleaner, the change from 1956 to 2026 says something about changing attitudes regarding formality and presentation in the American home, and it’s fair to wonder if those changing attitudes are related to broader developments in the society, many of which are not terribly good.

Is there some strange connection between requesting that guests remove their shoes and pajama pants in the airport? In the American context, probably yes.

As for me, I’ll keep wearing my sport coat at the airport and my loafers in the kitchen.

​Indoor footwear debate, Shoes in house, Global differences, Lifestyle, Culture, Etiquette, Hospitality, The root of the matter 

The media melted down last week as the Department of Homeland Security’s top attorney, James Percival, criticized “the worst of the worst” activist judges who are blocking President Trump from securing our borders and our homeland.

The American people should be outraged — not by the rebuke of a top federal official, but by the judges who are overstepping their authority and putting us in danger.

The left’s playbook is obvious: Activist judges usurp power that they do not have to block the Trump administration, and then liberals in the media run interference for them.

President Trump is doing what people re-elected him to do: secure our southern border and deport the tens of millions of illegal immigrants who were allowed in this country by the Biden administration and previous administrations. But a small number of activist federal district judges have issued rulings contrary to the law that have made this a lot more difficult, frustrating the will of the voters.

The examples are especially shocking when you get past the media spin. The Trump administration has now repeatedly won at the Supreme Court on the president’s ability to end Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from specific countries. For example, people allowed to come here temporarily after 1991’s violence in Somalia are still here 35 years later.

Some 50,000 Hondurans were permitted to come here after 1999’s Hurricane Mitch; President Trump ended their temporary status last September. The administration was sued for finally ending TPS for multiple countries, and the Supreme Court upheld the Trump position that temporary means temporary. Yet today, even after the Supreme Court ruling, rogue judges in Massachusetts and Illinois continue to deny the president the ability to terminate TPS.

An even more ridiculous example is that the federal government still has not been allowed to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal alien who has no legal right to be here. Why? Because a district judge ordered Garcia, a suspected gang member, released into the United States. The Trump administration is appealing that ruling too, spending valuable time and taxpayer dollars defeating yet another activist ruling by a rogue judge.

Rather than defend these indefensible judicial rulings, the liberal media are attempting a sleight-of-hand trick and are attacking Percival for criticizing judges by name. This is laughably hypocritical, since U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani targeted Percival directly in an official judicial opinion.

Some of the left’s greatest heroes have said far more bombastic things than the Trump DHS has ever said, and they did so without journalists hyperventilating. President Obama broke centuries of precedent by castigating the Supreme Court in person during the State of the Union Address over the Citizens United case, causing a visible reaction of disbelief by Justice Samuel Alito.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) all but threatened Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by name that “you will pay a price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Sure enough, deranged leftists have attempted to murder Justice Kavanaugh and Justice Amy Coney Barrett ever since that hateful speech, yet we never hear the media call for Schumer to exercise civility.

RELATED: The Justice Department finally has a grown-up in charge

Alex Wong/Getty Images

By now, the left’s playbook is obvious: Activist judges usurp power that they do not have to block the Trump administration, and then liberals in the media run interference for them, distracting the public with manufactured outrage.

The goal is to run out the clock on the Trump era. The critics tell Percival to simply appeal these rulings without criticizing judges, but the appeals cost the department months of time in a brief four-year presidential term, which is exactly what the left wants. The public needs to know the agenda they voted for is being thwarted by activist judges.

As DHS’ top lawyer, Percival is right to call out rogue district judges and make clear that activist rulings will be appealed and overturned by the higher courts.

I held Percival’s job during the first Trump administration, and I faced many of the same challenges from activist judges. The department has an obligation to correct misinformation and false impressions in the public, especially those that will encourage more illegal immigration, visa overstays, and other lawbreaking.

Judges are public servants with a public trust, and the Constitution says that they are to hold their positions only on condition of “good behavior.” The Trump administration must continue to call them out, continue to get their rulings overturned, and continue to carry out the mandate of the voters.

Either America will finish the fight against illegal immigration or illegal immigration will finish America.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

​Activist judges, Department of homeland security, Illegal immigrants, Kilmar abrego garcia, Southern border, Supreme court, Deportations, Opinion & analysis, Donald trump 

Border Patrol agents caught a man who returned to the U.S. after being previously deported, according to an exclusive statement to Blaze News.

Francisco Gallegos-Garza was deported to Mexico after he was convicted in 2011 for illegal re-entry into the U.S. and served 46 months in prison.

‘Criminal illegal aliens who repeatedly attempt to enter our country pose a serious risk, and our agents stand ready to meet the challenge.’

On Aug. 10, Border Patrol agents were patrolling west of Del Rio, near the Rio Grande, when they encountered Gallegos-Garza, who is now 59 years old.

The man has an extensive criminal record, including a felony conviction for injury to a child with intentional bodily injury.

Gallegos-Garza faces another charge of re-entry after deportation and faces up to 20 years in prison, if convicted.

“Keeping repeat offenders from entering our borders is key to safeguarding our communities,” said Del Rio Sector Chief Patrol Agent Anthony “Scott” Good.

“Criminal illegal aliens who repeatedly attempt to enter our country pose a serious risk, and our agents stand ready to meet the challenge,” he added.

The Trump administration has significantly ramped up deportation and other immigration enforcement efforts. In June the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency said that there had been 356,389 total deportations for the current fiscal year.

RELATED: Illegal alien with a badge impersonates Border Patrol agent to disrupt mission — and calls in ‘reinforcements’

The Trump administration has blamed the former Biden regime for easing immigration enforcement and allowing millions to flow into the U.S.

“Fulfilling President Donald J. Trump’s mandate, the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection have delivered the most secure border in history, stopping dangerous criminal aliens and illicit narcotics from entering our communities, which will keep America safe for generations to come,” read a statement from Border Patrol to Blaze News.

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​Us border patrol, Immigration, Illegal immigration, Child abuse, Deportations, Politics 

Readers familiar with the Dr. Seuss classic “The Cat in the Hat” will remember the twin chaos agents Thing 1 and Thing 2. “‘These Things are good Things,’” the Cat reassures the children, whose mother has inexplicably left them under the supervision of a fish. “‘They are tame. Oh, so tame! / They have come here to play.’”

The Things briefly feign innocence, then quickly reveal themselves to be marauding imps, knocking over nightstands and ruining the linens. “I do not like the way that they play!” says the son of the house.

Now here comes Woke 1 and Woke 2. “Woke 1 was crazy,” said U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, quoting an unnamed city councilman in a viral interview for ABC. The congresswoman sheepishly acknowledged that Americans did not like the way Woke 1 played out, while also implicitly announcing that there will soon be, or already is, a Woke 2. And it will be tame. Oh, so tame!

For purposes of advertisement, Woke 2 will try to keep its trans members less conspicuous than Woke 1 did, for at least as long as it takes to re-establish national power.

There is, in fact, a new version of wokeness in the making. But just as Thing 2 was fundamentally identical to Thing 1, Woke 2 will not be any different in essence from Woke 1. They are both here to upend the furniture.

Wokeness in all its forms is grievance politics. Its central idea is that an injustice lies at the heart of America and must be corrected to atone for the historical misery inflicted on groups of innocents.

What is changing in Woke 2 is the account of who those innocents are and how they have been wronged. Woke 1 was founded on the notion that black women are the most oppressed, and therefore most righteous, of all people. “I’m thinking,” said Kamala Harris in her vice presidential victory speech, “about her and the generations of women — black women.” She mentioned many other kinds of women, of course, but the list began and ended with “the black women — who are too often overlooked, but so often prove that they are the backbone of our democracy.”

This approach had rhetorical power, up to a point. It traded on the successes of second-wave feminism and the reality of black slavery in America’s past. But it ran into some problems. Third-wave feminism, as worked out by theorists like Judith Butler, made it basically impossible not to affix the prefix “trans-” wherever the word “woman” appeared. So the flag of Woke 1 became the complicated and confusing progress Pride flag — a gay rainbow with black and trans colors intruding from the left.

RELATED: How Kamala Harris accidentally sold the SAVE America Act

Christian Bruna/Getty Images

To make matters worse, the legacy of slavery did not actually touch all the racial minorities that Democrats wanted to bring into their fold. Most Nigerians, for example, had not experienced segregation in the United States. Nor had the millions of unvetted South and Central Americans streaming across the border.

They were certainly “people of color.” But so were Chinese, Japanese, and Indian Americans, whose typically enviable life outcomes fit awkwardly into the narrative that the country was built on a ruthless caste system.

The contradictions heightened as Woke 1 faced a series of embarrassments such as Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the 2023 Supreme Court case in which Asian students complained that admissions officers were discriminating against them in favor of black applicants. Then there were the notorious Trump ’24 ads that pinned Harris to her previous support of taxpayer-funded gender surgeries for federal prison inmates.

Placing black women at the center of the moral universe created an unexpected and electorally unworkable set of obligations to illegal immigrants and queer felons.

Clearly, the coalition needed shuffling. And so rearranging the order of priorities in the grievance hierarchy is what the reinvention of woke has actually been about. In place of the black trans woman who defined Woke 1, Woke 2 has chosen as its ideal victim the dispossessed Palestinian liberationist, fighting with Hamas against Israel. This has a number of interesting strategic advantages.

First, the racial argument has been neatly streamlined. Rather than implausibly analogizing every racial group in America to the victims of Jim Crow, Woke 2 presents the black American story as just one instance of a global fight for justice carried out by minorities everywhere and epitomized in the intifada.

RELATED: Socialism’s favorite bait-and-switch

Scott Olson/Getty Images

In 2023, on a panel for the Democratic Socialists of America, future New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani claimed that “when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.”

He was outlining the blueprint for Woke 2, which takes its cues not from Judith Butler but from post-colonialist Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth” (1961). “Between colonial violence and the insidious violence in which the modern world is steeped,” wrote Fanon, “there is a kind of complicit correlation, a homogeneity.” Therefore, “The colonized, underdeveloped man is today a political creature in the most global sense of the term.”

Recently, in an intriguing interview with the New Yorker’s David Remnick, Democrat Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed put forward an argument that connects Fanon’s global struggle to America’s domestic economy. He claimed that pro-Israel politicians are allowing “the money that should be spent taking care of our kids to be sent to a military that has done a genocide.”

In other words, Woke 2’s new order of priorities allows its proponents to suggest that white or white-coded (read: Jewish) oppressors are funneling money away from America’s working poor to fund a worldwide campaign of mass slaughter.

Distant as this account is from reality, it is much more ruthlessly focused as a line of woke reasoning. It emphasizes foreign policy and the economy, where the public’s real anger lies, and deftly mutes the discredited claims of LGBTQ extremists.

In practice, any woke administration of any variety will end up imposing pretty much the same bizarre sexual priorities on the country once elected. But for purposes of advertisement, Woke 2 will try to keep its trans members less conspicuous than Woke 1 did, for at least as long as it takes to re-establish national power.

Replacing the progress Pride flag with the Palestinian flag will distract from the ravages of queer excess while infusing socialist revolution with the moral self-righteousness of anti-white resentment.

Whether this tactic succeeds with voters is another matter. If it does, though, Americans will discover that both Woke 1 and Woke 2, like Thing 1 and Thing 2, only play nice until they can start turning over tables. If we want to avoid a rerun of the early 2020s, then — to paraphrase Seuss — we will have to get rid of Woke 1 and Woke 2.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.

​Black women, Democratic socialists of america, Dr seuss, Foreign policy, Illegal immigrants, Woke 1, Woke 2, Zohran mamdani, Economy, Lgbtq agenda, Alexandria ocasio-cortez, Abdul el-sayed, Opinion & analysis 

Ariana Grande’s new music video for her song “Petal” opens with a “parental advisory and viewer warning.”

Before a single verse is sung, a voiceover cautions: “The following video contains explicit content and depicts graphic violence, which may be offensive to some viewers. Viewer discretion is advised.”

It’s an honest warning. The nearly seven-minute video that follows includes one of the most graphically violent sequences in a mainstream Hollywood pop music video in recent history.

In the video, a skeletal-looking Grande plays the role of Pepper, an aspiring actress who repeatedly auditions at the fictional Fame Inc. and faces harsh rejection from male executives over her looks and talent. Eventually, Pepper snaps and murders the panel with a chainsaw.

The sequence cuts between stark red silhouette shots of Pepper wildly swinging the chainsaw and closer live-action frames that show the blood spraying as limbs and fingers are severed. She keeps going until the executives are a mangled, bloody heap, then walks out of the room still covered in gore, as the room full of her fellow female auditionees erupts into applause and cheers.

The scene is so horrifically violent, Allie Beth Stuckey refuses to play it on her show. But she does expose what’s going on beneath Grande’s sudden dark turn.

Allie highlights a disturbing pattern among female pop stars.

“They become darker and edgier and more violent and more disturbed in their artistry as time goes on,” she says, pointing to Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, and Chappell Roan as examples. “That seems to also be true of someone like Ariana Grande.”

Between the gory violence in the “Petal” music video and Grande’s “skin-and-bones” frame, Allie is nearly certain the “Wicked” star is under the influence of demonic powers.

“When you have this skeletal figure covered in blood, you see the wedding of these two things [and] she’s glorifying them … I do think that there is something very dark going on mentally and spiritually here,” she says, noting that Grande has not admitted to any weight-related illness or struggle and has insisted she’s “so much healthier now than she used to be.”

“I don’t know what goes on behind the scenes in Hollywood. I think some very scary exchanges probably happen,” Allie continues, “but again, we don’t even need to know all of that to know that this is just the nature of sin: It takes you from one thing to the other.”

She argues that between Grande’s sickly weight, her new dark image, and her dating Ethan Slater, her “Wicked” co-star who was married and had a child, Grande should be “a very controversial figure.”

“But instead her posts still get millions of likes. People still praise her as being beautiful and wonderful,” says Allie. “I’m like, ‘No, this girl is on the brink of death, fantasizing and glorifying murder — the last thing our culture needs right now. And she’s a home-wrecker.”’

To hear more, watch the video above.

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.

​Allie beth stuckey, Ariana grande, Hollywood, Spiritual warfare, Blazetv show 

Why are so many young Americans struggling to find lasting relationships? According to BlazeTV host Nick Freitas, the answer has a lot to do with the way modern dating has not only been influenced by feminism — but has been reshaped by the apps.

These apps, Freitas says, have created a “fake environment” where men get far less attention than women do.

“On Tinder, men’s average match rate is 5.26%. Women’s is 44.4%. So that’s an eight times difference, roughly. On Hinge, men swipe right on 61% of profiles. Women swipe right on 5% of profiles,” he explains.

“This part blew my mind. There’s a huge gender skew, like on Tinder, 67%-76% of the people on there are male. For Hinge it’s 60%-40%; for Bumble it’s 54%-46%,” he continues.

“On all these platforms where, again, we’re being told to go find people … it’s even worse, because one of the things that women typically need to truly be attracted to a man is they actually need to be able to be in proximity toward them,” he adds.

And an Institute for Family Studies study found that couples who meet in real life are much happier than ones who met online — and there’s good reason for it.

“Modern dating is already set up for failure, which is to say that you’re essentially putting on a performance for another human being. But your ability to perform outside of who you really are is far more limited in person than it is online, especially when we have all kinds of enhancements and filters and everything else that are going on,” Freitas explains.

However, as men and women begin to point the finger at each other for the growing issue of modern dating, Freitas points out that there’s something they both need to realize.

“As we go into this final phase talking about what should you be doing is men, you have every right to be pissed at the system that was set up for you,” he says.

“What I want you to understand is that it’s harder sometimes to understand how the women were also lied to because the women were lied to in a very, very different direction. You were put down by the system; they were built up by it,” he explains.

“But you were both lied to,” he adds.

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

Start watching Nick Freitas NOW at blazetv.com and use the promo code NICK40 for $40 off your BlazeTV+ subscription.

​Dating apps, Modern dating, Nick freitas, Online dating, Feminism, Data, Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, Blazetv show 

DiJonai Carrington may have committed the most educational flagrant foul in the history of basketball.

I was discussing the episode with a friend who asked, “Do you remember roller derby?” I confessed I did not. “It was a sport where people enjoyed watching women beat each other up,” he said. I saw the connection immediately.

‘White privilege’ did not appear spontaneously in professional sports. It has an intellectual pedigree.

It reminded me of undergraduate classes in which feminists argued that women should run the world because they are more level-headed, calm, and compassionate than men. I had also watched some of those same people treat conservative colleagues with remarkable contempt. The theory and the behavior did not always match.

The WNBA has lately offered a rather vivid reminder that women, being human, are perfectly capable of aggression, rivalry, resentment, and the occasional refusal to accept responsibility.

During Saturday’s game between the Chicago Sky and Indiana Fever, Sophie Cunningham broke toward the basket for a layup. Carrington pursued her from behind and struck Cunningham across the head and neck. Officials reviewed the play, upgraded it to a flagrant 2, and ejected Carrington.

This was WNBA drama. Then higher education entered the game.

After her ejection, Carrington posted on Threads: “WHITE PRIVILEGE @indianafever.”

One has to admire the efficiency. Universities can spend an entire semester teaching students to interpret ordinary human interactions through racial categories. Carrington managed it before the game was over.

Predictably, people asked the obvious question: What precisely did Cunningham’s whiteness have to do with Carrington hitting her in the face?

Former NFL player Emmanuel Acho was among those who challenged Carrington’s invocation of white privilege. Carrington later said people had misunderstood her: She was not claiming the ejection itself was caused by white privilege, but pointing to what she regarded as a larger pattern of white players receiving different treatment. She defended her understanding of the subject by citing her education, including Stanford.

And there, buried beneath the WNBA drama, was the genuinely interesting story.

Carrington herself appealed to her education as authority for the framework she was using. That does not prove some Stanford professor taught her how to explain this particular foul. It does show how natural it has become for educated Americans to reach for concepts such as “white privilege” when interpreting conflict and punishment.

RELATED: Magical thinking just made the WNBA Draft

Melissa Tamez/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images

America’s universities have spent decades teaching students to interpret institutions and human behavior through racial categories. “White privilege” did not appear spontaneously in professional sports. It has an intellectual pedigree. Students encounter frameworks in which racial identity becomes a morally significant category through which achievements, punishments, disagreements, and disparities are interpreted.

Carrington apparently regards her education as establishing her authority on the subject. Fine. Then taxpayers and parents should pay attention to what that education teaches people to see.

Stanford is private, of course, but like many American universities, it receives substantial federal funding. Universities receiving federal money are subject to federal antidiscrimination law. That does not mean professors cannot discuss controversial theories of race. They obviously can. The serious question comes when theories move from subjects to be examined into institutional doctrines that classify people morally by race.

Imagine reversing the language. Imagine a university program teaching students to interpret the behavior of black classmates through a theory of “black privilege,” complete with generalizations about what black people characteristically possess, how they characteristically think, and what judgments should attach to them because of their racial identity.

Would anyone seriously maintain that race had nothing to do with it?

The Carrington episode also illustrates something universities rarely advertise about these theories: They can be wonderfully useful for avoiding personal responsibility.

In the classical university, education aimed at forming a good soul: one capable of wisdom, ordered toward what is good, and disciplined against vices such as hatred, envy, and bitterness. This did not mean the good person escaped persecution or injustice. It meant that injustice did not excuse becoming unjust in return. A good soul fears God, not men — or women.

Today’s university is different. It teaches students to locate wrongdoing in systems, structures, identities, and power. Once in a while those explanations are relevant. But they can also become a vocabulary for explaining away one’s own choices. For the philosophy students reading this, the contrast is Socrates versus Thrasymachus: seek the good, or reduce everything to power.

The old-fashioned response to committing a flagrant foul was fairly straightforward: “I went too far.”

The new response requires considerably more vocabulary.

One can discuss systems, privilege, disparities, power structures, historical patterns, and institutional inequities until the original question — “Why did you hit her in the face?” — disappears beneath a small graduate seminar.

That is one of the most corrosive temptations of identity ideology. It can supply an external explanation for almost every unfavorable consequence. If I succeed, I overcame oppression. If you succeed, you benefited from privilege. If I am punished, we investigate the system. If you are punished, justice has finally arrived.

Personal responsibility becomes strangely difficult to locate.

Carrington has also defended her aggressive play on the grounds that she will do everything she can to prevent an opponent from making a layup. Fair enough — except that this rather misses the point of organized sports.

Basketball is not defined as “do everything you can to stop the other person.” It has rules.

That’s what distinguishes basketball from rugby or a parking-lot fight.

RELATED: ‘She didn’t wait until it was easy’: Victim of brutal injury from male athlete praises Sophie Cunningham

Michael Reaves/Getty Images

You may contest the shot. You may block the ball. You may position yourself defensively. You may even commit an ordinary foul to force free throws. What you may not do is simply employ whatever technique seems most likely to prevent the basket.

Otherwise, why stop with a cross-face? Tackle her. Bite her. Kick her. Put her in a rear-naked choke.

Although, given recent WNBA highlights, perhaps I should stop giving anyone ideas.

The rules are not an obstacle to the game. The rules constitute the game. And that is precisely the moral lesson obscured by the ideology Carrington invoked.

Civil society works the same way. We do not get to suspend ordinary standards of conduct because we believe ourselves to be fighting injustice. We do not get to judge people by their skin color because an elaborate theory tells us doing so is enlightened. Anti-racism becomes corrupting when it licenses hatred, envy, or racial blame in the name of correcting hatred, envy, and racial injustice.

Carrington’s foul lasted only a moment.

Her explanation deserves more attention because it inadvertently reminded Americans that when racial ideology shows up on the basketball court, it did not necessarily begin there.

Someone taught the framework. Quite possibly at a university. And taxpayers help support the institutions where it flourishes.

​Chicago sky, Dijonai carrington, Indiana fever, Sophie cunningham, White privilege, Higher education, Diversity equity inclusion, Identity politics, Racism, Stanford university, Wnba, Opinion & analysis 

Until now, Google Gemini has been an optional part of Android. Most of its features are locked behind the dedicated Gemini app, or you can choose to rely on Google Assistant as your on-device companion for fielding questions and completing tasks. That is all about to change, though, as Google officially prepares to retire its old assistant for an AI future, and it is coming sooner than you think.

Google brought Gemini to Android in early 2024. Since then, the company has progressively injected its AI into every corner of its operating system. The latest iteration, Gemini Intelligence, aims to take its chatbot a step farther by giving it agentic capabilities. At launch, the only way to set Gemini as your default personal assistant instead of Google Assistant was to manually make the switch in your settings. Many newer phones, however, default to Gemini straight out of the box.

You aren’t allowed to delete it from your phone. You can, however, take away its functionality.

Needless to say, if you have avoided Gemini like the plague thus far, your efforts are commendable, but your luck is about to run out.

Starting on September 4, Google will start rolling out Gemini support as the default personal assistant in all applicable Android models — devices with 2 GB of RAM or more that run on Android 9 or later. The process will take several weeks to reach everybody, so you may not lose access to Google Assistant immediately. However, once it is complete, Gemini will take over as the default assistant on your handset, whether you like it or not.

It’s not just your phone, either. The switch is coming to all devices in Google’s product ecosystem, including tablets running Android, car infotainment systems with Android Auto, smartwatches running on Wear OS, and TVs with Google TV or Android TV. In other words, you can’t escape it … but you might be able to turn it off, if you know where to look.

How to remove Google Gemini as the digital assistant on Android

To disable Gemini on a Samsung Galaxy device, open the Settings app, select “Apps” near the bottom of the page, and tap “Choose default apps” at the top. From there, tap “Digital assistant app,” and choose either an alternative to Google or select “None” from the options. Now, when you invoke the digital assistant on your phone, absolutely nothing will happen. Your digital assistant is effectively gone.

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/One UI 9.0 on Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8

For Google Pixel phone owners, open up the Settings app and choose “Apps” near the top of the page. Next, select “Default apps,” followed by “Digital assistant app,” and finally, choose “None” or an alternative option to Google, if applicable. Congrats, now your phone no longer has an AI-powered digital assistant!

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/Android 17 on Google Pixel 10 Pro XL

If you use an “other” branded Android phone, such as a Motorola, OnePlus, Nothing, etc., the process should be similar to the steps above. The main goal is to find the default apps section in your settings and change the digital assistant to anything other than Google. Once you do that, you’re free from Gemini! Well, sort of. There’s more …

How to remove Gemini from your Android apps

Google has also baked Gemini into many of your favorite apps, including Gmail, Maps, and Drive, but this should only work if you have Personal Intelligence enabled. To check, open the Gemini app on your phone, select “Personal Intelligence,” and then “Connected Apps.” From here, uncheck every app and service that’s enabled. There are a lot of integrations on this page, so make sure you scroll all the way to the bottom and get every single one.

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/Android 17 on Google Pixel 10 Pro XL

How to disable the Gemini app on Android

Now that we’ve fired Gemini from its digital assistant role and banished it from Google apps, there’s one last thing to do, and this one comes with an unavoidable caveat.

Some new phones these days, especially from Samsung and Google, come with the Gemini app installed by default, and you aren’t allowed to delete it from your phone. You can, however, take away its functionality.

RELATED: Google forced age restrictions onto Android. Are they right for you?

yourstockbank/Getty Images

To disable Gemini on Android, simply swipe into your app drawer and locate Gemini in the app list. Hold your finger on the app for several seconds to bring up the secondary menu, and choose the “i” icon that indicates “App info.” Next, tap on the “Disable” switch. You’ll get a warning message to try to convince you to change your mind. Ignore that, disable the app anyway, and you’re all set. You will no longer see Gemini in your app drawer, and it will cease to work.

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/Android 17 on Google Pixel 10 Pro XL

Reclaim your privacy from Gemini

As expected, it’s not easy to pry Gemini’s grubby claws out of an Android device. The service is ubiquitous, and as Google triples down on its AI strategy, it will only become more prevalent throughout its operating systems. However, if Gemini is not something you want anywhere near your phone and your data, these steps will help you reclaim some of your privacy and peace of mind.

​Artificial intelligence, Tech 

Since the 1980s, Cliffe Knechtle has been evangelizing on college campuses as part of his “Give Me an Answer” ministry. His son Stuart joined him in 2015, and together the father-son duo continue to conduct their open-air Q&A sessions on campuses around the nation, addressing students’ questions and doubts with the explicit goal of sharing the gospel.

In the nearly five decades “Give Me an Answer” has been operating, Cliffe has had a front-row seat to observe college students devolve in many disheartening ways.

On this episode of “Relatable” with Allie Beth Stuckey, Cliffe and Stuart explain the three biggest factors that have changed since the dawn of the ministry — and which one has been the most disturbing.

The emotional fragility of students is something Cliffe didn’t have to consider back when the ministry began — but today, it is something he is forced to adjust to everywhere he goes.

“My dad grew up in Switzerland, and when he was 18, he sat up in the Alps with a gun, watching Hitler’s Panzer divisions roll toward Switzerland. My grandpa, my dad’s dad, was in the front lines with his gun,” he reflects. “Today, when Donald Trump wins the election, university students go to a crying room to get counseling.”

This hypersensitivity has been a challenging factor to adapt to, he admits.

“I’m so grateful for Stuart and for my wife, Sharon, because they’ve helped me understand that and helped me not be quite as harsh and quite as direct as I have often unfortunately been,” Cliffe shares.

The second shift he has seen is the growing belief in moral relativism — the idea that right and wrong are subjective.

“Moral relativism and sexual immorality has become so commonplace that if you stand against that, you are really, really weird,” says Cliffe.

The third shift he has seen is the rising conviction that science is the ultimate truth.

“Unfortunately, what has become too firmly entrenched is unless you can prove it scientifically, it’s not true,” says Cliffe.

“It’s fascinating to watch — one group is totally into relativism, and the other group is into unless you can scientifically prove it, it’s not true,” he continues, “and so to be able to address both of those camps is a challenge.”

It is difficult, he explains, because the gospel, with a few minor exceptions, is largely opposed to moral relativism, and while the gospel of Jesus Christ is “based on evidence,” it is not based on “scientific proof.”

But of all three shifts, Stuart finds the second — the rising belief in moral relativism — to be the most shocking.

He shares a story from one of his college campus visits where a large group of students followed him around, pressing the issue of euthanasia.

“When I started 11 years ago with [my dad], I did not see — for the first few years, at least — any type of devaluing of human life — the relativizing of human value like I do today,” he says.

“[At one campus], this group follows me — very, very progressive group — to a corner where I was eating a sandwich. And they corner me and they say, ‘Hey, how dare you say that you are going to try and save the life of a suicidal 16-year-old woman? That’s devaluing her freedom and autonomy. If anything, you should aid her in her decision to kill herself,”’ Stuart shares.

Their certainty, he says, left him “shell-shocked.”

“They wouldn’t say get a noose or, you know, push her off a cliff. They were more so saying, though, a type of euthanization like the elderly get, you know, whether it’s a pill or something along those lines,” he says, “and so they pressed me for a good hour in a very angry way.”

“Personal autonomy and freedom is considered really the top idea and thing to pursue, even more so than the value of human life.”

To hear more about the Knechtles’ ministry, watch the episode above.

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.

​Allie beth stuckey, College campus, Indoctrination in schools, Evangelists, Blazetv show 

I was lucky to grow up during the adolescence of the tech age. Sleepovers meant Super Smash Bros. with friends. The 2000s meant building free personal websites and poking around whatever new technology had just appeared. A lot of my formative experiences came from discovering what these tools could do.

Now I’m a young father, and I want my kids to have the same chance to enjoy technology’s creativity and connectivity.

The KIDS Act risks placing more sensitive information in more places while flattening the very different ways children use technology.

Of course, security was always part of the bargain. As technology has evolved, so have the vulnerabilities. But the KIDS Act approaches those risks with a sledgehammer — and may make children less safe in the process.

A basic cybersecurity principle is that services should collect as little data as possible — certainly no more than they can reasonably protect. The KIDS Act pushes in the opposite direction.

If gaming services and social media platforms must make legally consequential decisions based on a user’s age, more of them will need some way to verify it. That means more companies asking children and parents for sensitive information — and more databases that can be breached.

The risk is not merely that more data could leak. The data itself could become more sensitive. Liability concerns may be enough to incentivize some services to demand government-issued IDs, biometric information, or similarly intrusive identifiers.

We have already seen the danger of age-verification systems creating new troves of information. In the United Kingdom, a similar law helped drive broader age-checking requirements, and a later Discord data breach exposed identity documents held by a third-party verification provider. The point is not that every age check will produce a breach. It is that collecting information that was never needed before creates something new to steal.

The KIDS Act also sweeps very different online experiences into a one-size-fits-all framework. App-based games, console games, PC games, and social platforms do not expose children to the same kinds of interactions or risks.

Parents should be vigilant about how their children use all of them. But parents are better positioned than Congress to decide which spaces are appropriate for a particular child. When we hand that judgment to a clumsy legal framework, kids may either lose access to genuine social interaction or start bypassing the safeguards altogether — often ending up in less safe corners of the internet.

That matters because online connection is not fake connection.

RELATED: British Invasion: Inside the UK’s Orwellian plan to control YouTube

Anna Barclay/Getty Images

The lockdowns made this obvious. When governments shut down schools, workplaces, churches, and ordinary social life in 2020, millions of people turned to the internet because they had nowhere else to go. Friends used Zoom to play Dungeons and Dragons. Families bonded over Animal Crossing. For many, online spaces were not a replacement for real life so much as the only part of real life still available.

The lockdowns are over, but the lesson remains. Online communities can be frivolous, toxic, educational, creative, supportive, or all of those things at once — just like offline communities.

The harms of youth overexposure to social media are real. So are the benefits lawmakers risk sweeping away. People have used online communities to find life-changing information about rare medical conditions and to build what amounts to one of the largest educational ecosystems in the world.

The problem with the KIDS Act is not that Congress wants to protect children. Parents want that too. The problem is that the law treats more data collection and centralized rules as if they were synonymous with safety.

They are not.

As a parent who grew up online, I want my kids to have access to creativity, connection, and fun without turning their identities over to every service they use. My wife and I do not even post photos of our children online. Privacy is not an abstraction in our house.

Parents already have tools. Nintendo offers parental controls, and services such as Bark and Aura can help families manage devices and online activity without requiring the government to redesign the internet around age verification.

The KIDS Act pushes in the wrong direction. It risks placing more sensitive information in more places while flattening the very different ways children use technology.

Those of us fortunate enough to grow up with the opportunities the internet created should be careful about raising the digital ladder behind us — especially when the safety measure at the top may make the fall worse.

​Age verification, Cybersecurity, Data collection, Data privacy, Opinion & analysis, Social media, Technology, Parental controls, Video games, Congress, Kids act, Safety 

A rifle-toting male allegedly tried robbing a convenience store in Oklahoma City last month — but when the clerk said there was no cash, the suspect lowered the bar just a bit.

KOKH-TV reported that officers were called to a possible armed robbery at a convenience store near N.E. 63rd and Bryant Avenue on July 16.

‘He’s a revolving door; he knows nothing will happen …’

When police arrived at the scene, the station said a store employee told investigators a male wearing a gray mask over his head tried to rob him.

The employee said the suspect was carrying an AR-15-style rifle and demanded “$100 to $200,” KOKH said, citing the incident report.

However, when the employee said he didn’t have any money, the suspect grabbed about five Hostess snacks from the shelf and walked out, the station reported.

RELATED: Inmate hands judge ‘wad’ of counterfeit cash to pay bond — then actually tells judge to ‘keep the change’: Police

PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images

Authorities later arrested Tobias Braddy on a complaint of attempted robbery with a dangerous weapon, the station said.

WKRC-TV said Braddy was taken to the Oklahoma County Detention Center, but Blaze News last week checked the detention center’s inmate list, and Braddy wasn’t on it.

One commenter under KOKH’s Facebook post about the incident said, “He’s a revolving door; he knows nothing will happen …”

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Oklahoma county sheriff’s office, Arrest, Bizarre news, Attempted robbery with a dangerous weapon, Oklahoma city, Crime 

Across Canada, Europe, and a growing number of U.S. states, assisted death is increasingly presented as relief from suffering. The Netherlands even uses “unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement” as part of its legal standard for euthanasia.

Before lawmakers and physicians define suffering as unbearable, they should listen to someone who has borne it.

No one can bear a lifetime of suffering at once. But the shepherd gives grace for the next 24 hours.

In a recent interview with my longtime friend Joni Eareckson Tada, she addressed California’s End of Life Option Act.

“It’s almost like people who feel they live with unbearable suffering can just move to California and end it all,” she said.

“Unbearable” does a great deal of heavy lifting in that sentence.

A diving accident at 17 left Joni a quadriplegic. Now turning 77, she has endured two rounds of breast cancer and decades of chronic pain.

By almost any ordinary measure, Joni has endured what lawmakers increasingly describe as unbearable suffering. Yet she is still here. Still serving. Still living a life of substance and consequence.

She has written more than 60 books, reaches more than a million radio listeners, and leads a worldwide disability ministry. Few living Christian voices speak more clearly to those who suffer.

At the end of our interview, I asked whether she would ever retire.

“No.”

Joni cited Paul, torn between departing to be with Christ and remaining because others still needed him. Heaven was “far better,” but the work was unfinished.

She does not minimize pain. She rejects death as its most compassionate answer.

I have spent 40 years beside my wife, Gracie, who has endured 98 operations, bilateral amputations, and relentless pain.

Joni sees unbearable suffering from the wheelchair. I see it from beside the wheelchair.

She sees the suffering person think, “My life has become a burden.”

I see the caregiver think, “This burden is mine alone.”

My own recent cancer treatment brought a familiar question to the front row: Who will care for the person I love when I no longer can?

As assisted death spreads, vulnerable people can hear another question beneath the language of choice: Would everyone else be relieved if I were gone?

That is where compassion can become something darker.

RELATED: Euthanasia and the lie of the ‘good death’

Mininyx Doodle/iStock/Getty Images

Death can begin to look like the answer to suffering we fear, consequences we refuse to bear, or lives that ask more of us than we believe we can give.

The prevailing creed is autonomy: I alone decide what suffering I will endure and what another person’s life may require of me. The same logic appears in abortion: No life may demand more of me than I am willing to give.

But once death becomes an accepted answer to suffering, the judgment does not remain entirely private. Families, physicians, insurers, and institutions inevitably begin weighing burdens, costs, prognosis, and quality of life.

They may call that compassion. Christian compassion asks something harder.

Compassion enters suffering. It does not eliminate the sufferer.

If suffering is merely random, eliminating the sufferer can masquerade as mercy. But if a sovereign God rules over this world, suffering is never meaningless or beyond His reach.

Christianity rejects that counterfeit compassion. We entrust ourselves to Christ and enter the burdens of others.

Human worth is not conferred by health, independence, or usefulness. God made us in His image. Paul calls members of Christ’s body who appear weaker “indispensable” (1 Corinthians 12:22).

But what sustains us when the pain does not end?

Joni’s answer is not willpower. Gracie’s answer is not optimism. They are sustained by Christ.

What does that look like?

No one can bear a lifetime of suffering all at once. But the shepherd gives grace for the next 24 hours. Psalm 23 does not promise a short valley. It promises we will not be abandoned within it.

Following Gracie’s 92nd operation, she returned to her hospital room tangled in tubes and IV lines. A young nursing assistant came in to check on her.

Still emerging from anesthesia, Gracie sensed something was wrong.

“How are you?” she whispered.

Tears filled the woman’s eyes as she confided that her marriage was in trouble.

Gracie threaded her hand through the lines and took the woman’s hand. Then she weakly quoted her friend Joni: “God permits what He hates to accomplish what He loves.”

Neither woman could see what God was doing. Neither believed He was doing nothing.

RELATED: The small mercy of a pressed pillowcase

zsv3207/iStock/Getty Images

The woman’s shoulders straightened, and she breathed a little easier.

Gracie was one beggar showing another where she had found bread.

We do not become someone else’s savior. Even from within our own anguish, we can help people catch their breath and point them to the Savior who understands their suffering and whose purposes extend beyond what we can explain.

“Bear one another’s burdens,” Paul writes, “and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2).

That command applies to everyone who belongs to Christ. It cannot be outsourced.

If we say Christ is sufficient, visible obedience should follow.

Do we take Him at His word? If we do, how would anyone know?

They would see us entering the burdens of others.

Sometimes to sit. Sometimes to carry. At all times, to point to the Savior.

​Euthanasia, Opinion & analysis, Chronic pain, Caregiving, Faith, Maid canada, Assisted suicide, Death, Suffering, California, End of life option act 

On a recent episode of his “Interesting Times” podcast, New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat interviewed Yale law and history professor Samuel Moyn.

One particular clip from the episode has gone wildly viral. In it, Moyn suggests that minors should have some stake in elections because decisions about the future impact them. But since the law prohibits their casting votes, another eligible class should be charged with casting those votes on their behalf.

But his most shocking claim came next.

When Douthat inquired about the parents of children being the ones to cast those additional votes, Moyn argued against the idea.

His reasoning? Parents aren’t the best ones to determine what’s in their kids’ best interest.

“Because there’s a divergence of interests between parents and children. And I think it’s likelier that young people — not people who are raising families — will have the best insight into the interests of children,” Moyn said.

“I think parents generally confuse the interests of their family with the interests of their children. Part of our goal, I think, as parents, but also as a society, is trying to make sure that children aren’t the hostages of their parents,” he added.

On this episode of “Live Free,” BlazeTV host and Lakepointe Church Pastor Josh Howerton exposes not only what he sees as the spiritual danger behind Moyn’s words but also how popular this toxic ideology has become in our current culture.

Moyn’s belief that what’s in children’s best interest cannot be determined by their parents, Howerton says, is “emblematic of thinking that is far more prevalent and far more influential in our culture than people realize.”

Moyn, he explains, is not some “fringe” thinker. “This is the person that’s training the most prominent legal minds in our nation,” he points out.

Moyn’s proposal to shift the proxy voting power for children away from parents and give it to young adults is the “demonic reverse image of Malachi 4:6,” says Howerton.

“Malachi 4:6 says that what the Spirit of God does … is He turns the hearts of the children to the fathers and the fathers to the children. What unholy spirits do is they turn the hearts of the fathers against the children and the hearts of the children against the fathers,” he explains.

The three main “streams of progressivism” push this spiritually toxic ideology, says Howerton.

He then explains how each goes about poisoning the minds of kids against their parents:

Critical theory teaches children to “see their parents as racist oppressors that they have to oppose in order to stand on the side of justice”; queer theory “disciples kids to see their parents’ views on gender, marriage, and sexuality as bigoted and repressive, so they have to rebel against their parents to ‘be themselves”’; and hyper-therapy culture “disciples children to see their family of origin … as the source of every problem that they ever have, so they have to go no-contact or separate from their parents to be happy.”

All three of these streams are specifically “designed to reverse-disciple children to turn the hearts of children against the fathers,” says Howerton.

Moyn’s proposal is simply “a fourth way” to do this, he argues.

Join BlazeTV+ and start watching Josh today at blazetv.com/JOSH. Use promo code JOSH40 to get $40 off your subscription.

​Critical theory, Fathers, Josh howerton, Queer theory, Ross douthat, New york times, Blazetv show 

If you were a kid in the 1960s or ’70s, chances are you watched “Davey and Goliath” without ever seeking it out. It was just there. On Sunday mornings, when television offered slim pickings for a kid, you might stumble across a slightly stiff clay boy named Davey Hansen and his morose talking dog, Goliath.

“But, Daaavey …” the dog would protest in his deep, reproachful voice whenever his owner was about to do something foolish.

An entire children’s television plot about two boys looking forward to Holy Communion. Try pitching that one today.

Unless you paid attention to the opening credits — the Luther rose, the Lutheran Church credit, and the theme music, Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” — you might not even have realized you were watching religious programming. Yes, Davey moved at a less frenetic pace than most children’s fare, had no toys or breakfast cereal to sell, and usually learned a lesson before the credits rolled. Otherwise, it was just another kids’ show.

Looking back, that’s the remarkable part. A church-funded children’s show could simply turn up on commercial television alongside everything else, with no explanation required.

‘Gumby’ gospel

In 1958, Franklin Clark Fry, president of the United Lutheran Church in America, committed an astonishing $1 million of church money to creating a television program for children. The church’s original idea was to put a minister in front of a camera to deliver short sermonettes.

Fortunately, Dick Sutcliffe thought this sounded like terrible television.

Sutcliffe, a former newspaperman working in the church’s broadcasting operation, didn’t object to the content. As his daughter later recalled his verdict: “The theology is fine, but it’s not good for television.”

Instead, he thought about his own young son. “What would I say to Mike about God?” he asked himself. “And how would I say it to him?”

Sutcliffe conceived a series of modern parables and hired Art and Ruth Clokey, the husband-and-wife team behind “Gumby,” to make them. Ruth was herself the daughter of a Lutheran minister. Sutcliffe wrote the first script, and the Clokeys produced the 15-minute pilot, “Lost in a Cave,” in 1960.

“Davey and Goliath” premiered in syndication the following February and soon reached nearly 200 television markets — thanks to a distribution strategy hard for television stations to resist: The Lutherans gave it away.

Commercial stations got polished children’s programming; the church got access to American living rooms. By 1973, an audience study estimated that “Davey and Goliath” was reaching 5.1 million people a week.

Imagine a mainline Protestant denomination attempting something that ambitious today.

God willing

“Davey and Goliath” was no “VeggieTales.” Still, Davey’s family went to church, and God came up a lot.

And the Christianity amounted to considerably more than “be nice.”

In the very first episode, “Lost in a Cave,” Davey hears his father say “God willing” and wants to know what he means. His father tells him that God cares about what happens to every one of us because he loves us.

Then Davey gets lost in a cave.

A guide searches for the injured boy and eventually rescues him. Back in the sunlight, Davey grasps the point of the whole adventure: The guide came looking for him when he was lost; God seeks and cares for us when we are lost too.

Other episodes went considerably farther. In “The Family of God,” Davey and his friend Jonathan are downright excited about receiving their first Communion. Another boy, Cisco, is decidedly less impressed: “Communion? Who cares?”

Davey and Jonathan spend much of the episode trying to convince him otherwise. Pastor Miller, meanwhile, visits the Hansen home to make sure Davey understands what he is about to receive, explaining the bread and wine in relation to Jesus’ death on the cross and the unity of Christians as the family of Christ.

An entire children’s television plot about two boys looking forward to Holy Communion.

Try pitching that one today.

More than the ‘Davey face’

For all this God talk, “Davey and Goliath” was very much a product of mainline Protestantism, which by the early 1960s increasingly understood fighting racial prejudice as part of its Christian mission. The show addressed race and integration remarkably early.

Jonathan was black, and Cisco was Hispanic. Jonathan in particular was among television’s early examples of a black child depicted simply as the close friend of a white child. “The Polka-Dot Tie,” from 1961, tackled racial prejudice, and later episodes made an increasingly integrated cast part of Davey’s ordinary world.

Sutcliffe’s daughter later offered a wonderfully concise explanation of her father’s thinking: “Dad would say if we’re going to talk about God loving all of us, we ought to get to see more than the Davey face.”

The social message still had an explicitly theological source. God loved everybody, so Davey’s little clay world ought to have everybody in it.

RELATED: When Archie Comics found Jesus: Strange artifacts from a once-Christian culture

Albert L. Ortega/Sidney Morning Herald/Getty Images

Staying power

“Davey and Goliath” had surprising staying power. After the initial run of 39 episodes and four specials, the Lutheran Church in America funded another 27 episodes and two specials in the 1970s. The last original special aired in 1975, although reruns remained a Sunday-morning fixture into the early ’80s.

Then even that began to change. According to the Associated Press, commercial stations discovered they could make money selling airtime around other religious programming — much of it produced by conservative Christians — rather than carrying the Lutherans’ free little claymation show. “Davey and Goliath” gradually disappeared from mainstream television.

The United Lutheran Church had meanwhile become part of the Lutheran Church in America in 1962. Another round of mergers in 1988 produced the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Along with churches, pension obligations, and hymnals, the ELCA inherited an unusual piece of intellectual property: “Davey and Goliath.”

And eventually it decided Davey was worth dusting off.

Snowboard synodality

The duo’s first resurrection was an unlikely one. In 2001, the ELCA licensed “Davey and Goliath” for a Mountain Dew commercial that gently spoofed the characters’ hopeless squareness. The joke worked precisely because viewers still recognized them. Better yet for the ELCA, the royalties helped finance a proper comeback.

In 2004, after nearly three decades without a new adventure, Davey and his dog returned in the hour-long “Davey and Goliath’s Snowboard Christmas.”

Davey now has two new friends: Sam, who is Jewish, and Yasmeen, who is Muslim. The three go snowboarding while comparing Christmas, Hanukkah, and Ramadan and learning to respect one another’s religious traditions. ELCA staff worked with Jewish and Muslim scholars on the script.

ECLA communications director Eric Shafer described the resulting program to the Associated Press as “very much an interfaith show about the oneness of the three faces of Abraham.”

In 1961, Davey’s lessons about how to treat other people proceeded from a specifically Christian account of reality: God, Scripture, church, Christ on the cross, Holy Communion. By 2004, interfaith understanding and inclusion had moved much closer to the center of what Davey’s church wanted him to tell the wider world.

It might be asking a lot of a little clay boy and his talking dog, but “Davey and Goliath” remained in Lutheran hands long enough to become a potent symbol of American religious decline.

Somewhere between the cave and the snowboard slope, “Davey and Goliath” changed — from teaching Christian truths with a light touch to burying them beneath universalist platitudes. And in that journey, you can see American mainline Protestantism changing with it.

​Art and ruth clokey, Davey and goliath, Franklin clark fry, Gumby, Kids television, Lifestyle, Sunday mornings, United lutheran church, Syndication, Ecla, Mainline protestantism, Culture, Faith 

The conga line of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” guest hosts has us thinking the unthinkable: Do we miss the real deal?

Make no mistake, Kimmel’s Trump derangement long ago gave the comic osteoporosis of the funny bone. But a quick sample of this week’s guest host reminds us there are even worse options than the former “Man Show” star.

It appears that the creative team used AI to help design the Lobo character played by Jason Momoa.

Take “Black-ish” alum Anthony Anderson. To the actor’s credit, he hasn’t cried like a widdle baby like Kimmel sometimes does. Still, one of his recent monologues proved painful.

A sample?

Apparently, after the NATO summit last month, Trump hid inside a catering cart to sneak out of Turkey due to security threats. And let’s give it up. Let’s give it up to the Secret Service. Do you know how hard it is to sneak a pig out of Turkey? … That’s the same way he used to get onto Epstein’s plane.

Comedy needs a kernel of truth to be funny. And as we’ve known for some time, Trump wasn’t a presence on Epstein Air, regular or otherwise.

Someone else was though. Remember when all the late-night shows piled on former President Bill Clinton for taking the Lolita Express a reported 26 times?

Somehow, Kimmel and co. forgot that news …

AI/DC

There’s a morbidly funny “Simpsons” meme that captures the “piling on” of anyone who has already suffered enough.

“Stop! He’s already dead!”

Now, it’s “Supergirl’s” turn. The Warner Bros. bust flamed out this year with critics and moviegoers. It stalled the DC Comics franchise and put overseer James Gunn in the hot seat.

The clunker is facing new problems this week. A featurette sharing some behind-the-scenes magic from the movie revealed the production used AI to enhance the movie.

In particular, it appears that the creative team used AI to help design the Lobo character played by Jason Momoa.

That’s a no-no in Hollywood these days (even if more and more artists are copping to using the technology).

Team Warner Bros. yanked the video off of YouTube, but the news went viral all the same. Turns out Kryptonite isn’t the only thing Supergirl fears …

Presidential pardon

There’s a reason the legacy media is suddenly in love with all things “South Park.” It has nothing to do with Cartman, Butters, or the show’s no-holds-barred approach to comedy.

Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone pounced on President Donald Trump all last season. Hard. Relentlessly. Now, suddenly, the show has fawning articles across the media landscape.

Imagine that!

Deadline did the honors this week, recalling how the show has tackled American presidents over its 30-year run. Yet one leader got very little attention. Hmmm. As the trade rag writes:

“Curiously, Joseph Robinette Biden — 47th President of the United States — has never appeared in a significant role in ‘South Park,’ having had his animated cameo cut from [season 12 episode] ‘About Last Night …’ There were fewer seasons during his presidency, so that may be why.”

Fewer seasons. Yeah, that’s the ticket. It has nothing to do with the creators ignoring a leader with obvious cognitive decline or a vice president known for her word salad spinning …

With cancellations like these …

Blacklists ain’t what they used to be.

Once upon a time, a communist sympathizer would be hounded out of Hollywood. Or worse.

In recent times, all it took to get blacklisted was suggesting you voted for President Donald Trump. James Woods hasn’t had a major starring role in a decade, meaning La La Land would rather ignore his two Oscar nominations to make sure a free thinker didn’t grace the movie set.

And of course, he’s far from alone. Cheryl Hines’ bustling career dried up the moment her husband, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., joined team Trump.

Now, ex-“Scream” actress Melissa Barrera is complaining about her blacklisting for her anti-Israel musings.

“There are a lot of people that got fired for basically saying Palestinians deserve human rights and they shouldn’t be getting bombed and attacked in this way.”

“Basically” does a ton of heavy lifting in that quote. Except that’s not why a microscopically small group of stars, including Barrera, suffered professional punishment. Nor does it explain why she’s so … busy … all of a sudden.

Her recent credits include “Your Monster” (2024), “Abigail” (2024), “The Copenhagen Test” (2025), and the upcoming “Black Tides” and “The Collaboration.” Plus, she just made her Broadway debut earlier this year.

Worst. Blacklisting. Ever.

​Anthony anderson, Bill clinton, Celebrity, Cheryl hines, Entertainment, Hollywood, James gunn, Jason momoa, Jimmy kimmel live, Lifestyle, Matt stone, Melissa barrera, Movies, South park, Supergirl, Palestine, Israel, Joe biden, Toto recall 

“A diplomat who says ‘yes’ means ‘maybe,’” the great French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand is supposed to have said. “A diplomat who says ‘maybe’ means ‘no,’ and a diplomat who says ‘no’ is no diplomat.” Whether Talleyrand actually said it hardly matters. The spirit is right: Diplomacy, like politics, is the art of the possible.

Put another way, diplomacy is the art of getting what you want without needlessly making it impossible for the other side to give it to you.

For the first time in decades, an American secretary of state has a plausible path to the pantheon.

By that standard, the United States has produced few truly great diplomatic tenures in the past half-century. There have been capable secretaries of state and important agreements, but remarkably few achievements with the durability of the great settlements of earlier eras.

Madeleine Albright’s tenure remains inseparable from NATO expansion and the deterioration of relations with post-Soviet Russia. Colin Powell’s is shadowed by his 2003 presentation at the United Nations and the Iraq War. Condoleezza Rice brought competence, but no settlement that transformed America’s strategic position.

Hillary Clinton’s much-advertised “reset” with Russia aged badly. John Kerry helped produce the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Iran nuclear deal, both of which were abandoned by the first Trump administration. Rex Tillerson never found his footing. Mike Pompeo was more effective, but his major diplomatic projects did not fundamentally reorder America’s position abroad.

Antony Blinken helped oversee AUKUS with Britain and Australia, an important strategic arrangement, though more an extension and deepening of existing alignments than a new diplomatic architecture.

America’s earlier history offers a much higher bar. Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, William Seward, Hamilton Fish, John Hay, George Marshall, George Kennan, and Henry Kissinger helped shape American diplomacy in ways that outlasted the administrations they served.

Their work changed not merely the headlines of the day but America’s long-term position in the world.

A few years ago, almost no one would have guessed that Marco Rubio might be the next American diplomat with a plausible claim to join that company.

When Trump nominated Rubio for secretary of state, commentators wondered whether he would moderate the president’s more unpredictable foreign-policy instincts. Old Republican voices, sidelined after Trump’s rise, and left-leaning academics alike expected friction between Trump and a man long identified with the GOP’s interventionist wing.

That prediction has not held up.

RELATED: Trump is continuing JFK’s war on communist subversion

The senator Trump mocked became his best diplomat Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto/Getty Images

On his second day in office, Rubio told State Department personnel that their mission was to ensure American foreign policy remained centered on the national interest: whatever makes the country “stronger, safer, and more prosperous.”

He added that conflict would sometimes be unavoidable, but never at the expense of national security, the national interest, or America’s core values.

The language signaled a break from the old habit of treating international approval as an end in itself.

That shift can be dismissed as political adaptation. It is also evidence that Rubio has absorbed something larger: The pre-Trump Republican foreign policy consensus is gone, and a new one is being built in its place.

At the Munich Security Conference this year, Rubio delivered a broadside against unfettered free trade, deindustrialization, mass migration, and an international order detached from the interests and identities of the nations expected to sustain it.

He also spoke explicitly about the shared language, religion, culture, and ancestry connecting Europe and America — language difficult to imagine from a secretary of state only a few years ago.

The record is becoming more substantial.

In 2025, Rubio played an important role as NATO members agreed to a new 5% defense spending commitment by 2035. He has kept open the possibility of negotiations with Iran, even amid anger from some Israelis over the administration’s approach.

He has repeatedly pursued efforts to bring Ukraine and Russia toward negotiations after years in which diplomacy between the two sides largely stagnated.

And on Venezuela, Rubio has been credited as a central figure in the administration’s campaign against Nicolás Maduro, a dramatic reversal in U.S.-Venezuela relations.

On Cuba, Rubio has paired pressure with calls for political change and dialogue, while also speaking directly to the Cuban people.

Rubio has therefore become something unusual: a secretary of state who is not merely influential inside the administration but increasingly visible to the public.

In 2026, he has at times seemed to eclipse nearly every other Cabinet official in political stature. His popularity among Republican voters is especially striking for a secretary of state, an office that usually produces prestige without a mass constituency.

Barely 18 months into his tenure, that does not yet make Rubio a great secretary of state. It does make the possibility serious.

RELATED: Gen Z is reopening America’s cold cases

Bettmann/CORBIS/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

The unanswered questions are enormous: Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Ukraine, North Korea, and the Ortega regime’s recent actions in Nicaragua could all complicate or diminish his record.

Durability is the test. A diplomatic achievement that vanishes with the next administration is not much of an achievement at all.

But Rubio has already helped push NATO toward higher defense commitments, pursued talks over Ukraine, increased pressure on Cuba and Venezuela, and strengthened Washington’s effort to counter Chinese influence around the Panama Canal.

If those gains endure — and if he can turn today’s openings into settlements that survive Trump — Rubio’s legacy will look very different from that of the secretaries of state who preceded him.

The pantheon is not his yet. But for the first time in decades, an American secretary of state has a plausible path to it.

And why stop there?

​Donald trump, Marco rubio, National interest, Opinion & analysis, State department, Foreign policy, America first, Diplomacy, Statesman 

For years, influencer Nara Smith has been celebrated online as the glamorous face of the “tradwife” movement, attracting millions of followers with videos showcasing homemade meals, family life, and domestic routines.

However, during a recent appearance on “Call Her Daddy,” Smith pushed back, insisting she never saw herself as a traditional homemaker.

And BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey isn’t buying it.

Stuckey points out that Smith went “on a podcast that is so opposed to the values” that she displays and trashed “the category” that she makes her living embodying.

“For her to be like, ‘No, I’m a boss babe,’ and ‘how dare you categorize me as this.’ This is the trend and the category that has made you what you are, Nara Smith,” Stuckey says. “And for you to go on this degrading sex podcast and trash that, I don’t like it.”

In a clip from her appearance on the podcast, Smith tells host Alex Cooper that she was used “as the poster child for the tradwife movement,” which she found “very bizarre.”

“I don’t prioritize being a homemaker. I’m a working mom,” she said.

“Do I love cooking because it’s my passion and because I kind of have to do it given my autoimmune? Absolutely. But that’s a passion of mine. It’s a hobby,” she continued. “It’s not something that I need to be doing.”

“Primary caregiver for my kids? No. My husband and I split it 50/50.”

“I don’t think a tradwife would be cooking in like Schiaparelli, you know, or a Moschino look straight off the runway. Like, I don’t think that’s what a tradewife would do,” she added.

“I just think that this is gaslighting,” Stuckey comments.

“I think that she knew very well exactly the trend that she was capitalizing on, and now that we have books like ‘Yesteryear’ saying that this is problematic, she’s like, ‘No, no, no, what? That was never me,’” she continues.

“Maybe you didn’t mean for it to be, or maybe you now don’t want it to be, but that is what you were doing, and that is what you were playing upon,” she adds.

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.

​Call her daddy, Influencer, Allie beth stuckey, Nara smith, Tradwife, Yesteryear, Alex cooper, Blazetv show