Category: blaze media

When it comes to RAM shortages, no tech company is safe. The gaming industry was one of the first to feel the full effects of AI’s supply chain chokehold, but eventually, it extended outward to impact even the world’s most valuable brands, including Apple.

The Cupertino tech giant has been looking for ways to offset low RAM availability and keep the cost of its products down, but its latest solution has lawmakers worried.

RAM from these blacklisted manufacturers is untested for Apple’s needs.

The rest of us should be concerned too.

Apple’s choice could put at risk not only the company and its products, but our national security.

America’s memory failure

Apple may be a multi-trillion-dollar company, but it’s not immune to the RAM crisis. Especially now that so many Apple products are used alongside AI, ample RAM is crucial to delivering a reliable user experience.

Historically, Apple has relied on several partners to supply the RAM for its first-party Apple silicon chips. You may even know some of these companies — Samsung (yes, the prolific Android phone manufacturer), SK Hynix out of South Korea, and Micron (that recently closed its consumer RAM business after 29 years to service Big Tech AI brands). Unfortunately, the growing need for AI data centers has completely devoured available supplies, forcing Apple to look toward other unlikely partners.

Apple is getting desperate for more RAM

So who’s the memory supplier of last resort?

The very source America is ostensibly gobbling up all that memory to beat.

That’s right. China.

Reports say Apple is in talks with Chinese-owned manufacturers to increase RAM availability for its product ecosystem. This alone is enough to raise some red flags, considering that China has a reputation for spying on Americans and stealing from Big Tech.

To make matters even worse, the two China-based brands that Apple is eyeing for RAM — ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC) — both have sordid pasts. The Pentagon previously declared both brands as companies linked directly to the Chinese military, while YMTC is on the U.S. Entity List, meaning the company is a direct threat to national security.

In other words, Apple is attempting to partner with adversaries of the United States simply to gain access to more RAM, and lawmakers aren’t happy.

Lawmakers don’t want Apple to make a huge mistake

Politicians on both sides of the aisle have taken notice of Apple’s RAM expansion strategy. Sens. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called on Apple to withdraw its attempts to lobby the Trump administration to agree to the purchase of RAM from CXMT and YMTC, citing connections with the Beijing military. They also noted that Apple’s increasing reliance on Chinese manufacturers could harm attempts to bring more manufacturing jobs back to the States. Finally, national security concerns around Chinese RAM could prevent the U.S. government from using Apple products in any official capacity moving forward. Lawmakers have implored Apple to end its pursuit of Chinese RAM by August 21, but no final moves have been made yet.

RELATED: Trump bans Chinese robots — but your robot vacuum may be spying on you already

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It goes without saying that Apple is on the cusp of opening its products to unforeseen vulnerabilities or reliability issues. On a basic level, RAM from these blacklisted manufacturers is untested for Apple’s needs, and they may or may not hold up to the same quality as Apple’s current providers. On a national security level, Chinese RAM could make Apple’s products perfect targets for tampering or unforeseen security flaws. Chinese RAM integration could also make Apple susceptible to a U.S. device ban, similar to what we’ve seen with gadgets from Chinese manufacturers like Huawei and ZTE, though this would only happen in extreme cases, given Apple’s value to the U.S. economy, reputation among consumers, and prowess as one of the most innovative technology companies on the planet.

Apple technically doesn’t need the government’s approval to purchase RAM from blacklisted companies, especially if this RAM is only used in products sold outside of the USA, but moving forward with a deal could have serious consequences for the tech giant, its products, and consumers. That said, while Chinese manufacturers may have the RAM that Apple desperately needs, it may not save the company money in the long run as suppliers are poised to charge top dollar to bail Apple out of a jam.

​Tech, Microchips, Apple, China, Ram 

Caitlin Clark has become one of the biggest names in sports, but BlazeTV host Steve Deace argues she now faces a defining moment that could shape her entire legacy. He explains that she cannot afford to remain silent on the debate over the future of women’s sports, arguing that the issue is not only about personal conviction.

“She has an absolute obligation, not just morally, but financially, athletically, to address the issues that Sophie Cunningham is speaking on,” Deace says.

Clark has remained silent on the issue of men in women’s sports, as she most recently refused to comment on fellow WNBA star Sophie Cunningham’s stance that transgender “women” should not be allowed on the same court.

“This is not a matter of opinion, and I don’t even think it’s a matter of conscience. I think it’s a matter of fact that Caitlin Clark has an obligation to address this,” he continues, asking, “What league does Caitlin Clark play in?”

Deace points out that Clark’s league, the WNBA, is specifically called the “Women’s National Basketball Association.”

He also notes that despite her spot as a top women’s athlete, she still wouldn’t beat a much younger all-American male athlete.

“Freshmen going into college this year. How many of them do you think Caitlin Clark could beat one-on-one?” Deace asks co-host Todd Erzen.

“None. None of them,” Erzen replies.

“She couldn’t beat the average high school star athlete. And she’s the greatest, she’s maybe the greatest female athlete in the world alive today … so then it would seem like protecting the integrity of what that word ‘W’ means, would be vitally important to her,” Deace says.

“What would that do to Caitlin Clark’s stock to just watch these guys come in and pretending to be women and just absolutely physically just roll her, just steamroll her on the way to the basket. She could not even get a shot off,” he continues.

“So it seems as if you are profiting off of being a woman, playing in a league whose first word of its branding is ‘women’s’ … then defining what is and is not a woman would be paramount,” he adds.

Want more from Steve Deace?

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​Caitlin clark, Sophie cunningham, Steve deace, Womens sports, Transgender women, Wnba, Blazetv show 

The majority of practicing Christians believe that tithing 10% of their income is the biblical standard for living out financial faithfulness — but according to Christian finance expert and Ramsey Solutions personality George Kamel, true financial faithfulness requires a lot more than that.

On this episode of “Relatable,” Kamel tells Allie Beth Stuckey what it really means to honor God with our finances.

Financial faithfulness, says Kamel, starts with changing our mindset about money as a whole.

“I think people underestimate the freedom that exists when you go, ‘You know what? I’m a steward of this money. It’s not mine. I’m managing it for someone else,”’ he says, “and when you do that, you look at money through a whole different lens because now it’s not all about me and my selfishness and what could I do with this? It frees me to go, ‘OK, it’s God’s money.”’

This mentality shift, Kamel suggests, creates “three buckets” our money can go into: enjoyment, saving/investing, and giving.

But all of the buckets must be poured into “wisely,” he emphasizes.

“How do we enjoy [money] wisely? Well, obviously, we don’t want to, you know, use it on debauchery, but you can use it to go on vacation. You can use it to upgrade the car. You can use it to have a nice house. That’s OK. Those things aren’t evil in and of themselves,” he tells Allie.

As for investing, Kamel points to the parable of the talents in Matthew 25 to argue that smart investing is biblical.

“Who got all the accolades? The guy who actually planted it and grew the money versus the guy who planted it and nothing came of it and it was just wasted,” he says, “and so you want to make sure that you’re stewarding this well, that it’s growing so that you can give an inheritance to your children’s children as Proverbs says.”

But in the Bible, money is most often discussed in the context of giving charitably.

“With the 2,300 scriptures about wealth and possessions, I think the authors of the Bible knew that we would struggle with the treasures on earth part more than the treasures in heaven part,” says Kamel, urging people to give their money for kingdom purposes.

Allie then wonders if it’s possible to be “too frugal.”

It all comes down to one’s motive, says Kamel.

“Why am I being frugal? To create margin to have kingdom impact? Great! That’s a healthy motive,” he says, “but if it’s just to save because I’m miserly and I have a scarcity mindset, there is no biblical scripture to back that up.”

To hear more, 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, Christianity, Dave ramsey, George kamel, Money, Stewardship, Blazetv show 

I don’t love Shiloh Hendrix as a First Amendment martyr. Then again, most First Amendment martyrs aren’t especially lovable.

Maybe Hendrix is a great gal in person. I don’t know her. But on April 28, 2025, she was at Roy Sutherland Playground in Rochester, Minnesota, with her toddler when an 8-year-old black boy allegedly took an applesauce pouch from her diaper bag. Hendrix chased him, retrieved the pouch, and, according to witnesses, repeatedly called him the Very Worst Word in American English™.

A free country doesn’t need to convert every ugly human encounter into a criminal proceeding.

The row got the attention of Sharmake Omar, a Somali immigrant who began recording her on his phone. Hendrix told him it was “none of [his] f**king business” and walked away. Omar challenged her to say the word again.

Hendrix obliged.

“F**k you, n*****. N*****, n*****, n*****.”

Omar posted the video online, sans asterisks. Fifteen months later, an Olmsted County jury acquitted Hendrix of disorderly conduct toward the child — and convicted her of disorderly conduct toward Omar.

Say what?

For good or ill, Hendrix has now joined some august company: Eugene V. Debs, Charles Schenck, H.L. Mencken, Upton Sinclair, Henry Miller, Clarence Brandenburg.

The First Amendment has always had lousy taste in clients. Still, Hendrix hardly belongs in that group. Schenck went to prison for distributing anti-draft leaflets with the Bill of Rights printed on one side. Sinclair was arrested for reading the First Amendment aloud. Brandenburg, a Klansman, gave us one of the great protections for political advocacy.

Hendrix doesn’t even rise to the level of “F**k the Draft.” She got angry in a park, took the bait, and said an ugly word over and over.

Should she have exercised more self-control? Probably. But since when did criminal law punish bad manners?

Which brings me to Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire.

The 1942 Supreme Court case gave us “fighting words”: face-to-face insults punishable when likely to provoke an immediate breach of the peace and forming “no essential part of any exposition of ideas.”

RELATED: Claude shows the future: No AI for dissenters

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Libertarians mostly hate Chaplinsky. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression calls the doctrine “quaint” and notes that the Supreme Court has not upheld a fighting-words conviction in 80 years.

True enough. Give government power to punish offensive speech, and it will abuse it. That’s why I’m against hate-speech laws. But that does not require pretending every noise made by a human mouth is an “argument” worthy of First Amendment protection.

Hadley Arkes, the constitutional scholar who has influenced my thinking for decades, suggests an admirably simple test:

The soundness of the test can be confirmed again instantly whenever we give a panel of people this set of words and ask if they can identify the terms clearly established as terms of insult, as opposed to words that may be on the borderline of insult, or perhaps even terms of approval and commendation: 1) kike, 2) wop, 3) n*****, 4) urologist, 5) meter maid, 6) saint. People will not show the slightest puzzlement here in fixing on the words used as insulting or “fighting words.”

Exactly. Nobody wonders whether “urologist” is the slur. A blind man could see the difference.

“F**k you, n*****” directed at a black man advances no proposition about race. It is an epithet. Threats, extortion, perjury, provocation — all are words, and all can be actionable.

I made a related argument 16 years ago in Snyder v. Phelps. Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church had every right to preach that America was damned. I argued that they did not have the right to commandeer a dead Marine’s funeral. Mencken called the boundary “the last limits of the endurable.”

So two cheers for Chaplinsky.

But that’s a long way from concluding that Hendrix committed a punishable offense.

She was carrying her child and walking away. Omar was recording and baiting her. He practically announced the consequence: The internet was going to see this. It did. Hendrix was identified, doxxed, and condemned by millions.

Omar had counter speech. He had a camera. He had the internet. He won.

Why did the state need to pile on?

Nothing about the encounter suggested an “imminent breach of the peace.” Yet the jury convicted Hendrix for insulting Omar while acquitting her over the nastier conduct alleged toward the 8-year-old.

RELATED: Two Americas, under Fauci, with liberty and justice for none

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Hendrix’s attorney, Brian Karalus, says the judge excluded exculpatory evidence and mishandled witness disclosures. He called the proceeding a “fraud” and a “circus” and has filed an appeal. Maybe the appellate court says he is wrong, but I hope he wins.

Chaplinsky does not give prosecutors a permission slip. The state still must prove that these words, in this context, were likely to provoke a fight in the moment.

That’s what angers me about this case. It was needless.

Hendrix behaved badly. She said something vicious to a little kid and allowed herself to be provoked when she should have kept walking.

At the same time: So what? A free country doesn’t need to convert every ugly human encounter into a criminal proceeding.

Again, two cheers for Chaplinsky and the “fighting words” doctrine. It’s good law. We should keep it and use it — sparingly. But thank God for every last constitutional protection Shiloh Hendrix has coming to her.

​Fighting words, Opinion & analysis, Disorderly conduct, First amendment, Minnesota, N-word accusation, Law and order, Chaplinsky v. new hampshire, Hate speech 

For one extraordinary moment, Anthony Fauci had the attention of the world.

For someone working in public health, epidemiology, and infectious disease, that kind of audience was almost unimaginable. A field normally confined to laboratories, medical journals, and government briefings suddenly occupied every household, with Fauci standing at its center.

Others will now have to rebuild the public’s trust in public health. That work will require humility, candor, and a willingness to answer questions without treating the questioner as an enemy.

He had the credentials, the access, and the attention of a frightened public. Imagine what he might have done with it.

I am willing to believe noble aspirations drew Fauci into public health. It is largely unglamorous work performed by people concerned with disease prevention, sanitation, research, and the countless measures that help people live longer and healthier lives. Public health is one of America’s noblest forms of stewardship.

Yet at the field’s most visible and consequential moment, Americans increasingly saw less of a champion for that calling than an indefatigable champion of Anthony Fauci.

A large ego does not necessarily prevent faithful stewardship. A cherished calling, however, can bring even an enormous ego to heel by reminding the steward that the work was never chiefly about him.

Fauci’s media choices reinforced the opposite impression. He became a familiar presence on CNN and MSNBC (now MS NOW) while the country’s highest-rated cable news programs aired on Fox. If persuading skeptical Americans truly mattered, why not spend at least as much time with the audience most skeptical of him?

Truth does not require friendly lighting. Someone confident in his work should be willing to face hostile questions and answer evidence with evidence. Fauci could have engaged Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that way. He might not have persuaded Paul or millions of skeptical Americans, but the public could have watched the exchange and learned from it.

Good teachers do not treat questions as threats to their authority or grounds for censorship. They use questions to explain, clarify, and sometimes reconsider.

RELATED: The Biden autopen scandal has one big winner: Anthony Fauci

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Americans initially accepted Fauci’s guidance because of the authority of his office. Over time, persuasion gave way to institutional pressure. OSHA imposed a vaccination-or-testing mandate covering roughly 84 million workers before the Supreme Court blocked it. Meta reported removing more than 20 million pieces of content and 3,000 accounts, pages, and groups under its COVID-19 misinformation policies.

Those decisions were not Fauci’s alone. They nevertheless formed the climate in which he told CBS that his critics were “really attacking science because I represent science.”

That was the moment stewardship gave way to something else.

I am not an epidemiologist. My authority to write this comes from more than 40 years of accompanying my wife through scores of operations, intensive care, amputations, complications, and consequential medical decisions. At times, Gracie could not speak for herself.

I have watched her medical challenges confuse, frustrate, frighten, and even humble some of the finest surgeons one could hope to meet. I have also watched those physicians respond by working harder to explain what they saw, acknowledge what they did not know, and guide us through their decisions.

We have disagreed and, at times, argued. The respect remained mutual. The physicians knew medicine. I knew Gracie. Good care required both.

Those rooms taught me that medical authority does not eliminate questions. It creates an obligation to answer them. Uncertainty honestly disclosed earns more trust than certainty falsely projected. Condescension and concealment have no place in examination rooms, intensive care units, or public health.

Scripture provides a simple standard: “It is required of stewards that they be found faithful” (1 Corinthians 4:2).

For a time, Fauci’s voice, opinions, assurances, and even his jokes traveled around the world. But the microphone has passed to others, as microphones always do.

RELATED: Two Americas, under Fauci, with liberty and justice for none

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The man who once had so much to say was eventually left repeating essentially the same answer 111 times. Invoking the Fifth Amendment is not evidence of guilt. Yet Fauci had already received a full and unconditional federal pardon covering any offenses arising from his official service between January 1, 2014, and January 19, 2025.

The pardon proves nothing by itself. Proof and trust, however, are not the same thing.

I would be hard-pressed to entrust Gracie’s care to a physician protected by a pardon reaching back six years before I had ever heard his name.

Americans have the right to notice the contrast.

Others will now have to rebuild the public’s trust in public health. That work will require humility, candor, and a willingness to answer questions without treating the questioner as an enemy.

Anthony Fauci mistook bright lights for stature. They never made him larger. They only magnified his shadow until it fell across the noble calling he had been entrusted to serve.

​Anthony fauci, Covid, Epidemiology, Intensive care, Medical authority, Misinformation, Osha, Public health, Supreme court, Opinion & analysis 

In March 2026, after a near-death hospital stay with sepsis, celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton publicly proclaimed that a lucid encounter with God inspired him to reconnect with the Catholic faith of his upbringing. He celebrated his new faith and declared his intention to live a holier life and begin taking his children to church.

Tragically, on Tuesday, August 4 — less than five months after his public conversion — Hilton was hospitalized after a TikTok livestream captured him appearing naked and covered in what looked like blood while holding a knife and engaging in self-harm.

Glenn Beck calls it an “absolute horror show.”

“He’s cutting himself, and it looks demonic. It really does. He’s covered in blood, and thousands of people watched it happen,” he says, confirming that the livestream was “not AI” and that Hilton is currently recovering in the hospital from “all kinds of lacerations.”

Before this horrific incident, Hilton, Glenn points out, appeared to be doing well and continuing down the path of his newfound Christianity based on his public activity, which highlighted his Bible readings, church attendance, prayer life, and sometimes the difficult work of his faith.

“Then Tuesday night comes,” says Glenn bleakly.

Naturally, everyone wants to know how this heartbreaking incident happened.

On this episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn offers a deeper and more sobering take on what happened to Perez Hilton — and where the biggest tragedy lies.

Glenn acknowledges the possibility that Hilton’s chaotic circumstances — near-death experience, a very public and raw Christian conversion, a stressful move to Miami, and 3 young children to care for — could have caused him to experience a psychiatric break.

“We could leave that this is medical, okay? And it very well might be,” he says.

But there’s also the possibility, Glenn argues, that Hilton is experiencing the gruesome realities of spiritual warfare.

He notes how he has warned his own friends about sharing God and the gospel on their large platforms.

“You will come under attack in ways you cannot understand,” he says, highlighting his own experience with spiritual warfare.

Glenn urges his audience not to waste their time trying to figure out the exact cause of Hilton’s tragic breakdown.

“I don’t know if … something [demonic] had taken hold of him or not. Maybe it was just sickness that had taken hold of him. I have no idea. Neither do you,” he says.

The far bigger concern, Glenn argues, is the thousands-strong audience that sat glued to their phones as Hilton self-harmed — some pleading with him to stop, while others recorded or shared the livestream.

“We’re a civilization that is rebuilding the Colosseum, and we put it into every pocket of our children’s clothes. We keep it open for 24 hours, and we call the roar ‘engagement,”’ he warns.

“I think the temptation is to look at a suffering man and see a demon and look at a sick man and see a sinner,” he continues, but the “devil doesn’t need to possess anybody to win Tuesday night; he just needs 15 minutes and a crowd that just can’t look away.”

Glenn pleads with his audience to avoid watching or sharing the video of Hilton and instead pray for him and his family.

“You can’t shut down the amphitheater, but you can decline to be part of the roar — and that’s the only vote that any of us get,” he says.

To hear more, watch the video above.

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​Christianity, Glenn beck, Perez hilton, Tiktok, Spiritual warfare, Mental illness, Blazetv show 

Editor’s note: This article is part of a point-counterpoint on Christian nationalism. Read Garen Christopher Kaloustian’s argument, “Why ‘Christian nationalists’ are liberals — whether they realize it or not,” here.

Garen is right about something that many self-described nationalists might rather not admit. Modern political nationalism emerged alongside liberalism, and the two were often allies.

The nationalists of 19th-century Europe were not generally fighting to restore the old order. They were often fighting against it. They wanted Italians to rule Italians, Germans to rule Germans, Hungarians to rule Hungarians. That put them at odds with the great dynastic empires and, frequently, with the Church. Metternich had good reason to regard nationalism and liberalism as related threats.

Conservatives have to conserve something that actually exists. For an American, that something is not the Habsburg Empire or Bourbon France.

Throne and altar

I should disclose my own bias here. I’m Catholic. I recognize the authority of the pope. I have no particular interest in proving that America is, or must remain, a Protestant nation, and I’m considerably more sympathetic than the average American conservative to the old Catholic critique of liberalism. In fact, I tend to see the Protestant Reformation itself as one of the great ruptures that eventually produced the liberal world. When Garen talks about throne and altar, I understand the appeal.

But I’m also an American, and this is where I think his argument goes wrong.

Garen defines nationalism as a doctrine of political legitimacy: Sovereignty belongs to the nation rather than to a king or emperor. Because this transfers legitimacy from the top down to the bottom up, he calls nationalism a species of liberalism. As he puts it, “To actually be conservative is to reject bottom-up legitimacy.”

Why?

That might describe a particular kind of European reactionary thought. It does not describe American conservatism as it has existed for more than two centuries.

America’s inheritance

An American conservative inherits a republic. He inherits the Constitution, representative government, the common law, federalism, Christianity, local institutions, and a political tradition in which the people are understood to possess rights that precede the state. He can argue about how well those things fit together. He can even acknowledge that some of them have roots in liberalism.

What he cannot plausibly do is declare the entire American political inheritance illegitimate. After all, what’s “conservative” about asking Americans to overthrow a 250-year-old constitutional order in favor of a European political system that they never had?

The same problem arises with Garen’s treatment of Christianity. He’s on firmer ground in describing throne-and-altar politics as part of the historic integralist tradition within Christianity. But Christianity itself is not synonymous with monarchy.

As a Catholic, I don’t need to speculate much about this. The Catechism teaches that political authority ultimately derives from God. But it also explicitly recognizes a diversity of legitimate political regimes. The Church’s Compendium of Social Doctrine goes farther: “The subject of political authority is the people considered in its entirety as those who have sovereignty.” The people may entrust the exercise of that sovereignty to elected representatives and replace them when they fail.

That doesn’t mean Catholicism embraces simple majoritarianism. John Paul II warned against the idea that truth is “determined by the majority,” and the Church teaches that political authority remains bound by the moral order and the common good. The people can’t make something just simply by voting for it.

But that is very different from saying legitimate political authority requires a king. Catholic teaching manages to hold together two ideas Garen treats as opposites: Political authority ultimately comes from God, and the people can nevertheless possess and exercise political sovereignty.

So the choice Garen eventually gives us — Christendom on one side, a liberal empire or balkanized ethnostates on the other — is too neat.

RELATED: Bernard Nathanson: Abortion architect who found mercy in Christ

Sydney Morning Herald/Antonio Ribiero/Getty Images

Cherry bomb

In fact, Garen makes a distinction that helps explain where I think he goes wrong. Nations and nationalism are not the same thing. Nations are ancient. Nationalism as a political doctrine is modern.

I’ve been reading Christopher Hibbert’s history of the French Revolution, and one little scene in the book captures the ambiguity nicely. Hibbert describes crowds wandering through the Tuileries after the royal family’s flight in 1791: “A cherry hawker sat with her basket on the eiderdown quilt of the Queen’s bed. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘Today, it’s the nation’s turn to be comfortable.’”

What exactly did “the nation” mean to her?

By 1791, the word had acquired a radical political meaning. The revolutionaries claimed that sovereignty belonged to the nation rather than the king. Perhaps our cherry seller had absorbed the new doctrine perfectly well.

But she was also using a word that referred to something considerably older: the people of France. The revolutionaries did not invent them.

France already possessed a people, a history, a culture, a territory, institutions, traditions, and a religious inheritance stretching back centuries. The revolutionary innovation was the claim that this pre-existing nation was now sovereign.

Americans and America

That is almost exactly the distinction Garen himself makes. And it’s why I think he asks his historical argument to do too much. He is right that modern nationalism emerged from the liberal and revolutionary upheavals that challenged Europe’s old dynastic order. But he has already conceded that the nation itself is much older. Establishing the liberal genealogy of nationalism therefore doesn’t establish that conserving a nation, preferring one’s fellow citizens, or preserving a national culture is inherently liberal.

The fact that 19th-century Italian nationalists fought against throne and altar does not tell us whether an American in 2026 should believe that America is a real nation, that its government has particular obligations to Americans, or that its inherited culture is worth preserving.

What today’s Christian nationalists generally mean by “nationalism” is not that every ethnic group in America should receive its own sovereign state. They mean something closer to the opposite: They believe Americans themselves constitute a nation, with a particular history and culture rather than merely a common set of administrative boundaries. That nation can include people of different ethnic backgrounds who nevertheless understand themselves to belong to a common people.

They believe citizenship entails obligations that don’t extend equally to every person on earth. They believe a government should prefer the interests of its own people. And Christian nationalists add that Christianity is part of the country’s inheritance and ought to have some meaningful place in its public life.

You can disagree with any or all of that. But pointing out that 19th-century nationalism helped destroy the Habsburg order doesn’t refute it.

Succession concession?

Garen argues that if nationalism is taken seriously as the principle that every distinct people deserves its own sovereign state, then the consistent American nationalist begins to look like a secessionist.

Perhaps. But why must an American nationalist accept that definition? If Americans constitute a nation, there is no nationalist principle requiring the United States to be divided into smaller ethnic republics.

A nation does require common things: a language, institutions, historical memory, loyalties, customs, and some idea of what membership means. It also requires boundaries. A nation that cannot distinguish between its members and everyone else is eventually no nation at all.

Garen’s argument about empires has problems of its own. He observes that the three great powers of the present day — the United States, China, and Russia — are enormous, multi-ethnic states capable of projecting power, while many European nation-states are small, dependent, and demographically declining.

Baby bust

True enough. But size is not the same thing as political health, and empire is hardly a guarantee of permanence. The Austro-Hungarian Empire disappeared. So did the Ottoman Empire. So did the Russian Empire, followed eventually by the Soviet Union. The British Empire once governed roughly a quarter of the world’s population.

Nor is it obvious that Germany’s low birth rate or Italy’s aging population is the consequence of being a nation-state. Russia, one of Garen’s own examples of a successful multi-ethnic empire, faces serious demographic problems of its own.

Garen points to the demographic decline of European nation-states, but he never establishes the causal connection. Why would Italians have more children if Italy were incorporated into a large Christian empire? Whatever is causing the fertility collapse across developed societies, Garen hasn’t shown that the culprit is the nation-state.

But the larger problem with Garen’s argument is his conception of what conservatives are supposed to conserve.

Nostalgia nation

Conservatism cannot simply mean fidelity to the political arrangements of Europe before the French Revolution. Conservatives have to conserve something that actually exists. For an American, that something is not the Habsburg Empire or Bourbon France. It is America.

Our inheritance is messy. It contains Christianity and Enlightenment liberalism, English common law and republicanism, individual rights and civic obligations. There are tensions among those things, and Garen is right to point some of them out.

But we don’t get to choose our inheritance; the conservative question is what we do with it.

And if there is such a thing as an American conservative, he must presumably believe there is an America to conserve.

​Christian nationalism, Church and state, French revolution, Moral order, Sovereignty, Protestant reformation, Conservatism, Integralism, Culture, Lifestyle, Point counterpoint, Faith 

Doesn’t it seem like conservatives are always trying to “out-conservative” each other? If you think of yourself as a real-deal, red-blooded conservative, rest assured there’s someone out there ready to tell you you’re not conservative enough.

And more often than not, it’s the self-proclaimed “Christian nationalists” who claim the top spot on the conservative totem pole.

If you care about preserving your people, their country, and their ethnic integrity, then you should not be a nationalist.

It’s a funny phenomenon to me, because If you actually examine it, “Christian nationalism” — and much of the conservative status hierarchy built around it — turns out to be a paradox: a supposedly conservative idea that isn’t conservative at all. And that’s not hyperbole.

Bottom up

Sure, the Christian nationalist’s pitch is that he’s the purest advocate for the normalization and institutionalization of Christianity. He’s staunch on all the “radical” positions (pro-life, anti-gay-marriage, anti-immigration, pro-Jesus), and he’ll tell you the nation needs to be Christian, that the government itself needs to reflect Christian values. He believes he’s a patriot because his beliefs as a Christian reflect the best interests of his nation. It all sounds good on paper.

But let’s forget the “Christian” part for a moment and take a look at “nationalism.”

When we think of a nation, we picture a distinct people who share a history, a culture, and, yes, even a race. Peoples have always belonged to their nations; it’s an ancient biblical concept — and an immutable one.

But nationalism is not the same thing as the “nations” it claims to speak for. Nationalism is a modern political doctrine, and once you trace where it actually came from, you find something the “Christian nationalist” won’t want to hear. It isn’t a conservative idea at all. It’s a liberal one.

Historical nationalism is the doctrine that concerned itself with the feudal peasant’s liberation from his king and church. It’s the idea that a country is governed by the masses of its native people, not the throne and altar. That’s the key distinction here. Political nationalism isn’t necessarily about preserving demographic and cultural integrity, although that is a key component. It’s about the legitimacy and authority of the people of the nation. Under a nationalist framework, the citizen is the sovereign. Authority flows from the bottom up, not the top down.

Vulgar outgrowth

History confirms it. After the French Revolution and the fall of Napoleon, Austrian Chancellor Klemens von Metternich and the Concert of Europe treated nationalism as a vulgar outgrowth of liberalism. The statesmen of the counter-revolution regarded nationalism not as a force for tradition but as one of liberalism’s most dangerous offspring.

That’s because the very concept of “grassroots” legitimacy is, by definition, liberalism. The idea that the underclass of an ethnic enclave can break away from the authority of the king and bishop and carve out their own country has always been (and always will be) a liberal notion. Modern political nationalism is, in many respects, a brand of liberalism draped in a tricolor flag.

Contrast that with how people understand “nationalism” today. When people today hear the word “nationalism,” where their minds usually go to is “race and demographics.” To be a white or Christian nationalist essentially means that you want the majority of the country to be white and Christian.

So then, if we’re to perceive the spirit of the times correctly, what the conservative right really has anxieties about isn’t political nationalism as a legitimacy doctrine, but ethnic integrity. What the majority of people truly want is to preserve their people and their people’s culture, not to necessarily hold the power of kings. These two terms, nationalism and ethnic integrity, definitely overlap and intersect, but they run on separate axes.

It’s important to note this distinction, because I would argue that if you care about preserving your people, their country, and their ethnic integrity, then you should not be a nationalist.

Small and dependent

Why?

Just take a look at what political nationalism has historically accomplished (or hasn’t, for that matter). The European ethnostates of the 19th and 20th centuries were mostly the successor states of the collapsed empires of the ancien regime. Germany, Italy, the Balkan states (you can go down the list) — all these nation-states were the children of liberal nationalist movements that pried their respective populations from the grip of royal authority and carved democratic governments out of them. Freedom and independence for all, or so they say.

But what does this do in reality? It creates security problems. The glaring issue with ethnostates is that they’re no longer large land empires. They’re small and dependent. Whereas these ethnostates would have had their ethnic integrity protected were they part of a larger Christian empire, the modern ethnostate is the fragile vessel that fails to do just that. The old nation that preserved its ethnic integrity inside an empire under throne and altar is swept aside because the people pridefully believe in grassroots self-governance.

Nearly every developed nation-state today faces some combination of demographic decline, economic dependency, or strategic vulnerability. Italy, Ireland, Germany, etc., are struggling to reproduce. Japan and South Korea remain wealthy and technologically advanced, but they too are confronting demographic trajectories that, if left unchecked, will eventually carry profound economic and strategic consequences. Meanwhile, states like Israel remain heavily dependent on the protection and patronage of larger powers.

RELATED: America’s ‘melting pot’ was never more than a covenient myth — here’s why

Bettman/Getty Images

Empire state of mind

Meanwhile, who prospers and dictates terms to everybody else? It’s the large, multi-ethnic empires, which primarily consist of the big three: the U.S., Russia, and China. And yes, both Russia and China are multi-ethnic empires. They’re not on the same level of diversity as the U.S., but they sit on the empire side, not the ethnostate side. Although they’re Russo- and Sino-majoritarian in population, they collectively govern Tatars, Chechens, Uyghurs, Turkics, Tibetans, and Mongols, as well as projecting power in their respective spheres.

All three of the major powers are able to project the power that they project and are able to administer the aid that they administer simply because of how big they are and how much they don’t care about being an ethnostate. They care more about being power-projecting empires than being a state with a distinct culture and people.

So if you’re an American, and you’re opining for a more “nationalist” agenda for your country’s future, what you’re really asking for is a balkanization agenda. You want to divvy the country up into smaller countries, each one carved along the lines of a distinct people.

Because when you take it seriously and follow it all the way through, that’s what nationalism is: the principle that every nation, with its own history and blood, deserves its own sovereign state. If nationalism is taken seriously as that principle, then the consistent American nationalist begins to sound like a secessionist. And anyone who is naively tempted by the prospect of secession has no idea how much harder life gets in a much smaller country.

King me

But here’s where the “Christian” half of “Christian nationalism” comes into play. To actually be conservative is to reject bottom-up legitimacy. To the historic integralist tradition within Christianity, legitimacy flows downward from God through throne and altar rather than upward from the people.

Smuggling a liberal legitimacy doctrine under a Christian banner simply does not fly.

Monarchy, deemed legitimate by the Church, is integralism, which is the opposite of vulgar nationalism. I’m not going to argue here for why Christian monarchism is the correct choice over secular republicanism. The point here is to say that liberalism definitionally is the departure from Christian monarchism. If you disagree with that, then you’re unaware of your own nation’s ideological genealogy.

Tugged in two directions

So what’s left?

The Christian nationalist is not a conservative, because his legitimacy runs up from the people rather than down from throne and altar. He’s a liberal who is unaware of his liberalism.

He is not, in any coherent sense, a Christian nationalist, because the faith he invokes is universal monarchism, which would subject multiple ethnic nations to its governance in practice (and thereby securing the integrity of the ethnic enclaves). And he is not an American nationalist either, because political nationalism applied honestly to this country would dismantle it.

So what does the “conservative” American Christian ultimately want?

When you strip it all down, he is tugged in two different directions. The first option is that he wants a large polity united by the Christian faith, reflected in its traditions, customs, and laws from the top down. That option has a name. It’s called Christendom. It is the old Christian monarchical order that 19th-century nationalist revolutions did so much to dismantle. It’s the precise opposite of “We the People” populism.

The other option is that he wants sovereignty and independence for what he considers “his people,” and that would result in a weak, balkanized ethnostate.

Otherwise, you’re stuck with a diverse, secular, and liberal empire.

The irony is that many who call themselves nationalists are, without realizing it, defending a political doctrine born from the same liberal revolution they claim to oppose.

​Christendom, Christian nationalists, Conservatives, Monarchy, Nation, Nationalism, Populism, Secessionist, Sovereignty, Faith 

What’s the very worst move a TV show can make if it wants to prove it’s a bona fide news outlet?

Bring in an unhinged former host for a teary-eyed reunion.

He’s loaded and stands as a prime example of our capitalistic system in action. Now, he wants to tear it all down.

That’s what “The View” has planned for its 30th anniversary special, at least according to one very unreliable source. The far-far-left showcase has asked ex-host Rosie O’Donnell to join the festivities. And the “Flintstones” alum said “yes.”

That’s according to O’Donnell.

“The View” has yet to confirm the invitation. An O’Donnell rep told USA Today there’s been no concrete announcement of the star’s return. Who are you going to trust: a rabid conspiracy theorist or a show that chronically peddles rabid conspiracy theories?

Extinction-level event

“Creative differences” are making a Hollywood comeback.

It’s one of the hokiest reasons for a film or TV show to fall apart. This time, it’s the next installment of the increasingly awful “Jurassic World” series. The last film, “Jurassic World: Rebirth” starring Scarlett Johansson, stunk up the joint but still made an outstanding $870 million in worldwide ticket sales.

The franchise will have to do it all over again without “Rebirth” director Gareth Edwards. He cited the oft-deployed phrase on the way out the franchise door. If he couldn’t hold his nose and direct the next film in the series, it’s a sign the saga will be about as fresh as pterodactyl eggs …

Dirty jobless

Mike Rowe may be famous, but he has two feet firmly planted in terra firma. The “Dirty Jobs” host is renowned for his practical approach to life. Gritty, blue-collar Americans cheer him on for it.

He isn’t unabashedly on the right, but we can all do the math. And when he speaks, people would be wise to listen. So Rowe went to town on the Democrats’ embrace of all things DSA this week.

That’s not a partisan screed, just a cold blast of reality.

“If the DSA continues to grow in popularity, and the Democrats actually campaign on their behalf, I think it’ll be the largest political blunder in my lifetime,” he wrote on social media.

If anyone can get through to Dems, it’s Rowe. Arguing with the purple-haired, 16-gender crowd can’t be any harder than chicken-sexing or pig-slop processing, can it?

Nolan negged

Did Christopher Nolan step on her cat’s tail?

“The Odyssey” director leaned on scholar Emily Wilson’s adaptation of the Homer poem to fuel his box-office sensation. And days after the film hit theaters, Wilson shredded Nolan’s handiwork.

Now, like Bruce the Shark in “Jaws,” she’s circling back to slam the film anew. The feminist scholar turned to the Atlantic for a fuller evisceration of the film:

The script grandly insists on the importance of human kindness, while the camera shows us an entirely different set of values. In these times of hatred and misinformation, we need more than the “apparent magic” of deceptive images. We need art that is truthful about the costs and the necessity of compassion, and that recognizes that a sense of spiritual superiority may not protect us from lies.

Nolan will have plenty of time to rebut her critiques. If he wants the ultimate revenge, he could name-check her when he’s on stage to pick up one of the film’s likely Oscar wins …

RELATED: 2,500 reasons ‘The View’ is pure leftist propaganda — and 1 reason the FCC should leave it alone anyway

Al Drago/Getty Images

Money Mark

Celebrity Net Worth, a popular site estimating how much the rich and famous have in their piggy banks, says Mark Ruffalo is worth a cool $35 million.

The in-demand actor has played the Hulk in eight feature films and two Disney+ TV shows. That alone can pad one’s bank account, but he’s been steadily employed for two decades in various films and TV projects.

He’s loaded and stands as a prime example of our capitalistic system in action. Now, he wants to tear it all down. He just hasn’t distributed his millions quite yet.

The actor used his celebrity clout to back multiple DSA candidates in Michigan earlier this week. Why? They want socialism in the good ol’ USA, he said (with a straight face).

“This is our movement coming to bear fruit. I mean, this is what we started in 2016. This is where the progressives have been moving. This is our time. And they have to spend more and more money each time to beat us. And it’s just a matter of time till they flop, and this could be it.”

Hulk … hypocrite! And that’s being kind.

​Lifestyle, Entertainment, Hollywood, Toto recall, Mark ruffalo, Marvel, Mike rowe, Dsa, Socialism, The view, Rosie o’donnell 

In July, Shane Gillis made comedy history, selling more than 77,000 tickets and setting records for the largest audience for a comedian and the most tickets sold for a solo stand-up act. The achievement put him past names like Kevin Hart, Steve Martin, and German stand-up Mario Barth.

It also came just seven years after cancel culture nearly killed his career.

Shane Gillis did not beat cancel culture by becoming less offensive. He beat it by becoming too successful to cancel.

In 2019, shortly after Comedy Central named him an “Up Next” comedian, Gillis landed the job every comic dreams about: a spot on “Saturday Night Live.” Then old clips surfaced of him doing a mock Asian accent and using a racial slur. Other clips featured supposedly unacceptable jokes about gay people. Within days, SNL fired him. Gillis later described the experience as painful enough to make it hard to “trust people … for a while.”

The timing was brutal. Gillis was fired during what we now recognize as peak woke, when careers could vanish because somebody with a Twitter account dug through 10 years of jokes and found the wrong sentence.

He was hardly alone. Sarah Silverman faced backlash over an old blackface bit. Dave Chappelle was attacked for mocking Michael Jackson’s accusers. Kevin Hart’s old tweets were dragged back into the spotlight. Suddenly the internet had discovered a tremendous new power: If enough people pretended to be offended at once, they could get somebody fired.

For a while, almost everyone played along.

That was always the secret of cancel culture. It was never a magical force. It was a consensual ideology. It worked because institutions submitted to it, employers feared it, and ordinary people convinced themselves that refusing to obey would make them the next target.

Words became temporarily unsayable. Leftists rewrote definitions and then declared that only certain people were allowed to use them. “Gone with the Wind” was pulled from streaming. James Gunn and Gina Carano lost jobs. People learned to keep their mouths shut because being called racist, sexist, or homophobic could cost them a career.

The woke mob did not win because everyone agreed with it. It won because too many people were afraid to laugh at it.

Now, two presidencies removed from peak woke, the whole thing looks much sillier. Plenty of celebrities once declared untouchable have returned to the mainstream. Land acknowledgments and pronoun rituals have become punch lines. “Culturally insensitive,” the kind of phrase that helped sink Gillis, sounds increasingly like a relic from a very stupid age.

So people post offensive jokes, recycle old podcast clips, and celebrate that “woke is dead.”

I would not start planning the funeral.

Cancel culture isn’t dead. It’s hiding.

Conservatives have every reason to feel confident right now. Republicans control Congress and the presidency. The administration has attacked “diversity, equity, and inclusion” throughout the federal government. The Supreme Court has handed down major victories protecting women’s sports. It can be tempting to believe the culture could never slide back to 2019.

RELATED: BILL PILLED: Maher warns fellow Democrats that they’re headed for woke-tastrophe

Shannon Finney/WireImage/Getty Images

But Donald Trump was president in 2019 too.

The first and second Trump administrations are very different, but Trump’s presence by itself does not prevent a woke resurgence. Cultural power does not live only in Washington. It lives in entertainment, universities, corporations, HR departments, newsrooms, and the countless people who decide whether the mob gets rewarded for showing up.

Gillis’ comeback is encouraging precisely because he did not wait for those institutions to forgive him.

Podcasts gave him somewhere else to go. After SNL fired him, Gillis joked that he could just appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast and everything would be fine. And he was right. Audiences increasingly learned that independently produced shows could be funnier, more honest, and less filtered than legacy television.

That shift reached well beyond comedy. Podcasts became a major force in the 2024 election. Trump and JD Vance used long-form appearances to show voters their humor and personalities outside carefully managed television interviews. Kamala Harris’ refusal to sit down with Rogan only reinforced the contrast. In the peak-woke era, scripted liberal slogans might have been enough. By 2024, they sounded canned.

Comedy is often the canary in the coal mine because comedy requires tension, risk, and the possibility that somebody will be offended. A culture that cannot tolerate a joke will eventually struggle to tolerate an argument.

Gillis rebuilt his career, but comedians are still testing the limits. Jerry Seinfeld said the “extreme left has suppressed the art of comedy,” then later walked that back by saying culture moves and a comedian’s job is to adapt. David Spade criticized L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom for “killing Hollywood” and took heat for it. Nate Bargatze was slammed simply for attending Trump’s UFC event at the White House.

RELATED: Colorado fire department employee FIRED over Snoop Dogg doll that ‘evoked’ history of ‘racial terror’

Heidi Gutman/Bravo/Getty Images

That is what hiding looks like. The old cultural reflex is still there, waiting for institutions to become afraid again.

Woke politics will not return because somebody waves a magic wand. It will return one concession at a time: one employee fired to stop a controversy, one joke declared beyond the pale, one institution deciding it is easier to surrender than tell an angry mob no.

That is why conservatives should resist the temptation to declare victory and go home. Free speech survives only when people keep using it. Comedy survives only when comedians keep telling the joke. Culture stays open only when institutions refuse to hand professional hecklers a veto.

The late, great Norm Macdonald understood this better than most. Early in his career, he joked: “People were beginning to talk about me, and that’s always good news. As Adolf Hitler once said, all publicity is good publicity.”

Shane Gillis did not beat cancel culture by becoming less offensive. He beat it by becoming too successful to cancel. That’s worth celebrating. It is not a reason to stop paying attention.

​Backlash, Cancel culture, Diversity equity inclusion, Entertainment, Joe rogan, Norm macdonald, Saturday night live, Shane gillis, Woke ideology, Womens sports, Opinion & analysis 

The hardest job in American politics isn’t balancing the budget, but admitting that the other side might have a good idea.

I understand this can feel like swallowing glass, but credit belongs where credit is due.

Prices fluctuate constantly under normal market conditions. Gas prices spike during oil embargoes. Airline tickets double in December. Retailers drop prices to shift winter inventory. Every consumer understands basic supply and demand.

Sustainable commerce requires a baseline of public trust.

Now, however, there’s a new way of pricing that flouts the usual rules, one most people are still oblivious to. It’s known as surveillance pricing.

Companies harvest vast amounts of personal data. They then study behavioral quirks and calculate the maximum amount an individual will pay for a given product.

New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill (D) recently signed a law, dubbed the Fair Price Protection Act, that tackles this predatory corporate practice.

Personalized price tags

When a customer goes to buy something online, the algorithm instantly detects a recent job promotion, a broken appliance, and an exhausting 20-mile commute. The system spits out a “personalized offer” that looks like a VIP discount, right up until you realize the VIP treatment is just a bespoke mugging.

New Jersey’s new law stops businesses from using personal information to construct personalized price tags for essential goods. The statute leaves traditional coupons, storewide clearance events, and opt-in loyalty programs alone. It places a hard ceiling on using private data to extract extra cash from individual wallets.

Every person participating in the economy is a target. Algorithms track physical location coordinates from cell towers, record search histories, and log exact purchasing frequencies down to the minute.

Data collection makes sense when it helps a company stock shelves or route delivery trucks. But we’re way beyond that now. High-tech logistics phases into loan-sharking when it’s used to calculate just how much price pressure you can bear before tapping out.

For example, let’s say two neighbors order identical refrigerators from the same website on a Tuesday afternoon. The first neighbor clears browser cookies, runs price comparisons across four tabs, and waits three days to buy. The second neighbor searches frantically because his old unit died overnight, threatening $300 worth of groceries. The algorithm identifies the second buyer as highly motivated (desperate) and jacks up the price tag.

RELATED: This throwback app is competing with Big Tech — using a business model out of the 1980s

Bryan Bedder/Getty Images

Grocery shopping exposes the same vulnerability that’s ready to exploit. A household managing a strict monthly budget leaves a detailed digital breadcrumb trail across meal-planning apps and store searches. Predictive software analyzes those habits and adjusts item pricing to test the family’s financial pain threshold. The family ends up paying an invisible desperation tax at checkout.

Stopping invisible pickpockets

In 1914, Congress created the Federal Trade Commission to stop trusts from fixing prices in smoke-filled boardrooms. Today, those boardrooms are replaced by cloud servers executing real-time financial extraction on millions of cell phones. Technology scales predatory practices at unprecedented speeds. Automated systems run millions of behavioral calculations every single second, adjusting prices faster than a human brain can process.

New Jersey’s law creates a blueprint for a uniform federal standard. Geographic boundaries should not dictate basic consumer protections against automated price gouging. A family driving across the George Washington Bridge into New York shouldn’t lose basic economic protections the second they cross the state line.

A national policy establishes clear boundaries for market competition. Companies should win customers by refining manufacturing, streamlining distribution, and lowering overhead costs. They shouldn’t win by writing software that hunts down strapped parents searching for infant formula at two in the morning.

Free-market economics depend on transparent pricing and informed consent. Adam Smith wrote extensively about the invisible hand of the market, but he never envisioned an invisible algorithm picking pockets in real time. Transactional freedom evaporates when a multibillion-dollar corporate server has complete information on a buyer simply trying to purchase dinner.

Capitalism for citizens

Conservatives traditionally champion market transparency, personal privacy, and fair exchange. New Jersey’s statute aligns directly with those values. True capitalism requires open competition, not rigged games where one side owns the deck, the table, and the security cameras overhead.

Companies retain every right to generate profits and return value to shareholders. Wealth creation drives technological progress and raises standard of living metrics in America and beyond. Sustainable commerce, however, requires a baseline of public trust. When consumers discover that their own personal information serves as a weapon against their bank accounts, that trust dissolves entirely.

New Jersey typically dominates headlines for political corruption trials, abysmal Turnpike traffic, and the inevitable road rage that follows. Yet Governor Sherrill’s administration managed to draw a remarkably sane line in the sand. Washington and the remaining 49 states need to adopt the exact same rule before every price tag in the country morphs into an automated shakedown.

​Surveillance pricing, Tech 

On August 4, Abdul El-Sayed, the radical progressive Muslim activist who has called for abolishing ICE, universal health care, codifying unrestricted access to abortion, and other far-left initiatives, narrowly beat Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary.

His victory bodes ill not just for the state of Michigan but for the United States as a whole, says BlazeTV host Steve Deace, because it exposes a chilling reality about America and the direction the nation is headed.

On this episode of the “Steve Deace Show,” the former Michigan resident pulls back the curtain on what’s really fueling America’s downward spiral into radicalization, mental illness, and racial idolatry.

“Gretchen Whitmer is probably the most successful Democrat politician the state of Michigan has had in a generation. … A decade as governor, queen bee of the state,” says Deace, “and she just got rolled by an Islamist in a Senate primary who won despite her endorsement of his opponent.”

What does this say about the direction of the nation?

According to Deace, we’re witnessing an “Islam surge” in the United States because the people have forgotten or rejected America’s intentional design to function like biblical Israel under the Sinai covenant — where the people obey God and receive His protecting and blessing, and as a result, the nation shines as a “city on a hill” that attracts outsiders to the true God.

“We want to be, in a civic sense, a covenantal people of the one true God. We want His favor, which means that we need to be a nation of His instruments, and you’ve seen God bless that,” says Deace. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t have lasted as long as we have.”

But as it was with ancient Israel, when the people stray, God’s discipline follows.

“One of the marks of a covenantal people receiving the discipline of the God you have covenanted with that you also see in the Old Testament is you’re overrun with foreigners and foreign gods,” Deace points out.

He asks if America’s current predicament — being overrun with illegal immigrants and the rising influence of Islam — could be God’s judgment on a nation that has rebelled against the covenantal design its founders sought to emulate.

“The answer, of course, would be yes,” says Deace frankly.

“We disobey God to a point collectively that He then removes His restraining hand. This is Romans 1,” he adds.

Whether America “lost [its] zeal” for “the one true God” or deliberately embraced “foreigners and their ways,” the “outcome is the same,” says Deace: God gives us over to our sinful ways, allowing us to reap the consequences of our decisions.

That’s why Islam is growing in power and influence in the United States, he argues.

New York City’s socialist Muslim Mayor Zohran Mamdani “is not an outlier but a herald,” Deace warns.

“After 9/11, we imported almost 4 million people from Islam-dominated countries,” and then we embarked on “a rebranding campaign that [Islam] is not a violent religion but one of peace,” he recounts.

“These seeds,” he says, “were planted many years ago” and are now being “[fertilized]” with “pagan indoctrination,” creating a spiritual “vacuum.”

“And nature abhors a vacuum, and the fake foreign demon gods will fill it for you. And if you won’t let them, you’re a racist, of course,” Deace observes.

“Normie voters,” he says, mistakenly believe that America’s biggest problems right now are “mental illness,” “racial idolatry,” and “radicalization.” But those are merely “symptoms” of a far deeper and more terrifying root problem.

“The disease is you’re up against a rival religion,” Deace warns.

To hear more, watch the episode above.

Want more from Steve Deace?

To enjoy more of Steve’s take on national politics, Christian worldview, and principled conservatism with a snarky twist, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Abdul el-sayed, Gretchen whitmer, Illegal immigrants, Islam, Mental illness, Michigan, Racial idolatry, Radicalization, Senate primary, Steve deace, Zohran mamdani, Blazetv show 

Gretchen Whitmer is probably the most successful Democrat politician Michigan has produced in a generation. Yet her endorsement just got rolled by an Islamist in my native state’s Senate primary.

How? Why?

It is time to smash the idols before they smash us. Either we let the Lion of Judah out of His cage — or we learn what fills the vacuum.

One of the things we’ve discussed on my BlazeTV show is that if you go back to the beginning of our now 250-year-old country, the founders repeatedly drew on the covenantal language they saw in the Bible between Old Testament Israel and God.

The Sinai covenant. The Ten Commandments. The blessings and curses of Deuteronomy. “Choose life, that you and your offspring may live.” The men who constructed this nation returned to these themes again and again because they understood something fundamental about a people hoping to endure: Obey God, and He will provide for and protect you.

In the New Testament, under the priesthood of every believer, Christians are called to become “living sacrifices” to God and then to our neighbors. That is how the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.

Think of a light in the pitch dark on a summer night. The bugs cannot help being drawn to it. In the same way, our unbelieving friends and family, our unbelieving neighbors, even unbelieving nations should be drawn to the light of a people living faithfully before God. That is part of the Great Commission laid out in Matthew 28.

We are meant to be a shining city on a hill for the cause of Christ.

So when the Declaration of Independence closes with the founders appealing to the “Supreme Judge of the world” for the rectitude of their intentions, they are not merely adding religious ornamentation. They are invoking Almighty God as judge of their cause. If their revolution is unrighteous, then let Him strike it down.

Days of fasting and thanksgiving were common among the founders for the same reason. They understood themselves as accountable to something above themselves.

Yet now Islam is here, taking ground and making demands.

What does that tell us?

One of the marks of a covenantal people under divine discipline in the Bible is that they are overrun by foreigners and foreign gods.

Uh-oh.

RELATED: The socialists are coming for the Senate

Kid-a/Getty Images

I do not know how much time we have left to turn this fate around. But lying to ourselves about it will guarantee that we have none.

This is Romans 1. God has removed His restraining hand and is allowing the American freak flag to fly at full mast.

Dearborn, Michigan. Minneapolis, Minnesota. Madison, Wisconsin. New York. California. The WNBA. You name it. We suck.

Paul describes something similar in his first letter to the church in Corinth, a congregation planted in the middle of a notoriously lascivious pagan culture. Corinth’s reputation for depravity was so notorious that moral decadence itself became associated with the city.

Paul then confronts one church member engaged in a form of sexual immorality so scandalous that, as Paul says, even the pagans would not tolerate it. His command is severe: Remove the man from the church and deliver him “to Satan for the destruction of the flesh.”

What does he mean?

Paul is demanding that the sinner face the consequences of his rebellion rather than allowing the church to become a nicer-than-God incubator for it. Making sin comfortable gives the sinner no incentive to repent.

So ask yourself: Do you belong to a church that behaves the way Paul prescribes?

And can the answer possibly be yes anywhere near Dearborn, Michigan — or any place becoming like it?

As we discussed last year on my show, Mayor Mamdani in New York was not an outlier. He was a herald of things to come in a land with an ungrateful and undisciplined church.

Since 9/11, the United States has admitted almost 4 million people from Muslim-majority countries. That alone would have tempted previous generations to sin in the opposite direction of our current surrender.

After Pearl Harbor, the Greatest Generation responded to Japan’s attack with the grotesque injustice of rounding up Japanese Americans and placing them in internment camps. That was evil.

But today we have raced to the opposite extreme. Rather than treat individual Muslims unjustly, we refuse to recognize Islamism as a rival civilizational and political force at all. We rebrand Islam as a “religion of peace” while importing more people from Muslim-dominated cultures in a quarter-century than live in my entire home state of Iowa.

RELATED: Stop ‘owning the libs’ and start owning institutions

Blaze Media Illustration

Where once there was overreaction, now there is willful blindness.

We are issuing Babylon an invitation.

Someone will always rule. Something will always be worshipped.

So we must stop fooling ourselves that bad politics or mental illness is the deepest enemy we face. Those are symptoms. What we are actually confronting is rival religion. And the only thing that defeats bad theology is good theology.

My fellow Americans, communism and Islamism are both ascendant in our land. It is time to smash the idols before they smash us. Either we let the Lion of Judah out of His cage — or we learn what fills the vacuum.

​Great commission, Gretchen whitmer, Islamist, Michigan, New testament, Old testament, Senate primary, Minneapolis minnesota, Zohran mamdani, Abdul el-sayed, Islam, Islamic extremism, Opinion & analysis 

The name might sound sweet, but BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales says Americans shouldn’t be fooled. A federal proposal dubbed the “Save Our Bacon Act” is making its way through Congress, and Gonzales believes anyone who cares about the welfare of animals — left or right — should oppose it.

“This is the one thing, the unlikely cause bringing liberals and conservatives together. This is the one thing that we can all agree on is that it turns out, no one likes seeing pigs locked in tiny cages,” Gonzales says.

The Save Our Bacon Act, she explains, “would strip rights away from states, which regulate farming pigs.”

“‘We’re just saving the pigs. We’re saving bacon, and we’re just protecting our family farmers.’ It’s actually not. Once you get past the cute acronym, this bill is not really about bacon at all,” she says.

The bill would “restrict states from imposing certain conditions on the production of livestock products sold within their borders,” which “targets laws like California’s Proposition 12, which was designed to protect animal welfare.”

“If this were passed, it would federally preempt qualifying state and local standards. So then there would be a federal law that would preempt state laws,” Gonzales says.

“Obviously, states, not Washington, D.C., should be free to set their own laws and policies, especially when you think about how states are known for different things, different industries, some agricultural, some not,” she continues.

The purpose of the law being targeted, California Prop 12, was to give animals that we eat a better standard of living while they’re alive.

“Now, I’m not PETA, OK? I’m not PETA … I’m not a vegan. I love meat. I love eating meat. But I also support the welfare of animals. And I don’t think that we should be forcing pigs into these gestation crates where they can’t move,” Gonzales says.

“During their pregnancies, they’re kept in these crates to prevent them from being able to move. And then when they give birth, they actually have to just nurse through it … they just roll over and the babies just nurse off the pig’s nipples, but they can’t even move,” she continues.

“That is inhumane, guys,” she adds.

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​Animal welfare, California prop 12, Peta, Pigs, Sara gonzales, Save our bacon act, Family farmers, Factory farming, Blazetv show 

When Chicago police arrested 23-year-old Philip Robinson late last month, police records show he was facing misdemeanor cannabis possession and resisting charges, CWB Chicago reported.

The next day — just after 9:30 a.m. July 29 — Robinson was taken for a court appearance, and the outlet said that “ordinarily, he would have been in and out of the courthouse within hours.”

‘Nice job by our correctional staff catching it upon intake.’

But Robinson’s X-ray security screening at the courthouse was anything but ordinary.

“Cook County Sheriff’s Office correctional staff recovered a loaded firearm” from Robinson — who was still in custody — “after it was detected during routine intake screening,” the Cook County Sheriff’s Office said. “The firearm — a 9mm Taurus loaded with 13 rounds including one in the chamber — was safely recovered before it could enter the secure facility.”

The gun was seen in Robinson’s groin area, according to an image the sheriff’s office released.

With that, the sheriff’s office referred the matter to the “conveniently available prosecutors for approval of felony charges,” CWB Chicago said.

The outlet indicated prosecutors signed off on three new counts: possession of a firearm with a revoked Firearm Owner’s Identification card, aggravated unlawful possession of a firearm, and unlawful use of a weapon.

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

What’s more, Robinson — who would have been automatically released from custody in connection with the misdemeanor charges under Illinois’ SAFE-T Act — got no break after Judge John Hock got word of the suspect’s security screening, CWB Chicago said.

Indeed, Robinson was detained pending trial, the outlet said.

While the sheriff’s office said, “Nice job by our correctional staff catching it upon intake,” CWB Chicago had questions: “Assuming for a moment that Robinson had the firearm as alleged, where did he get it? Or did Chicago police officers not find the firearm while searching him?”

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​Chicago police, Cook county sheriff’s office, X-ray, Security screening, Gun, Courthouse, Arrest, Crime 

When the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order in Trump v. Barbara, it settled for now in the courts who becomes a citizen at birth. It did not settle — and could not settle — whether American citizenship may be bought and sold.

It remains well within the power of Congress and the president to shut down the contracts, clinics, agencies, and visas that convert foreign money into American citizenship — without amending the Constitution or defying the court. Until the court revisits the issue, the political branches are solely responsible for overseeing the marketplace, and they have no excuse to delay.

Why buy a visa when you can commission a citizen?

If you doubt that such a marketplace exists, meet the Simpson triplets.

Nearly 20 months ago, Kyla Simpson of St. Augustine, Florida, gave birth to triplet boys as a gestational surrogate for an intended parent she had never met: a single man in China. He never came. Not during the boys’ two months in the NICU, not through the year and a half the Simpsons raised them, and not even when one of the triplets died of RSV.

When the man from China sent two strangers in a black SUV to collect the boys, Simpson refused. Then, she moved to terminate his parental rights, and he resurfaced with a lawyer and an emergency pickup order, which a Florida judge granted. The surviving twins, 20-month-old American citizens, now sit in state care while his attorneys obtain travel documents.

Why would a Chinese man pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for children he has never crossed an ocean to meet? Because he wasn’t buying children. He was buying American citizens.

A surrogate-born child of a foreign national receives a birth certificate, Social Security number, and passport at birth. When the child reaches age 21, he can petition for green cards for his parents and siblings, turning one commissioned pregnancy into chain migration for an entire family, at a fraction of the cost of the half-million-dollar EB-5 investor visa.

Why buy a visa when you can commission a citizen?

Birth tourism in overdrive

This citizenship-for-sale system has three serious dangers.

First, the burgeoning international surrogacy industry is a clear example of immigration fraud and abuse. For example, within days of President Trump signing the executive order on birthright citizenship, the agency Surrogate First issued workaround guidance for prospective parents, explaining that for international clients, “the certainty of their child obtaining U.S. citizenship at birth is a significant factor” in choosing America.

Likewise, Creative Family Connections advertised a “2-step birth certificate process” to guarantee citizenship for the children of foreign clients regardless of executive action. Prior to that, another agency pitched surrogacy as cheaper than the EB-5 investor visa.

RELATED: 1776, not 1608: What the Supreme Court got wrong on birthright citizenship

Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images

The co-founder of one California agency told NPR that dual nationality would be “a win-win situation for your children.” A fellow agent admitted many of her clients were “high-level Communist Party officials and celebrities” seeking American citizenship for their children.

Second, the international surrogacy industry is a national security threat that intensifies every year. Children with American passports who are raised under Chinese Communist Party rule can vote as adults in U.S. elections, join our military, work in sensitive research, and even run for president.

Beijing exploits every vulnerability American citizenship offers, whether the parents intend it or not. Why would it ignore this one?

Third, the industry is a child-welfare catastrophe. Authorities found 21 surrogate-born children in the home of a former CCP official tied to immigration fraud and smuggling — discovered only after an infant arrived at a hospital with severe head trauma in Arcadia, California. Chinese billionaire Xu Bo has reportedly commissioned 100 children and counting through American surrogates to build a personal dynasty.

According to data in the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s own journal, surrogacy cycles commissioned by foreign intended parents surged 78% from 2014 to 2019, from 2,758 to 4,905 embryo transfers a year, with Chinese nationals the largest customer base at 41.7% — quadruple the next country.

More than 107 Chinese-owned surrogacy agencies operate in Southern California alone, many with Mandarin-only marketing and some listing offices in mainland China, where surrogacy is illegal. Indeed, international commercial surrogacy is merely the newest wing of a larger operation. Conventional birth tourism results in an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 annual U.S. births to Chinese nationals — a phenomenon that, according to investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, Chinese sources themselves describe as massive.

Since 2013, he estimates that more than one million “U.S. citizens” are being raised in China because their mothers came here to give birth.

Pulling up anchor

Yes, the Trump v. Barbara majority misread the 14th Amendment, whose author said it excluded “persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens.” A future court should revisit the issue, with the Simpson case as Exhibit A. In the meantime, however, there are concrete actions Congress and the executive branch can take to address birth tourism.

Close the state loophole with federal law. Earlier this year, Florida became the first state to prohibit surrogacy contracts with foreign nationals from adversarial nations, including China, Russia, Iran, and others. But the law does not stop Florida citizens from working with a California-based agency.

We need federal action to shut this market down. As Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) proposed via the SAFE Kids Act and Rep. Scott Perry (R-Penn.) introduced via the Preventing International Surrogacy Exploitation Act, Congress should ban international commercial surrogacy outright by prohibiting foreign nationals from contracting with American surrogates or agencies.

Notably, the vast majority of developed nations — aside from the United States and Ukraine — already have a law like this in place.

RELATED: Where is the outrage over our stolen birthright?

Douglas Rissing/Getty Images

Cut off the travel and count the trade. Congress and the State Department should deny visas to anyone traveling to the U.S. to commission or collect a surrogate-born child. They should also mandate federal reporting, through the CDC or another agency, of every commercial surrogacy contract and resulting live birth, including the client’s nationality.

There is no reason to regulate the export of technology more carefully than the export of our own citizens.

Make the buyer, not the baby, pay the price. Heritage Foundation Vice President Roger Severino has proposed the boldest remedy. Vice President JD Vance has already endorsed Severino’s plan to end birth tourism citizenship in U.S. territories, which China has exploited.

Every solution so far has focused on the “anchor.” Severino’s plan, by contrast, targets the “boat.” Under existing law, the president has broad authority to bar any class of foreign nationals whose entry he deems detrimental to U.S. interests.

He should use that power to give every foreign national without permanent residency who has a child on U.S. soil a simple choice: Relinquish the child’s American citizenship, or never legally set foot in the United States again.

This doesn’t remove citizenship from the children. But it does mean that the parents who refuse would become permanently ineligible for any visa, asylum, refugee status, or temporary protected status; any lottery or family-based entry; or any future path to residency or citizenship, including through marriage to an American.

The Supreme Court says these children are citizens. Very well — then act like it.

American citizens should not be purchased for export, warehoused unclaimed, or shipped beyond the reach of American courts. The 14th Amendment was written so that no one born on American soil could be bought or sold. It’s time to extend that same protection to children born via international commercial surrogacy schemes.

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

​Birthright citizenship, Child trafficking, Immigration fraud, Jd vance, National security, Social security, Supreme court, Temporary protected status, Opinion & analysis 

While suburban consultants call in sick with mild lower-back aches from ergonomic office chairs, Iowa corn growers lose arms to steel PTO shafts on 200-horsepower tractors.

Agricultural labor is unforgiving. In fact, farming is more dangerous than working as a police officer or firefighter, with 23 fatal injuries per 100,000 workers.

I am the son of a farmer. I know firsthand what backbreaking labor actually costs and how brutally the modern system devalues it.

Bitter harvest

Heavy steel farm implements chop, grind, and crush human tissue without delay. Spinning driveshafts running at 1,000 revolutions per minute yank loose shirttails into gearboxes within milliseconds. Grain bin entrapments swallow dozens of operators every harvest season, suffocating men under 50,000 pounds of shelled corn in 20 seconds flat.

Even so, today some of the greatest dangers facing American farmers aren’t found in the fields. They’re found on the balance sheet.

U.S. Department of Agriculture reports project total farm debt to hit $624.7 billion very soon. A brand-new John Deere combine can cost as much as $1 million on the lot, while the increasing computerization of farm equipment has produced a years-long battle over whether farmers can repair machines they ostensibly own. In July, the Federal Trade Commission and five states reached a settlement with Deere & Company requiring it to give farmers and independent repair shops access to software and other repair tools previously available only to authorized dealers.

That is a rare piece of good news. American Farm Bureau Federation records show that Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies rose by 46% last year, with more than 315 cases filed in federal court. Farm families sign multimillion-dollar operating notes every spring, gambling their ancestral property on diesel prices and unpredictable rainfall.

For too many farmers, crushing debt becomes a death sentence. Centers for Disease Control data shows farmers take their own lives at a rate 3.5 times higher than the national workforce average. The official body count stands at 43.2 suicides per 100,000 farm workers. Behind every statistic is a family who loses a husband, father, brother, or son.

RELATED: The day my father handed me the gun

NurPhoto/Getty Images

Extreme isolation

A grower drags himself out of bed at four in the morning to pull 16-hour shifts in 100-degree heat. He provides endless tons of cheap grain for coastal grocery chains. His personal paycheck yields negative operating margins and endless bank interest notices.

Extreme isolation magnifies the misery, leaving men alone for hours on end, with overdue land mortgages and loaded shotguns. Rural mental health services remain nonexistent, forcing decent, hardworking Americans to fight crippling depression with manual labor until their bodies give out.

America lost 15,000 individual farm operations in 2025, an average of 41 every single day. Thomas Jefferson championed a nation of independent yeoman farmers owning land free of debt. Wall Street hedge funds buy up those foreclosed family tracts on county courthouse steps today.

The USDA found that the only sales category in which the number of farms actually increased was farms with annual sales of $1 million or more. Half of all American farmland is now operated by farms with sales of at least $500,000.

Global fertilizer empires and multinational grain trusts operating from high-rise office buildings accelerate this destruction. Commercial nitrogen fertilizer costs continue to surge, making every harvest more expensive and turning the simple act of breaking even into a Sisyphean struggle.

Future foreclosed

Who would willingly sign up for such a life today? The numbers reveal a troubling answer.

The average American farm owner is 58 years of age. Farm kids watch their fathers spend a lifetime battling debt and despair only to see little reward at the end. Many understandably walk away from the family business. America is running out of farmers, and the consequences will reach every dinner table in the country.

I’m not an American citizen, but I am the son of a farmer. I know firsthand what backbreaking labor actually costs and how brutally the modern system devalues it. When you grow up on a farm, you learn early that livestock don’t take holidays. The crops don’t wait for good weather, and equipment breaks precisely when you need it most.

It is an existence defined by physical risk and absolute exhaustion. The work is thankless, and the farmer lives a largely invisible existence. He is ignored by many and mocked by those who have never done a day of physical work in their lives.

To ignore or mock the farmer is to undermine the very foundation of self-reliance. A country that destroys its independent producers surrenders its national independence to foreign supply chains and corporate conglomerates. Conservative ideals depend on preserving private property rights and local community ownership.

And American food security depends on those who begin work at sunrise and end long after it has set. Saving the American farmer requires restoring basic economic sanity to rural property rights. Urgent action is needed before the damage becomes irreversible.

​Farming, Lifestyle 

When Catherine Herring found out she was pregnant with her third child, her husband began behaving in strange ways — including obsessing over her hydration.

After an emergency left her and her unborn child on death’s doorstep, Catherine hired a private investigator to look into her husband. What she discovered led to their divorce and his arrest.

On this episode of “Relatable,” Allie Beth Stuckey sits down to hear Catherine’s harrowing story.

In 2022, Catherine found out she was pregnant a week after she and her husband decided to separate. The news resulted in him choosing to stick around, but his behavior was markedly changed.

“[One] morning, he brought me a plastic cup of water and a biscuit and said that he had noticed I wasn’t drinking enough water, and for the sake of my pregnancy, he wanted me to stay hydrated, and then he added that he was not going to leave until I had finished the entire glass of water,” Catherine recalls.

“As time progressed and I drank more of the water and ate more of the biscuit, he started urging me to drink faster, and he ultimately was standing over me urging me to chug the water. And when he did that, that was the first time I actually looked down into the cup, and I realized that the water was not clear. It was kind of creamy, almost milky,” she adds.

When she questioned him about the drink, he shrugged it off and acted like he had mistakenly used a dirty cup. But when “violent cramping” and complete loss of bodily control began 30 minutes later, Catherine knew something was terribly wrong.

“Something had been in that cup,” she tells Allie.

Amid the chaos, Catherine recalled an article she had recently read about Google blocking a pro-life group’s advertisement for abortion pill reversals.

“I thought about that article, and I ended up googling abortion pill reversals, and a pregnancy hotline number came up … and I said, ‘This is going to be the craziest thing you’ve ever heard, but I think my husband put something in my drink this morning,’” Catherine recounts.

“[The nurse] frantically was trying to get me a prescription for progesterone, which I always find so ironic now. You don’t have to have a prescription to obtain chemical abortion pills at this moment in the United States of America, but you do need a prescription for progesterone to counteract the abortion pills to do the reversal,” she explains.

Miraculously, Catherine already had progesterone pills from a previous pregnancy and was able to get a dosage in her system shortly after drinking the water her husband brought her.

But her symptoms didn’t stop.

“I kept getting sick throughout the day, and then I started bleeding heavily, and I was still in touch with the hotline nurse, and she urged me to go to the emergency room,” says Catherine.

When she got to the ER, a “solid black” urine sample alerted doctors and nurses that her kidneys were failing.

“They started an IV, started me on antibiotics, and then they also conducted an ultrasound, and that was the first time that I saw my daughter’s heartbeat,” Catherine recalls.

But because hospitals “cannot test for prescription drug poisonings,” Catherine couldn’t get a clear answer about what her husband had put in her water that morning, so she partnered with a private investigator, who instructed her to go back home and “pretend” to take the drinks her husband gave her in order to collect evidence.

In the end, they discovered he attempted to poison her and the baby “six more times.”

“We ended up finding two sets of abortion pill packaging in my trash, and one of the poisoning attempts he did in front of two eyewitnesses. And then the seventh and final drink, we caught him making it on a hidden camera that we had placed into my kitchen air vents,” says Catherine.

“It was so terrifying because he was still to my face saying that he loved me, that he cared about me, that we were going to work this out,” she adds.

Forty days after the first of seven total poisoning attempts, Catherine finally had enough evidence to go to the police. A month later, her husband was arrested and charged with felony assault to induce abortion, felony assault of a pregnant person, and then felony assault injury to a child.

“Ultimately he took a plea deal,” says Catherine. “The felony assault to induce abortion was dropped, and his plea deal was for 180 days in jail plus probation for the attempted murder of our daughter seven separate times.”

“I think these plea deals and weak sentences, they only embolden abusers, and so it’s been really scary,” she says, calling his sentence “a slap on the wrist.”

In the divorce proceedings, it came out that Catherine’s husband had long been “living a double life,” including engaging in an extramarital affair. Today, he is serving an eight-year prison sentence after repeatedly violating a protective order that barred him from contacting her.

But life is looking up for Catherine and her children — including her youngest daughter, Josephine Grace. Despite being born prematurely with multiple developmental issues, Josephine is thriving today.

“If she walked in the room, you would have no idea that she had overcome so much in four short years. She is a true inspiration, and I’m so grateful to be her mom,” says Catherine.

To hear more of Catherine’s story and the advocacy she’s doing today around domestic violence and the weaponization of abortion pills, check out the episode above.

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​Abortion, Abortion pill, Allie beth stuckey, Domestic violence, Blazetv show 

A stretch of roadway near the South Chicago Chapel on East 95th Street was shut down as investigators continued to process the dozens of bodies found improperly stored at the funeral home.

Multiple law enforcement sources told WGN-TV that at least 50 decomposing bodies were found on Thursday stuffed into closets and the garage at the business in Chicago, Illinois.

She was cited for leaving bodies in an unrefrigerated area that had a ‘rodent infestation, causing decomposition and maggot infestation.’

The Chicago Police Department said the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation called officers to the business on a “license investigation.”

WLS-TV reported that the owner of the funeral home was recorded as Clark Morgan, whose name matches that of the person who ran Chicago Heights crematory. That business was shut down after more than 100 bodies were found improperly stored on trailers last year.

Morgan’s wife, Johanna, was listed as the funeral director at South Chicago Chapel, but her license was suspended on Wednesday after a history of disciplinary action.

In one incident, she was cited for leaving bodies in an unrefrigerated area that had a “rodent infestation, causing decomposition and maggot infestation.”

Residents near the funeral home said they smelled a very foul odor for about a year.

“Every time I come through here, I smell a foul smell in the air, and I was wondering what that smell was, and I kept thinking maybe it was the sewer,” Frank Dower said. “That is so awful, but I hope they get it resolved. I hope they get it resolved and put the bodies away properly like they’re supposed to be, and justice for the families.”

“Oh man, it’s awful,” Valkiery Velez said. “I’ve lived here for about a year, and I could smell it this entire year. It’s like dead rodents, dead animals. You can smell it, yeah.”

Officials said that forensic pathologists found bodies in different states of decomposition.

RELATED: Florida man found dead from self-inflicted gunshot wound after being accused of sexually abusing corpse at funeral home

The families of the people at the funeral home have been left in limbo as the investigation continues.

“We don’t know if Melody is in there or not,” Patrice Halliburton said, referring to her sister, who had been cremated at the funeral home. “So right now, we’re more fearful that she is than we are angry.”

Local Alderman Peter Chico released a statement about the incident Friday.

“I was horrified when I found out about the bodies at the South Chicago Chapel Funeral Home,” he said. “My thoughts and prayers go out to the families who may have had loved ones there.”

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​Decomposing bodies, Chicago, Illinois, Abuse of corpse, Crime 

President Donald Trump lit into the far-left victor of the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in Michigan after the highly anticipated contest.

Abdul El-Sayed, 41, was able to defeat establishment candidate Haley Stevens despite polling showing that she had the advantage over the Republican candidate.

‘He doesn’t love Israel; he doesn’t love Jewish people. He hates them. He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart.’

“The polls were wrong again last night when they thought it would be a landslide victory for a hater of Jews and a hater of Israel,” the president said during an event in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

“This guy hates Jews,” he continued. “Somebody said, ‘Oh, that’s a little strong.’ No, he hates Jews, and hates Israel.”

“Abdul El-Sayed, can you believe this? This could only happen to me. Abdul El-Sayed, lovely gentleman. He’s a man of hate, and now he’s going around saying, ‘Oh, I love everybody.’ He doesn’t love everybody. Put him in office, and you’re going to find out what he loves!” Trump said.

El-Sayed has been criticized widely for his far-left progressive values, and his narrow victory is seen as another defeat for the establishment wing of the party trying to keep control away from the extremist fringe.

“He doesn’t love Israel; he doesn’t love Jewish people. He hates them. He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart, and there’s not a frickin’ thing he can do about it,” the president continued.

“When I watch Abdul, he’s full of s**t!” he added to laughter and applause.

El-Sayed will face 63-year-old Republican Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan, who ran unopposed for the Republican nomination.

RELATED: Far-left Democrat promised driver’s licenses for illegal aliens in video unearthed from his past

Speaking to his supporters on Wednesday, El-Sayed invoked his Muslim religion when asked how he would beat Rogers.

“I want you to remind them that if we come through this, when we come through this — inshallah — that we’ll have taken $70 million on the chin and kept fighting back,” he said.

Inshallah means “God willing” in Arabic.

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​President donald trump, Abdul el-sayed, Us senate, Michigan, Democratic primary, Muslim, Islam, Politics