Category: blaze media

I don’t know what I clicked on that caused this, but lately most of the suggested videos on my YouTube sidebar are of morose and lonely young men saying things like:

Nobody wants to be in a relationship.

I’m 31, and I’ve never had a girlfriend.

It’s an easy formula. Speak in low tones. Sigh with profound weariness. Encourage men to feel sorry for themselves.

Everything about life sucks and is horrible.

I’m not sad. I’m empty.

I look at women, and I’m exhausted.

I prefer to live alone. In silence.

The pains of being pure at heart

The sad-looking narrators of these videos are usually sitting in a dark room, or at a desk, or sometimes in their crappy car. There are no visible decorations, no posters on the wall. Maybe there’s a row of Russian novels in the back or the collected works of Nietzsche.

The young men are usually sitting far enough from the camera to make them look fragile, weak, broken, and alone.

Each man tells his tale of woe. He’s given up on dating. He doesn’t enjoy talking to girls.

He feels disenfranchised, unwanted. Society is against him. The whole world is holding him down.

The women’s perspective

If you click on enough of these videos, you will eventually end up on the women’s side of the debate, faced with a cascade of videos from equally disillusioned young women saying things like:

Are men hiding?

Why are guys refusing to date?

It’s fun to hate on men.

Since when do dudes not want to smash?

The death of boyfriend culture.

If you start clicking on those videos, you might end up with some mix of the two, which reveals that the feeling of doom is everywhere:

Something isn’t right with people anymore.

No wonder everyone is gay now.

She’s 29, and she’s so lost in life.

No thank you, ladies. I’m good.

Dating fatigue is setting in. Women are giving up.

Night at the psy-opera

My first thought was that all these videos look suspiciously similar. Is this some sort of psyop? Is some nefarious organization trying to undermine heterosexual attraction? Or destroy any hope for Gen Z’s marital happiness?

Meanwhile, I find myself stupefied by the infinite parade of Millennial and Gen Z guys and gals, depressed, lonely, talking into their phones in their empty rooms.

How many people are really like this? Probably a lot. And that’s not good news for anybody.

RELATED: Evie magazine’s critics are wrong. Allow me to mansplain why.

Evie Magazine/Sigrid Estrada/Getty Images

Hetero-what?

It brings to mind the famous article “The Trouble with Wanting Men” from the New York Times, which declared, “Women are so fed up with dating men that the phenomenon even has a name: heterofatalism.”

(Since it’s the New York Times, nobody asked what the men think.)

Apparently, “heterofatalism” means that anyone who still feels trapped in heterosexual hell should kill themselves. Or at least feel very ashamed.

The writer of the piece, Jean Garnett, resents her own heterosexuality. Despite how objectively worthless men are, she still feels compelled to try to attract them. She craves that feeling of being longed for and desired.

She wants things to be like when she was younger. When men couldn’t resist her. When men couldn’t keep their hands off her.

Though from the sound of Ms. Garnett, I’m sure she would have something to say about any unwanted touching.

What women want

I have watched many of these videos. Men have their various complaints about women: Their girlboss attitude, their unrealistic standards, their doodle tattoos.

And women think men have lost their manliness. They seem withdrawn, passive, and preoccupied with their own troubles.

Women want men to approach them, charm them, buy them a drink.

But contemporary men are hiding in their basements, terrified of being #MeToo’d or rejected or ending up on social media as the butt of a small-penis joke.

Money talks

If these videos aren’t some secret plot to make young people miserable, they are at least a way to make money on the internet.

These men, sitting in their cars, staring forlornly into the gray skies outside, are gathering large followings.

It’s an easy formula. Speak in low tones. Sigh with profound weariness. Encourage men to feel sorry for themselves.

There is at least some psychological relief in that. If it’s happening to everyone, it’s not really your fault. It’s society’s fault. It’s the times. It’s woke politics.

Support the youth!

I do feel great sympathy for these young people coming up. It’s tough to be young and first venturing out into the world — especially at this particular moment in time, when everything about society seems structured to create conflict.

But I suspect they will find some form of happiness. It just isn’t going to be easy. And it might come in forms that are unfamiliar.

Either way, we should understand the challenges Gen Z seems destined to face. They are the ones with nothing to lose. Which means they’re the ones who will fight the coming battles.

We should remember that and help and support them in any way we can.

​Culture, Dating, Generation z, Heterofatalism, Lifestyle, Men and woman, Youtube, Zoomers, Blake’s progress 

When my documentary “15 Days” came out, I expected pushback. The film showed how American schools stayed closed long past the point at which honest people could defend the closures.

What I got was stranger. People asked me what to do.

Strangers in airports, parents at screenings, people who had never sat through a school board meeting in their lives — they wanted a plan. They wanted to know their part.

My second film, “Uncancellable,” is my answer.

The film is about Maud Maron. If you do not live in Manhattan, you may not know the name. You should.

Maud is a mother of four who has spent the last six years being told to sit down and shut up by every institution she belonged to. She has not sat down. She has not shut up. She keeps losing seats and titles, and somehow she keeps winning the argument.

Maud Maron is not a celebrity. She is a mother with a list of opinions and a refusal to swallow them to keep the room comfortable. The cure for the country is more of her, not fewer.

The argument is whether Americans are still allowed to think for themselves in public.

Maud was a public defender at the Legal Aid Society for more than 20 years. She started an advocacy group called PLACE NYC that defends screened schools and gifted programs in a city quietly dismantling both. She was elected to her community education council in District 2.

Then came the summer of 2020. Every progressive workplace in America held the same struggle session.

On a Zoom school board meeting that summer, a white board member sat with his friend’s black baby on his lap while making the case for keeping merit-based admissions at New York’s specialized high schools. Activists called him a racist. Letters circulated. Signatures were demanded.

Maud shrugged it off. She would not engage in identity politics, and she would not step down from her school board seat. For that, the lawyers at the Legal Aid Society called her a racist too. She was pushed out of her job.

She did not go quietly. She sued them.

In 2024, Maud introduced Resolution 248, which asked the council to examine the question of boys competing in girls’ sports and to put girls themselves in the room where the decision was being made. The council passed it. Activists followed her around. Council members who privately agreed with her said nothing in public.

RELATED: NYC moms file federal lawsuit against leftist education officials who allegedly punish those with dissenting views

Noam Galai/Getty Images

In 2025, the resolution was rescinded. Maud lost her school board seat in the next election. The activists declared victory.

Here is what they missed: Maud kept talking.

She is slowly winning in the culture the fight she lost in the room. A growing number of parents now say in public what almost nobody would say in 2020. That is partly because of Maud and people like her, who took the first hits so the rest of us would not have to.

In the film, Maud describes people coming up to her and saying she has the courage to say what they cannot. She turns the question around.

Why can’t they?

It is a fair question. Every parent who has watched a school curriculum get rewritten without input has felt this. Every employee who has rewritten the same Slack message four times to avoid setting off a colleague looking to be offended has felt it.

We are afraid. That fear is the whole problem.

This is what I keep telling people who ask me what to do: You do not need a national platform. You need a local one.

The school board meets this month. The PTA needs a treasurer. The neighborhood listserv has a thread about a new library policy. Your sister-in-law is about to pull her child out of public school and is too embarrassed to say why. Your son’s teacher used a phrase at parent night that made you uncomfortable, and you said nothing.

Start there. Speak up at the kitchen table first. Then at the school. Most of the people in your life are probably waiting for somebody to go first. You can be that person.

People love to say one person cannot change a country. One person cannot. A million ones can. That is what a force multiplier is.

RELATED: Democrats vilify NYC parents, demand they abandon request for policy review of transvestites in girls’ sports

Photo courtesy of Palladium Pictures

It is also why every authoritarian system in history has worked so hard to make the first person who speaks pay the highest price. If you can scare the first one quiet, the second one never opens her mouth.

I come from the Soviet Union. I know how that works.

“15 Days” and “Uncancellable” may look like different films, but they ask the same question: Are you willing to be the first one to say the true thing?

Both are stories about free speech and ordinary people who refused to stay quiet when their professions and neighbors wanted silence. The cost of speaking up is real. The cost of staying silent is worse.

Some people will tell you the country is too far gone for one Tuesday-night school board meeting to matter. They are wrong, and they are mostly the people who do not want you to show up.

Show up anyway. Bring a friend.

Maud Maron is not a celebrity. She is a mother with a list of opinions and a refusal to swallow them to keep the room comfortable. The cure for the country is more of her, not fewer.

It starts with the small, unglamorous habit of saying what you actually think, in the room you are actually in, to the people who are there with you.

That is the force multiplier. That is the whole revolution.

​15 days, Covid, Lockdowns, Uncancellable, Legal aid society, School boards, Maud maron, Opinion & analysis 

James Talarico, a Democratic Texas state representative, former teacher, and Presbyterian seminarian, is the Democratic nominee facing Republican Ken Paxton in the competitive 2026 U.S. Senate race in Texas.

Talarico’s campaign is built heavily on his “Christian” faith, which he uses to justify abortion, the LGBTQ+ agenda, and other progressive causes, leading many conservatives to call him a heretic, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and a blasphemer.

BlazeTV’s Sara Gonzales is one of the loudest voices warning that Talarico would be a curse on the state of Texas. On this episode of “Come and Take It,” Sara unveils three disturbing facts about the Scripture-twisting seminarian’s church — St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas.

1. ‘Christ-centered’ … but open to ‘all religions’: St. Andrew’s shocking statement of faith

On the FAQ page under the section “What does this church believe,” St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church’s website reads:

We are Presbyterian, yet our first allegiance is to Christ’s gospel of universal love. We are Christ centered, yet we respect and learn from all religions of love. We affirm the ancient symbols of our faith, yet we strive to speak a new language that includes all people and affirms the scientific discoveries of our day. We hope to teach children the stories of the Bible without sectarian dogma. We strive to be a close, nurturing community, yet we welcome all people into our midst. We wish to live in inner peace, yet hear God’s call to work for peace and for universal human rights. We take faith seriously, yet believe the journey should be fun. We celebrate life in many artistic forms.

“So, not a Christian church at all,” Sara says, calling it a “fun club.”

2. Proudly ‘out’ lesbian chaplain: The reverend on staff at Talarico’s church

One of the reverends on staff is a lesbian woman named Babs Miller. Her profile on the website reads, “I was finally ordained here in 2014, 24 years after I graduated from seminary, as an ‘out’ lesbian chaplain.”

“That’s how you know that this is not a real church, is when they have a pastor who’s like, ‘I’m living in sin, yeah. Come to our church. … I’m going to preach to you about God’s word while I’m not following it in my daily life and bragging about it,” Sara scoffs.

3. ‘Safe haven’ for porn? Sexually graphic books found in St. Andrew’s kids’ library

“At St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, at their church library — where children allegedly are allowed to just roam, hang out — are sexually explicit books,” Sara says.

According to the church’s website, the library features “over 1,300 books ranging from topics in history to social justice to Christianity and world religions.” This includes a banned book section, described as “a safe haven for stories from a variety of life experiences and viewpoints.”

“Much like the Bible, recorded histories of people’s lives are not pornography. Using that word for LGBTQ+ stories or other hard topics is a political tactic, not an honest description,” the website reads.

But Sara disputes this claim, noting that the library catalog features numerous pornographic books, including “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson, which contains graphic depictions of rape and incest, and “This Book Is Gay” by Juno Dawson — a book that’s been widely banned in public schools for its graphic depictions of the “ins and outs of gay sex.”

Other controversial titles include “Trans Kids, Our Kids: Stories and Resources from the Frontlines of the Movement for Transgender Youth,” “Called OUT: The Voices and Gifts of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Presbyterians,” “Becoming Nicole: The Inspiring Story of Transgender Actor-Activist Nicole Maines and Her Extraordinary Family,” and the graphic novel “Gender Queer” (one of the most banned books in the country for its sexually explicit illustrations).

“If this is in a church library — not just accessible to adults who are allegedly trying to practice Christianity, but also, like, able to be viewed by children, by minors — what won’t this church do?” Sara asks. “I mean, this is demonic, to say the least.”

To hear more, watch the full episode above.

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

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

​Come and take it, Come and take it with sara gonzales, Austin texas, James talarico, Presbyterian church 

When I heard that a black female Howard University professor of “communication” had written a Substack piece supporting accused murderer Karmelo Anthony and attacking the victim’s family, I was not surprised.

I regularly research this genre of racialist academia, much of it grounded in grievance, paranoia, and moral inversion. So I reviewed my personal library of pseudo-academic studies for what I already knew I would find about the author.

Con men and grifters have more than their share of psychopaths. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior appears more frequently among academics than is comfortable.

Sure enough, there she was: Dr. Stacey Patton, a prolific spinner of race-driven commentary who monetizes narcissism and paranoia for a rarefied audience.

Patton is typical of blindered black academics who contribute to the myth of ubiquitous black oppression in American society, a myth that now boasts its own literature. Much of systematized black academia has long been characterized by racial paranoia and self-regarding grievance.

This creates a paradox on campus. Mental illness in higher education is rarely identified and treated. Instead, institutions often nurture and encourage various maladies, even celebrating “neurodiversity,” especially when it serves ideology. At the extreme, grievance-studies enclaves become magnets for the like-minded, creating self-sealing provincial communities where paranoia and narcissism harden into conspiracy theory.

Consider Patton.

She contributed to “Presumed Incompetent II,” a key text in the canon of “poor me” paranoia and grandiose narcissism. Her chapter is titled “Why I clap back against racist trolls who attack black women academics.” This is classic main-character narcissism. Yet in its biography of Patton, Howard University modifies the chapter title, perhaps to make it sound more academic: “How Right-Wing Media Outlets Are Fighting Real Diversity in Academe.”

For narcissistic academics like Patton, reality can be edited as part of the self-regarding method. If needed, they can simply make it up.

Patton is hardly alone. The racialist canon contains countless articles and books with titles such as “Racial Battle Fatigue in Higher Education,” “Racial Battle Fatigue,” “Racial Battle Fatigue in Faculty,” “Black Fatigue,” and “Toxic Ivory Towers.” Patton, a “communication” professor and self-described historian, is an active participant in this paranoid fantasy. She defends her racialism this way:

Can you imagine people saying that a cancer researcher focuses too much on cancer? Or how about a climate scientist is suspiciously obsessed with climate? How about somebody saying a theologian keeps bringing up god? They wouldn’t. But when Black scholars study race, suddenly our expertise is some kind of pathology.

RELATED: Howard University professor’s wild take: Austin Metcalf’s dad is the real villain

Claudio Caridi/iStock/Getty Images

Genuine scientists are questioned all the time, and they are held to strict standards of method. Patton is not. The chief difference is that she has no discernible expertise unless she claims “identity” itself as expertise. The entire genre of narcissistic racialism rests on confirmation bias, selection bias, erasure of the distinction between fact and fiction, Orwellian manipulation of language, made-up “composite stories,” postmodern relativity of truth, outright fables, and rescue hypotheses designed to protect racialism from disconfirmation.

Most troubling, these dysfunctions are rooted in codified paranoia — the core of the racialist myth.

In Patton’s Substack piece attacking the father of murder victim Austin Metcalf, she distinguishes herself as a purveyor of communal narcissism. The piece is nominally about Karmelo Anthony. In reality, it is another exculpatory exercise for bad behavior.

She writes from the ideological hotbox known as Howard University, where the maladies of “poor me paranoia” and grandiose narcissism find a distinct genre of faux scholarship, especially among black female academics.

Howard has become a sort of academic “Love Boat,” the final destination for fading intellectual celebrities who could not survive in the world of rigorous scholarship and sharp criticism. It is the last stop for Nikole Hannah-Jones of the error-riddled 1619 Project; Ibram X. Kendi, scandal-plagued author of “How to Be an Antiracist” and failed director of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research; and Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of multiple empty autobiographical meditations on an unaccomplished life.

So no one should be surprised that a purveyor of paranoia plies her trade there. Howard offers a communal home for professionalized narcissism, and the symptoms are obvious to anyone willing to look.

One of those symptoms is “virtuous victimhood,” in which people story-tell themselves into victim status, blame others, then seek compensation or “reparations” for their declared victimhood. I have written extensively on this psychological phenomenon. It is the de facto resource-extraction strategy for the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement, which I explore in “DEI Exposed: How the Biggest Con of the Century Almost Toppled Higher Education.”

Con men and grifters have more than their share of psychopaths. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior appears more frequently among academics than is comfortable.

The campus provides a kind of microbiology lab where mental illness can worsen, not encumbered by healthy introspection and certainly not by medical treatment. Here I refer specifically to the maladies of “poor me” paranoia and narcissistic personality disorder. Racialist oppression studies are grounded in both.

By “racialist,” I do not mean “racist” in the common sense, but rather in the neutral sense used by W.E.B. Du Bois. Racialists are consumed by race as the single explanatory factor and conduct their lives inside a race-driven fantasy. They view the world exclusively through the “lens” of race. When someone uses the term “racial lens” or “lens of race,” know that he is engaged in a resource-extraction con.

Patton monetizes her red-meat racialism on Substack, addressing a paid audience — a morally vacant fringe of black America, along with guilty white liberals — that is troubled, paranoid, easily duped, and easily led by grifters. The audience for this racialist niche literature is large enough for a quasi-academic to earn a good living. University of Pennsylvania professor John L. Jackson described this credulous audience in “Racial Paranoia.” Jackson, to his credit, survived Howard with his integrity intact.

RELATED: America is done buying bogus racial alibis

This does not mean racialists such as Patton lack passion, sincerity, intellect, or certitude. Of course they marshal facts, though often interspersed with claims that are doubtful at best and fabricated at worst. Evangelists for cults and extremist movements also exude passion, sincerity, charisma, and certainty. They weave fantasy and fact until the two become indistinguishable.

As I explain in “DEI Exposed”:

The technique appears to be to simply fabricate something, the more ambitiously egregious the better, to pass it off as fact, and then to circulate it with bluster, bluff, and zeal. It demonstrates the power of paranoid thought and action and repetition to achieve legitimacy as a ritualized “truth.”

Racialists are passionate about their faith-based ideology. Many are skilled persuaders. Some are talented tale-spinners. Others are crusaders with a burning sense of conviction.

That energy drives the racially aggrieved in academia — the vignettes, scenarios, composite stories, fables, and tales built around the assumption that whatever happens must be explained through the magical reality of paranoid ideology. The conclusion is predetermined.

As one passage from the academic literature puts it:

So long as the poor-me paranoid can maintain her strategy, she will retain a high self-esteem. She will be motivated to go to great extremes to maintain this — inventing the evidence, or concretizing ambiguous comments, expressing her beliefs in terms of absolute certainty, and, most of all, amplifying the enormity of the conspiracy against her, as would be warranted to persecute an immense talent.

Subclinical paranoia and narcissistic personality disorder provide the evaluative framework for this extremist slice of academia, whose growth accelerated after the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Unfortunately, a subset of black America, supported by “bad me paranoid” white liberals, buys into the infantilizing fantasy. In that fantasy, the faux persecuted are always absolved of responsibility, and a racialist enemy is always available to blame, no matter how tortured the explanation.

In 2026, however, we see signs of sobriety. Academia is growing less tolerant of dubious provincialism, and society is growing less tolerant of consequence-free violent behavior, even as Patton and her compatriots attempt to legitimize the murderous violence of Karmelo Anthony. Because of Patton and her ilk, we may see many more Karmelo Anthonys sacrificed before this tendency is reversed.

Stacey Patton and the racialist clique would do better to sound a warning than to cheer on racially justified violence that brings disastrous legal consequences and appropriate punishment. Patton’s next book is due in October and, of course, has a racialist theme: “Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children.” We shall see what she says.

I am not optimistic. The monetization of psychopathy is not easily remedied, especially when lavishly compensated careers depend on it.

​Opinion & analysis, Black lives matter, Karmelo anthony, Stacey patton, Howard university, Racialism, W.e.b. dubois, Racism, Ibram x. kendi, Diversity equity inclusion, Nikole hannah-jones, Ta-nehisi coates 

Every summer, we get to celebrate the first love of every girl: her father. Before she knows what love is, before she has language for it, a daughter is learning it from him. The way he looks at her. The way he stays. The way he shows up on the hard days and the ordinary ones.

Long before she sits in a pew and hears about a God who is steadfast and faithful, she has already been given a picture of what that looks like — or she hasn’t. The difference between those two things will follow her for the rest of her life.

That steady, faithful presence inspired something in me that his illness could not take from him.

Living standard

The role of fatherhood, particularly to daughters, is one of the weightiest callings a man has. A father is his daughter’s first introduction to unconditional love, her first model of strength and gentleness working together. The world provides little girls with countless stories about knights in shining armor and perfectly orchestrated Hollywood romance. It is easy for those fictional portraits to slowly become the standard by which real love gets measured.

But a dad has a more powerful opportunity than any fairytale can offer. He can step into his daughter’s life as the living standard, the real man who shows her what it means to be fully known and fully cherished.

When she is old enough to hear that God loves her as a Father, she will reach for the nearest frame of reference she has. For better or worse, that frame is you, Dad.

Dad’s darling

I often think about my own dad, Norm Haverkos, who spent more than 40 years living with multiple sclerosis. By the time I was in grade school, he couldn’t walk without falling. Eventually, he couldn’t walk at all.

What he could do, and chose to do, every single day was show up. Growing up, I followed my dad around just to be near him. My sister would tease me about it and call me “Dad’s darling.” I never denied it. I was his love, and he was mine.

Despite his illness, my father never made it an excuse to step back from his duties to his children. Confined to a wheelchair, he still found ways to be present: in our garage workshop as we refinished antiques on winter afternoons, in the stands at whatever event we were part of, in the confusing seasons when I simply needed him nearby.

He refused to let his limitations hold him back. He was a tender shepherd to our family, guiding us not in the typical way the world portrays strength, but in a way that demonstrated faithfulness. A shepherd doesn’t lead from the front because he’s the strongest. He leads because he refuses to leave. That was Norm Haverkos. He led us, carried us, and loved us, despite his fleeting mortality.

RELATED: Bruce Willis, dementia, and my father

Jim Spellman/WireImage/Getty Images

The grace to guide

That steady, faithful presence inspired something in me that his illness could not take from him. He helped me understand a God who does not abandon His children when life gets difficult. Like any father, my dad was not perfect, but he was present. And in his presence, I found my worth. Eventually, I found my way to the One whose love my father’s had been pointing toward all along.

The weight of the calling each father carries is heavy. But each dad can be equipped with the grace to carry it. You do not have to be a perfect man to be a faithful one. You do not have to have all the answers or feel whole. If you haven’t given it your best yet, there is mercy and forgiveness to start fresh, and start today.

Sacred calling

Norm Haverkos was not flawless — not physically, not always emotionally — and yet the mark he left on my life ultimately shaped tens of thousands of girls I would go on to serve. That is the math of faithful fatherhood. It multiplies in ways you will never fully see.

To every father reading this: Your daughter is watching. She is learning who God is by watching who you are. She is building her worldview on the foundation of your presence in her life. That is a sacred calling, and it is not too late to honor it.

Be the kind of man she can’t help but follow around. Be the kind of man who makes her a darling, not of her father only, but of her Father in heaven.

​First-person, Faith, Family, God, Christian living, Multiple sclerosis, Christianity, Daughter, Father’s day 

To some in our modern society, the holiday celebrated on the third Sunday in June may seem archaic. Father’s Day may even invite calls to downplay or mock the role fathers play in our culture.

But the holiday provides important lessons in honor, respect, sacrifice, and long-term responsibility — lessons our 21st-century world badly needs to recover.

Father’s Day gives us an opportunity not only to recognize the imperfections of our earthly fathers, but also to honor and bless them in whatever small ways we can.

Consider the parable of the prodigal son, as Jesus recounts it in Luke’s Gospel. The younger son asks his father for his share of the inheritance, effectively seeking to end his relationship with the man who gave him life. Upon receiving his portion, he journeys to a foreign land and promptly squanders it in debauchery.

Our world provides far more opportunities for temptation than existed in the time of Christ, and many of them now sit in the palms of our hands. Social media, online gambling, pornography, and endless distraction are instantly available with a few clicks. Little wonder Western society seems more individualized and more alienated than ever.

Fathers, when they embrace their proper role, can stand against those prevailing currents. With God’s help, fathers can model upright living for their children and give them an example to follow.

As the head of a business founded by my parents half a century ago, I cannot thank my father enough for the lessons he gave my brothers and me. The Christmas I turned 13, he gave me a pocket-sized Bible. His note inside included these words: “The solutions to any problem are in this great book. Try to read a chapter each day of your life, and you will be happy.”

My father did not merely surrender his own life to Christ’s will. In his own way, he taught me to do the same — to pursue a personal relationship with God and try to align my life with God’s word. The way my father loved my mother and lived his faith helped shape me into the man, husband, father, and business leader I am today.

A culture that devalues fathers threatens to leave future generations without the broader perspective and discipline they need to flourish — inside the family home and in daily life with neighbors, friends, and co-workers.

In his letter to the early church in Ephesus, the apostle Paul reminds children to “honor your father and mother so that you may live long in the land.” By their nature, honor, respect, and obedience require sacrifice, traits our popular culture rarely celebrates.

RELATED: Want to leave a legacy for your kids? Focus on living like this.

martin-dm/iStock/Getty Images

But I would not have done as well in my roles as a husband, father, and business leader without the discipline and values my father helped instill in me. Those life lessons extended far beyond the four walls of our family’s home and business.

Father’s Day gives us an opportunity not only to recognize the imperfections of our earthly fathers, but also to honor and bless them in whatever small ways we can. And for those of us who are fathers and grandfathers, it offers a chance to pass on the values our fathers — earthly and heavenly — have given us.

That may be the greatest inheritance we leave our children.

​Father’s day, Fatherhood, Family, Honor, Faith, Christianity, Opinion & analysis 

BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey is celebrating a new chapter with the announcement that baby No. 4 is on the way — but alongside the exciting news, she has a message for Christian women who believe they need to live up to certain “myths” in order to fulfill their roles as women.

“One of the biggest myths in Christian womanhood,” she says is the “idea that one, biblical womanhood and so-called traditional womanhood or being a so-called tradwife are completely synonymous.”

The idea of a tradwife has been perpetuated endlessly on social media, where women portray themselves in long floral dresses and baking sourdough loaves.

“We’ve kind of conflated the trad-aesthetic — which is a social media trend for some people, I’m not saying it’s not genuine for many people — with being a biblical woman. And it’s not always the same thing,” Stuckey says.

Another myth of Christian womanhood is that your life does not begin as a woman until you get married and have children.

“My argument is not that those things cannot bring a level of fulfillment because they absolutely do. They’re good and wonderful blessings. The biggest earthly blessings I have in this life are my family, my husband, and my children,” she says.

“However, they are not the pinnacle of your fulfillment and satisfaction. Christ is, which means you can have that right now if you are a Christian, no matter what stage of life you’re in,” she says, pointing out that you can faithfully serve God from anywhere.

Another myth Stuckey sees infiltrating modern Christian women is what she calls “therapy culture,” which is essentially self-help language, self-affirmation messaging, inner-child therapy concepts, and therapeutic frameworks.

“Ultimately, I think all of these psychological ideas elevate the God of self rather than leading us to Christ and encouraging us towards self-denial,” she says.

While this modern therapy messaging encourages looking inward for happiness, Christianity says to look to Christ.

“Of course, that is true,” Stuckey says.

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, Children, Christianity, Family, Husband, Marriage, Relatable, The bible, Tradwife, Relatable with allie beth stuckey 

In September 2025, Toyota officially opened Woven City at the foot of Mount Fuji: a development of streets and residents, robots and cameras, inventors and ordinary people arranged on land formerly occupied by a car factory. The company calls it a “living laboratory.” What Toyota has built is not quite a city and not quite an experiment. The city is a model, staged in domestic architecture, demonstrating that the most important question in technology right now is not whether artificial intelligence can write a poem or pass an examination, but whether it can carry a parcel, assist a frail body, and navigate a loading dock without killing anyone.

This arrangement is an example of what Japan has begun calling “physical AI.” The term has spread quickly. Two years ago, it appeared mainly in specialist papers. Today it is found in strategy documents, industrial policy, parliamentary testimony, and semiconductor planning. The government has formally pledged, through its Basic Policy on Economic and Fiscal Management, to formulate a strategy for robots equipped with AI and advanced semiconductors. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry illustrates the concept with a warehouse robot that maps its environment, chooses routes dynamically, avoids obstacles, and coordinates with other machines in real time. The Japan Science and Technology Agency’s research arm organizes the field around three directions: stronger task execution, better adaptability to diverse environments, and coexistence with humans.

Making machines more like bodies may be more consequential than making them more like minds.

There is a history to the choice of the word “coexistence.” Japan has been making robots for decades, and it has been making stories about robots for even longer. The mechanical dolls of the Edo period, the karakuri ningyo, were clockwork figures that concealed their mechanisms inside appealing social surfaces: a doll that served tea, another that fired an arrow. Japan has long cultivated a public culture in which mechanism and social performance are not antagonists. That inheritance runs through Astro Boy and Waseda University’s decades of humanoid research, through every official document that describes robots as a component of public welfare. When METI describes image sensors as the human eye of physical AI, it is drawing on a vocabulary assembled over centuries. Japan keeps remaking a robotics culture, and today’s discussion of physical AI is the latest round of creation.

The urgency, however, is contemporary and specific. Japan is aging at a rapid rate. Caregivers are scarce. Logistics workers are scarce. Regions outside the major cities are emptying. METI launched its RING Project in 2025 to eliminate regional labor shortages through robot deployment. A 2024 revision of government guidelines on long-term care technologies was framed around reducing caregiver burden and supporting elderly self-reliance. The delivery robots now permitted on public roads, under a 2023 legal change, are presented as a practical response to a known shortage.

The technical challenges are not simple. Robot foundation models cannot train on the open internet the way large language models do. Bodies encounter a world that resists transcription. NEDO, the government’s technology-development agency, notes that what is overwhelmingly lacking is data collected in the physical field. The AIROA consortium, established in December 2024, exists largely to build the data infrastructure for generative AI foundation models to work in robots at scale.

RELATED: Shadowy companies are selling access to your smart TV — and its data

JDawnInk/Getty Images

The stack that makes physical AI possible includes multimodal perception, state estimation, planning, control, feedback, safety, edge computing, and digital twins. Kajima and Preferred Networks’ navigation system for construction sites combines cameras, lidar, and inertial measurement to build maps of an environment that never stays the same from one shift to the next. Mujin’s architecture employs a digital twin running in continuous feedback with a physical warehouse, updating state, re-optimizing motion, and coordinating execution in something close to real time. Getting intelligence into bodies and those bodies into the world is a data-engineering problem of considerable difficulty.

Japan’s Moonshot Goal 3 sets a target of AI robots that allow more than 90% of people to feel comfortable with them by 2030. The target acknowledges that physical AI is, among other things, a social legitimacy problem. Waseda’s AIREC project, developing a care robot for household, welfare, and medical settings, is pointed at the hardest version of this problem: safe bodily interaction with vulnerable humans. The researchers describe tactile sensing, dressing assistance, attention mechanisms, and predictive learning for physical contact. Journalists who have visited the lab tend to describe the same scene: a robot trying to put a shirt on an elderly person without hurting him. That image is instructive; physical AI is most sensitive in close human interaction.

The rhetoric of Japan’s push rests on a claim of human augmentation rather than replacement, technology that reduces burden while preserving self-reliance. Nevertheless, the demographic crisis that makes robots attractive also makes the economics of replacement compelling. One-third of Japanese companies were already using or actively considering AI-powered robots by 2026, while researchers and trade journalists noted the intensifying competition from the United States and China in more autonomous, AI-enabled systems. Japan can use the language of augmentation for now. Whether it can continue to do so through demographic free fall and international competition is a different question.

The Japan Science and Technology Agency has noted that physical AI may address limits inherent in purely software-based intelligence. The assumption is that intelligence without a body is a specific and limited kind of intelligence. Once a system has to carry something, or navigate a construction site, or change an elderly person’s clothing, the problem of being in the world arises. Perception becomes active. Error has weight. Meaning is inseparable from situation. The Japanese know this. What is new is that the country is now wagering its industrial future on the proposition that making machines more like bodies may be more consequential than making them more like minds. At the foot of Mount Fuji, a living laboratory works to settle the bet.

​Tech 

Just because something sounds Christian doesn’t mean it necessarily is. Sometimes demonic forces masquerade as light and lurk unnoticed among believers.

On this episode of “Strange Encounters,” Rick Burgess warns Christians against a “spiritual counterfeit” that has already taken root in many modern churches: the Passion Translation.

The Passion Translation is a modern English paraphrase of the Bible created by former missionary Brian Simmons starting around 2012, with completion plans set for 2029. It aims to convey the “fiery passion” and emotional heart of God through dynamic, readable, heart-level language.

Rick argues that it is a dangerous pitfall.

“The more we researched this labor of love by Brian Simmons, the more my spirit was grieved and the more concern I began to have,” he says. “Here on ‘Strange Encounters,’ we absolutely believe with zero hesitation that the Passion Translation of the Bible is not of God. You need to get it out of your house if it’s in your house.”

His first qualm is that the Passion Translation calls itself a translation when it’s really a paraphrase. “It’s already being deceitful,” he warns.

His second issue is that “Brian Simmons has an egalitarian view of men and women in ministry and marriage,” meaning “he believes that men and women are interchangeable in the church and in marriage.”

Further, the Passion Translation, he argues, uses “hyper-charismatic” language that has “never been in Scripture.”

It was also not written by teams of scholars who can “check each other.” “Brian seems to be the sole translator here. He tries to act like there may be other people, but he never tells us who they are,” Rick says.

He accuses Simmons of being “deceitful” by using a later Syriac Bible version from 500 years after the Greek New Testament and falsely calling it the “original Aramaic,” making the Passion Translation “pure speculation” rather than a real translation.

But Rick’s number one issue with the Passion Translation is that it was supposedly inspired by a divine encounter. In 2009, Simmons claims that Jesus appeared to him and personally commissioned him to create the Passion Translation, promising to help him unlock secrets of the Hebrew language and give him supernatural downloads of revelation for the project, which supposedly included visits from an angel.

“We’re to believe that all those who translated the Bible into English correctly — none of them got it right? And some guy named Brian Simmons was deemed so valuable by God that Jesus went to visit him, touched his forehead, enlarged his brain so he could translate the Bible correctly for us?” Rick asks skeptically.

“He might have been visited by a supernatural being, but it wasn’t Jesus and it wasn’t an angel, and I have zero problem saying that and saying that boldly,” he declares.

What Simmons has done, Rick argues, is create a faulty version of Scripture that is appealing because it “makes people feel good.” But this is “incredibly dangerous” because “the Scriptures itself tells us never trust your feelings,” he says.

“This is why it’s so dangerous.”

To hear more, watch the episode above.

Want more from Rick Burgess?

To enjoy more bold talk and big laughs, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Strange encounters, Rick burgess, Spiritual warfare, Christianity 

Citing “alarming violence,” a New Jersey community has decided to cancel its Fourth of July celebration ahead of America’s 250th anniversary, KYW-TV reported.

The township of Mount Holly and its police department released a joint announcement earlier this week about the cancellation, the station said.

‘We understand the disappointment this decision may cause.’

“We regret to announce the cancellation of the 2026 Mount Holly Township Independence Day Celebration,” the announcement said, according to KYW. “This decision was not made lightly — over the past few months, we have been meticulously monitoring local and regional events throughout New Jersey, assessing which events have been canceled due to alarming violence, as well as those communities that have continued their events with significantly increased security measures and protocol put into place.”

Mount Holly is about 45 minutes east of Philadelphia.

KYW said the announcement indicated the township couldn’t create an “actionable solution in such a short period of time to alleviate our security concerns without incurring additional, significant costs to the township and our residents.”

“We understand the disappointment this decision may cause and extend our heartfelt thanks and gratitude to all who have supported this event over the years,” the announcement also said, according to the station.

While Mount Holly didn’t get into specifics regarding the “alarming violence” the announcement cites, KYW reported that numerous carnivals recently have been canceled. In May, the Roebling Carnival in Florence Township was canceled after the first night when crowds became unruly, the station said, adding that a police officer was injured amid numerous fights. Florence is about 20 minutes north of Mount Holly.

WTXF-TV noted that several recent area events have been “impacted by violence, including large fights involving teenagers.”

RELATED: Fights erupt, deputies hurt after more than 1,000 teens descend upon Florida amusement park in planned ‘takeover’

Indeed, a rash of “teen takeovers” have plagued various communities around the country over the last several months:

With one culprit claiming that “we was bored!” hundreds of teens rampaged a Bronx mall and even fought with police in a planned “takeover” on Presidents’ Day in February.A violent Florida teen takeover in May led to the arrests of 22 suspects as young as 12, officials said, adding that it resulted in “significant disruptions, fights, and other issues in the park.”A teen brawl in a Washington, D.C., Chipotle restaurant last month saw combatants using chairs as weapons — and occurred just one day after U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro announced she would prosecute parents of youths taking part in teen takeovers.In contrast, Chicago aldermen this week rejected a proposed ordinance that would have held parents of teen takeover participants financially accountable for their children’s actions.

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

​America’s 250th anniversary, Canceled, Fourth of july celebration, Mount holly, New jersey, Security concerns, Violence, Teen takeovers, Crime 

In his new book “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” Vice President JD Vance unveils the story of his spiritual journey — straying from the Christianity of his youth, periods of atheism, and his eventual conversion to Catholicism in 2019.

In a recent interview with BlazeTV’s Allie Beth Stuckey, Vance opened up about his turbulent faith journey, the pain of losing his anchor in Christianity, and what ultimately led him back to God through Catholicism.

Raised primarily by his Baptist “Mamaw,” Vance’s childhood was defined by Scripture readings, televised Billy Graham revivals, and occasional church visits — an upbringing he describes as devout but “unchurched.”

When Mamaw passed away when Vance was 20 years old, the faith she had raised him with fizzled quickly.

“I was an atheist two years later … Christianity to me was Mamaw, and when that was gone … I just didn’t really have any anchor to Christianity anymore,” he says.

But there was another factor in his falling away from faith: the evangelical church’s heavy emphasis on culture wars, especially the Terri Schiavo case, which he felt distanced from in light of his impending Iraq deployment, loss of his grandmother, and his mother’s severe drug addiction.

“Why are we talking so much about [Terri Schiavo] when I saw so much that was going wrong in my own community that it felt like the church wasn’t speaking to,” he recounts, emphasizing the importance of Christians caring about both public policy and the individual issues impacting communities.

“There was this sense of almost betrayal that there was a total chaotic situation in my own life, and the faith didn’t speak to it in the same way. And again, was that totally fair? No, but it’s certainly part of the story of why I lost my faith,” he confesses.

As a born-and-raised Southern Baptist, Allie has a different perspective on evangelicalism.

“Something I really appreciate about evangelicals is not only, you know, doctrinal fidelity and being consistent on that, but the willingness to take that and take those doctrines into the culture and to say, ‘Look, if God is the creator and the authority of all things, then that has to dictate what we think about life … [and] all of these other other issues as well,” she explains, “and when Christians don’t do that, especially if evangelicals didn’t do that, we’d be in a really bad spot.”

Despite these strengths, Vance ultimately found his way back to faith through a different tradition.

After achieving much worldly success, he found himself feeling empty and uninspired despite being surrounded by fellow high achievers at Yale Law School.

“These Christians in my life, they’re actually the ones who seem to have it figured out. Like they’re much happier, they’re much healthier, they’re much more well-adjusted,” Vance recalls.

“So that got me on the pathway of like, well, if they’re right about virtue and they’re right about character and they’re right about the things that actually matter, maybe they’re right about Jesus. Maybe this actually comes from some inner truth that radiates outward.”

This intellectual and personal reckoning eventually led Vance to Catholicism in 2019.

To hear more about his spiritual journey — including what ultimately drew him to Catholicism rather than the evangelical faith of his youth — watch the full interview 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.

​Relatable, Allie beth stuckey, Jd vance, Catholicism 

Father’s Day can be complicated.

For some, it is a day of gratitude. For others, it is a day of grief, anger, regret, or longing. Some remember fathers they dearly loved. Others struggle to remember a father at all.

The best fathers point toward a greater Voice. The worst fathers cannot eclipse it.

Thinking about Father’s Day recently, a friend sighed and said, “I guess I’ll have to figure out a way to honor my father.”

The hesitation said more than the sentence.

Years ago, a caller to my radio program spoke of caring for his aging father, an abusive alcoholic who at that point required assistance. The caller was 52 years old, yet he confessed that whenever he was around his father, he felt 11 again.

The years had passed. The wounds had not.

Another friend put it more bluntly: “My father was a pedophile.”

No explanation followed. No attempt softened it. Just the stark reality of a life marked by a father’s betrayal.

I once heard a well-known minister recount standing at his father’s grave at 16, feeling as though he were losing his mind. Looking at the headstone, he cried through his tears, “You can’t leave. You didn’t tell me what you think of me.”

He was not grieving the loss of money, advice, or even protection. He was grieving the loss of a verdict.

For all our confusion about identity, one truth remains stubborn: People know when something essential is missing. Despite endless debates about who we are, millions spend their lives searching for the same thing — a father.

Men sire children every day. Being a father is something else.

A father forms. He blesses. He corrects. He protects. He teaches. He commissions. With a word, he can instill courage or fear. He can strengthen a child for the journey ahead or leave wounds that linger for decades.

A father’s voice can penetrate places explanations never reach.

Forty-three years ago, my wife awoke from a three-week coma following a catastrophic automobile accident. Broken, disoriented, and in unimaginable pain, she did not know where she was. She did not understand what had happened. She could not comprehend what lay ahead.

The first words she heard were spoken by her father.

RELATED: NIGHTMARE as 3-year-old winds up in crocodile pit — suspect is already back on the street

Krishan Kariyawasam/NurPhoto/Getty Images

“Daddy’s here, Gracie. Daddy’s here.”

She did not know where “here” was. But she knew her father’s voice.

Years later, one of our sons fell on a playground and split his chin open. I rushed him to his pediatrician, where he needed stitches. As I held him while the doctor sewed him up, he looked at me with fear, confusion, and the unspoken question every hurting child eventually asks: Why are you letting this happen?

He knew nothing about infection, wound care, or why stitches mattered. No explanation I offered could bridge the gap between what he experienced and what I understood. So I kept repeating the only thing I knew to say.

“It’s OK. Daddy’s here.”

The explanation would have meant nothing to him. Presence meant everything.

There are fathers who leave too soon. Fathers who abandon. Fathers who wound. Fathers who spend a lifetime trying to repair the damage they have done. There are fathers whose voices still comfort decades later and fathers whose words still wound.

Many spend years trying to wipe their father’s face off God.

But Scripture does not ask us to measure God by our fathers. It asks us to measure our fathers by God.

Even when his only begotten Son cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” the Father had not surrendered his authority, abandoned his purpose, or ceased loving his Son. The darkness was real. The suffering was real. But the cross was not chaos. It was the predetermined plan of God for the redemption of his people.

Life eventually leads all of us into terrifying places we do not understand: hospital rooms, funeral homes, gravesides, cancer centers, long nights, and hard diagnoses. In those moments, we want explanations. Yet faith does not require complete understanding.

The older I get, the more I understand how my son felt lying on that examination table. He was too small to grasp what was happening to him. He could not understand why I allowed it. He only knew I was there.

Living in Montana, I am reminded daily of how small we all are. The mountains were here long before any of us arrived. The rivers carved their courses before our names were spoken. The wind that sweeps across this valley pays little attention to our plans, fears, or accomplishments.

We are smaller than we imagine.

RELATED: Want to leave a legacy for your kids? Focus on living like this.

Boonyachoat/Getty Images

Yet older than the mountains, older than the rivers, older than the wind itself, is a Voice that has never fallen silent.

When Gracie’s father sat beside her hospital bed and whispered, “Daddy’s here,” he gave a frightened young woman waking to a world she could not understand a gift beyond explanation.

But even that voice was only an echo.

Every good father is.

The best fathers point toward a greater Voice. The worst fathers cannot eclipse it.

When explanations fail, that Voice still calls to his children.

Perhaps that is why those words still move me after all these years.

“Daddy’s here, Gracie. Daddy’s here.”

In a frightened world, they remind me of a greater promise.

​Father’s day, Family, Trauma, Fatherhood, Scripture, Parents, Opinion & analysis 

Despite being raised in a Christian home, Haley Furst spent several of her young adult years identifying as a man. She even built a significant social media following around advocacy for transgenderism, abortion, and other left-wing issues.

But then Jesus found her in that darkness, pulled her out, and has been healing her ever since.

On this episode of “Relatable,” Haley shares her incredible testimony with Allie Beth Stuckey.

Although as a child Haley never questioned her gender, social media indoctrination sowed confusion in her young teenage years. In secret, she slowly began to question God’s design for marriage and gender.

Then at 16, she was sexually assaulted.

“It resulted in me becoming really uncomfortable with myself, with my body. And so, you know, I started to dress in a way that I felt protected me. … I cut my hair short. I started to wear what would be called men’s clothing,” she tells Allie.

Even though Haley was not planning to identify as a man despite her masculine look, her teachers began expressing support for her new appearance and inquired about what name and pronouns she wanted to use.

“These YouTubers, these creators that I would watch … they all had something in their past that was hard, and [transgenderism] seemed to work for them, and people are telling me, ‘Hey, this is what seems to be happening in your life.’ … I started to believe it for myself,” she recounts.

She then started identifying as nonbinary and using they/them pronouns.

“I was really, really welcomed in when I started to do that. I began to have more friends. I was a part of an LGBTQ club in my high school, and for the first time in my life, I started to feel like I had an identity that I could cling to that would open doors,” she tells Allie.

At 17, she told her parents she was transitioning into a man, leading to a tumultuous final year at home. When she turned 18, Haley moved in with a boyfriend and immediately began cross-sex hormone therapy. Roughly two years later, she had a hysterectomy.

All this time, Haley documented and built a large online community around her “transition.”

“I would make a lot of videos about my experience coming out and coming out to a Christian family, and a lot of people would identify with that, and we would have discussions … to encourage each other, to empower each other, and kind of fight against that ‘oppressive’ Christian belief,” she explains.

With her Christian foundation withering, Haley began to support and speak on more progressive issues, including abortion, Black Lives Matter, and even “anarchal communism.”

But when a bad breakup flipped her entire life upside down, Haley found herself in a deep depression working as a Starbucks barista. Even though she was surrounded by people in the LGBTQ+ community who were hostile to Christianity, she had a couple of co-workers who had recently become Christians.

“One evening when we were working together, [a coworker] started to read the Bible to me. … What he had actually read to me was Romans 8, and he had gotten to Romans 8:38, and something in my heart clicked where I had remembered that scripture from my youth,” Haley recounts.

“I became very sure that [Jesus] was what I was needing. … But I had told myself that there was no way I could ever be a Christian because I’m a leftist, because I’m transgender. … And so I can’t give my life to Jesus because Christians are conservative, straight people, and I am not that, and I will never be that.”

This tension created a deep anger in Haley, but after months of wrestling, she couldn’t shake her desire to follow Jesus.

“I prayed the prayer. I said, you know, like, ‘Christ, if you would still have me, I want you come make your home in my heart.’ And right in that moment, the presence of God fell so heavy in that room that I physically could not stand up. I kept trying to get up, and I would just fall on my knees, and I just began to weep,” she says.

“The feeling of Christ entering my heart and the experience of his love in that moment, just a touch of his love, made me mourn all the years I had spent apart from that, and I knew in that moment that I can never spend one day of my life apart from that ever again.”

But despite this newfound deep faith, Haley refused to de-transition. In fact, she went “further into [her] transition” in an effort to become so indistinguishable from a biological male that people in her new church couldn’t see her true identity.

This secretive life, however, consumed her. The anxiety became too much to bear, and one day Haley confessed to her pastor, who pledged to walk with her as she pursued Jesus. Other congregants did the same.

“I never had one person ever confront me about [being transgender],” Haley says.

But the Lord continued to press on her heart.

“I remember one evening thinking to myself, I don’t think I’m going to heaven as a man. … I don’t think I’m going to look at Jesus, and I don’t think he’s going to see a man. I think he’s going to see the girl that he made. … I think he’s going to welcome me by my name — not a name that I chose, but a name that was lovingly given to me by my parents,” she recalls.

That’s when Haley stopped taking testosterone, grew out her hair, and embraced femininity again.

“I thought, you know, I’ll never get married. I’ll never work in ministry. I’ll never get back what the enemy stole, and the way that the Lord has not only restored and redeemed, but given back a double portion in my life, I just stand in awe of what he’s done,” she beams.

To hear Haley’s full story and where she’s at today, 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.

​Relatable, Allie beth stuckey, De-transitioner, Transgenderism 

This Father’s Day, we celebrate the dads and father figures who have shaped our lives. But for me, the holiday has always carried a different meaning.

I didn’t have a close relationship with my father growing up. That distance was painful, but it taught me something I might not have learned otherwise: We rarely see what men quietly give until it is gone or not there.

There is an alternative perspective.

Father’s Day reminds us of something our culture all too often overlooks: Fathers matter, as do the countless ways men contribute to the well-being of those around them.

Earlier this year, the New York Times highlighted research confirming that father-child interaction has a profound impact on a child’s health and long-term well-being. Yet nearly one in four children in the United States live without a father in the home, and those children are four times more likely to grow up in poverty.

So despite this evidence, why is it that most messaging, whether in entertainment, education, or the workplace, ignores what men contribute and, even more dangerously, diminishes the risk that comes when a father’s positive influence is lacking?

In our era, men are often portrayed negatively: oblivious, selfish, incompetent; it’s a never-ending list. Popular culture frequently highlights their failures and belittles their successes. On a daily basis they are depicted as naive and ignorant at best, or misogynistic and demeaning at worst.

A 2023 Politico/Ipsos poll found that 36% of Americans believe entertainment and culture make it hard to feel proud to be a traditional man. That perception is not imagined but grounded in reality. Entertainment characterizes young men as narcissistic, self-consumed, and arrogant, and when these attributes are broadly assigned, they subconsciously become the norm we envision.

What happens when we adopt this mindset? The quiet efforts men make automatically become devalued. Their help is unwanted. Their character is irrelevant. Whatever they offer or become, it will never be enough — and the cost of this attitude is real: Roughly 6.8 million prime-age men are currently neither working nor seeking employment. This is a quiet withdrawal of men from a society that continues to tell them their contributions as a man no longer matter.

I want to be clear: This does not dismiss the very real and deep pain some women have experienced from men. Those situations are valid, they matter, and they should always be addressed. But as with any group, we must be careful not to let the worst examples define the whole. Most men do not fit the mold their critics assume.

There is an alternative perspective, one that reveals men motivated not by dominance but by devotion. Men who, when given the opportunity, would willingly and quietly carry responsibilities and make sacrifices in hopes of a better life for those they love. These qualities are far more common than they are given credit for.

As a young professional, a researcher, and a woman, I have been struck by how much you can discover when you simply observe. I am amazed by how many men have silently endured, pursued growth, and served others without recognition or expecting anything in return, not even a “thank you.” Their victories are private, and their sacrifices remain largely unseen.

I have known men who have wrestled with their shortcomings and chose the harder path of becoming responsible citizens, faithful leaders, and caring mentors. Men who valued their roles as friends, husbands, and fathers. Men who, even when they failed, were humble enough to admit their mistakes and strong enough to make them right.

There is often a reluctance to acknowledge this side of men, as though doing so somehow threatens women’s progress. However, the idea that either men or women must be diminished for the other to rise is not empowerment. It is an ideologically driven rivalry that prevents us from appreciating the unique strengths both bring. Only a mindset of complementarity, not competition, carries the power to set a higher mark for society as a whole.

On this Father’s Day, we celebrate the fathers and father figures who have encouraged us, sacrificed for us, and helped shape the people we have become. But may this also be a day to honor and recognize what men give daily. For the single dads striving to be present for their children; for the young men who hope to be fathers someday; for the lonely men who long for companionship; for the older men who continue to model character and integrity; and for the widowers who miss their wives every day yet choose resilience — your quiet sacrifices matter, your silent gifts are seen, and they are not forgotten.

Sometimes what men provide cannot be measured on a résumé or captured in a headline. Often the greatest gifts men give are the least celebrated: their willingness to carry burdens without complaint, the duty they feel to shoulder responsibilities without recognition, and their desire to provide a steady presence that quietly strengthens the lives of those around them. They go unnoticed by nearly everyone, except the people whose lives they quietly hold together.

​Lifestyle 

Say what you will about our president — at least he doesn’t eat cats.

Actress Anne Schedeen, best known for playing Kate Tanner on the 1980s sitcom “Alf,” died this week at 77. The news likely stirred fond memories with Gen X fans, but news of her passing featured a very 21st-century nugget.

‘[Supergirl] doesn’t live inside the binary of what we think a woman should be, that is what makes it so special and so exciting and so new.’

News outlets reported her passing, complete with a family statement lovingly remembering the mother, wife, aunt, and sister for her wit, creativity, and all-consuming obsession with our current president.

She leaves behind an extraordinary legacy of creative energy, whip-smart humor, delight in her family, adoration for little dogs, burning hatred for Trump, passion for secondhand thrifting, and love for a good story.

Wait … what?

Now, we’re used to stars like Robert De Niro slagging President Trump in every third sentence, but why would any family insist the press share their loved one’s political views in an obituary?

When “Alf’s” adopted parent is against Trump, you know the walls are closing in …

Silly Milly

For all we know, “Supergirl” star Milly Alcock may have the acting chops to be the next Meryl Streep. But for now she seems determined to be the next Rachel Zegler.

Zegler infamously helped crush her “Snow White” reboot with a series of silly, alienating press interviews. She wasn’t solely to blame for the film’s box-office pratfall, but she didn’t inspire audiences to flock to her film.

She became a case study for how not to market a movie. Now, it’s Alcock’s turn.

First, she whined about male viewers judging her as part of the “Game of Thrones” prequel series “House of the Dragon.” Later, she doubled down on that sentiment, singling out Christians in the process.

Now? She’s describing Supergirl as gender-fluid, or something.

“I’ve played a few characters that might have a potential queer through-line. I have many queer friends. So honestly, I’m kind of honored.”

Make it make sense. Alcock tries. Sort of.

“[Supergirl] doesn’t live inside the binary of what we think a woman should be. That is what makes it so special and so exciting and so new.”

Apparently, one of Supergirl’s superpowers is time-traveling back to 2020, the peak woke era …

RELATED: Full ‘Disclosure’: Steven Spielberg’s latest has no signs of intelligent life

Damon Packard/spectacletheater.com/Mike Coppola/Getty Images

Card sharp

We all know Whoopi Goldberg can play the race card like few others. Yet when Vice President JD Vance confronted her on the issue, she folded like a deck of, well, cards.

Later in the week, when a sane person like Vance wasn’t around, she went right back to her … black-and-white thinking.

Goldberg brought up the world champion New York Knicks and the team’s White House rendezvous, which led to this on-brand exchange from the “Sister Act” alum.

“I want all those black men to stand in our house and remind all of those people, as we tried to remind the vice president, that when you try to destroy one part of history, you are destroying all of our histories.”

Goldberg sure talks tough when someone with a functioning cortex isn’t on the panel…

‘Powers’ boost

“No, baby, no!”

The world’s sexiest spy, albeit with the worst teeth, is heading back to theaters. So says Mike Myers, the mischievous mind behind “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.”

The character headlined the 1997 comedy smash, and he came back for two diminishing sequels. We haven’t heard much from Myers over the past decade. He has disappeared into smaller character roles, like the record executive in “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Now, he’s threatening a fourth Austin Powers adventure.

Delayed sequels have a choppy history. “Zoolander 2” proved to be a disaster. “Anchorman 2” scored with audiences, but it couldn’t capture the original film’s glory. “Happy Gilmore 2” was pure nostalgia, little else. And the less said about “Blues Brothers 2000,” the better.

Myers looks rather youthful at 63, but some things are better left in the past. But if Austin could strike a death blow to the dying woke mind virus, maybe the time is right for a man whose middle name remains “Danger” …

Man with the tan

He’s been gone for about a month, but he remains his same insufferable self.

Stephen Colbert showed up at the opening of President Barack Obama’s Death Star, er, presidential center. And the former late-night host wore a tan suit to honor the man in question. Remember the media’s narrative that Obama’s tan suit moment proved his only real scandal?

That’s true … if you overlook the Russia collusion hoax, the Obamacare “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it” bait and switch, and the IRS’ targeting of conservative and Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status.

It’s all fodder for a great political satirist, which explains why Colbert didn’t go near any of the above.

Never change, Colbert. Never change.

​Lifestyle, Entertainment, Barack obama, Barack obama presidential center, Stephen colbert, The view, Whoopi goldberg, New york knicks, Austin powers, Mike myers, Toto recall, Jd vance 

The overturning of Roe v. Wade was supposed to be the pro-life movement’s greatest victory. Instead, abortion pills have become increasingly accessible, and abortions rates have skyrocketed.

BlazeTV host Steve Deace is well aware why that is.

“We’re having this big debate right now within our pro-life circles about how to proceed moving forward. And somehow we’ve been exceedingly stalled,” Deace says, pointing out that “nothing of significance” has happened in the pro-life movement since the overturning of Roe.

“Not only that, since we overturned Roe, basically every mailbox can have an abortion pill in America right now. Right? So something has clearly and systemically gone wrong,” he continues.

“We pulled off D-Day, but now we’re losing the war,” he adds.

One of the main reasons why the pro-life movement has stalled, Deace explains, is there is a “deep division over a particular tactic, and it’s the question of abolition as it’s called in some places.”

“My buddy Seth Gruber calls it equal protection, and it’s the idea that if you commit a murder, you should be held accountable as we hold people accountable for committing any other form of murder. And the mainstream pro-life movement is adamantly against this,” he explains.

“The biggest source of opposition to this in the mainstream pro-life side, frankly, is they just don’t think it’s politically viable, and it’ll get us nuked,” he adds.

However, Deace doesn’t think they truly believe in their mainstream pro-life beliefs.

“I don’t believe very many mainstream pro-life leaders truly believe in a second generation of third-wave feminism, there’s just a bunch of scared girls who don’t know what to do, like my mom 50 years ago before we saw what, you know, thermal imaging inside of the womb looked like,” he explains, noting that they’re making “political calculations.”

However, there has to be political calculations.

“We’re human beings in a fallen world,” he says, before giving his solution.

“We’re going to ban all the abortions except your so-called exceptions. Are you in? Not because we agree that there’s exceptions to murder, but we’re going to call forth a false objection. We’re going to call a bluff,” he explains.

“We’ll even let the doctor determine if it’s an exception or not. Think they’d still take the deal? No. And why won’t they take the deal?” he asks, adding, “Because they want to kill them all.”

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.

​Steve deace show, Pro-life, Roe v wade, Abortion, Religion, Steve deace 

When 18-year-old student Henry Nowak was fatally stabbed by Vickrum Digwa, a British Sikh, a horrific local crime quickly escalated to international headlines due to a catastrophic law enforcement failure.

Spurred by Digwa’s false accusation of racism, responding officers immediately handcuffed the mortally wounded teenager, even as he told them nine times that he could not breathe and four times that he had been stabbed. That Nowak was arrested and treated as a criminal while taking his final breaths has shocked and appalled the United Kingdom.

British institutions have traded the safety of their citizens for wokeness.

Bodycam footage of his harrowing final minutes also caught the attention of the U.S. government. The State Department warned on X that “ideological conditioning and two-tiered policing are glaring symptoms of civilizational decline that must be rejected across the West.”

Two-tier policing refers to the public perception that British law enforcement operates under a double standard — treating suspects, victims, and protesters differently based on race, religion, or political ideology.

The roots of this bias lie in the policies established by the College of Policing (the official national body that sets training standards) and the National Police Chiefs’ Council, which coordinates operational policy across all 44 U.K. police forces. These two bodies introduced the highly controversial and censorious “Non-Crime Hate Incidents,” which legally requires British officers to log and investigate citizens for lawful speech if anyone perceives it as motivated by hostility — even when no actual crime has been committed.

In May 2022, in the aftermath of the global George Floyd protests, the College of Policing and the NPCC launched the Race Action Plan, explicitly designed to embed anti-racist training across the entire justice system. The plan’s 2025 update codified an even more racialized doctrine.

Official guidance now states that a commitment to racial equity “does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘colour blind.’” By abandoning equality before the law, the policy instructs British police to treat individuals differently based on their race in an attempt to engineer equal outcomes. With law enforcement having absorbed this radical ideology, officers have become selective enforcers of justice, failing to intervene for fear of being labeled racist.

This is not a fringe theory. A new survey by the research group More in Common found that one-third of Britons now believe police actively favor ethnic minorities over white people. The chronic mishandling of the Nowak case provides further evidence of a system that despises the majority of its own citizens.

RELATED: America is done buying bogus racial alibis

Bill Oxford/Getty Images

Governed by an anti-racism doctrine, British institutions have traded the safety of their citizens for wokeness. The fatal cost of this ideological capture was laid bare in 2023 when Valdo Calocane slaughtered three people in Nottingham. He should not have been free.

Psychiatric professionals had repeatedly refused to section the psychotically violent Calocane, citing concerns about the “disproportionate overrepresentation of young black males in detention.” Captive to the progressive view that any statistical disparity constitutes systemic racism, authorities left a violent, psychotic man on the streets rather than risk accusations of racism.

Tragically, this stigma also contributed to the Manchester Arena terrorist attack in 2017 following a concert by Ariana Grande. Kyle Lawler, an on-duty security guard, witnessed the bomber, Salman Abedi, acting suspiciously with a heavy backpack. But Lawler failed to intervene or raise the alarm for fear of being branded a racist. Abedi detonated the device minutes later, killing 22 people — predominantly children and teenagers — and injuring over 1,000.

The Nowak case illustrates the same dynamic. Public criticism from Washington, combined with mounting protests on British streets, prompted pushback from Downing Street. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and senior Labour politicians vehemently rejected the two-tier accusation, stating categorically that they did not recognize the State Department’s characterization of the British justice system, a sentiment echoed by Justice Secretary David Lammy.

Starmer condemned the U.S. critiques, and even accused Elon Musk of overstepping diplomatic boundaries and attempting to stoke division on U.K. streets.

But in 2020, Starmer had no such reservations about commenting on American internal affairs following the death of George Floyd. He publicly urged then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson to address systemic racism directly with Donald Trump, openly criticized Trump’s response to Floyd’s death, and famously took a knee in a highly publicized display of solidarity with Black Lives Matter.

Labour’s attempt at containment was exposed when Vice President JD Vance took to X. Echoing his powerful Munich Security Conference speech, Vance argued:

Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies: abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit. … He would still be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.

Vance’s warning came days after a Sudanese asylum seeker was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder following a savage knife attack in Belfast, Northern Ireland — reported by the Telegraph as an attempted beheading. The victim, a man in his 40s, remains in serious condition after suffering significant injuries to his eyes, face, and back. Police stated the suspect is believed to have entered the U.K. by traveling from Dublin into Northern Ireland, where he had been granted leave to remain under a five-year visa.

The refusal to stem illegal immigration is a direct result of the policies of both main political parties. During the last six years of Conservative government, 128,000 undocumented migrants entered the country via the English Channel. Since Labour took power in July 2024, more than 70,000 illegal migrants have crossed into the U.K. on small boats.

Among those Britain is importing are individuals who despise the West and seek to harm its citizens. In the final week of January 2026, a Sudanese illegal migrant was sentenced to life imprisonment for the brutal murder of Rhiannon Skye Whyte, a hotel worker whom he stabbed 23 times at a railway station. Less than a fortnight later, an Iranian migrant pleaded guilty to sexual assault. In March, an Afghan asylum seeker received a 15-year sentence for the abduction and rape of a 12-year-old girl in a park.

For decades, uncontrolled immigration has been imposed upon the British public under the guise of multiculturalism, driven by successive governments in thrall to the liberal notion that diversity is a strength. This result has been social upheaval, rapid demographic change, and a society fractured into segregated cultural enclaves.

Expanding hate speech laws has effectively criminalized questions and complaints, leaving a nation paralyzed by fear and fueled by anger. JD Vance is correct to call this the politics of self-hatred.

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

​Henry nowak, Uk police, Two-tiered justice system, Vickrum digwa, Npcc, George floyd, Kier starmer, Labour party, Mass migration, Beheading, Opinion & analysis 

The lion’s share of Nvidia’s business is built around high-end GPUs — first for gamers, then for cryptominers, and now for AI data centers. This year, however, the company is branching out into an even bigger consumer computing category with its shiny new RTX Spark chip series destined to make Windows devices faster, more efficient, and more powerful than ever before.

A new ‘Spark’ of innovation

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took the stage at Computex in Taipei to unveil the first generation of RTX Spark hardware.

First came the chips themselves. The N1X, built in partnership with Mediatek, is a brand-new system on a chip) by Nvidia designed on an ARM architecture intended for Windows machines. It’s meant to compete directly with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chips for Windows on ARM and Apple Silicon for Mac.

Windows ARM laptops have yet to reach mainstream appeal. Nvidia hopes to change that.

Although the N1X is the most powerful option on the table, a lower-end N1 chip will also be available.

Nvidia RTX Spark laptopsNvidia/Computex 2026

For the spec nerds out there, NX1 features a Blackwell RTX GPU with 6144 CUDA Cores and 1 petaFLOP for AI computing, a 20-core Grace CPU, 128 GB of LPDDR5X unified memory, 70 billion transistors, and a Windows agent platform built alongside Microsoft. It looks impressive on paper.

Next came the devices. Nvidia is working with a number of OEM partners — including Microsoft Surface, Dell, HP, and many more — to launch and release the first RTX Spark-powered laptops, desktops, and workstations later this year. Laptops are expected to achieve all-day battery life on a single charge, while workstations can run local AI agents from the comfort of your home 24/7.

RELATED: Now our tech lords are saying AI won’t take everyone’s jobs. Here’s what’s really going on.

Moor Studio/Getty Images

Lastly, Nvidia is investing heavily in the longevity of RTX Spark devices with next-generation N2X and N3X chips already in the works for future releases.

RTX Spark desktops, laptops, and workstationsNvidia/Computex 2026

Why RTX Spark is important

RTX Spark is a significant departure from Nvidia’s usual business strategy. Historically, the company has only built dedicated GPUs for Windows machines that run alongside the CPUs and integrated graphics from companies like Intel or AMD. NX1 marks the first time it has released a complete solution that combines CPU, GPU, and memory into a single Nvidia-branded package for computers.

Now that Nvidia can control the entire chip experience within a Windows device, Huang claims that 100% of Nvidia’s software stack runs locally, from coding to generative AI, AI agents, and graphics. He further promises that every app ever made to work on an Nvidia GPU and every app made to run on Windows is compatible with RTX Spark, including Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, and even AAA video games.

RTX Spark NX1 chipNvidia/Computex 2026

This is a huge promise, considering that RTX Spark chips are built on an ARM architecture instead of the legacy x86 platform that powered Windows for the last 40 years. To drop an analogy, Huang is saying that his team has figured out how to put diesel in a gasoline-powered engine and make it run perfectly.

Disrupting Windows’ status quo

The RTX Spark series aren’t the first ARM-based chips for Windows. Qualcomm launched its own Snapdragon X Elite SOCs back in 2023. However, due to incomplete x86 legacy software compatibility and limited game support, Windows ARM laptops have yet to reach mainstream appeal. Nvidia hopes to change that, and if Huang’s claims are true, it might actually succeed.

To prove it, Huang touted the new Forza Horizon 6 and 007 First Light playing on two laptops in his hands as he stood on stage. Although the machines appeared to be showing videos of each game instead of running the games natively, Huang’s implication was clear that RTX Spark laptops could actually play both titles at up to 100 fps at 1440p.

RTX Spark compatibilityNvidia/Computex 2026

Our take on RTX Spark

I’m a huge fan of ARM laptops. As a Mac user, I was an early adopter of Apple Silicon with the M1 series in my 2020 MacBook Pro. At the time, there was nothing else like this chip — it was impressively fast, it sipped battery life to the point that I could use it for an entire workday and then some without a recharge, and it rarely heated up enough to kick on the fans. Apple Silicon is the ultimate companion for a remote writer like myself.

The story hasn’t quite been the same on Windows. While the Snapdragon X Elite offers a glimpse of the benefits I have grown to love in Apple Silicon Macs, inconsistent software compatibility, variable battery life, and poor performance have left Microsoft’s ARM-based OS looking rather inferior. I’m hopeful that RTX Spark will finally give Windows a competitive edge to push the chip category forward without losing any of the legacy support that made Windows great in the first place. Only time will tell.

RTX Spark devices are expected to be available this fall. Unfortunately, prices haven’t been released yet, and given the latest RAM shortages and inflated electronics prices, they’re sure to be expensive.

​Tech 

For generations, Democrats have portrayed themselves as the party of ordinary Americans — factory workers, waitresses, truck drivers, police officers, construction workers, and middle-class families trying to get ahead. Yet one of the most striking features of modern American politics is how often Democratic leaders, activists, and media allies seem genuinely baffled by the very people they claim to represent.

The latest example comes from Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse, whose reaction to President Trump’s appearance at a packed UFC event on the White House lawn last weekend revealed a familiar pattern among America’s cultural elites.

Time and again, Democrat leaders appeared surprised that Americans cared more about grocery prices and border security than about the priorities emphasized by elite institutions.

To tens of millions of Americans, UFC is simply entertainment. It is competitive, exciting, patriotic, and increasingly mainstream. To Hesse and myriad other journalists and political commentators, however, its popularity seems to require explanation — as though they are studying the customs of a distant tribe.

That reaction says far more about elite America than it does about UFC fans, and few institutions better embody elite opinion than the modern Democratic Party.

The inability to understand ordinary Americans has become a recurring problem for Democrats. Consider one of the most famous campaign images in modern history. In 1988, Democrat presidential nominee Michael Dukakis climbed into a tank in an effort to project foreign policy credibility. Though the campaign intended the image to demonstrate Dukakis’ strength and command in order to reassure wary voters, the photograph instead became a political disaster.

To many Americans, Dukakis did not look like a commander in chief — he looked like Alfred E. Neuman from Mad magazine, wearing an oversize helmet and generally appearing out of his element. The embarrassing image became iconic because it captured something larger than a single campaign mistake: a cohort of American elites — consultants, strategists, and media professionals — who apparently thought the photo was a good idea.

The same kind of blindness occasionally appears among establishment Republicans as well. George H.W. Bush’s comments upon seeing a new and improved grocery store scanner became a symbol — fairly or unfairly — of a politician disconnected from everyday life. But while both parties have produced elite figures detached from ordinary concerns, the problem is far more pronounced today on the left.

Indeed, many of the institutions that now shape Democratic politics are populated almost exclusively by people who live, work, and socialize within a remarkably narrow slice of America. They attend the same universities, read the same publications, and live in the same metropolitan areas. They follow the same social media accounts. Their children attend the same schools, and their friends share the same political and cultural assumptions.

And increasingly, they seem unable to comprehend how other Americans think.

When Hillary Clinton dismissed millions of voters as a “basket of deplorables,” many Americans viewed the comment not as a gaffe but as a rare moment of honesty. It reflected a prevailing attitude among Democrats, and elites more broadly, that disagreement could be explained only by ignorance, prejudice, or moral deficiency.

President Biden repeatedly displayed a similar tendency. During the 2024 campaign (before he was ousted), he and his allies often portrayed concerns about illegal immigration, inflation, crime, and cultural change as either exaggerated or illegitimate, even as polling showed those issues dominating voters’ concerns.

Time and again, Democrat leaders appeared surprised that Americans cared more about grocery prices and border security than about the priorities emphasized by elite institutions.

Vice President Kamala Harris often suffered from the same disconnect. Her public appearances frequently projected the impression that she was speaking to an audience of policy experts rather than to working Americans — when she was not donning fake accents, that is. Her campaign’s struggles were not merely ideological; they were cultural. Many voters simply concluded that she did not understand their lives.

The pattern extends well beyond politicians.

RELATED: Who wants to eat a trillionaire?

Leon Neal/Getty Images

Millions of Americans attend NASCAR races, pack country music concerts, and watch UFC fights. Elite commentators scoff and express bewilderment in response. Millions more display American flags, fill church pews, and worry about rising crime and open borders. Too often, the response from elite circles is not curiosity but contempt.

The Democratic Party once excelled at connecting with ordinary Americans precisely because it better understood their views. Franklin Roosevelt, known as a “traitor to his class,” spoke the language of workers because he wanted them to be part of the Democrats’ coalition for generations. Harry Truman connected with voters because he shared many of their instincts. Even Bill Clinton possessed an intuitive feel for middle-class anxieties and aspirations.

Today’s Democrat coalition increasingly draws its leadership from elite universities, media organizations, nonprofits, foundations, government bureaucracies, and professional-class enclaves. These institutions exercise enormous cultural influence, but they are not representative of America as a whole.

As a result, Democrats increasingly mistake the views traded in faculty lounges, newsroom editorial meetings, and Washington policy conferences for the views held around kitchen tables. That confusion helps explain their shock at one political surprise after another, especially Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024.

Democrat strategists express astonishment after yet another batch of election results defies their expectations. Panels of “experts” search for explanations, and reports are circulated that blame political circumstances or voters’ various “isms.” But the possibility that the Democrats have lost touch with ordinary Americans is rarely, if ever, considered.

RELATED: The left’s icons keep face-planting in public

Scott Kowalchyk/CBS/Getty Images

A political movement cannot represent people it does not understand. And it cannot understand the views of many Americans whom it increasingly views with a mixture of confusion, suspicion, and disdain. For a party that still considers itself the party of the people, that is a major problem it has yet to reckon with.

And it is also a problem for America as a whole. A healthy republic depends on officeholders who can understand — and respect — the culture and traditions of their fellow citizens, even when they do not share them. When America’s governing and cultural elites lose the ability to see the nation as it actually is, they make poorer decisions, deepen political divisions, and erode the mutual trust on which self-government depends.

A republic cannot long endure if those who wield influence come to view ordinary Americans not as fellow citizens to be understood but as strangers to be belittled and ignored.

Editor’s note: This article appeared originally at The American Mind.

​Democrats, Ufa, Trump, Hillary clinton, Deplorables, Kamala harris, Elites, Nascar, Middle america, Upper class, Opinion & analysis 

On May 15, Gen Z director Curry Barker’s “Obsession” hit theaters. The psychological horror film follows a young man whose wish for his longtime crush to love him comes true in far more intense and unsettling ways than he had hoped.

The film was an instant box office phenomenon, grossing over $285 million worldwide despite its humble $750,000 budget. Its popularity is driven largely by Gen Z viewers; audience data shows roughly 75% of ticket buyers are ages 18-34.

Dubbed a “Gen Z Fatal Attraction,” the mainstream take is that the movie resonates because it warns against toxic “nice guy” dynamics. In Zoomer internet culture, “nice guys” are men who believe they deserve romantic interest simply because they’re polite and friendly. When rejected, they grow resentful and angry, convinced they’re entitled to a woman’s affection. Their niceness is viewed as a manipulative tactic rather than an offer of genuine friendship.

In the film, protagonist Bear is hopelessly in love with his longtime friend Nikki. Mainstream critics see him as the classic “nice guy” who turns to manipulation — snapping a “one wish willow” to force her affection, making the story catnip for a generation that loves to call out such behavior.

But BlazeTV host John Doyle argues this surface-level reading misses what is really drawing young people to “Obsession.” On this episode of “The John Doyle Show,” Doyle unpacks the film’s true cultural power.

In the film, Bear asks his friend Ian for advice on confessing his feelings to Nikki.

“He’s immediately told by Ian that he’s just, you know, too real, man. He’s too authentic about all of it. And because he’s so authentic about it, it’s coming off cringey and weird,” says Doyle.

This is exactly what keeps so many young people single and lonely today, he argues.

“We literally will not do anything at all,” Doyle says. “We will just, you know, sit there in the corner with our cool cards until we die.”

Or they’ll resort to “epic [pickup artist] tactics” like “negging” — dishing out backhanded compliments or subtle insults in hopes of making the romantic target seek the negger’s approval. But never authenticity.

This outright refusal to be authentic is portrayed in the film when Nikki point-blank asks Bear if he likes her, to which he replies “as a friend.”

“He failed to be authentic. He was too afraid,” says Doyle, rejecting the mainstream narrative that “Obsession” is about “nice guys trying to exercise control over women.”

“[‘Obsession’] is, I think, just about that inauthenticity, and I think it ultimately is telling you the truth.”

To hear more, watch the episode above.

Want more from John Doyle?

To enjoy more of the truth about America and join the fight to restore a country that has been betrayed by its own leaders, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​The john doyle show, John doyle, Gen z