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Four people are dead and at least 20 people are injured after a shooting at a bar on the South Carolina coast early Sunday morning, officials told the Associated Press.

A large crowd was at Willie’s Bar and Grill on St. Helena Island when arriving sheriff’s deputies found many people with gunshot wounds, the AP said. St. Helena Island is just north of Hilton Head Island.

‘Our prayers are with the victims, their families, and everyone impacted by this horrific act of violence.’

Bar owner Willie Turral was inside the restaurant — which was full of patrons there for a high school alumni gathering — when he heard shots “in bursts” outside, the AP said, adding that Turral said the reaction was “screaming and panic and fear.”

The Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that it received reports about the shooting shortly before 1 a.m.

“Upon arriving at the scene, deputies made contact with a large crowd of people, several of which were suffering from gunshot wounds,” the statement reads. “It was learned that hundreds of people were at the location when the shooting occurred. Multiple victims and witnesses ran to the nearby businesses and properties seeking shelter from the [gunshots].”

More from the sheriff’s office:

The circumstances of this incident are still under investigation. At this time, we know that at least 20 people were injured. Four were transported to area hospitals in critical conditions and four victims were pronounced deceased at the scene. Names of victims will not be released at this time. The Beaufort County Coroner’s Office may release additional information regarding the deceased victims pending notification of their next of kin.

The sheriff’s office added that it is “investigating persons of interest.”

RELATED: VIDEO: 3 dead, multiple victims injured in North Carolina mass shooting; suspect reportedly flees by boat

Turral said his bar was hosting an alumni event for Battery Creek High School in Beaufort, which is about 10 miles northwest of St. Helena Island, the AP reported.

Republican U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (S.C.) posted on X that she was “COMPLETELY HEARTBROKEN to learn about the devastating shooting in Beaufort County. Our prayers are with the victims, their families, and everyone impacted by this horrific act of violence.”

The AP said about 5,000 or more Gullah people living on St. Helena Island trace their ancestry to enslaved West Africans who worked rice plantations in the area before being freed at the time of the Civil War.

Willie’s Bar and Grill advertises itself as serving authentic Gullah-inspired food and describes itself on its website as “not just a restaurant but a community pillar committed to giving back, especially to our youth,” the AP added.

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​Fatal shooting, South carolina, Bar, St. helena island, Four dead, Willie’s bar and grill, Crime 

When self-proclaimed “backwoods Navy Seal wizard hermit” Chadd Wright walked into Joe Rogan’s studio, he didn’t have a script or a plan — just a prayer. And their Spirit-led gospel conversation ended up reaching millions.

“I’m very passionate about the faith that I’ve been given,” Wright tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey, explaining that he also owns a company called the 3 of 7 Project that’s committed to helping others grow physically, mentally, and spiritually.

“I listened to you on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and I said, ‘I like this guy,’” Stuckey tells Wright. “Because you were so persistent in sharing the gospel and so clear. I was just so drawn in to the whole conversation.”

“What was it like sharing the gospel on such a huge stage?” she asks.

“I was definitely scared as a cat going in there,” Wright answers.

“I’ve done a lot of crazy stuff in my life, both through being a SEAL and then through ultra-endurance sports. But that’s just like a different type of challenge that, you know, is hard for me. … And so, I was scared going in there, but Joe was very welcoming,” he explains.

“He’s the one that led into that conversation around faith and why I believe the way I believe. I didn’t have to force that. He led us into that,” Wright tells Stuckey.

“I’m not an intellectual type, and the Holy Spirit took over and allowed me to say the things that I said. Truly … I didn’t have any of that pre-prepared,” he adds.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

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

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President Donald Trump once again has gone off script, this time during his historic address to Israel’s Knesset on Monday.

Trump traveled to Israel Sunday to deliver remarks and celebrate the landmark peace deal the administration brokered between Israel and Hamas. During the speech, Trump admitted he went off script when he urged Israeli President Isaac Herzog to pardon Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust.

‘Who the hell cares?’

“Hey, I have an idea,” Trump said. “Mr. President, why don’t you give [Netanyahu] a pardon?”

Trump promptly received another standing ovation from the Knesset. Notably, the majority of the Knesset share a political affiliation with Netanyahu, who is part of the right-wing Likud party.

RELATED: ‘BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS!’ Trump brings an end to another bloody war ahead of Nobel Prize announcement

Photo by Evelyn Hockstein – Pool/Getty Images

“That was not in the speech, as you probably know,” Trump added. “But I happen to like this gentleman right over here, and it just seems to make so much sense. Whether we like it or not, this has been one of the greatest wartime presidents. Cigars and champagne, who the hell cares?”

Trump has previously expressed support for pardoning Netanyahu, who he says is the victim of a legal “witch hunt.”

“Such a WITCH HUNT, for a man who has given so much, is unthinkable to me,” Trump said in a Truth Social post in June. “He deserves much better than this, and so does the State of Israel. Bibi Netanyahu’s trial should be CANCELLED, IMMEDIATELY, or a Pardon given to a Great Hero, who has done so much for the State.”

RELATED: Democrats feign outrage as Trump administration shutdown layoffs hit: ‘They seem to be enjoying it’

Photo by Saul Loeb – Pool/Getty Images

“Perhaps there is no one that I know who could have worked in better harmony with the President of the United States, ME, than Bibi Netanyahu,” Trump added. “It was the United States of America that saved Israel, and now it is going to be the United States of America that saves Bibi Netanyahu. THIS TRAVESTY OF ‘JUSTICE’ CAN NOT BE ALLOWED!”

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​Donald trump trump administration, Peace president, Peace deal, Ceasefire, Israel, Hamas, Palestine, October 7, Benjamin netanyahu, Knesset, Isaac herzog, Pardon, Witch hunt, Likud party, Politics 

President Donald Trump successfully brokered a peace last week in the Gaza Strip, bringing an end to the bloody, two-year war between Israel and Hamas terrorists that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people and prompted political unrest across the world.

The European members of the Nobel Peace Prize committee opted on Friday not to recognize this triumph of life-saving diplomacy or the peaceful resolutions that the American president previously secured between other warring nations, including Azerbaijan and Armenia and India and Pakistan.

While the Nobel Prize Organization is loath to recognize the good work that Trump is doing, others much closer to home appear to be paying attention.

‘Trump is still more popular now than he was eight years ago.’

According to the RealClearPolitics poll average, President Trump is presently outperforming former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama in terms of second-term job approval.

As of Oct. 13, President Trump’s job approval rating was 45.3%.

At the same point in their respective second terms, Obama — then arming Islamic terrorists in Syria and facing heat for his Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups — had a rating of 44.4%, and George W. Bush — then dealing with the political fallout of Hurricane Katrina and a seemingly interminable war in Iraq — had a rating of 39.5%.

RELATED: Oops! The man they call a ‘threat to democracy’ just made peace again

Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

Pollster Nate Silver’s approval tracker alternatively shows Trump with an average approval rating of 43.9% and a disapproval rating of 52.3% as of Oct. 13.

According to the Silver Bulletin, the historical daily approval polling average for Obama on Oct. 13, 2013, was 44.41%, and the approval average for George W. Bush on Oct. 13, 2005, was 40.12%.

Silver indicated that Trump, whose rating has apparently not taken a hit from the Democrats’ government shutdown or his administration’s recent layoffs of federal workers, is outperforming himself, noting, “Trump is still more popular now than he was eight years ago.”

An Oct. 9 Quantus Insights poll had Trump’s job approval rating even higher than indicated by the RealClearPolitics poll average or Silver’s average — at 47% approving with 51% disapproving. While a slim majority, 53%, signaled disapproval for his handling of the economy, 68% of voters said they supported his Gaza peace plan.

Blaze News has reached out to the White House for comment.

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President Trump told members of a White House roundtable on Wednesday that he would designate Antifa a foreign terrorist organization.

The roundtable discussion, which included reporters who have covered Antifa street violence in Portland and Seattle for years, led to the president saying, “Let’s get it done.”

‘We’ve been treating Antifa like a local crime issue.’

While Trump designated the group a domestic terrorist organization in late September, no such formal designation officially exists in U.S. law. The president did direct all “relevant executive departments” to use their authorities to disrupt and investigate Antifa operations, but escalating the group to an FTO comes with a wider array of enforcement options.

First, providing any material support or resources to an FTO is a federal crime with a prison sentence of at least 20 years. Any bank, person, or organization that provides funding to an FTO is subject to a federal investigation, and any financial institution that becomes aware that it “has possession of, or control[s]” FTO funds and fails to intervene would face a $50,000 fine per violation.

The designation also opens up any noncitizen to possible deportation, if ties to Antifa are found. Aliens can also be determined to be inadmissible to the United States if they are found to be in connection with or in support of any FTO.

RELATED: Concrete action the feds, states, and citizenry can take right now to stop the madness

A man is arrested after a shootout with anti-fascist activists on August 22, 2021, in Portland, Oregon. (Photo by Mathieu Lewis-Rolland / AFP) (Photo by MATHIEU LEWIS-ROLLAND/AFP via Getty Images)

Executive Order 13224, signed by President George W. Bush in September 2001, blocked the ability of those connected to FTOs to make transactions related to property.

The FTO designation also unleashes the Treasury Department, giving the Office of Foreign Assets Control the ability to freeze assets and block use of assets of any organization found to be working with terrorists.

“All property and interests in property of designated individuals or entities that are in the United States or that come within the United States, or that come within the possession or control of U.S. persons are blocked,” the executive order states.

Additionally, labeling Antifa an FTO allows for surveillance of any “foreign powers” and their “agents” at a lower threshold than the average U.S. citizen.

This is where the possible downside of designating Antifa as an FTO comes into play. Spying on foreign governments, foreign factions, or a “foreign-based political organization, not substantially composed of United States persons” could lead to all sorts of diplomatic issues, as well as civil rights problems.

RELATED: Leftists try to shut down Turning Point USA at Rutgers for criticizing Antifa professor

Journalist Nick Sortor (2nd R) holds an American flag as he speaks during a roundtable about Antifa in the White House on October 8, 2025. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP) (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

The risk of political weaponization in the future is also of grave concern, considering how federal entities have already been seemingly used against Trump.

First Amendment issues could also arise, and the designation raises questions as to whether expressing support for Antifa’s stated beliefs, past or present, online would prompt a federal investigation.

Blaze News national correspondent Julio Rosas, who attended the Antifa roundtable, says the FTO designation would be a great move to dismantle the support Antifa has overseas.

“This movement is not just a problem in our country. Antifa is very active in the U.K., France, and Germany, to name a few places,” Rosas told Blaze News. “Due to its decentralized nature, Antifa relies on support groups that work towards their same goals.”

Blaze News senior politics editor Christopher Bedford stated that freedom of speech and civil liberties must be protected but added, “We’ve been treating Antifa like a local crime issue when they are, in fact, enacting political terror.”

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​News, Antifa, Anti fascist, Portland, Seattle, Terrorism, Domestic terrorism, Politics 

Former ESPN anchor Sage Steele was among those in 2021 forced to take the COVID-19 vaccine in order to keep her job — but after complying and getting the shots, her employer let her go anyway.

Steele was taken off the air following a podcast appearance on “Uncut with Jay Cutler,” where she called vaccine mandates “sick” and “scary.”

“You’ve had this long career, this illustrious career, and it came to a point when truth was on the line, and you took a risk,” BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey says to Steele.

“I had been suspended, punished at ESPN in 2021. As we tape this, exactly four years ago I was suspended and in bed, sobbing and scared to death of what was next,” Steele explains.

“I was suspended for speaking up about being forced to take the COVID vaccine in order to keep my job at Disney. … I had to be fully vaccinated by September 30, 2021, or else, and I waited until the very last second, and I had prayed about it,” she continues.

While Steele was against taking the shots, the pressure she felt as a mother with bills to pay was too much, and she decided to comply.

“I was ready to walk away, but as the sole wage earner with three kids and an ex and alimony and all those things, I felt like I had to make the choice to do it to keep my job. I still struggle with that. I feel like I caved,” she explains.

“So, I did it, and I complied, and then I talked on a podcast about it,” Steele tells Stuckey, noting that she went on the podcast immediately after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, so she was extra angry.

“I said, ‘I think it’s sick and wrong for any employer to force an employee to do something to their bodies that they don’t want to.’ Pretty simple. I said, ‘But I love my job, and I need my job.’ And here we are,” she tells Stuckey.

“And that was the beginning of the end,” she adds.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

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

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Americans are accustomed to innovation improving their lives. From smartphones to artificial intelligence, breakthroughs keep coming — and most of them happen in the United States, where freedom fuels invention. But across the Atlantic, the story is very different. Europe’s regulators have built a bureaucracy that smothers creativity.

The lesson is simple: Innovation thrives where government steps back, not where it rules from Brussels.

Europe doesn’t need more commissions or consultations. It needs courage to scrap bad laws and let innovation breathe again.

A recent analysis from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation drives home the point. All seven of the world’s trillion-dollar tech firms are American. Europe can claim only 28 companies worth more than $100 billion. Over the past decade, European firms raised about $426 billion — $800 billion less than their U.S. counterparts.

Rather than learn from failure, Brussels tightened its grip — proving again that when regulators fail, they regulate harder. Their Digital Markets Act and Copyright Directive saddle companies with costly mandates that make life harder for both innovators and consumers.

EU regulators insist that their rules ensure fairness, transparency, and competition. In reality, they’re strangling convenience and driving users crazy.

Take Google Maps. Because of DMA rules, Europeans can no longer click directly into expanded map views. As one user complained on Reddit, it’s become “a severe pain in the butt.” The new restrictions also hobble tourism. Google Search can’t link directly to airlines or hotels, forcing travelers through clunky intermediaries that waste time and money.

The Copyright Directive makes things worse. It tells search engines to display only “very short” snippets of news articles — without defining what that means. Bureaucrats promise to judge “the impact on the effectiveness of the new right,” which means nothing. By contrast, American courts have long recognized that snippets are fair use and help people find what they need. U.S. policy treats information as a public good; the EU treats it as a privilege controlled by the state.

The damage goes beyond search results. The EU now forces Apple and other “gatekeepers” to make their devices interoperable with third-party software — a costly demand that undermines engineering efficiency. Features like iPhone-to-Mac mirroring and real-time translation could disappear from European markets because of it.

As Cato Institute’s Jennifer Huddleston noted, “The real-time translation feature would be immensely helpful in Europe with so many languages; however, the consequence of European regulation is that it might not be available.”

RELATED: Can anyone save America from European-style digital ID?

Photo by Lab Ky Mo/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

And when companies don’t comply fast enough, Brussels slaps them with massive fines. Apple got hit with 500 million euros (around $580 million), Meta with 200 million euros (around $232 million) — punished not for misconduct but for trying to innovate.

The EU now says it will review whether the DMA “achieves its objectives of ensuring contestable and fair digital markets.” That’s bureaucratic code for “we might make it worse.” Meanwhile, the Copyright Directive’s vague language grows even more dangerous in the age of AI, where machine learning depends on large-scale data use that Brussels can’t seem to comprehend.

Europe doesn’t need more commissions or consultations. It needs courage to scrap bad laws and let innovation breathe again. If Brussels wants to compete with America, it should stop punishing success and start trusting its own entrepreneurs. A lighter-touch approach has worked for the United States — and it could save Europe from technological irrelevance.

​Opinion & analysis, Opinion, Eu, European union, Red tape, Bureaucracy, Bureaucrats, Bureaucratic red tape, Eu bureaucrats, Surveillance, Big tech, Brussels, Apple, Facebook, Meta, Google maps, Regulation, Fines 

Communist China’s secret SIM farms in the United States are tied to a series of hoax SWAT raids that targeted numerous conservative political figures, according to an eye-opening report from Blaze News investigative journalists Steve Baker and Joseph M. Hanneman.

These dangerous hoax raids have impacted high-ranking individuals, including a senior U.S. Secret Service official, members of Congress, such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), and conservative political commentators, like Tim Pool.

‘The intent behind these attacks is clear: to kill, injure, and silence key voices.’

Author and freelance columnist Larry Alex Taunton was among the many individuals targeted in these hoax SWAT raids. In March, Taunton captured surveillance footage of three officers, rifles drawn, attempting to enter his home while he was in bed.

“Nineteen men in body armor arrived at my home under the cover of darkness and pointed automatic weapons into my house. But for my very alert German shepherd, my wife and I might have been killed and perhaps a police officer or two. (I was armed),” Taunton told Blaze News, adding that people who saw the surveillance footage were “horrified.”

Taunton expressed skepticism that the raid was connected to China, though he noted that the FBI had informed him the agency suspected “it was directed by foreign agents.”

“On the other hand, they seemed to think my ‘swatting’ was related to my efforts to expose the corruption of [the United States Agency for International Development]. That made sense given what happened in the weeks leading up to my swatting,” he stated.

— (@)

Taunton explained that he had recently spoken on Steve Bannon’s “WarRoom” about how the USAID “was running a massive human trafficking op running from South America, through the Darién Gap, straight up to the U.S. border.”

A few weeks later, while in Cairo, Taunton claims he “had a dramatic standoff” with police in Egypt outside of a USAID facility.

“But China?” Taunton questioned. “I know it is said the Chinese play the long game, but I don’t see the connection to my swatting unless they were somehow recipients of USAID monies.”

RELATED: Exclusive: China behind massive nationwide SIM farm network that directly threatens American critical infrastructure

Photo by David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

When asked whether he believes the hoax SWAT raids are an act of war, Taunton replied, “If done by a foreign power, yes. At the very least, it is attempted murder by proxy.”

He called it “both true and troublesome” that a source told Blaze News that the only reason the SIM farm in New York City was taken down was because a senior Secret Service official had been the target of a bogus SWAT raid.

“Otherwise, this investigation would have never been initiated,” the source stated.

According to that quote, Taunton said, “The feds were going to do nothing in my case nor that of others.”

“That’s a problem,” he remarked.

Sean George, also known on X as Beard Vet, told Blaze News that the hoax SWAT raid on his residence on March 16 “stole our peace” and has forced “constant vigilance for 7-8 months now.”

“China’s SIM farms reveal a coordinated attack, not random. It’s a national security crisis demanding urgent action from the government,” he said. “If it’s confirmed that China’s SIM farms fueled the swattings, then it was 100% an act of asymmetric warfare.”

“We need justice and President Trump must prioritize dismantling these networks, possible sanctions and revoke all visas from Chinese nationals,” George added.

RELATED: China rules the resources we need to build the future. Now what?

Photo by Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Dustin Grage, a columnist for Townhall, and his family were also victims of a bogus swatting attempt in March. Grage told Blaze News that the attacks should be “a top national security priority,” noting that “it’s not surprising that China might be behind these attacks.”

“They have the most to lose under a Trump presidency,” Grage stated. “Considering I was one of the leading voices exposing Tim Walz’s ties to the CCP, it makes sense I’d be targeted. Like others who’ve been attacked, our work was instrumental in helping elect President Trump.”

Those targeted by these hoax swatting attempts generally agree that they constitute domestic terrorism, Grage added.

“If it’s discovered that a foreign entity is behind them, I don’t see how anyone could argue it’s not an act of war,” he continued. “When a foreign power targets and endangers American lives on our own soil, that’s exactly what it is.”

“While I’m not an expert on how this SIM card network went undetected for so long, I do know that it must be stopped,” he said. “With the assassination of Charlie Kirk, we’ve reached a point where all threats to political voices must be treated as serious acts of violence. The intent behind these attacks is clear: to kill, injure, and silence key voices.”

Grage called on the Trump administration to “send a clear message that this will not be tolerated.”

A White House official told Blaze News, “The administration is closely monitoring this issue and has assured that appropriate resources are focused on addressing the matter. This is an ongoing investigation, and we have nothing additional to share at this time.”

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​News, Swat, Swatting, Swatting attacks, China, Sim farms, Sim farm bust, Larry alex taunton, Sean george, Dustin grage, Sim farm, Politics 

A pair of males who had been on parole and probation are behind bars after allegedly committing the same crimes that got them in trouble with law enforcement previously.

First up is 21-year-old Anthony Cheeks, who was charged with robbing passengers on a Chicago train line — after he had completed parole for robbing a passenger on that same train line, CWB Chicago reported.

‘You know, I shoot m***********s!’

The outlet said Cheeks was accused of robbing a 38-year-old man’s backpack on a Red Line train Sept. 5.

Then, just six days later, Cheeks and accomplices approached a 47-year-old man aboard a Red Line train at the 47th Street station, CWB Chicago noted, citing prosecutors.

Cheeks allegedly demanded the victim’s bottle of Tito’s vodka, and when the victim refused, Cheeks allegedly put his hand in his pants to suggest he had a gun, the outlet said.

“You know, I shoot m***********s!” he allegedly warned before taking the vodka bottle and punching the victim in the face, chest, and head, CWB Chicago reported.

Transit video cameras recorded both incidents, and both victims identified Cheeks in a photo lineup, the outlet said.

As it happens, court records show Cheeks got a four-year prison sentence in 2024 for mugging a 66-year-old man the year prior — again, aboard a Red Line train — and Cheeks recently completed parole in that case, CWB Chicago said.

But Judge Antara Rivera ordered Cheeks detained on robbery and aggravated battery charges for last month’s incidents, the outlet noted. Cook County Jail records indicate Cheeks was booked on Sept. 16, and he remained behind bars Friday on no bond; his next court date is listed in jail records as Tuesday.

RELATED: Panhandler pushes 82-year-old woman face-first to ground, breaking her knee, after she wouldn’t give him money, officials say

Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune

Next up is 22-year-old Kyir Walker, who’s accused of taking a phone at gunpoint and then transferring nearly $1,200 to himself — while on probation for stealing phones and transferring money to himself, CWB Chicago reported in a separate story.

Prosecutors said Walker and an accomplice took victims’ phones and banking apps to drain their accounts outside the Nike Store in the 600 block of North Michigan Avenue in 2024, the outlet said.

In one case, a 20-year-old lost $500 through his Chase app, CWB Chicago reported, adding that in another case, a 37-year-old lost $2,000 through Bank of America after Walker allegedly grabbed the victim’s phone under the pretense of a donation request. That victim later received taunting text messages from the offenders, prosecutors said, according to the outlet.

Both victims identified Walker in photo lineups, CWB Chicago said, and officers took Walker into custody last year after recognizing him while working a Cubs game.

Judge Shelley Sutker-Dermer last November sentenced Walker to a two-year “second chance probation” after he pleaded guilty to two counts of theft from person, the outlet said, adding that Walker was required to complete 40 hours of community service and earn his GED; if successful, his convictions would be wiped from his record.

But prosecutors said Walker around 4 a.m. May 11 of this year approached a 23-year-old man from Crown Point, Indiana, in the 600 block of North Clark and allegedly displayed a gun, ordered the victim to unlock his phone, and used it to Zelle $1,190 to an account identified as “BBOYS,” CWB Chicago said.

Once again, the victim later picked Walker out of a photo lineup, the outlet said, citing police reports. Officers took Walker into custody near Wrigley Field on the evening of Oct. 2 when they recognized that he was wanted in connection with the May armed robbery, CWB Chicago added. Judge John Hock ordered Walker detained on Oct. 3.

Walker remained Friday in Cook County on no bond; his next court date is Oct. 17, jail records indicate.

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​Chicago, Parole, Probation, Repeat offender, Same crimes, Arrests, Jail, Cook county sheriff’s office, Broken system, Crime 

Allie Beth Stuckey, BlazeTV host of “Relatable,” recently debated 20 liberal Christians on the newest installment of Jubilee’s popular “Surrounded” series.

The format is simple: Stuckey sits at a small table in the middle of 20 self-identified “progressive Christians” and makes four claims. Then, one by one, her debate opponents rush to a chair opposite Stuckey and debate her until a majority of the debate participants vote that person out. The process repeats for each of Stuckey’s claims.

Here are the topics that Stuckey debated:

The Bible says that marriage is only between one man and one woman.Abortion is a grave moral evil.Empathy can be toxic and lead to sin.Progressivism and Christianity are at odds.

Before the debate, Stuckey revealed that Charlie Kirk — the greatest debater of our time — offered her sage advice on how to win this Jubilee debate.

“I wanted to cancel this debate, because it was right after Charlie died and the day before his memorial. But then I remembered that this was the last real conversation CK and I had. He was such a good friend,” Stuckey wrote on X. “I took your advice, Charlie. Thanks for everything.”

In text messages, Kirk advised Stuckey that “it’s very important every time they make a claim” to question “is that biblical?” and “by what standard [do] you believe that?”

“You have them up against a wall — they will TRY and get you on a major difference of something prescriptive vs. descriptive — MOST of the ugly stuff of the Old Testament is DESCRIBING not PRESCRIBING to us. Very important difference,” Kirk wrote in one text message.

Kirk, who participated in a Jubilee debate himself, also advised Stuckey of the “best two questions to ALWAYS ask.”

“What do you mean by that exactly?”What biblical evidence do you have to support that?”

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, Jubilee debate, Charlie kirk, Christianity, Christian, Liberal, Progressive christian, Faith 

While Microsoft just scrapped plans for a massive data center in Caledonia, Wisconsin, due to local pushback regarding environmental concerns, a multitude of other data center construction projects riding the general push to terraform the modern human environment in the U.S., and abroad, are proceeding apace.

“Based on the community feedback we heard,” Microsoft said in a statement reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “we have chosen not to move forward with this site.” The community feedback, however accurate, was filtered through several layers of local and regional government zoning bodies including Caledonia Plan Commission, which is advising Microsoft go ahead with a separate data center nearby. The second site occupies 244 acres and would see the compound situated near a local power plant.

The push toward more and more power is one of several critical environment components in the seemingly endless project to expand data centers everywhere. Increasingly, we’re seeing tech giants like Microsoft and Google locate projects near existing power plants or just opting to build their own on site. The strain on the grid is reflected in surging electrical rates around the U.S.

People can still have some sway … if they can get informed and insert themselves into local discussions.

If we take Oregon as an example, we see some interesting and contradictory trends. On the one hand, Oregon has long prided itself at the citizen and local-government level on “doing the work” to ensure some reasonable environmental protection. It hasn’t been a total success; citizens and small businesses have bent over backwards since the 1970s to make accommodations. Isn’t it curious, then, with respect to the question of who pulls the strings in the state, to observe that electrical rates for most citizens have gone up 50% in the last few years? That price hike will continue. Estimates vary, but it appears that Oregon is devoting approximately 11% of its power generation to big tech data centers.

RELATED: Taliban accused of shutting off internet to ‘prevent immorality’: ‘An alternative will be built’

Photo by Mohsen Karimi/Getty Images

We’ve written about terrifying water consumption surrounding data centers. The numbers are difficult to pin down, but even moderate estimates show the centers running through enormous amounts of fresh water. What goes a bit undiscussed are the chemical residues inherent to data center operations, and here again, the push to more tech and more cash leaves little chance for scientists to get a handle on the various impacts — human, animal, and long-term environmental, including life cycle.

The search, such as it is, for a balance between industrial processes and environmental regulations has never quite worked. We probably shouldn’t hold much hope regarding the particularly disturbing chemical output of so-called PFAS that’s native to data center operations. These are the so-called forever chemicals: “Pfas are a class of about 16,000 chemicals most frequently used to make products water-, stain-, and grease-resistant,” the Guardian recently noted. “The compounds have been linked to cancer, birth defects, decreased immunity, high cholesterol, kidney disease, and a range of other serious health problems.”

PFAS are present in data centers. No one agrees just how much. We know the water and gaseous outputs of the operations will go somewhere, for good or for ill. And politicians know that, just as with previous industrial-environmental disasters, they’ll likely be moved on through the revolving gov-corp-media door by the time the real bill comes due.

Invisible PFAS didn’t quite make the cut in “Eddington,” Ari Aster’s stinging satire of the local politics of big data centers, but they’re the icing on a disturbing cake served up to towns all over America: Colossal flows of fiat cash swamp the interests and voices of citizens so divided in ideology that they can’t mount a coordinated pushback. If you throw enough money at local officials, they’re going to give in. The AI boom has seen capitalization like never before, so there’s plenty to paper over pesky environmental regs. As shown in Caledonia, however, people can still have some sway … if they can get informed and insert themselves into local zoning, impact, building, and resource discussions.

​Tech 

History is not indoctrination — or is it?

How many people know that the scriptures were cited by our founders more than Locke, Montesquieu, and Blackstone combined? Students learn that James Madison is the father of the Constitution, but do they know that he would likely have failed unless he had promised a bill of rights to Pastor John Leland?

My frustration with the lack of education boiled over with the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Does today’s generation realized that the pilgrims were literally a church plant and that the Mayflower Compact was modeled after a church covenant?

It’s more likely they believe that America was formed under secular influences with just a tiny tip of the hat to a generic god for good measure.

The doctrine of the separation of church and state, they assume, is to purge religion from the civic arena at the behest of Jefferson and the Constitution. Most are shocked to learn that this doctrine originated with a politically engaged pastor, Roger Williams. He had been banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his religious beliefs and threatened with deportation back to England, where he would certainly be imprisoned. Instead, he fled north with the assistance of the Native Americans, where he founded Providence. Williams derived this concept from Isaiah 5, likening the vineyard to the church, the wild grapes to the world, and the hedge to the wall of separation.

As a pastor in the Ohio legislature, hardly a day goes by that the uninformed do not criticize my engagement in the political sphere without any awareness that the top signature on the Bill of Rights was a pastor who also happened to be the first speaker of the House.

My frustration with the lack of education boiled over with the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

I met Charlie at the National Association of Christian Lawmakers conference last December. He was grateful for the work that I had done in Ohio on the SAFE Act and Save Women’s Sports and emphasized the power of pastors being engaged. He understood our American heritage and preached the power of God’s people being engaged.

My colleagues observed that he was a unique blend of Rush Limbaugh and Billy Graham. But in a nation increasingly unaware of its own heritage, his bold proclamations elicited hate, anger, and violence from the uninformed.

This is the fruit of deconstruction and post-structuralism in America. When one generation stops teaching our history and the next generation starts rewriting it, we shouldn’t be left wondering why our youth are disconnected and disaffected.

The Charlie Kirk American Heritage Act is my response to ensure that each generation can enjoy the benefits of learning the source of liberty as told by our founding fathers.

America’s educators who understand these truths know that hate groups like the Freedom from Religion Foundation lurk in the shadows ready to prey on them with lawsuits designed to silence and intimidate them. One superintendent informed me that it was, in fact, a violation of the First Amendment to teach the impact of religion on America. It’s not, of course, but I couldn’t convince him of the truth.

RELATED: Bring God back to schools — before it’s too late

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During our first committee hearing on the Charlie Kirk American Heritage Act, opponents asked why we only mention Christianity in the bill. The answer is simple: All faiths are equally free — but not all faiths contributed equally to ensure that freedom.

One Democrat retorted that our founding fathers used generic monikers for deity so that all could interpret God to be who they imagined Him to be. He was insulted that I wrote, “If we were to remove Christianity from American history, we would have no American history.”

Rather than taking my word for it, I suggested that he consult the founding fathers.

John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson on June 28, 1813, “The general Principles, on which the Fathers Achieved Independence, were the only Principles in which, that beautiful Assembly of young Gentlemen could Unite, and these Principles only could be intended by them in their Address, or by me in my Answer. And what were these general Principles? I answer, the general Principles of Christianity, in which all those Sects were United.”

The Charlie Kirk American Heritage Act simply affirms that teaching the positive impact of Christianity on American history is consistent with the First Amendment and is not a violation of the doctrine of the separation of church and state.

Teachers should be free to teach the truth. My hope is that Charlie is smiling down on this legislation and realizes that the impact he made will outlive him for generations to come.

​Charlie kirk, Ohio, God in schools, Christian education, American history, Founding fathers, Charlie kirk american heritage act, Faith 

The fragrance of revival has been drifting like incense across the nation ever since the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, . This feeling took physical form yesterday when 6,500 women from all over the country gathered in Allen, Texas, for Allie Beth Stuckey’s Share the Arrows conference.

After a day filled with worship led by Francesca Battistelli and lots of encouraging talks from some of the most prominent voices in conservative evangelicalism, including Alisa Childers, Jinger Vuolo, and Katy Faust, Allie took the stage to close out the event with a speech on something we desperately need if we want to keep this revival burning: bravery.

“Whether we die surrounded by our children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren or whether we die young as a martyr, like Charlie, may it be said of us: she was brave for the Gospel until her final breath,” Allie declared.

While bravery is certainly a difficult road, we have “seven reasons” to be brave, she said.

1. Jesus was brave.

Although Jesus was fully God, he was also fully man, which means he needed bravery, Allie explained. He faced persecution, loss, grief, and pain, but because of his unparalleled love for humanity, He faced a criminal’s brutal death with courage.

Allie emphasized, “Jesus modeled godly bravery for us when he went willingly to the cross, even though he dreaded the pain that he would have to endure.”

In Matthew 16:33, Jesus encourages believers to face their own inevitable tribulation with bravery: “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

How do we take heart in today’s modern world? We do what Christ followers have always done in the face of trial: “We do what God calls us to do, even when it’s painful, even when it’s unpopular, even when it’s scary, even when it requires sacrifice, even when we lose friends and we lose family and we lose jobs,” Allie affirmed.

2. The Holy Spirit empowers us to be brave

For Christians who fear they don’t have the courage to be brave, Allie reminded them that bravery comes not from our own strength but from the power of the Holy Spirit.

She noted, “When Jesus leaves this Earth, when he ascends to be at the right hand of the Father, he says, ‘I’m not leaving you alone. I’m leaving you with a Helper.’”

We were given the Holy Spirit because God, who created us, knows our limitations. “God made you not enough. He made you fallible. He made you finite so that you depend on Him,” Allie stated. This dependence isn’t just for salvation; it’s for the trials we face every day. But through the power of the Spirit, we can face our giants with courage.

3. God commands us to be brave.

God’s call for our bravery echoes in Scripture’s most repeated command: “Do not fear.”

In Isaiah 41:10, God tells us why we can be brave: “Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”

In Matthew 10:28, He reminds us that while our bodies can be killed, our souls are His: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.”

Whether facing literal death or the loss of human approval, Christians stride in bravery, anchored by God’s eternal strength.

Allie asserted, “The fear of the Lord is how we live, not the fear of man.”

4. God, not man, determines our day of death

To Christians who fear death, Allie reminded them that God numbers our days before we’re even born. To step out in bravery doesn’t change this.

God “is never looking down and wondering, ‘how did that happen?’” she said. “The tragic day that Charlie was assassinated – God had already pre-ordained that day to be the day that Charlie went to glory before Charlie was born.”

Quoting Scottish Presbyterian evangelist John Gibson Paton, who brought the Gospel to pagan tribes on islands in the Indian Ocean despite extreme hostility, Allie read: “I realized that I was immortal until my master’s work with me was done. The assurance came to me, as if a voice out of Heaven had spoken, that not a musket would be fired to wound us, not a club prevail to break our bones, not a spear leave the hand in which it was held vibrating to be thrown, not an arrow leave the bow, or be made ready to be loosed against us, without the permission of our Father in Heaven.”

“The day of your death is determined by God, so be bold,” Allie urged.

5. The day of victory is determined by God

Isaiah 25:8-9 tells us that “[God] will swallow up death forever; and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth…It will be said on that day, ‘Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us.’”

We can be brave because this is the future we look forward to, Allie encouraged.

6. Bravery is the Christian heritage

For millennia, brave Christians have carried the good news of Jesus to the ends of the earth, fearlessly facing persecution, martyrdom, and cultural hostility.

Allie gave the example of Sabina Wurmbrand – a Jewish-born Christian missionary, evangelist, and human rights advocate, who boldly preached the gospel during the brutal Stalinist era in Romania. The wife of a pastor, Sabina helped run her husband’s underground ministry amid communist persecution. Even though she faced imprisonment, slave labor, and surveillance for her evangelism, she continued sharing the message of Jesus Christ with oppressed believers, Soviet soldiers, and even prison guards – many of whom came to faith through her witness. After Sabini and her husband fled to America, they founded Voice of the Martyrs, an organization dedicated to supporting persecuted Christians worldwide by providing Bibles, aid, and advocacy.

Sabini’s story is one of many Christians whose bravery emboldened them to preach the gospel fearlessly despite persecution, imprisonment, and the shadow of death. In her memoir, she wrote, “Courage is not the absence of fear but the will to do what is right in spite of it.”

“That is our heritage as Christians,” Allie proclaimed.

7. The Gospel is worth it

“All of us are called to take risks for the gospel,” Allie stressed.

It doesn’t always look like starting a podcast or running for office. Standing up for Jesus is the work of stay at home moms and CEOs alike.

“The body of Christ and the kingdom of God is built on the unseen and unsung radiant obedience of Christians who believe with everything in them that the Gospel is worth it,” Allie concluded.

In a world craving courage, Allie’s charge at Share the Arrows ignited a spark, urging every woman present to embrace the fearless legacy of Christian bravery and carry the gospel’s light, no matter the cost.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

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

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With no end in sight to the government shutdown, President Donald Trump’s administration is putting Democrats in an unenviable position.

Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought announced Friday that the administration has officially begun issuing reduction in force notices, laying off over 4,200 government workers across several key departments, like Treasury, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security. As the government approaches its third week of the shutdown, Democrats are left weighing their options.

‘The easiest way to stop this is for five [Democrats] to come to their senses.’

These layoffs come as no surprise. Vought previously threatened Democrats with mass layoffs just days before the September 30 funding deadline. Still, Democrats are feigning surprise.

“Here’s what’s worse: Republicans would rather see thousands of Americans lose their jobs than sit down and negotiate with Democrats to reopen the government,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement. “The way forward is simple: Stop the attacks, come to the table, negotiate, and reopen the government. Until Republicans get serious, they own this — every job lost, every family hurt, every service gutted is because of their decisions.”

RELATED: ‘PAY OUR TROOPS’: Trump unveils creative solution to minimize military’s shutdown pain

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Democrats blocked the Republican-led funding bill that would have kept the government open and operating at virtually the same funding levels.The GOP’s bill was a simple, clean, 90-page continuing resolution with no partisan anomalies, save a bipartisan line item that would boost security funds for lawmakers following Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

Rather than voting alongside Republicans to keep the government open, Democrats decided to introduce their own $1.5 trillion spending bill that would reverse major legislative accomplishments achieved in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. Democrats also insisted on immediately renegotiating healthcare subsidies from the Affordable Care Act, though these aren’t set to expire until the end of the year.

Democrats are in the minority in both the House and the Senate.

RELATED: White House deploys nuclear option amid Democrat-induced shutdown stalemate

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Senate Democrats have stubbornly voted no over a half dozen times on reopening the government. One senior Democratic aide told CNN that the party will not concede short of “planes falling out of the sky.”

“The pressure thus far hasn’t moved them at all,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) told Blaze News during a press call hosted by the Republican Study Committee. “They seem to be enjoying it.”

“I don’t think anybody in the White House takes any pleasure in this at all,” Johnson told Blaze News. “I’ve spoken to the president about this myself. Of course, I’ve spoken to Russell Vought as well. They’re in an unenviable position.”

“The easiest way to stop this is for five [Democrats] to come to their senses in the Senate and join Republicans to reopen the government.”

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​Schumer shutdown, Chuck schumer, Hakeem jeffries, Senate democrats, Donald trump, Russ vought, Russell vought, Office of management and budget, Hhs, Dhs, Treasury department, Department of health and human services, Department of homeland security, Mass layoffs, Trump administration, White house, Government shutdown, Reduction in force, Rifs, Charlie kirk, Affordable care act, Aca subsidies, Healthcare subsidies, Mike johnson, Republican study committee, Rsc, Omb, Politics 

In his opening salvo, the esteemed Scott Yenor righteously scrutinizes the travesty of single-sex education at the Virginia Military Institute. Yenor lays bare the deleterious effects that forced sex integration has had on honor, cohesion, and the society into which graduates of the school march. What he emphasizes less, however, is how the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Virginia fundamentally changed the nature of VMI’s military character and the essential path to reclaiming same-sex spaces for military officer formation.

The key part of Yenor’s essay is his call to create new institutions like VMI — schools that would force a legal and cultural reckoning over sex in education and the military. It’s a persuasive argument because red-state governors already hold the power to act. They can challenge entrenched institutions and build new ones that reflect their citizens’ values.

The modern obsession with sex equality may be the clearest example of how civilian ideology corrupts military formation.

A governor such as West Virginia’s could establish a military academy with full higher-education credentials and an attached ROTC program to train future officers. Its character must be ironclad — steeped in discipline, animated by a warrior ethos, and set apart from the civilian world its graduates would swear to defend.

While offering a four-year degree is necessary to attract those with talent who are willing and able to lead and thrive, this status must not infringe on the mission of the next VMI. This new academy must seek to minimize the distinction between the academic and military spaces to the greatest extent possible. This does not mean that cadets should take exams in body armor, but rather that their college experience should produce elite warrior leaders.

Every class, extracurricular, and academy event should directly relate to the military profession. This would almost certainly mean smaller course offerings, fewer Division I athletics, and fewer civilian professors without military experience. Above all, like VMI, West Point, and the Naval Academy, a student hierarchy (or chain of command) must be the definitive experience of academy life.

The cost of integration

The modern obsession with sex equality may be the clearest example of how civilian ideology corrupts military formation. As Yenor argues, new military academies must be all-male to restore the ideal of masculine virtue and preserve the integrity of a space insulated from the social fashions and ideologies of civilian life.

Male-only environments aren’t just valuable for education — they’re indispensable for building effective military units. The case for single-sex academies rests on a simple truth: Men must train as they fight, and the continuity between those two worlds determines whether they win.

Scholarship from the 1990s first identified how gender integration erodes cohesion and readiness within combat formations. Subsequent physiological studies reinforced the point, finding that women experience higher injury rates and markedly greater attrition in strenuous training environments. Such outcomes in the formative stages of a soldier’s career have profound implications for the design of academies that are meant to cultivate endurance, resilience, and mutual reliance.

The operational record echoes these concerns. The U.S. Army Special Operations Command’s “Women in ARSOF” report revealed deep dissatisfaction among operators, with nearly 4 in 5 saying that integration undermined effectiveness. More conclusively, a 2015 Marine Corps study demonstrated that all-male units outperformed mixed-gender counterparts in speed, lethality, and cohesion.

These findings matter for academies, for they are the crucibles where young men forge the habits of trust and shared hardship that define combat units. If integrated units struggle to match the performance of male-only formations, then academies designed on an integrated model risk instilling the very fissures that later compromise unit effectiveness on the battlefield.

Passing the Ginsburg test

Much of this effort can be accomplished outside of Washington, D.C., but that does not obviate the need for the federal government to adopt policies that will protect male-only military spaces from inevitable legal challenges.

Sec. Pete Hegseth could direct the Department of War to issue a new regulation barring women from ground combat roles. Because their prior exclusion was rooted in departmental rulemaking rather than congressional statute, Hegseth would have authority to act at the direction of the president.

Without decisive national direction, any new academy would stand vulnerable to the same scrutiny that undid VMI’s traditions.

Congress could intervene to block or codify such a policy, but absent legislative action, executive authority would control. Even a layman’s reading of U.S. v. Virginia reveals that such bold policy action is a necessary precondition to building the kind of alternate institutions Yenor identifies as necessary to rebuild sex-segregated education in the military.

Under the heightened “exceedingly persuasive justification” standard, Virginia had to convince the Supreme Court that excluding women from VMI was both essential and well-founded. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg disagreed. She pointed to the military’s decades-long inclusion of women in federal service academies as proof that VMI’s male-only model lacked a factual basis. In her view, Virginia’s justifications were speculative and failed the constitutional test she applied.

RELATED: Female veteran says Pete Hegseth is RIGHT about women in the military

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The real lesson of U.S. v. Virginia isn’t that single-sex military education is unconstitutional. It’s that such institutions can survive only when their structure aligns with national policy. Ginsburg’s reasoning hinged on the fact that by 1996, women already served in the academies and the armed forces, making VMI’s stance seem outdated. For new male-only academies to endure, they must rise alongside a broader policy shift that treats sex-segregated combat preparation not as exclusion, but as essential to military effectiveness.

Yenor is right that cultural renewal will require state leaders who are willing to build institutions that resist prevailing orthodoxies. Yet even more important is the recognition that law follows policy. Without decisive national direction, any new academy would stand vulnerable to the same scrutiny that undid VMI’s traditions.

The path forward, then, lies in building academies with an unambiguous martial ethos, supported by federal policies that make male-only formation not only culturally defensible but also constitutionally secure. Only then can the United States produce the kind of warrior men upon whom its survival ultimately depends.

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

​Opinion & analysis, Opinion, West point, Virginia military institute, Vmi, Usma, Naval academy, Dei, Diversity equity inclusion, Diversity equity and inclusion, Dei in military, Feminism, Military readiness, Single-sex education, Coed 

Chick-fil-A was once again ranked as the number-one fast-food restaurant in the American Customer Satisfaction Index. It’s the 11th consecutive year the chicken chain has held the top spot.

But it’s not just CFA’s food and service that have made it one of the most popular chains in America. It’s something much more nuanced.

Chick-fil-A didn’t set out with a customer-first strategy and later decide to care about people.

Unlike most other organizations in the industry, Chick-fil-A has discovered an authentic way to integrate business strategy and corporate culture. It’s often said that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” I’ve found that this statement is only half true. Culture is undoubtedly powerful. It shapes mindsets, decisions, and environments. However, it doesn’t negate the need for strategy.

For true, lasting success, culture and strategy need to feed off each other. When they’re disconnected, the result is often imbalance, misalignment, and, ultimately, mission drift. A business can be healthy yet lack purpose, or have a clear purpose yet operate in an unhealthy way.

Thriving organizations — the ones that stand the test of time — are those that harmonize who they are (their culture) with what they do and how they do it (their strategy). This integration is essential for missionally driven leadership.

Let’s go back to Chick-fil-A.

The company is built on biblical values, honors the Sabbath, fosters servant-hearted leadership, and champions hospitality. These values are operational standards. They guide how team members respond to guests with “my pleasure,” how conflict is resolved, and even how franchise partners are selected.

Chick-fil-A didn’t set out with a customer-first strategy and later decide to care about people. It cared about people first, and from that foundation, the strategy naturally emerged. That distinction matters.

RELATED: Here are 5 Christian companies that join Chick-fil-A in publicly proclaiming their Bible-based views

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When core values shape strategic direction, execution becomes more consistent and more resilient, especially in the face of disruption.

And yet culture alone is not enough. Without strategy, culture easily becomes sentimental, a fond memory of “how things used to be” without the structure needed to drive meaningful outcomes. Leaders must be vigilant in asking: Is our culture shaping what we pursue, how we define success, and how we evolve in the face of change?

The return-to-office debate provides a timely example of how strategy and culture must interact.

In June 2025, Ford Motor Company announced it would require white-collar employees to return to the office four days per week. CEO Jim Farley framed the decision as a step toward a “more dynamic company,” one that fosters in-person creativity and collaboration. That’s a strategic choice, but one rooted in a specific cultural aspiration.

Across industries, leaders are weighing similar decisions. Do we bring everyone back? Stay remote? Create a hybrid solution?

While there’s no one-size-fits-all answer, the wrong approach is to follow trends blindly or make decisions out of fear. The right starting point is culture. What kind of culture are we trying to build? What rhythms cultivate collaboration and mentorship? Do our physical and digital environments reinforce the values we profess or erode them?

For some organizations, RTO policies can rekindle a sense of belonging and a shared mission. For others, flexibility and trust are core values best expressed through remote autonomy. The key is less about whether employees sit at a shared desk and more about whether the strategy supports the cultivation of a shared identity.

In my work with CEOs and business owners, I’ve witnessed a key dynamic among healthy organizations: They let culture shape strategy, and they let strategy reinforce culture. It’s a two-way street.

Right now, culture matters more than ever in attracting and retaining talent, sparking innovation, and uniting multigenerational teams around a shared purpose. That’s why everything from hiring practices and customer service to key performance indicators and product development must reflect and reinforce the values a company holds dear.

It’s one thing to say we value integrity; it’s another to weave it into how we sell, serve, and lead.

So what does this look like in practice?

First, leaders must examine whether their strategic priorities truly align with the values they profess. If your organization touts that people matter most, does your strategy show it through investments in employee development, customer care, and sustainable work rhythms?

Next, consider what kind of culture your current strategy is creating, whether intentional or not. Every strategy has cultural side effects. Sometimes, a relentless drive for performance without margin produces a culture of fear and burnout.

Then, consider your internal language. Do your people have a shared understanding of what terms like “excellence,” “service,” or “innovation” mean within your unique context? Without clarity, even good intentions can lead to confusion or misalignment.

Finally, reflect on leadership behavior. Are you and your leaders embodying both the values and the strategic vision? Employees learn far more from what their leaders model than what they say. When leaders walk in alignment with both strategy and culture, they build trust, and trust builds momentum.

So yes, culture may eat strategy for breakfast, but only when the two sit at the same table, aligned, accountable, and advancing together.

The real secret behind Chick-fil-A’s dominance? Culture and strategy are on the same menu.

​Chick-fil-a, Corporate culture, Strategy, Business, Culture 

Harvard sociologist Christina Cross is on a mission to downplay the importance of a two-parent home in black families — while claiming that instead of a stable family structure, they simply need more government aid.

“It is true that when black children grow up with both parents, they tend to experience advantages, and they do tend to have improved outcomes. It is also true, unfortunately, that they still lag behind their white peers in the same family structure,” Cross said in an interview with journalist Michelle Martin on PBS.

“And my findings indicate that much of that has to do with these wide gaps in economic resources. And so if we really want to turn the tide, we need to be thinking about how to bolster family resources instead of making cuts to key social safety net programs like Medicaid and SNAP,” she continued.

“We could be thinking about ways to help families to stay afloat during these challenging times by increasing that amount of aid,” she added.

In another clip, Martin points out that “black two-parent families are almost invisible in academic literature even though they make up nearly half of black families today.”

“Because we haven’t focused on black two-parent families, we haven’t known how drastic the opportunity gaps are for this group compared to their white peers. It has allowed us to believe for so long that the two-parent family is the great equalizer, which has actually shown up in the way that we craft policy,” Cross explained.

BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock and BlazeTV contributor Delano Squires are not even close to being on the same page as Cross.

“Christina Cross wrote about the quote-unquote ‘myth’ of the two-parent family about six years ago in the New York Times. So I’m familiar with her work, and she’s one of, you know, she’s the type of scholar who connects marriage to white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy,” Squires explains.

“So again, it’s this idea that marriage is an oppressive institution, that it’s rooted in whiteness and that it doesn’t benefit black families as much as it does white families, which obviously is completely false, but this is the type of thing that you get nowadays,” he continues.

“The next thing you know, she’s talking about more government funding for TANF and SNAP, which has nothing to do with two married two-parent families because the median household income for black married couples under the age of 65 is $122,000,” he adds.

This, Squires explains, is “higher than the median income overall for every other racial group including Asians.”

“So she starts by saying, ‘Look at black two-parent families’ and then by the time she’s finished with you, she’s talking about more government welfare programs,” he says, adding, “which almost exclusively are for unmarried women with children.”

Want more from Jason Whitlock?

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Taylor Swift has long been lauded as a girl next door, the sweet, innocent, perfect role model for your young daughters — but after her latest album, BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey is asking moms everywhere to reconsider their stance on the pop star.

“Okay, moms,” Stuckey begins. “Your daughters should not be listening to Taylor Swift. They should not be. She is not a role model. And it actually baffles me that there are Christian moms who will say, ‘Well, she’s better than Chapell Roan’ or ‘she’s better than Bad Bunny’ or ‘she’s better than, I don’t know, Selena Gomez.’”

“Y’all, the bar is in hell, if that is our standard. The bar could not be lower if we are deciding on the righteousness of our kids’ entertainment choices based on the most degenerate stuff out there. That is not how Christians should be thinking,” she explains.

Back when Swift was a teenager, Stuckey recalls listening to her.

“We were in the same life stage. She was talking about this, you know, silly, superficial stuff. She was talking about teenage romance. She was not talking about opening up her thighs to someone who is not a husband. Okay? And that is literally what she is singing about,” Stuckey says.

“There is zero reason for you to allow your daughter to be listening to or going to the concert of Taylor Swift,” she adds.

Stuckey then quotes Song of Solomon 2:7, “Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.”

“I think it’s so important to make sure to do everything that we can to keep our daughters, to keep our kids on the right track spiritually, mentally, and emotionally. Like, I think about the mistake that I made when I was a teenager and reading smut. … It wasn’t, like, explicit ‘Fifty Shades of Gray,’ but a lot of innuendo, a lot of, like, hot and heavy implication about what was going on behind closed doors,” Stuckey explains.

“That kind of ‘Twilight’ stuff I should not have been reading as a 16-, 17-year-old alone in my room because it creates in you a desire that cannot be fulfilled in a holy way. And purposely consuming content that creates in you, whether you’re an adult, but especially as a teenager, that creates in you a desire, a longing that may be natural, but cannot be fulfilled in a way that is honoring to God is not good,” she continues.

“And we as parents are called to steward our children,” she adds.

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“Angelo.” With no surname necessary, the mere mention put Washington’s late-Cold War intelligence establishment on edge. Their tormentor was but a thirtysomething staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Contrarily, to the Cold Warriors sacrificing their all to defend the nation from communist subversion and nuclear missile threats, that single name, like a messenger from heaven, brought comfort and joy.

Angelo Codevilla, who died in 2021, knew and understood that the country that took him in as a boy would preserve itself and its founding principles by having the most capable intelligence and counterintelligence services the world had ever seen. “Most capable” didn’t mean the largest, or the most lavishly funded, or supplied with the most high-tech gear. It meant having the most creative, most principled, most virtuous, and wisest people doing the job.

Angelo was his own man. He stood true to his principles, never feared burning bridges, and often anticipated enjoying the flames.

Angelo watched the U.S. intelligence apparatus deteriorate. Visiting CIA headquarters over the years, he passed the stone inscription that the late and great CIA Director Allen Dulles placed as what he intended as a permanent greeting: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free” — the Gospel according to John.

In the last year of his life, Angelo saw the videos of CIA corridors festooned with mind-numbing murals and telescreens promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. To Angelo, who spoke Latin, DEI meant “of God.” A new god, a false one, possesses the American intelligence community today.

The evolution to this point was entirely predictable, and Angelo foresaw it early. He had the most remarkable track record of any American. Close to a half-century ago, on the newly formed Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Angelo called out the CIA, not for its cult of secrecy, but for its cult of untruthfulness.

A relentless force

Angelo arrived at the Senate in 1977, just as George H.W. Bush left his 11-month stint as CIA director and as the liberal Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) wrapped up sensational hearings and reports about the intelligence community.

Angelo’s committee work and intellectual rigor were so distinguished that President Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential transition team chose him to be part of its intelligence and diplomatic section. He had built a rapport with Reagan’s campaign manager, the distinguished Office of Strategic Services veteran William J. Casey. Casey had done the unthinkable during World War II by proposing, then running, operations behind German lines after D-Day to open the invasion route for Allied American, French, and British Empire forces to march to Berlin.

Rapport and mutual respect grew to deep trust when Casey ran the CIA. Angelo became Bill Casey’s man in the Senate. But Angelo Codevilla was never the CIA’s man. To him, the CIA was just a bureaucracy that performed a necessary function. He believed that the bureaucracy was performing its function poorly and going in the wrong direction. No bureaucracy, he believed, was sacred. Certainly, none should ever be permanent.

Angelo wasn’t even Bill Casey’s man. He was his own man. He stood true to his principles, never feared burning bridges, and often anticipated enjoying the flames.

Angelo trusted and admired President Reagan for the good in him and for his ideals. He worked closely in a fraternal and trusting relationship with Reagan’s national security adviser, Judge William Clark. Casey brought the Senate staffer Angelo to private White House meetings with President Reagan.

Angelo found himself in the curious situation — or, knowing him, he created the situation — of serving on the Senate committee whose job was to oversee the CIA while also working with the CIA director himself to get ahold of the dysfunctional and demoralized bureaucracy. The CIA wasn’t being truthful with Congress, and it wasn’t being truthful with Casey either.

It wasn’t a matter of the CIA’s being secretive. Angelo had all the necessary clearances. It was a matter of being truthful. This bothered Angelo immensely. So did incompetence. And so did ideological blinders. Angelo was never in awe of the CIA or the FBI, though he did say once, 33 years ago, that the FBI merited some of his esteem. That was then.

That year, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, he wrote a monumental work, “Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century,” on what a successful intelligence community should look like, how it should act, and why. The CIA was far, far behind the curve, looking backward instead of forward. “The major elements of U.S. intelligence will have to be rethought and rebuilt,” he said.

Of course, they were not rethought or rebuilt until after their hand was forced — after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Even then, the rethinking and rebuilding were done entirely wrong. Instead of the eternal standards of philosophical soundness and professional excellence that Angelo laid out in 1991, the U.S. intelligence system treated its bureaucratic instincts as sacrosanct, taking critical theory as its lodestar, and glowering establishmentarians cemented the new order.

The CIA leveraged its network of mid- to late-career bureaucrats — the “Old Boys” — to manage perceptions by leaking to the press, helping write or actually writing the popular histories, dominating the academic studies of intelligence, and credentialing those who would play well with others.

Angelo understood strategy the way others pretended to.

Angelo had his own exceptional network, however. He played five-dimensional chess in his sleep. He knew all about bureaucratic warfare and subversion both as a scholar and a practitioner. He knew exactly whom to call, when, and what to say.

Certain senators dreaded him. So did select high-ranking CIA and FBI officials.

He had a bipartisan spleen. On the Senate Intelligence Committee, Codevilla gleefully terrorized Republicans and Democrats alike with pointed, relentless inquiries that exposed intellectual inconsistencies and sheer sloppiness. He forced analysts and policymakers alike to address inconvenient facts as facts. They hated him for it, but many of them admitted he was right in private.

Angelo was known for his broad smile of iron teeth long before Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko (or a KGB officer assigned to the pliant Washington Post reporter Dusko Doder, who related it to the American audience) came up with the term to describe Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev.

“Iron teeth” applied to Angelo far better than it did to the Soviet leader. Codevilla’s militant joviality while pummeling Washington’s morally corrupt and weak-minded power elite flummoxed both friends and enemies. Hit hardest were the victims of Codevilla’s intellectual inquisitions. They could never quite tell whether the iron smile was a signal of genuine joy in shepherding one lost in a sea of laziness and prejudice toward logical reasoning or whether the smile was a precursor to a deadly verbal salvo — until it was too late.

Allen DullesBettmann via Getty Images

Challenging the Old Boys’ club

Angelo was a perceptive talent-spotter. He sized you up quickly. He would go out of his way to help those whom he deemed earnest. He reveled in discussions of facts, reason, and philosophy. One didn’t have to agree with him to be his friend. But if you were out, you were out permanently. He despised what he called “dishonest treachery.”

Treachery is part of the intelligence profession. It has to be. Angelo studied treachery and respected it. Dishonest treachery, to Angelo, was treachery executed in a morally wrong way and for morally wrong reasons. The world is treacherous. People are treacherous. To navigate treachery for a cause larger than oneself, one had to understand treachery, expect it, and deal with it on its own terms.

Born in Italy during the collapse of Mussolini’s fascist regime during World War II, Angelo always focused on the fundamentals. He always referred to the classics. He was the only member of the Senate Intelligence Committee staff, and perhaps the only person on earth, who read and studied the intelligence community’s entire super-secret annual budget, line by line — a pile of papers two feet high — year after year.

Angelo had a fear-inducing way of questioning intelligence leaders. He would say, “I asked Aristotle’s simple questions of officials throughout the Intelligence Community: What is the purpose of this activity? Why do you do this rather than something else? Do you do this for the sake of that, or vice versa? By what criteria do you judge your products good or bad?”

“I was astounded,” he remarked, “at how little thought had been given to decisions that affected thousands of careers, billions of dollars, and the nation’s very future. All too often, the answers to my questions were ‘We’ve always done it this way,’ and ‘How insulting for you to ask!’”

Angelo understood strategy the way others pretended to.

He was offending the agency or the bureau. Not the missions. The mission is never first in a permanent bureaucracy.

Angelo played five-dimensional chess in his sleep. He knew all about bureaucratic warfare and subversion both as a scholar and a practitioner.

Reasoned arguments were not part of the debate. The custom, then as now, was to attack the questioner and defend the bureaucracy. Decades before DEI and LGBTQ+, the FBI had its own informal acronym for its personnel: “DEB,” or “Don’t Embarrass the Bureau.”

“The attack is usually three-pronged,” Angelo explained when unpacking bureaucratic argumentative tactics. “First, this person must be revealing classified information. Second, this person does not know the whole story, and we who do know it are forbidden from commenting, except to say ‘You’re wrong.’ Third, this person’s demeaning tone precludes a rational explanation of some admittedly valid points.”

“So, in practice, three points boil down to one: Leave the field of intelligence for the Old Boys.”

The Old Boys would retire or die out, having mentored a new set of Old Boys, or New Genders, or whatever the flavor of the month may be, but the goal would be the same: Silence honest discussion about intelligence, counterintelligence, and whatever has become of “national security.”

Making truth-telling politically incorrect, and therefore wrong or immoral — and thus evil and professionally destructive — remains a defense tactic for intelligence agency bureaucrats. Angelo decried political correctness very early as it came into vogue. As it was killed off in favor of a more virulent strain, wokeness, he continued his crusade against it.

The Old Boys’ networks that he called out from the 1970s became, or were already part of, what he would later define as “the ruling class.”

‘Why? What for?’ And other inconvenient questions

Before the pale riders of cultural Marxism penetrated the intelligence community, Angelo was hammering away at the sheer aimlessness of American intelligence collection and analysis, most of which he saw as existing for its own sake.

After World War II and the bipartisan consensus about containment of communism, defining American national interests was easy: Take the fight to the communists, who were strategically mobilized to tear apart our country and our culture by any means necessary, both ideologically and physically. By defining national interests, even broadly, America can define the scope of its foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, and national security services.

Even the beginning faced deep flaws, plus tensions about growing globalism. That mission was poorly understood and became diluted over time, with priorities left up to “experts” from the Washington establishment and the Ivy League, further distorted by critical theorists of the Frankfurt School variety. Reagan temporarily disrupted that trend, but his monumental mission to bring down the USSR itself required immense intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities.

The end of the Soviet Union allowed anyone with eyes to see that the intelligence establishment had become, as Codevilla had warned from his Senate staff perch, a huge intelligence-industrial complex that existed more for itself than for the national interest, whatever that national interest had become.

Codevilla became one of the first serious people after the Cold War to question why the United States was pouring so many resources into technologies to spy on everything possible around the world. Surveying America’s colossal human- and technological-intelligence might in 1992, he asked, “What for?”

Then, he crystallized the obvious but inconvenient facts. “To what does all of this amount? The activities to which we loosely refer as the U.S. technical collection system [were] never planned according to any single purpose, nor are they administered by a single organization,” he said. Some congressional oversight “sometimes prod[s] the system toward coherence. Yet coherence is elusive, because coordination is ex post facto to budgetary planning.”

Angelo’s unwelcome observation went unheeded, with Osama bin Laden proving the point with his ingeniously simple attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and all the Saudi and Qatari funding behind them. The al-Qaeda leader was but the most famous of a parade of “known wolves.” A bright and aggressive CIA man in Sudan tried to arrange bin Laden’s capture or elimination before he carried out the acts of terror he was openly planning, but he found little support up the intelligence chain and zero at the top of the CIA and in the Clinton White House. So bin Laden was allowed to remain free to attack.

Angelo had a bipartisan spleen. He gleefully terrorized Republicans and Democrats alike with pointed, relentless inquiries that exposed intellectual inconsistencies and sheer sloppiness.

It took a madman in a cave to force the United States to drop everything and try to add coherence to American intelligence. When that coherence came, it arrived in the hurried form of a huge centralized security apparat with near-limitless capabilities: the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, an überpowerful post that, in the wrong hands, would build coherence by abusing power and politicizing the apparat, resulting, by the time of Codevilla’s death, in a largely incoherent intelligence politburo, a rogue state deeply embedded within a state, whose modus operandi became guided by a revived Comintern’s critical theory and wokeness.

“Intelligence concerns human activities, and human beings, unlike God, go to great lengths to disguise their work. So perhaps the most serious charge that can be made against the fruits of U.S. intelligence concerns not the collectors but another set of people: the counterintelligence officers who should have guarded the integrity of the collectors’ work,” Angelo wrote in “Informing Statecraft.” American counterintelligence failed to do so, and Codevilla is one of the very few scholars to explain why.

Weaponized language

Angelo carefully studied language and the weaponization of words and grammar. He disdained wishy-washy intelligence products full of caveats, euphemisms, and that terrible passive voice.

He embraced the ancient treasure of virtue. Here I speak of virtue in the Aristotelian, Hebraic, and Christian senses. Niccolò Machiavelli changed the public understanding of virtue, influencing philosophers of liberalism in subsequent centuries. He taught how to change language to trick the reader to agree with the opposite of the original definition and intent and to reason, with easy logic, that evil was a virtue.

This was the most subversive aspect of Machiavelli’s writings. Subversion is an operational part of intelligence, though seldom adequately practiced by the CIA abroad or identified and combatted by the FBI to protect our constitutional republic at home (though competently waged against the American public).

Most readers of Machiavelli rely on translations. Angelo grew frustrated with some of those translations, even those by the finest scholars. Raised in an Italian-speaking home, he read Machiavelli in its original form and discovered that, especially in the case of the Florentine’s most important work, “The Prince,” the translators had “cleaned up” the Florentine evil genius’ imprecise uses of words, his often poor grammar, double meaning, or doublespeak, and indeed his bad use of pronouns. The cleanups improved the flow and readability of the translations and arguably corrected Machiavelli’s sloppy mistakes.

Angelo found that Machiavelli’s mistakes were purposeful, intended to convey or obscure meaning. So he set out to re-translate “The Prince,” in a literal but what he called an “inelegant” translation, and packed it with footnotes to explain the calculated plays on words and puns to distort language and understanding.

RELATED: Trump must clean house at DEI-crazy CIA

Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

Machiavelli was all about power for power’s sake — not for higher ideals, as Allen Dulles or Bill Casey later sought. It was power politics simply. Angelo explained how the mistranslators of Machiavelli, inadvertently or otherwise, taught people to dispense with goodness and all forms of higher purpose, to break down human relationships and society for the purposes of power.

Machiavelli twisted the meaning of virtue into a “tool for wretchedness,” suggesting that evil may be praiseworthy, twisting the concepts of evil and good. “The Prince,” Angelo said, marked the center of gravity from the standpoint of the sovereign: “Do I do virtuous things that don’t keep me #1, or do I do evil things and stay on top?” It refers to no higher purpose than that.

And so Angelo foresaw, whether translating Machiavelli or writing on — and acting for — intelligence, counterintelligence, and national security, that the machinery created to defend our constitutional republic has been perverted to seek and preserve power for power’s sake. The CIA as a bureaucracy, the FBI as a bureaucracy, Old Boys’ networks against citizens, the ruling class, political correctness, wokeness, critical theory, and cultural Marxism are all effectively automatons stockpiling power for their own sake.

Subversion

Treachery had a love child called subversion. Few mainstream American studies of intelligence or counterintelligence over the past six decades or so devote much attention to subversion — how both to defend ourselves and our society against it and to utilize it against our enemies. Codevilla treated subversion as a natural human behavior. He devoted a whole chapter to it in “Informing Statecraft.”

He also made a study of one of the 20th century’s most notorious subversives, the Italian Comintern man Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci adopted the gradualist, cultural-Marxist approach to revolution, combining the evils of Marxism with the evils of Machiavelli and a dash of Mussolini to give us an early strain of critical theory.

Angelo embraced the ancient treasure of virtue in the Aristotelian, Hebraic, and Christian senses.

Few besides Gramsci knew and applied Machiavelli as well as Angelo. Gramsci did it to subvert and destroy Western civilization. Codevilla understood and explained Machiavelli in a bid to save civilization and its moral foundations and to save its chief protector, at least then: the United States of America.

Angelo also understood Gramsci’s kindred spirits at the Germany-based Frankfurt School, another Comintern enterprise, which was rooted at Columbia University and fanned out through the Ivy League and West Coast universities. The Frankfurt School populated the OSS Research and Analysis Branch during World War II and infiltrated the early CIA’s intelligence directorate and its analytical products with a cultural-Marxist worldview. It penetrated the FBI after Robert Mueller’s centralization and indiscriminate mass hires following 9/11, which is quite likely why President Barack Obama asked Congress to extend Mueller’s statutory 10-year term limit as director for another two years, making the then-cognitively-impaired Mueller the second-longest-reigning FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover.

This wreaked damage that the rest of us are only beginning to understand as we watch the rot of critical theory permeate the Intelligence Community, just as it has our military and educational systems.

Angelo called it early. In a work on political warfare that he wrote in 2006 titled “Political Warfare: Means for Achieving Political Ends,” he noted that as dangerous as the enemy spies are who steal secrets, they merely steal secrets. Alger Hiss was a valuable Soviet spy, but his greatest value to the Soviet enemy was something else by far: a major controlled agent of influence and recruiter for Moscow within the Democrat and diplomatic establishments.

Worse than the spies who steal secrets and the controlled agents of influence, Angelo warned, were the subversive, uncontrolled fellow travelers, the so-called innocents and useful idiots who followed and mainstreamed the work of controlled agents — the men who designed the sellout to Stalin at Yalta, for example.

Since World War II, United States foreign policy succeeded despite, not because of, its giant intelligence-industrial apparat, Codevilla argued in his 1992 book. “Informing Statecraft” is so fundamental, and its principles and guidance so timeless, that it remains among the most important and informative volumes on both statecraft and intelligence more than three decades later. A future president should require all his intelligence, national security, and foreign-policy appointees to master the book.

American intelligence and counterintelligence understand little of this in terms of performing their missions that the public has entrusted to them. Nor does Congress, which makes the laws.

Nor do the courts, which interpret them. Nor do all but a very few of the nation’s schools. And so Angelo Codevilla’s approach to intelligence laid the foundations for his studies of America’s national character and of the ruling class.

Enduring character

To Angelo, America’s superpower status was an exception to its exceptionalism, an anomaly brought about by its defeat of fascism and its brief but squandered victory in the Cold War over the Soviet Union and communism. The post-Soviet world, he reasoned, was the time for America to return to its founding roots.

Nations have character. Their governments affect society, the moral order, and family. In a vicious circle, politics make or break all. America’s founders were all men of character. They spoke openly of virtue, not in the twisted Machiavellian sense, but in its real essence.

A coherent and strategic foreign policy was a core element of the American Revolution, the founding of the American constitutional republic, and the growth of the United States and the American dream to become a superpower. The greatest successes occurred when American intelligence, like the federal government itself, was very limited and very small and when U.S. strategic goals were simple and understandable to the average citizen who could support them.

Times are different, but the principle remains. The United States needs a strong foreign secret-intelligence service to collect and analyze information on issues vital to its national interests to inform a president and his administration. It needs a similar service to conduct activities covertly that diplomats and the military cannot or should not do. It needs a robust counterintelligence service to neutralize foreign spying and influence against us and a moderate security service to defend against violent or subversive internal threats to the Constitution.

Sheer size bears no relation to strength and robustness. As the world’s sole superpower, the United States built a Leviathan government that created a new ruling class through a form of bureaucracy and corporatism that linked political power and wealth. It attacked family, religious belief, and personal character. Surveying history, and stressing the profound America chronicled by Alexis de Tocqueville, Angelo in 1997 recognized the culture wars under way that ultimately begat today’s critical theory of wokeness.

How could America keep the peace in the world if it wasn’t even at peace with itself? Angelo naturally wrote a book about it: “To Make and Keep Peace,” subtitled “Among Ourselves and with All Nations.” Much earlier, with Paul Seabury, he wrote one of the most important modern textbooks of peace’s opposite, titled “War: Ends and Means.” And then, he provided a collection of essays during the Global War on Terrorism titled “No Victory, No Peace,” which observed, in what would mark the early part of a forever war, “The Bush Administration has not achieved peace because it has not sought victory.” That was back in 2005.

Photo by MIKE SARGENT/AFP via Getty Images

Angelo constantly asked the annoying question, “Why go to war if you don’t intend to win?”

A common thread bound all his works on conflict, defense, intelligence, peace, and treachery. That thread was about keeping America first, a solid and reasoned approach without the politicized jingoism, and tempered by a firm grounding in America’s founding principles and the Western moral tradition.

As time went by, after Reagan’s successful strategy brought down the Soviet Union and the military-industrial and intelligence-industrial complexes mushroomed to what they are today, Angelo focused extensively on the elites who run American politics and policy and the uniparty that became known as the Swamp and the permanent ruling class.

As an aside, perhaps Angelo’s most impactful legacy, more than 40 years ago, was to build up a leader in the U.S. Senate to push for a space-based weapons system to shoot down incoming ballistic nuclear missiles. This effort involved constant coordination with the Reagan White House. A Soviet active-measures campaign aimed at weak and treacherous politicians and other elites kept Congress from providing the funds to build and deploy that revolutionary, workable system.

The prospect of an American strategic missile-defense system wrecked the Soviets’ nuclear war calculus and, with Reagan’s own nuclear modernization, tricked the Kremlin into bankrupting the USSR with needless new weapons programs that Reagan planned to negotiate away. However, Congress never funded a functional space-based missile defense, and to this day, America remains completely vulnerable to a strategic nuclear missile attack.

The ruling class, as personified by President George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton, never tried to understand the nature of the jihadist enemy. Angelo called them out for it at the time. Unlike in domestic politics, where they worked tirelessly to keep themselves in power, he observed, they never sought to win abroad.

Angelo Codevilla flew with the high and mighty, not because he craved being among them but because he knew he had to be.

The same was true for the permanent class within the military and intelligence communities. Indeed, by the 2000s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had completely removed the word “victory” from its annual 400-page “Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms.”

On learning this during dinner with friends, Angelo grew incensed but was not at all surprised, switching the conversation to pose the question, “Why have a military if our leaders say nothing of victory?”

This need for an endlessly growing spy machine resulted more through the incrementalism of American interventionism and forever wars than through a grand design for a giant foreign and domestic spy apparat, or so we’d like to think, but the result was the same. A grandly designed spy apparat would have been more logical and effective than the one we have.

Angelo Codevilla flew with the high and mighty, not because he craved being among them but because he knew he had to be.

Even in Washington, he always took the time to mentor young people to become the next generation of diplomats, spies, and national security leaders.

He taught, among remarkable colleagues, at Boston University during the years when BU President John Silber was on the cusp of transforming the middling school into a top-flight institution with a world-class national security and international diplomacy program — a transformation that died with Silber and swirled down the loo of intellectual mediocrity, wokeness, and the scam of critical-race-theory corruption. Still, Boston University’s very woke Pardee School of Global Studies, of which Angelo was never on the faculty because the school didn’t exist at the time, proudly claims him as a professor emeritus.

Bureaucracies in need of replacement

Government bureaucracies are just bureaucracies. When they atrophy and abuse the public trust, they should be abolished. In an orderly way, their essential functions can be transferred to another bureaucracy that can do the job, or, better yet, they can be culled to create a new bureaucracy to last for as long as it faithfully executes its intended purpose.

Angelo agreed that we don’t need the FBI and CIA as they are. But that doesn’t mean that America doesn’t need strong foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, and even internal security agencies to defend the country and its interests from foreign adversaries. Bureaucracies come and go. And just as the FBI and the CIA came from parts of the distant past, Angelo argued in his later years that it was time for them to go in favor of something better.

Replacements would have to be designed according to the priorities of America’s mission in the world, which he saw as driven by the American people’s priorities for the central government to serve them, with their consent as the governed, and not for the ruling class to serve itself. The people determine their needs, the elected officials determine strategies and policies to fulfill those needs, and then the officials design and authorize the intelligence apparatus necessary to execute those strategies and policies.

And this is where Angelo labored his last. For years, he had referred to the America seen by Tocqueville — its mission, its place in the world, its relations with foreign countries, and its securing its own defense. His last work, published posthumously in 2022, drew lessons in statecraft from an intellectual and political giant and near-forgotten contemporary of Tocqueville, President John Quincy Adams.

Although America had leading political families such as the Adamses even when Tocqueville made his observations, there was no ruling class. America’s founders fought relentlessly to avoid the emergence of a national class of elites, even though several states in the federation had their own dominant political or economic families and clans. But there was no massive, permanent central government with a constellation of companies with business models of milking the taxpayers’ udders. There was no interstate ruling class.

The superficiality of popular American history almost passes over John Quincy Adams, viewing him as the son of a founding father and a one-term president during a period of undistinguished one-termers.

In “America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations: Lessons in Statecraft from John Quincy Adams,” Codevilla described a true American foreign policy, one as consistent with the vision of the founding fathers as with present-day America First nationalism. Adams was the brilliant but practically forgotten 19th-century secretary of state and president who, as a 5-year-old, had been brought by his parents, John and Abigail Adams, to watch the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775.

John Quincy Adams effectively founded U.S. foreign policy and grand strategy. He authored the Monroe Doctrine to preserve the independence of the new American republics from Mexico to South America and to keep European powers out of the region.

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Photo by asbe via Getty Images

In studying Adams’ extraordinary experiences as diplomat, secretary of state, president, and statesman, Codevilla showed America’s successes in determining its own national interests in geopolitics by limiting them, reducing the need for a global, expeditionary military and a centralized, European-style security state to prop up, among other things, a ruling class.

He celebrated John Quincy Adams’ principles and achievements — among them, ghostwriting the extraordinarily successful Monroe Doctrine as secretary of state — and tracked American foreign policy and geostrategy from Adams’ time to the present, uncovering a consistency of principles regardless of international circumstances.

Application of those principles is associated directly with America’s rise. Abandonment of them, over time, tracks with America’s relative decline. Revival of them, Codevilla would argue, would be cause for optimism.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind and was adapted from “Fighting Enemies Foreign and Domestic: The Legacy of Angelo Codevilla” (Encounter Books).

​Opinion & analysis, Angelo codevilla, Intelligence community, Cia, Truth, Deep state, Senate intelligence committee, Ruling class, Allen dulles, Cold war, Soviet union, Global war on terrorism, 9/11, Victory, Peace, Saudi arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq war, National security, National defense, Weekend long read 

For decades, Bill Maher has mocked religion with missionary zeal. He built his career sneering at scripture, scorning believers, and branding Christianity a fairy tale for fools.

Few men have done more to cement their place as America’s most committed unbeliever. And to his credit, Maher has never hidden his contempt. Week after week on “Real Time,” he lampooned pastors, derided prayer, and preached his own brand of secular gospel — cheap, cynical, and completely godless.

If even he can recognize evil when he sees it, what excuse remains for those who claim to serve God?

That’s what makes his latest remarks so shocking.

On a recent episode of his show, Maher did something few in the modern West dare to do: He defended Christianity. He spoke not with irony, but with indignation, condemning the genocide of Christians in Nigeria. If this were any other group, he argued, it would be on every front page — and he’s right.

“The fact that this issue has not gotten on people’s radar — it’s pretty amazing,” Maher said. “If you don’t know what’s going on in Nigeria, your media sources suck. You are in a bubble.”

“I’m not a Christian, but they are systematically killing the Christians in Nigeria. They’ve killed over 100,000 since 2009. They’ve burned 18,000 churches. … These are the Islamists, Boko Haram,” he continued. “This is so much more of a genocide attempt than what is going on in Gaza. They are literally attempting to wipe out the Christian population of an entire country.”

The fact that it takes an atheist to say what many Christian leaders have not and Western journalists will not is a sobering sign of our decay.

While Maher’s words are rare, the blood he described is not. Just a few weeks ago, armed insurgents stormed the Christian community of Wagga Mongoro in Adamawa State in the dead of night. Four were killed, many more wounded. Homes, shops, and a church were set ablaze.

Earlier in August, coordinated assaults swept through farming villages in Benue State. Nine Christians murdered in five days. In June, over 200 butchered in a single weekend — parents, priests, and children alike.

Across Nigeria, Christians are being hunted for their belief. The perpetrators — Boko Haram, the Islamic State in West Africa Province, and radicalized Fulani militias — share one mission: to wipe out Christianity and impose Islamist rule.

It’s nothing less than a slow, systematic genocide.

Under former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, this campaign flourished. Militants gained ground while soldiers stood aside. Entire villages vanished. Churches became tombs. What the world calls “unrest” is, in truth, organized extermination. It’s “genocide” by every definition.

Since 2009, more than 50,000 Christians have been slaughtered in Nigeria. Churches reduced to rubble. Priests hacked to death at the altar. Worshippers gunned down mid-prayer. These are not isolated horrors but rather part of a single, unbroken chain of persecution.

Yet in the West, this bloodshed barely registers. If thousands of Muslims, Jews, or atheists were annihilated, it would dominate headlines for months, and rightly so. But when Christians die, the press looks away.

And silence, in this case, is complicity.

RELATED: Atheist offers ironic cure for America’s woes

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Over the past decade, the United States has poured over $7.8 billion in aid into Nigeria — funds meant for peace and progress. Yet the country’s most vulnerable, the rural faithful, are left defenseless. The Nigerian government shrugs, Western governments continue to provide funding, and the media remains silent. It’s easier to ignore a massacre than to admit moral failure.

Aid without accountability is blood money. Every dollar sent to Abuja should demand justice — protection for Christian villages, prosecution of terrorists, and dismantling of jihadist networks. Anything less is an endorsement of evil.

Nigeria is not alone. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, ISIS-linked rebels have killed thousands. In Burkina Faso, pastors are executed and churches incinerated. In Mozambique, Christian towns have been erased from the map. Across Africa, a perverse pattern repeats — the union of radicalism and Western indifference, and the victims are nearly always Christian.

But Nigeria stands apart. It is Africa’s most populous nation, its economic and political heart. If it falls, the shock will reverberate across the continent.

So I ask, where is the outrage? Where are the protests, the headlines, the hashtags?

The same media class that rushes to champion every self-proclaimed victim of oppression falls curiously silent when the oppressed are believers. The same outlets that preach “diversity” intentionally turn blind eyes to the destruction of a faith followed by 2.6 billion souls. The hypocrisy would be laughable if it weren’t so lethal.

The modern left has grown so morally inverted that an atheist must now defend the faithful. Bill Maher’s rebuke should pierce the conscience of every journalist, pastor, and policymaker who claims to care about justice.

If even he can recognize evil when he sees it, what excuse remains for those who claim to serve God?

For years, Western leaders, particularly those on the left, have droned on about defending the weak and giving voice to the voiceless. But when the victims are Christian — often barefoot widows in burned-out villages clutching starving children — matters of justice don’t seem to matter. What could be weaker than that? What could be more deserving of compassion?

Nigeria now stands at a crossroads — and so does the West.

The issue isn’t whether Christianity can survive persecution — it always has. The question is whether nations built upon its moral foundation still believe in the values they inherited.

Because when an atheist must defend the faith, it isn’t just Christianity under siege. It’s the very conscience of the civilized world.

​Bill maher, Christianity, Nigeria, Christian genocide, Africa, Christians, Faith