Los Angeles voters appear ready to fire Mayor Karen Bass (D). They just aren’t replacing her with Spencer Pratt. That’s California for you!

A new UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll for the Los Angeles Times has City Councilwoman Nithya Raman (D, DSA) leading Bass 39% to 28%, with fully one-third of likely voters still undecided.

California is not secretly conservative. Los Angeles is not secretly Republican. And voters who reject Karen Bass are under no obligation to replace her with someone to her right.

The mayor’s numbers are dreadful. Nearly two-thirds of likely voters view her unfavorably. Bass has spent much of the year absorbing blame for homelessness, housing costs, and her response to the Palisades fire.

So much for the idea that Los Angeles voters are content with failure. They aren’t. They may simply have a very different idea of what should come next.

Raman is not offering Los Angeles a conservative correction. Far from it. She comes from the activist left and has the backing of the Democratic Socialists of America. She polls especially well among younger voters.

Bass has a strong left-wing pedigree of her own, but she has been around long enough to become establishment: Sacramento, Congress, City Hall.

Raman represents something newer.

A Democrat electorate can decide that a Democrat mayor has failed without becoming Republican. This should not be difficult to understand. Somehow, it remains difficult.

I have been making versions of this argument for a long time.

In 2014, after another statewide Republican drubbing, I wrote a column for the Sacramento Bee asking, “Hypothetically Speaking, How Can California Republicans Win Again?” (Sadly, not online — turns out the internet is not forever.)

My answer was not: Move left. My answer was: Move.

Move into neighborhoods. Into schools. Into communities Republicans had largely stopped contesting. Talk to voters in English and Spanish. Focus on local problems.

“For a minority party to become a majority,” I wrote then, “it cannot merely oppose. It must propose.”

I also warned against fatalism.

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Of course Republicans were out-funded and out-organized. Of course much of the press disliked them. So what?

Two years later, after Donald Trump won the presidency while California voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton, I wrote another column called “Take California, Please.”

California had just legalized recreational marijuana, elected Kamala Harris to the Senate, extended high income-tax rates, tightened gun laws, raised cigarette taxes, and approved more borrowing.

In short, California voted like California. It still does.

Today, Democrats constitute nearly 45% of California’s registered voters. Republicans are just under 25%. No Party Preference voters make up nearly 23%.

Los Angeles is cerulean blue.

Even Richard Riordan, the lone Republican mayor during the city’s long Democrat era, was no conservative in the contemporary sense. The dude was a Catholic who called himself “pro-choice.” Come on.

The mystery is not why Democrats keep winning. The mystery is why conservatives keep acting surprised.

Spencer Pratt, to his credit, seems to understand part of this better than some of his loudest supporters. After losing the June primary, Pratt recently told followers that Los Angeles “had its chance for a candidate of change.”

Then he blamed them.

“A lot of you just stayed home,” Pratt wrote. Others voted for another candidate. “I told you to get ten of your friends to vote, and you didn’t do it.”

Notice what he did not say. He did not say the election was stolen.

Some of his supporters have been happy to say that for him. Pratt’s explanation was less comforting: His supporters did not turn out enough voters.

Now 63% of Pratt’s June voters remain undecided between Bass and Raman.

The revolt against Bass is real. It is not a conservative revolt.

RELATED: The socialists want a new Constitution. Believe them.

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Pratt has another message for Californians: “Vote for governor, you still have a shot.” Yes, but it’s a long one.

Karen Bass has a rather different view.

In a recent interview, Bass declared the race effectively finished. “Our governor’s name is Xavier Becerra,” she said. “You don’t need an election on November 3. A Republican cannot win in this state.”

The gall of the woman! Of course California needs an election.

But forget the swagger for a moment and look at the arithmetic behind it. The latest PPIC poll has Becerra leading Republican Steve Hilton 60% to 38% among likely voters.

Those numbers should look familiar. Gavin Newsom beat Republican John Cox by nearly 24 points in 2018. Four years later, Newsom beat Brian Dahle by more than 18.

Those elections did not require cheating. Those are landslides.

I don’t like that any more than most Blaze News readers do. But I am not going to tell you California is secretly Republican because I wish it were. It isn’t.

California is a mostly blue state with vast swaths of red and millions of conservative residents.

Pratt’s response to Bass was revealing in another way. One-party dominance, he argued, teaches politicians that they do not have to earn votes. Give them a loss occasionally, he said, and perhaps they will try harder next time.

There is an old political truth in there. Competition disciplines parties. Long periods of dominance can breed complacency.

But California conservatives have their own problem. Sorry, friends. We are a despised minority.

Democrats have spent decades cultivating unions, ethnic communities, neighborhood groups, renters, homeowners, public employees, donors, activists, and candidates. The democratic socialist left understands this perfectly well. The DSA does not merely post about Nithya Raman. Its volunteers knock on doors.

Online enthusiasm is something else. X is not a precinct operation. A viral post is not a voter file. Ten thousand furious replies are not 10,000 ballots. As Spencer Pratt learned the hard way.

The work of politics isn’t easy. It’s tedious. It’s local. It requires endless hours nobody applauds and conversations with people who may dislike you before you open your mouth.

California is not secretly conservative. Los Angeles is not secretly Republican. And voters who reject Karen Bass are under no obligation to replace her with someone to her right.

You are not required to like California as it is. I sure don’t.

But before anyone can explain its politics, much less change them, there is one unavoidable requirement: See the place clearly.

​Activists, California, California politics, Competition, Democratic socialists, Democrats, Donors, Gavin newsom, Homeowners, Housing costs, Karen bass, Los angeles, Nithya raman, Palisades fire, Republicans, Spencer pratt, Dsa, Opinion & analysis 

In a day where TikTok theology is wracking up millions of views, it’s more important than ever for Christians to know what the Bible actually says.

On this episode of “Live Free,” Josh Howerton’s co-hosts and fellow pastors Paul Cunningham and Carlos Erazo address a viral TikTok video, in which the creator claims the Bible has several contradictions.

“The Bible says that God is all-knowing. Psalm 147:5 says that His understanding is infinite. First John 3:20 says that God knows all things. Matthew 10:30 says that He knows the number of hairs on our heads,” the video creator began.

“But in Genesis 18, God says He’s going to go down to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to know how sinful they’re being. An all-knowing God would know that. He wouldn’t have to go down there. Also, an all-present God would already be there,” he argued.

In his second claim, he argued that the empty story was inconsistent across the gospels: “In the books of Matthew and Luke in the Resurrection story, it says that the women who discovered the empty tomb ran off and told everyone that the tomb was empty. But in the book of Mark, it says that the women were afraid and didn’t tell anyone.”

The creator’s final claim aimed to debunk the Bible’s definition of love: “And then of course there’s the whole God is love, but then it also says that love is patient and kind, never jealous or boast. But then it says that God is a jealous God. So how could God be love if love isn’t jealous?”

Cunningham begins by addressing the TikTok creator’s claim about love and jealousy, pointing to the semantics of the word “jealous.”

“The same word can be used in certain ways in certain contexts that would be appropriate and in other ways that would be inappropriate,” he says.

He gives the example of a husband being jealous regarding his wife. “I should not be jealous if my wife were simply to say hello to a male co-worker, but I actually should be jealous if my wife slept with that male co-worker,” he explains.

“The reason I give that analogy is that usually when it says God is jealous in the Bible, it’s in relationship to His people, Israel, and it talks about in context that they are His bride and they are giving love to a different god or a different thing that only belongs to Him,” he adds.

Erazo then dives into the creator’s claim that an all-knowing God would not have to visit Sodom and Gomorrah to find out what the people were up to.

He gives the analogy of playing hide-and-seek with his 4-year-old son. “I’ll say, ‘Where are you? I don’t see you.’ I know where he is because I’m his father,” he says. “And so when God seems to be asking questions and when He seems to not know one thing, He knows.”

“A fancy phrase for that is called anthropomorphic language,” adds Cunningham. “God has to use language we can understand to help us understand a God we can’t completely understand.”

Above all, Cunningham and Erazo want believers to not allow “seeming contradictions” to shake their faith.

“When you see videos like this, don’t freak out if they bring up something you’ve never thought about because someone else has thought about it and probably given a really good answer for it,” says Cunningham.

To hear the duo’s full response to the video and other kinds of TikTok theology, watch the episode above.

Join BlazeTV+ and start watching Josh today at blazetv.com/JOSH. Use promo code JOSH to get $20 off your subscription.

​Josh howerton, Tiktok, Theology, Blazetv show 

Actress Tatiana Maslany recently called Tom Selleck and Michael Jordan “cowardly” for keeping politics out of much of their work.

Some readers may ask: Who?

If all art is political, as Maslany says, then let the art speak. Give us a performance powerful enough to make us listen.

Maslany won an Emmy for “Orphan Black” and starred in Marvel’s “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.” That is a career many actors would envy. Selleck and Jordan, however, are household names whose audiences have stayed with them for decades.

I wonder whether Maslany has thought much about why.

On Mehdi Hasan’s show, Maslany argued that all entertainment is political. Selleck had explained that he saw little sense in alienating half the country when his job was to entertain it. Jordan’s famous line about Republicans buying sneakers made much the same point. Maslany called that kind of restraint cowardly.

Fame and money can make anyone feel invulnerable. At the height of their fame, Selleck and Jordan could have told audiences what to think at every opportunity. Instead, they showed enough judgment to consider what they might lose by doing so — and whether politics was necessary to the work in the first place.

They built careers that lasted longer than the moment when everybody wanted an autograph.

I have seen this kind of signaling on a much smaller and more personal level. At one teaching hospital where my wife received extensive treatment, some young residents wore pronouns on their badges. None of the attending surgeons who treated Gracie did. I could choose the attending surgeon; the residents came with the package.

Let me be blunt. If you make pronouns part of your professional presentation, I notice. To me, putting them front and center signals concerns I do not want inserted into a relationship built on competence and trust. I could not choose the residents assigned to Gracie’s care. When the choice is mine, however, I make it.

Were the attending surgeons cowards for leaving pronouns off their badges? I have no idea what each of them believed. I know that when Gracie faced another surgery, their personal lives and politics never entered the room or gave me reason to question their judgment.

That becomes rather important when you are standing at an operating room door.

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An entertainer’s public choices work much the same way. Maslany can impugn Selleck and Jordan. She can say whatever she pleases. And I can decline to spend a dime or a minute on her work.

I cannot watch a Robert De Niro movie now without hearing his political rants instead of his character. When football players began kneeling during the national anthem, I stopped watching. Nearly a decade later, I still have not returned. The NFL went on without me, and I went on without it.

Gillette lost me the same way. When the company aired its commercial about “toxic masculinity,” I stopped buying its products. I never announced a boycott. I simply bought another razor. My eyebrows went up when I later heard Dana Perino say on “The Five” that her husband, Peter, had done the same.

How many other customers quietly made that decision?

Nobody has to organize a boycott. People can simply find another razor, another movie, or something else to do on Sunday afternoon. The business may never learn why the customer disappeared.

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Maslany recently turned 41. She is no newcomer waiting for her first break. She knows how much talent and luck it takes to land a role people remember, and she cannot know how many more will come.

Perhaps she will gain admirers for what she said. Perhaps she will never miss a role or a paycheck. Or perhaps some people she hopes will watch her next performance will quietly walk away. Others whose livelihoods depend on her work may absorb some of the cost.

That is the part of celebrity political speech people often miss. The audience does not owe the performer its continued attention.

If all art is political, as Maslany says, then let the art speak. Give us a performance powerful enough to make us listen. Calling two men cowards is easier than producing work people will still want to see decades from now.

Selleck and Jordan understood something about fame while they had plenty of it: An audience does not belong to you.

Maslany is free to speak her mind. The rest of us are just as free to decide whether we want to hear any more.

​Entertainment industry, Michael jordan, Freedom of speech, Hollywood, Tatiana maslany, She-hulk, Tom selleck, Robert de niro, Boycotts, Actors, Audiences, Opinion & analysis 

During a discussion of the controversial Lindsay Clancy case, “The View” co-host Sunny Hostin made a terrifying admission.

Not only did Hostin recount serving on the 1991 jury that found a man not criminally responsible by reason of insanity after he killed, dismembered, and cooked a woman — she claimed she was the reason he got off.

“I cannot believe that she thought it would be a good idea to admit this in public on her show that is national,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales comments, before playing the clip of Hostin.

“The reason I feel so strongly about this holdout juror is because I was a holdout juror in a case, in the Daniel Rakowitz case. I don’t know if people remember it,” Hostin began.

“Apparently several jurors questioned afterwards said one holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict. That was me. And it was because I saw clearly that he was psychotic,” she continued.

“He was in a psychosis. He did not mean to kill her. And once he killed her, he panicked. He chopped up her body parts. Yes, boiled her body parts. Tried to commit the perfect crime,” she added.

“You got this guy off?” co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin asked, shocked.

“That’s how much I believe in the insanity defense,” Hostin replied, adding, “And he fed her body parts to the unhoused.”

“One juror threw a chair at me. They were so angry with me. But one by one, I picked them off and said, ‘What about this? What about that?’ And we ended up … unanimously voting that he was not criminally responsible by reason of insanity,” she added.

“That’s because they just wanted to go home,” Gonzales comments. “That’s because they couldn’t stand being in the same room with you anymore.”

“Let’s just be clear here. Sunny Hostin bullied an entire jury into siding with a murderer who killed and ate someone,” she adds.

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

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

​Lindsay clancy, Sunny hostin, Daniel rakowitz, The view, Sara gonzales, Blazetv show 

Massachusetts, birthplace of the American Revolution, is considering a new experiment in identity politics. Companion bills in the Massachusetts House and Senate — H.3351 and S.2134 — would establish a permanent commission dedicated to the interests of Muslims in the state. Among its duties would be to “identify and recommend qualified American Muslims for appointive positions at all levels of government, including boards and commissions.” Muslims make up a small percentage of the state’s population of roughly 7 million.

The legislation suits Massachusetts’ identity-politics obsession. It slides effortlessly alongside previous steps to protect the rights of Jews, gays, Asians, and blacks. Except now, lawmakers are proposing to put the state’s imprimatur on one of the world’s most rapacious and cruel belief systems.

The history of Muslim-majority societies offers ample material for examining the relationship among Islam, religious freedom, political authority, and the treatment of minorities.

The proposal should alarm Americans even more than the election of Zohran Mamdani or the proposed development of the Meadow, a mosque-centered, all-Muslim enclave in allegedly red Texas.

Block and tackle

On August 11, former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville, a sitting U.S. senator and Republican candidate for governor of Alabama, clapped back at the Massachusetts proposal. He posted on X that no such legislation would ever emerge on his watch in the Yellowhammer State.

Coach Tuberville should do more than post platitudes. If elected, he should seek legislation making Alabama the first state in the nation to formally declare Islamic teaching inimical to the history and tradition of Alabamans and force a constitutional debate over how far a state may go in protecting its religious heritage. And he should be willing to block and tackle for this policy all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Declaration of Independence does not define religious belief alongside its four mentions of a Creator. The Constitution likewise offers no comprehensive definition of religion. American courts have generally avoided establishing a single definition that would determine which faiths count as religions and which do not.

The “history and tradition” approach used by the Supreme Court in other constitutional contexts — most famously in Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion on gun rights in Heller (2008) — offers Tuberville a provocative model for the argument we propose. Heller did not concern religious liberty, and its test does not govern the First Amendment’s religion clauses. But history and tradition are hardly irrelevant to constitutional interpretation.

The Alabama way

And the history and tradition of America is deeply Christian. More directly, much of it is Protestant Christian. That is especially true in Alabama, which became a state in 1819 after settlement largely by migrants from other Southern states who brought with them overwhelmingly Protestant religious traditions. Earlier Spanish and French settlement left a Catholic inheritance, particularly around Mobile.

Recent Alabama history gives Tuberville two bright lights to follow. The first is former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore. Moore was removed from office in 2003 after refusing a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building. He was suspended from judicial office again in 2016 over an order concerning same-sex marriage after the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision. The latter position, by the way, was broadly consistent with the view Barack Obama publicly professed before 2012. As the nation’s biblical foundation crumbles, courts are reconsidering some disputes over Ten Commandments displays, while polling suggests support for some gay-rights positions has plateaued or declined from its peak. Whatever one thinks of Moore himself, arguments once treated as beyond the pale have not disappeared.

The second beacon is Hoover, Alabama, where the Planning and Zoning Commission last December unanimously recommended denial of a rezoning request that would have allowed the Islamic Academy of Alabama and a Muslim prayer center to relocate to Meadowbrook Corporate Park. City planning staff cited concerns including compatibility with the comprehensive plan, traffic, and occupancy projections. The academy subsequently withdrew its application before the Hoover City Council could make the final decision.

The issue should resonate with Tuberville because his erstwhile hometown, Auburn, will soon face its own debate. Tuberville should make clear what role, if any, he believes the state should play when Alabama localities confront such controversies.

Coach Tuberville’s playbook

In Montgomery, Tuberville could begin by forcing a debate over a history lesson the late Charlie Kirk gave in 2024: America’s founding political culture was overwhelmingly Christian and, more particularly, Protestant. Religious tests existed in a number of states during the founding era. Charles Carroll of Maryland was the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence; Daniel Carroll of Maryland and Thomas Fitzsimons of Pennsylvania were the only Catholic signers of the Constitution.

Second, Tuberville and his legal team should explicitly ask a question existing constitutional law does not answer in the way we would like: How much authority does a state retain to defend its particular religious and cultural inheritance against an ideology it regards as hostile to that inheritance?

Current First Amendment doctrine places formidable limits on what Alabama could do. That is precisely why such legislation would constitute a constitutional challenge rather than an ordinary exercise of existing state authority. The bill could state Alabama’s historical relationship with Christianity and argue that the people of Alabama possess a legitimate interest in preserving that inheritance. Doing so would provoke a major confrontation over the First, 10th, and 14th Amendments and the Supremacy Clause — and force Americans to debate whether existing constitutional doctrine adequately equips states facing potentially existential cultural change.

Third, Alabama could explore the constitutional limits of legislation preventing state courts from substituting foreign or religious law for state and federal law. Any such statute would have to be carefully written: Religious principles can arise in contracts, wills, arbitration, and other private arrangements protected by existing law. The objective should be to establish unequivocally that Alabama courts are governed by Alabama and federal law, not to pretend that current First Amendment doctrine permits the state simply to outlaw references to Sharia.

Finally, Alabama should require serious academic instruction in the Bible’s influence on Western civilization and American history in its public schools, consistent with constitutional limits on devotional instruction. The state cannot do better than to examine the curriculum developed by Hillsdale College.

RELATED: ‘I think they’re demons’: Why JD Vance refuses to downplay supernatural evil

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Verse of the sword

The larger argument concerns Islam itself. Islamic scripture and jurisprudence contain teachings concerning nonbelievers, warfare, conversion, tribute, and political authority that deserve far more scrutiny than contemporary American discourse generally gives them.

Quran 9:5 and 9:29 are among the passages at the center of centuries of argument over jihad and the treatment of non-Muslims. Islamic scholars themselves have long debated naskh, or abrogation — the doctrine that some Quranic revelations supersede others — including the relationship between earlier passages associated with Muhammad’s period in Mecca and later revelations from Medina.

Muslims disagree sharply about what those passages require today. That disagreement should be acknowledged rather than used as an excuse not to examine the texts at all.

What Alabama cannot plausibly do under existing First Amendment law is simply declare Islam “fighting words” and suppress it on that basis. The Supreme Court’s fighting-words doctrine is far narrower than that. But Tuberville could force the more difficult political and constitutional question underneath the phrase: What happens when Americans believe a religious ideology contains not merely private theological claims but a political program fundamentally at odds with the constitutional order?

That is the debate Alabama should provoke.

From X to executive

The history of Muslim-majority societies offers ample material for examining the relationship among Islam, religious freedom, political authority, and the treatment of minorities. Tuberville need not pretend that current constitutional doctrine already gives him the answer. His opportunity would be to ask the question aggressively enough that courts, lawmakers, and voters have to confront it.

Tuberville’s response to Massachusetts was what you do on X. But it was a quip for no gain compared with what a laser-focused, fearless, conservative Christian governor could attempt in office. In Matthew 21:42, Jesus quotes Psalm 118:22 and affirms that He is the cornerstone of the faith.

Make Alabama the cornerstone of America’s anti-caliphate wall.

How Governor Tuberville acts, if voters give him the job, will reveal whether the SEC’s famed Riverboat Gambler has the team and the guts to play smash-mouth legal football.

​Tommy tuberville, Islam, Caliphate, Alabama, Christianity, Jihad, Identity politics, Law, Faith, Massachusetts