President Donald Trump recently renewed his criticism of the left’s immigration agenda, taking aim at mass amnesty. The Democratic Socialists of America are making the point for him, calling to “grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status.”

The White House Council of Economic Advisers released a new report last week estimating that the DSA’s immigration policies could cost Americans a whopping $440 billion to $613 billion over 10 years. And that’s not the worst of it.

‘The rule of law cannot co-exist with mass amnesty.’

According to the CEA, allowing mass amnesty could create $36 billion to $47 billion in estimated annual costs for just SNAP, Medicaid, and HUD housing vouchers.

The report argues that these costs would come from “turning the existing population of illegal aliens into legal residents eligible for federal social safety net programs.”

While DSA candidates like Melat Kiros believe “millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States right now should have an immediate pathway to citizenship,” American taxpayers should be asking the more important question: If mass amnesty could leave taxpayers with billions in new costs every year, what exactly does it solve?

It certainly does not solve the underlying problem. It changes the legal status of the people already here while leaving the incentives that attract more illegal immigration intact. We have been down this road before. Not to ruin the ending, but we somehow keep finding ourselves right back to where we started.

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act. The law created legalization programs for millions of illegal aliens while also establishing employer sanctions intended to discourage the hiring of unauthorized workers. About 2.7 million people ultimately received legal status under the law.

However, the bargain did not work. Due to IRCA’s eligibility cutoff, roughly 2 million were excluded from legalization, while an estimated 500,000 were eligible but never received legal status. According to the Migration Policy Institute, those who remained in unlawful status “became the nucleus of today’s large unauthorized population.”

The enforcement side also fell short. Weaknesses in employment verification and document fraud undermined employer sanctions. The problems IRCA was meant to address ultimately grew. The unauthorized population increased from an estimated 3.5 million in 1990 to 12.2 million by 2007.

Legalization changed the status of millions of people, but it did not prevent the country from having to deal with an even larger unauthorized population later. A growing population of illegal aliens brings larger costs for schools, health care, housing, and other public services.

RELATED: Republicans cannot serve two masters on immigration

Kent NISHIMURA/AFP/Getty Images

The DSA platform does not just call for mass amnesty; members also want an end to ICE detention and deportations.

CEA estimates the “net cost to taxpayers of ending deportations and ICE detentions to be between $79 and $139 billion over 10 years.” The report argues that doing so would eliminate fiscal savings associated with current immigration enforcement.

Former Border Patrol agent and Texas Public Policy Foundation senior fellow Ammon Blair puts it plainly: “The rule of law cannot co-exist with mass amnesty.”

If amnesty paired with enforcement did not keep our country from ending up back here, why should taxpayers expect amnesty with less enforcement to work any better?

Mass amnesty is not an immigration solution. And it cannot prevent the next wave of illegal immigration.

American immigration policy sends a message around the world. If the United States repeatedly demonstrates that entering or remaining in the country illegally may eventually end in legal status, policymakers have to consider the incentive that amnesty creates for the next person deciding whether our immigration laws are worth obeying.

That is the problem with DSA’s socialist immigration promises. The slogans are simple, yet the consequences are anything but. Americans would be left paying billions in new costs while the DSA simultaneously calls for less immigration enforcement.

We cannot mistake an old idea for a new solution. History has shown us that mass amnesty is not the answer. Socialism has never been short on promises, but it is taxpayers who are always expected to foot the bill.

​Americans, Democratic socialists of america, Deportations, Ice detention, Illegal immigration, Mass amnesty, Medicaid, Melat kiros, Taxpayers, Opinion & analysis 

What happens when a society teaches people that they have no lasting purpose, then wonders why they feel hopeless?

I am spending time volunteering with Stranraer Reformed Presbyterian Church in Scotland. On Thursday, October 15, the church is hosting a free public talk on depression at 7 p.m. at the Millennium Centre. Depression deserves our attention because its effects reach beyond individuals into families, communities, and the life of nations.

The Christian still wrestles with sin and sorrow. Yet Christ is working in us. Our hope rests on His faithfulness, not on our ability to manufacture a cheerful mood.

I am also a professor at Arizona State University, where I see the importance of this question among students. The 2024-2025 Healthy Minds Study, based on responses from more than 84,000 students at 135 colleges and universities, found that 37% reported moderate to severe depressive symptoms, and 33% reported moderate to severe anxiety. Both measures had improved since 2022, but the burden remains enormous.

In Great Britain, the picture is troubling too. NHS England found a common mental health condition in 22.6% of adults ages 16-64 in 2023-2024, up from 18.9% in 2014. Among 16- to 24-year-olds, the figure was 25.8%. In Scotland, 2023-2024 data show that 10% of adults reported at least two symptoms of depression and 16% at least two symptoms of anxiety.

Some people seek relief through alcohol or drugs, but self-medication can become another prison. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism notes that alcohol may temporarily relieve anxiety even as heavy drinking and repeated withdrawal worsen it. The damage can spread outward: The United Kingdom recorded 9,809 alcohol-specific deaths in 2024, and victims in England and Wales believed offenders were under alcohol’s influence in 39% of violent incidents in 2023-2024.

Clinical depression is not simply unbelief. Faithful Christians suffer it, and medical treatment can help. My concern here is spiritual hopelessness: What account of life can sustain someone when pleasure fades and suffering remains?

The secular state can fund treatment and other necessary services, but it cannot supply redemption. No program can answer the question that comes before policy: Why should I have hope? If human beings are only material organisms, here briefly and then gone, what lasting meaning does suffering possess?

That does not mean every government intervention fails. It means government has limits. A list of recommended behaviors may help people manage a problem, but it cannot give them a reason to live or reconcile them to God. Our trouble reaches deeper than ignorance of the rules.

A culture that reduces human beings to appetite, chemistry, and consumption should not be surprised by a crisis of purpose. Physical pleasure and distraction cannot bear the weight of the human soul. An evening’s escape still leaves tomorrow’s question waiting.

RELATED: Where was God? Frank Turek asks the question after Charlie Kirk

Owen Anderson

Christianity begins somewhere else. Human beings are made in the image of God, and Christ redeems His people by His blood. Our lives therefore have meaning now, not merely after death.

Sometimes Christianity itself gets reduced to “when you die, you go to heaven and avoid hell,” as though everything before death were unimportant. That misses our present calling. Alienation from God has consequences now. Clinical depression is no verdict on anyone’s salvation, but spiritual despair can foreshadow the hopelessness of separation from God. Communion with Christ brings hope into the present.

First, our feelings do not define us. We cannot always explain why darkness settles over us, but we can bring God’s Word to bear on it. The psalmist asks his own troubled soul, “Why are you cast down, O my soul?” (Psalm 42:5). Then he directs it: “Hope in God.” His sorrow is real, but it does not have the final word.

Second, Christianity offers grace rather than a ladder we climb to earn acceptance. Rules can identify wrongdoing, but they cannot free sinners from sin’s power. Islam’s five pillars, for example, prescribe religious duties, but Islam does not offer the Reformed Christian doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone. The distinction is not academic: Christian hope rests on what Christ has done, not on whether we can accumulate enough religious merit.

I find no comparable assurance in religions built around reincarnation. A cycle of death and rebirth governed by karma is not the Christian promise of reconciliation with God and resurrection. Christianity offers a destination, not an endless series of attempts to repair ourselves.

RELATED: What Chris Hansen knows about sin that modern culture forgets

Kelsey McNeal/Disney General Entertainment Content/Getty Images

The Christian still wrestles with sin and sorrow. Yet Christ is working in us. Our hope rests on His faithfulness, not on our ability to manufacture a cheerful mood.

That hope also takes practical form in the church. We visit the lonely, listen to the grieving, pray with the discouraged, and help families bear burdens they cannot carry alone. The sufferer needs patient fellowship, not an accusation that sadness proves spiritual failure. The gospel gives us both a message to proclaim and neighbors to love.

Finally, Christian hope reaches beyond the individual. The Great Commission sends the church into the world because the nations belong within the scope of Christ’s saving purpose. History need not follow a straight upward line; setbacks do not cancel God’s promises. I believe Scripture points toward a day when “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord” as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:9).

That gives parents, students, and churches reason to labor faithfully even when today’s headlines seem to announce defeat.

Christians have hope to offer a hopeless world. We should bring it into the darkness. If you happen to be in the Stranraer area, join us October 15 at 7 p.m. And for a further resource on spiritual depression, listen to Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ series.

​Depression, Medication, Sorrow, Sin, Christians, Alcohol, Drugs, Mental health, Faith, Death, Christ, Great commission, Scripture, Opinion & analysis 

Artificial intelligence has already transformed the way Americans work and research.

But BlazeTV host Daniel Horowitz believes the public is being sold an inflated vision of artificial general intelligence — and pouring staggering resources into the wrong model to achieve it.

“I actually like AI,” Horowitz tells BlazeTV host Steve Deace. “And I believe for narrow tasks, edge computing, localized sovereign data … there’s a lot of good stuff being done.”

“My concern is, we’re misallocating resources away from the most useful, least painful, least consuming analogues of AI and using an all-of-government approach towards this AGI, which in my view is the least useful … most expensive, really unfeasible the way they’re trying to do it, and also problematic,” he explains.

“For the average person out there, like me, that only knows about AI doing that or asking ChatGPT questions, help them understand the distinction that you just drew in ways that would relate to their understanding of the technology,” Deace says.

“If you want an ‘ask me anything,’ what they did was get people addicted to it, and then they’re like, ‘OK, it doesn’t cost anything,’” Horowitz explains.

“But then it does. Actually, we’re going to have to build five hyperscales in every county, and this much power, and yada yada, and make everything else more expensive,” he says.

“So, now that’s an ROI thing,” he continues. “It’s not that there is no use to artificial general intelligence, right — this open-ended generative AI. It’s not that there’s no use to it. It’s that there is a question of an ROI in the way they’re going about doing it.”

“Is it accurate to say that you believe, therefore, we’re overselling this technology to the American people based on what you just told us?” Deace asks.

“We’re overselling the need and utility of centralized cloud hyperscale model for AI. In terms of deploying it in low latency, narrow at the edge, there’s things like the Iron Dome in Israel. You know, Israel has no hyperscale,” Horowitz replies.

“My core thesis is what they’re selling you on — again, and people could disagree with me, but my contention is that, just the opposite. Not only am I not opposed to it, I believe they are doing what government does in health care and many other sectors,” he continues.

“They’re misallocating resources towards a bubble and to Oracle’s grift of their 1970s technology of a centralized cloud in an impossible way that would perpetually have to scale in a way that either becomes obsolete or unfeasible,” he adds.

Horowitz goes on to explain that one of the only reasons this is being done is “a surveillance state.”

“Remember, China doesn’t have nearly as many of these because they built their surveillance state — in large part from these same companies, by the way — before AI. So, they already have it. They don’t need it,” he says.

And what Horowitz finds extremely concerning is that auto companies have just “won the rights to your texts when they get cycled through the car player.”

“They got all of it, and they won in court that they’re able to keep it,” he says.

“Your car, your home, your appliances. They would ideally want every step you make, every breath you take,” he adds.

Want more from Steve Deace?

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

​Artificial intelligence, Daniel horowitz, Surveillance state, Steve deace, Ai, Blazetv show 

Humility is the necessary virtue.

Let me unpack that a little: Without humility, Saint Peter will not let you pass through the Pearly Gates.

Our culture has moved so far toward autonomy that we can barely imagine obedience as anything other than weakness.

And what is humility?

Like the old adage says, humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less. If you study the lives of the saints — or, for that matter, almost any historically admirable person — you’ll recognize that humility is an immensely attractive quality.

Celebrity cleric

Blessed Fulton J. Sheen, America’s most famous Catholic bishop of the 20th century, had plenty to be proud of. Now on his way to sainthood, Sheen was a brilliant scholar, a gifted writer, and one of the most compelling communicators of his age. His radio broadcasts reached millions. His television program, “Life Is Worth Living,” drew audiences in the 1950s that rivaled the biggest entertainers in America.

Yet two episodes in Sheen’s life suggest that one of his greatest virtues was not eloquence at all. It was obedience.

The first came before almost anyone knew his name.

After his ordination in 1919, Sheen pursued advanced studies in Europe and distinguished himself at the University of Louvain in Belgium. He became the first American to win the prestigious Cardinal Mercier Prize and earned the university’s coveted agrégé degree. By the time he was 30, Oxford and Columbia reportedly wanted him to teach philosophy.

Then, in 1926, his bishop ordered him home to Peoria, Illinois — not to a university, but to St. Patrick’s, one of the city’s poorest parishes.

Sheen went.

He visited the sick, celebrated Mass, begged for parish funds, and preached. Nine months later, his bishop explained what had happened. People worried that Sheen’s European success had made him “high-hat,” too important to take orders. The parish assignment had been a test.

He passed.

Entertainer in exile

Soon Sheen was sent to teach at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., beginning the public career that would eventually make him famous.

Four decades later, obedience cost him far more.

By then, Sheen was a household name. His television audience reached into the tens of millions. But he had also clashed with New York’s powerful Cardinal Francis Spellman over money Sheen raised for the missions. Sheen appealed the dispute to Rome and prevailed. Spellman, according to accounts of the dispute, did not forget it.

In 1966, Sheen was sent to Rochester, New York. Many biographers have interpreted the transfer as a form of exile: One of the world’s most famous religious communicators suddenly found himself running a relatively modest diocese far from the center of American media.

His years there were difficult. Accustomed to packed auditoriums around the world, Sheen once gave a series of retreat talks in Rochester’s largest auditorium and drew a disappointing crowd.

“The whole world comes to hear Fulton Sheen, except his own diocese,” he reportedly told a fellow priest.

RELATED: Tens of thousands attend beatification of anti-communist TV star priest Fulton Sheen

Dick Lewis/New York Daily News/Getty Images

Right or wrong

It’s tempting to make the lesson here that Sheen’s superiors were right. They were not necessarily right at all. Spellman may have acted vindictively. Sheen himself made mistakes in Rochester. Authority can be petty, shortsighted, and simply wrong.

But that’s precisely why obedience — like its close friend, humility — is a virtue.

Obedience means little when the person in authority agrees with you. Its real test comes when you believe you are more talented, more informed, or more capable than the person giving the order — and perhaps you are.

Modern celebrity culture teaches almost the opposite. Discover your gift. Build your brand. Grow your platform. Maximize your reach. If an institution doesn’t recognize your genius, leave it. If a boss frustrates your calling, find another boss. If a church constrains your ministry, start your own.

That instinct is not always wrong. Institutions can become corrupt, and conscience has claims no human authority can erase. Obedience is not servility, nor does it require cooperating with evil.

But our culture has moved so far toward autonomy that we can barely imagine obedience as anything other than weakness.

Serving in silence

There is a particularly American — and, yes, Protestant — dimension to this. The Reformation elevated individual judgment against ecclesial authority, while the American experiment elevated independence and suspicion of hierarchy. Those impulses produced real goods. But untethered, they can also produce a Christianity in which everyone becomes his own pope, pastor, and doctrinal court of final appeal.

Catholicism proposes something harder: Your gifts are not entirely your own. Your vocation does not entitle you to the largest audience. You may be called to serve where no one applauds. You may even be badly deployed by legitimate authority.

Sheen, who had every reason to believe his voice belonged on the biggest stage available, accepted assignments beneath his stature and endured humiliations he did not deserve.

In 1979, near the end of Sheen’s life, Pope John Paul II embraced the frail priest in St. Patrick’s Cathedral and offered what may be the perfect summary of his legacy: “You have written and spoken well of the Lord Jesus Christ. You are a loyal son of the Church.”

Not the most famous son. Not the most brilliant.

A loyal one.

In an age obsessed with building our platforms, Fulton Sheen leaves us with a harder question: Can we remain faithful when obedience costs us the audience we think we deserve?

​Cardinal francis spellman, Catholicism, Christianity, Entertainment, Fulton sheen, Protestantism, Blessed fulton sheen, Pope john paul ii, Faith 

For policymakers and citizens sick of decades wasted on failed globalist experiments, Marco Rubio’s nationalist speech in Athens on Wednesday was a huge gulp of fresh air. The alternative to collectivist one-world ideology can sound almost embarrassingly obvious: Nations should pursue their own interests, recover confidence in their inheritance, and cooperate from a position of strength rather than dissolution.

Rubio’s setting made the point for him. Speaking at the Pnyx beneath the Acropolis, he traced America’s inheritance through Athens, Rome, Christendom, medieval Europe, and England. He called for the West to recover the ambition, confidence, and national power it once took for granted. His speech made the civilizational case in deliberately grand terms.

Pretending the Eastern Romans never existed — or that they have nothing to tell us about who we really are — leaves us poorer, more arrogant, and less prepared for the trials ahead.

But his civilizational reset could have been stronger and surer. The great omission was the thousand-year span defined not by Athens, Rome, or even Jerusalem, but by Constantinople — capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and guardian of a Roman Christian civilization that survived long after the political West had collapsed.

Its final outposts fell only about three decades before Columbus reached the Americas. For perspective, 30 years ago the Unabomber was arrested, the first Motorola flip phone appeared, and IBM’s Deep Blue became the first computer to beat a reigning world chess champion in a game under standard tournament conditions.

That Byzantium received no real showing in Rubio’s address is hardly surprising. Despite its millennium-long life after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Eastern Empire has endured generations of Western neglect, condescension, and selective amnesia.

There are many reasons. One is that the modern West became preoccupied almost to obsession with its own political development — its revolutions, constitutions, ideological struggles, and repeated attempts to construct an order that could tame human nature without destroying liberty. Somewhere along the way, the East came to seem like the place where history had stalled.

“Byzantium” — no longer “really” Rome in Western eyes — became shorthand for decadence, intrigue, stagnation, and oriental despotism. The important action supposedly moved elsewhere: to the Latin West, where Europe would eventually beat back Islamic power at Tours, Lepanto, and Vienna and narrate the victories as its own civilizational story.

That is an impoverished self-understanding. Excising the Eastern Roman Empire deprives the West of some of the warnings it most needs as it flails through geopolitical waters that seem unprecedented, mostly because we have forgotten so much precedent.

The Eastern Romans spent centuries fighting for survival against great powers on their frontiers. Their long rivalry with Sasanian Persia culminated in a ruinous early-7th-century war that exhausted both empires. Almost immediately, Arab Muslim armies surged through territories Rome and Persia had fought over for generations. Centuries later, Latin Christians inflicted one of Byzantium’s worst wounds themselves when the Fourth Crusade diverted to Constantinople and sacked the city in 1204. The empire was restored in 1261, but it never recovered its former strength.

RELATED: Rubio celebrates Western exceptionalism, warns civilization is at an ‘inflection point’

Mark Schiefelbein/POOL/AFP/Getty Images

The point is not that the modern West owes Byzantium an apology, although some historical humility would be healthy. The point is that civilizations sometimes face grueling, protracted defense requiring a spiritual sobriety to match. Today the West is dangerously tempted by visions of global end-zone dancing — speedrunning the uncool parts of geopolitics in favor of a world-war blitz won by super-duper wonder-weapons.

Some Constantinopolitan emperors knew the temptation. Nikephoros II Phokas, the warrior-emperor who reigned from 963 to 969, won spectacular victories against Muslim powers and reportedly sought church recognition of soldiers killed in those campaigns as martyrs.

The church refused. Patriarch Polyeuctus invoked St. Basil’s Canon 13, which says that although killing in war had not traditionally been treated as murder, soldiers who shed blood should abstain from communion for three years because their hands were not clean. Whatever else one makes of the canon, the answer to Nikephoros was unmistakable: Military victory did not automatically confer holiness.

That is a useful warning against today’s temptation to treat defeating our enemies by whatever means we choose as the height of spiritual purity and moral heroism. It is also a reminder that strong, healthy, independent churches can serve as an irreplaceable counterweight to political rulers who begin to imagine themselves as spiritual authorities and their regimes as godlike powers before which citizens and foreigners alike must bow and scrape.

RELATED: The last knight of Europe rides again

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

And Polyeuctus’ victory points toward something still more important. Spiritual authority does not arise from the top-down power of worldly lawgivers. Holiness begins with people willing to make the difficult purification of their own hearts a lifelong athletic practice — the opposite of the performative, self-flattering spiritual box-checking Jesus decried in the parable of the Pharisee and the publican.

The West would benefit from reordering its sociopolitical habits in that direction — not to weaken itself or retreat into inert obscurantism, but to recover clarity and responsibility at a time of immense division and instability.

Much of today’s turmoil arises from efforts to turn political might, now amplified by astonishing technology, into a new god and a new church with very old stripes. Rubio is right that the West must remember what it is. But Athens and Rome are not enough, and “Christendom” becomes dangerously abstract if we skip the civilization that carried Roman Christianity for a thousand years while the Western world was being remade.

Pretending the Eastern Romans never existed — or that they have nothing to tell us about who we really are — leaves us poorer, more arrogant, and less prepared for the trials ahead.

​Citizens, Confidence, Eastern roman empire, Greece, Marco rubio, Responsibility, Technology, Vienna, Western civilization, Christendom, Rome, Athens, Constantinople, Byzantium, Opinion & analysis 

Share the Arrows, Allie Beth Stuckey’s annual women’s conference, returned for a third year on Saturday in Dallas, Texas. The “Relatable” host built the event to encourage and strengthen Christian women seeking sound doctrine and sisterhood when the progressive culture takes aim.

As always, the lineup fit the purpose. Rosaria Butterfield, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Alisa Childers, and Costi Hinn, among other prominent names in the evangelical world, each took the stage, with Christian music duo Shane & Shane leading worship.

At 37 weeks pregnant with her fourth child, Stuckey closed the event with a powerful speech on the importance of clarity and courage — two words that undergird the entire Share the Arrows conference and her broader platform.

“Clarity comes from knowing God and His Word, and courage comes from trusting God and His Word,” she said.

While these concepts seem to go hand in hand, they’re not always working together as they should. And when they don’t, man gets himself in trouble, Stuckey warned.

The first example, she said, of how knowing God’s Word doesn’t always translate to trusting it goes all the way back to Genesis, when the serpent approached Eve in the garden.

Stuckey pointed out how Satan asked Eve, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’” Eve’s response was the correct answer: “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.”’

Satan responded with what Stuckey called a “half-truth”: “You will not certainly die. For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

This was enough to convince Eve to disobey God’s command and convince her husband to do the same.

“Eve knew God’s words. Eve had the biblical knowledge. … She could repeat God’s words back to Satan even in a high-pressure moment,” said Stuckey.

What she lacked was “trust.”

“Because of that choice, because of the buying in to the confusion, there’s a distance from God,” she explained. “There’s difficulty with creation, and there’s dissonance between each other.”

The pattern of Eve’s sin — knowing the Word of God but not trusting it — is still playing out today, Stuckey warned. Christians are still confronted with that same question: “Did God really say …?” and Satan is still at the ready to answer with confusion — a “half-truth” that almost sounds biblical.

“The people in shady corners of Manhattan don’t sell knockoff Louis Vuittons by convincing you a Kroger bag is the real thing,” she analogized. “They give you something that looks really close to the real thing because that’s the only way you’ll buy it.”

Satan, too, she warned, is also a master of “counterfeits,” and if we don’t know and trust God, we’ll fall victim to his schemes.

“Ultimately, all believing of lies, all sin comes down to this: Who do you trust?” Stuckey said. “Satan is satisfied with having us puffed up with knowledge. He is OK with us having clarity. None of that matters if we do not trust God.”

She pointed out the epidemic in modern culture, especially when it comes to “progressive Christianity,” of people knowing what God’s Word says about gender, sex, marriage, and the sanctity of life but choosing to believe lies anyway.

“Bible knowledge is not enough if we do not trust God,” she reiterated.

Stuckey then pointed to the example of Jesus, who, like Eve, was tempted by Satan and responded by repeating God’s Word. However, He triumphed because He did what she failed to do: trust God.

“Jesus is the perfect embodiment of not just clarity but clarity and courage,” she said.

God, she urged the audience, is worthy of our courage to trust him. “This God who is love, who is kindness, who is righteousness, who is compassion, who has not spared his own son … if this God is for me … who in the world can be against me?” she asked.

“If this God is for me, then what He tells me to do, what He tells me to say, what He tells me is right, and what He tells me is wrong is for my good and is done in love. It’s not just enough to know that. … You have to trust it.”

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

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​Allie beth stuckey, Share the arrows 

Americans shouldn’t wait until Sharia courts become widespread before deciding where they stand — and Brigitte Gabriel is doing everything in her power to help them see the threat before it’s too late.

Gabriel tells BlazeTV host Nick Freitas that she was shocked to relive her upbringing in Lebanon — where her home was attacked by Islamic extremists — on 9/11, when her daughter sat watching the towers fall on the news and asked her, “Mommy, why did they do this to us?”

“And I found myself, Nick,” she explains, “looking into my daughter’s eyes and repeating to her the exact same words my father said to me when I was a 10-year-old little girl, laying wounded in a hospital in Lebanon, hooked up to IVs on both arms, one blood bag in one arm, one IV in another, asking my father, ‘Why did they do this to us?’”

“And my father told me, ‘They hate us because they consider us infidels, and they want to kill us.’ Here we were two generations apart, two continents apart. I had to look into my daughter’s eyes and repeat to her the same words my father said to me,” she continues.

“That day I was reborn as an activist,” she adds, noting that this is why she started the Act for America foundation in 2002.

This foundation serves to “organize people in chapters nationwide to teach them how they can impact policy at their local level.”

Not only does the foundation now have over 5 million members nationwide, but it has successfully passed 300 bills at the federal and state level.

And the latest bill it is putting through Congress is the Preserving Our Constitution Act of 2026.

“It says no Sharia courts are allowed to operate in the United States. We are building the firewall to make sure that this does not happen,” Gabriel explains.

Freitas warns that this could easily become a problem for the U.S., as in the U.K. right now, there are 84 Sharia courts.

“Please understand that when Brigitte here is talking about Sharia courts in the United States, it is an inevitability unless you’re proactive,” Freitas says. “Because the moment they start going, and you haven’t prepared yourself for this, now all of a sudden, they win a couple of cases in court, and nobody wants to challenge them, and they start setting them up everywhere.”

However, Gabriel has some bad news.

“The Sharia courts are already operating in the United States,” she says. “The first Sharia court was established in Richardson, Texas, in 1991. Since then, we have documented 150 cases judged under Sharia law in the United States in 23 states.”

This is why in 2009, Gabriel got to work on the American Laws for American Courts bill, which says that “no law that is not compatible with the U.S. Constitution would be allowed to be practiced in an American courtroom.”

“We were able to pass that law in 13 states,” she explains.

“We’ve been fighting this battle for a long time,” she adds.

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

Start watching Nick Freitas NOW at blazetv.com and use the promo code NICK for $20 off your BlazeTV+ subscription.

​Americans, Lebanon, Sharia courts, Uk, Islamic extremists, 911, Islam, Nick freitas, Blazetv show, Brigitte gabriel