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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alex WROBLEWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

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

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

That was the moment stewardship gave way to something else.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alex WROBLEWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

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

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

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

Americans have the right to notice the contrast.

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

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

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

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

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

Glenn Beck calls it an “absolute horror show.”

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

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

“Then Tuesday night comes,” says Glenn bleakly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To hear more, watch the video above.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

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

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

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

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

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

Throne and altar

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

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

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

Why?

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

America’s inheritance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sydney Morning Herald/Antonio Ribiero/Getty Images

Cherry bomb

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

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

What exactly did “the nation” mean to her?

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

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

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

Americans and America

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

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

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

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

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

Succession concession?

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

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

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

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

Baby bust

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

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

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

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

Nostalgia nation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bottom up

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

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

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

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

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

Vulgar outgrowth

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

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

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

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

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

Small and dependent

Why?

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

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

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

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

Bettman/Getty Images

Empire state of mind

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

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

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

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

King me

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

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

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

Tugged in two directions

So what’s left?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s according to O’Donnell.

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

Extinction-level event

“Creative differences” are making a Hollywood comeback.

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

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

Dirty jobless

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

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

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

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

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

Nolan negged

Did Christopher Nolan step on her cat’s tail?

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

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

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

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

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

Al Drago/Getty Images

Money Mark

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

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

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

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

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

Hulk … hypocrite! And that’s being kind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For a while, almost everyone played along.

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

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

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

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

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

I would not start planning the funeral.

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

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

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

Shannon Finney/WireImage/Getty Images

But Donald Trump was president in 2019 too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heidi Gutman/Bravo/Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sustainable commerce requires a baseline of public trust.

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

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

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

Personalized price tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bryan Bedder/Getty Images

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

Stopping invisible pickpockets

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

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

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

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

Capitalism for citizens

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

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

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

​Surveillance pricing, Tech 

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

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

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

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

What does this say about the direction of the nation?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To hear more, watch the episode above.

Want more from Steve Deace?

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

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