For most of his career, Charles Murray carried a strange sort of notoriety.

He never asked for it, and he certainly didn’t enjoy it, but it clung to him all the same. He was the man who pointed out differences in IQ across groups — differences supported by mountains of data — and was promptly told he was a monster for noticing.

It is refreshing to watch a man of his stature poke holes in the pretensions of modern unbelief.

To the elite commentariat, acknowledging uncomfortable facts is far more dangerous than denying them. Murray learned that lesson the hard way. The label “racist” followed him for the simple sin of looking at the world as it is, not as fashionable minds say it must be.

Now, in his new book “Taking Religion Seriously,” he commits a second and perhaps even more impermissible offense: He takes God seriously. And in our age of brazen unbelief — when Richard Dawkins still preaches that matter explains everything and Sam Harris speaks of spirituality while denying the Spirit — this is the ultimate rebellion.

Murray has joined an unexpected migration of thinkers who once rejected faith but now find themselves drawn to it. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, once firmly planted in the New Atheist camp, shocked her old colleagues in 2023 when she publicly embraced Christianity.

Murray’s turn is quieter, more measured, and unmistakably his own. But he is walking down the very same path.

Faith beyond reason

The book is a quick read, but it echoes for days.

Murray writes not as a preacher but as a man who has spent a lifetime studying human behavior at its highest and lowest extremes. He knows what happens to communities when faith vanishes. He tracked it in “Coming Apart” long before religion reporters noticed. When church attendance drops, families weaken, neighborhoods suffer, and loneliness settles like dust over entire towns.

For years, Murray called for a “cultural Great Awakening” — a return to shared habits and values without requiring belief itself. Even then, the idea looked doomed, like trying to spark a flame in deep space. And now, finally, he seems willing to concede the obvious.

This book is Murray’s attempt to understand that missing ingredient. It’s the story of an agnostic who found himself slowly pulled toward the transcendent.

His wife, Catherine, became interested in faith. Murray followed her questions, then his own. He approached classical arguments for God not as trophies to be displayed but as puzzles worth pondering. The unmoved mover. Fine-tuning. The strange universality of the moral compass. And he reads C.S. Lewis with the care of a man who knows he may be wrong and wants to be right.

This humility gives the book a sense of clarity. Murray doesn’t pretend to have been struck by lightning. He jokes that he has yet to feel the “joys of faith,” comparing himself to a child outside a bright window, watching a celebration he longs to join. It is one of the loveliest passages in the book and one of the most honest.

RELATED: Why real Christianity terrifies the elites — and they’re right to worry

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To his credit, Murray confronts the fear that haunts the secular mind: the fear of looking foolish.

His mention of the “tribe of smart people” lands less as pride and more as an admission that he was shaped by a previous paradigm in which intellect stood in for conviction. And he knows exactly how that tribe behaves. Terminal lucidity? Near-death experiences? To the self-appointed high priests of materialism, such things must be dismissed before anyone dares examine them. They carry their disbelief like a badge of honor.

Murray refuses to play along. If the evidence points beyond matter, he says, follow it. Even if the clever people frown — and especially then.

It is refreshing to watch a man of his stature poke holes in the pretensions of modern unbelief, not with anger or sarcasm, but with a steady hand and a willingness to face what many prefer to ignore — and hope we ignore too.

Truth conquers data

For Christians, the most moving aspect of the book is Murray’s recognition that religion can’t be divorced from the heart of who we are. A society can’t thrive on secondhand virtue. It must grow from living faith, not admiration from a distance.

Murray’s old belief in an underlying, all-encompassing framework without God now strikes him as absurd. The last few years have shown him what many Christians already know: Attempting to build community on the fumes of forgotten belief is folly. The foundation is already dust before the first brick is laid.

Murray now accepts the existence of God. He accepts the reliability of scripture. He accepts the claims of Christ. And perhaps most telling of all, he no longer fears death. A man who once considered suicide at the end of life now finds himself at peace.

That, in itself, is a kind of miracle.

“Taking Religion Seriously” isn’t an altar call. It’s something rarer: the record of a mind long trained to trust data now learning to trust truth. Murray shows that the honest search for meaning will always lead beyond materialism, beyond ego, beyond the boundaries set by those who pride themselves on sophistication but know nothing of the soul.

​Charles murray, Reason, Christianity, Christian, God, Taking religion seriously, Faith 

Genesis 6 remains one of the most debated and controversial sections of the Bible. The extreme brevity yet massive implications of the description of the Nephilim — the wicked offspring of “the daughters of man” and “the sons of God” — have kept scholars locked in debate for well over two millennia.

There are three main bodies of belief when it comes to the Nephilim: They were wicked humans spawned from the intermarriage of the godly line of Seth and the ungodly line of Cain; they were human tyrants born of kings claiming to be divine and their harems; or they were giant human-god hybrids created from the coupling of fallen angels and human women.

Timothy Alberino — “explorer, teacher, real-life Indiana Jones, and the author of “Birthright: The Coming Posthuman Apocalypse and the Usurpation of Adam’s Dominion on Earth”’ — falls into the latter category, arguing there’s abundant biblical and historical evidence proving the divine nature of the Nephilim.

But his theory doesn’t end with their decimation in the worldwide flood described in Genesis 6-9. Alberino believes we will see the return of the Nephilim agenda in the end times — not the same giants, but a new hybrid abomination born of man, machine, and forbidden knowledge.

In this riveting interview with Glenn Beck, Alberino dives into a theory that will leave ice in your veins and fire in your prayers.

The book of Enoch, which Alberino argues is an authentic, divinely inspired text corroborated by both the Old and New Testaments, gives us insight into the world’s “golden age” — the period when the giant race of Nephilim roamed the Earth. It also perhaps explains legends like Atlantis — a city ruled by Poseidon’s “demi-god” sons before the sea swallowed it up in a great flood.

The “golden age” of human-god procreation outlined in the book of Enoch is the “origin story” of “every primary ancient civilization,” including the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, says Alberino. In these cultures, demon gods (“Watchers” in Enochian language) and their giant offspring were revered and worshipped. Only the Hebrews saw this era of halfbreeds as “a nightmarish dystopia.”

While this age ended with the great flood, Alberino believes another golden age of hybrids is coming. “Everything that was done in the antediluvian [pre-flood] world,” specifically “the corruption of all flesh,” is “going to be repeated to some extent, [but] not exactly in the same way,” he says.

In this new golden age, humans will merge not with gods but with something that is quickly becoming god-like: technology.

As humanity edges ever closer toward a “post-human apocalypse,” with developments in “genetics, robotics, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology” continuing to skyrocket and coalesce, we will inevitably be forced to answer this harrowing question: “What does it mean to be a human being, and is our humanity worth preserving?”

“We are in some sense building the mechanism of our own destruction right now. We are creating the tools that are going to enable us to redefine human biology — to remake Adam,” says Alberino.

But it won’t be Adam from Eden. It will be the demonic spawn of man and machine — a transhuman and eventually a post-human, which we’ve been told repeatedly by globalists and tech elites are in humanity’s pipeline.

Much of the world won’t bat an eye.

“From the secular, atheistic, Darwinian perspective, who cares, right? Because there’s nothing sacred about being human,” says Alberino. “I mean, there’s nothing in their worldview that makes the human being anything other than an animal with a bigger brain.”

To these godless technocrats and the hordes who blindly follow, transhumanism and post-humanism are “just the natural course of human development,” but “the biblical narrative is quite different,” Alberino explains. “The biblical narrative defines mankind … as being created in the image and likeness of God.”

But the imago dei of our nature isn’t the only reason preserving humanity is paramount. Christians would do well to remember that there’s only one qualification for eligibility in Christ’s redemption plan: “You must be human,” Alberino warns.

But transhumans and post-humans aren’t people any more, which means they’ve lost access to salvation of Christ.

Glenn, who has been warning about digital Armageddon for years, wonders if this merging of man and machine is the mark of the beast warned about in the Revelation. According to the prophetic text, once you have the fatal mark, salvation is impossible. What if the reason for this is because the mark of the beast signifies that you’re not a human and therefore not eligible?

“Once you become transhuman, you can’t undo that. … That starts to make that scripture in Revelation work … because you’re not human,” he says.

“Precisely right,” agrees Alberino.

“The technology we hold in our hands is going into our brains very soon. It is going into the cerebral cortex, and rather than surfing the internet with our thumbs, we’re going to be surfing the internet with this accomplice — artificial intelligence — through the speed of thought,” he says.

Once this happens, being a regular human being means oppression, isolation, and poverty. It means the world leaves you behind. But to those who either bend the knee or excitedly sign up for the merge, they’ll be living in a new golden age.

As the world hurtles forward into a harrowing technological future, we ironically find ourselves back in the Garden of Eden faced with the serpent’s same temptation: “You will not surely die. … You will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

The question, Alberino says, is: Will we strike another “Faustian bargain” and “sell our birthright for a bowl of stew — for the advances and the advantages of post-humanism, of transhumanism?” Or will we see “the worth of [our] humanity” — the humanity that gives us access to the blood of Jesus — and resist the pull?

To hear the full interview, watch the video above.

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​The glenn beck podcast, Glenn beck, Timothy alberino, Nephilim, Genesis 6, Blazetv, Blaze media, Transhumanism, Posthumanism, Ai 

Handing a smartphone over to a child in 2025 is like putting a child in the middle of a junkyard and calling it a playground.

Yes, the space contains useful tools and materials for adults who know what they are doing. They arrive with knowledge, caution, and protective equipment. They know where to step and what to avoid. And if the adult should get hurt through recklessness or inattention, they have enough life experience to know how to mitigate the harm.

Missing red flags is not just possible — it is inevitable.

And even if you post warning signs at the gate, the environment itself remains full of hazards — rusted metal, broken glass, exposed wiring, spilled gasoline. A child placed in that environment is vulnerable not because the child disobeys the signs, but because the space was never designed for them to navigate safely. The danger is structural.

But kids are naturally curious, and they like to explore. Five out of every 10 children who spend time in that “playground” will be significantly, perhaps even fatally, harmed by the experience.

This is the situation we have created by normalizing smartphones for children. Smartphones were never intended for young users, yet in the U.S., more than 60% of children ages 5 to 11 and 84% of teens now have one.

Those devices are portals to an enormous ecosystem of apps — approximately 1.8 million available in Apple’s App Store alone. According to Apple’s 2023 Transparency Report, 500 experts assess about 132,000 apps each week. That breaks down to around 265 apps per reviewer per week or about nine minutes per app.

Nine minutes to determine how the app collects and stores data, whether it enables account creation (and deletion), whether it uses copyrighted materials, whether it meets hardware and software standards, whether it contains illegal or harmful content, and whether it can be used to facilitate illegal or harmful activity

Most readers could not read the Apple App Review Guidelines in nine minutes, let alone meaningfully evaluate an app’s design, mechanics, and community-risk profile.

All that before you even get to questions of safety.

Little wonder, then, that so many apps that seem innocuous at first blush are later discovered to be a predator’s playground.

RELATED: Is your child being exposed to pedophiles in the metaverse?

Francisco Javier Ortiz Marzo/iStock/Getty Images Plus

A recent New York Post headline warns, “Wizz is like ‘Tinder for kids,’ as teens use the app to hook up while adult predators lurk.” Wizz is marketed to users ages 12 to 18 as a way to meet new friends who share common interests. In practice, it functions more like a teen version of Tinder, complete with profile swiping and private messaging that connects minors with total strangers, including adults posing as teens. The Post details three cases of adult men who allegedly used the app to meet underage girls.

Wizz is far from the only example.

This fall, a married 42-year-old father of two was convicted in the U.K. for encouraging a child to self-harm. The man created six fake profiles on Discord and Snapchat, each one posing as a teenaged boy, in order to ensnare, blackmail, and abuse a 13-year-old girl.

The investigation was hampered by the fact that he had used stolen identities and fake accounts to communicate with his victim and by the fact that the apps he used to communicate with her allowed him to set the messages to “auto-delete,” which left no digital trail for investigators to follow.

Kik, an anonymous messaging app, was considered a haven for child predators because it provided anonymity and allowed users to communicate without sharing phone numbers. Vice reported in 2019 that the app was shutting down, but it is still available for download on Apple’s App Store and, as recently as this summer, was linked to a number of child exploitation cases.

Any social media platform targeted specifically to young users is ripe for abuse, but often parents do not know about the dangers until the harm has already been done. We rely on the imagined expertise and authority of professional reviewers.

If the app is available on an app store, we assume it has been properly vetted.

But the truth is that app stores rely on developers’ self-reported age-ratings and safety claims. And with less than 10 minutes to spend reviewing each app, the deck is stacked against children and families. Missing red flags is not just possible — it is inevitable.

Congress must act and pass the App Store Accountability Act.

The bill would require app stores to be transparent about how apps handle data, how they moderate interactions, and for whom their products are intended. It would establish clear responsibility when apps marketed to minors become vehicles for grooming, harassment, or exploitation. And it would ensure that companies profiting from child-facing platforms cannot simply shrug and point to the fine print when harm occurs.

The App Store Accountability Act will not eliminate every risk, but it will help end the era of Big Tech reviewing itself and calling it protection. That would be a big win for families.

​App store accountability act, Smarphones, Predators, Children, Protect children 

Elton John has recently praised President Donald Trump for his foreign policy work but stopped short of saying he was one of the nation’s greatest presidents.

Instead, the beloved musician explained what could cement Trump as one of the greatest American presidents ever to sit in the Oval Office.

Last year, John called it “brilliant” when Trump labeled North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un “Rocket Man” in reference to one of John’s songs, but the singer faced backlash over allegedly endorsing Trump for the 2024 presidential election.

‘If he wants to go down as one of the greatest presidents in history…’

John later clarified his position in an Instagram post, saying he was “simply acknowledging the fact that Trump has long been a fan” of John’s music and that “historically he’s been very kind” to him.

Fast-forward to an interview with Variety published Tuesday, and the 78-year-old is still not shy about giving the president credit where it is due. Moreover, John praised Republicans who have shown interest in his work to find a cure for AIDS.

“The bipartisan thing makes common sense. To see us come so far with the medical and scientific advances, and to think this is the only disease that can be completely cured in one’s lifetime,” John explained.

“President Trump has maybe solved the peace problem. If he wants to go down as one of the greatest presidents in history … if he ended AIDS, that would really be a feather in his cap.”

RELATED: Trump called Kim Jong Un ‘Rocket Man’— and Elton John ‘thought it was brilliant’

2004: Melania Knauss, Donald Trump and Sir Elton John during 12th Annual Elton John AIDS Foundation Oscar Party Co-hosted by In Style – Inside at Pearl in West Hollywood, California, United States. Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/WireImage

Sir Elton spoke more generally on Trump’s peacemaking progress overseas, expressing hope that the “big war” between Israel and Palestine will be “settled” soon.

He then referred to AIDS as “another war” that is being prevented from ending because governments won’t allow medicine to get to the people who need it.

“There are crimes against millions of other people that are happening because of governments and stigma and hate,” John remarked to Variety. “It’s so frustrating when you have the medicine, you have prep, you have the antiretrovirals. We can stop the spread of AIDS, if people just got off their backsides and treated human beings in a Christian kind of way.”

RELATED: Trump admin leaves Elon Musk’s Grok, xAI off massive list of AI tech partners

Donald Trump and Elton John walking together at the Taj Mahal Casino Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey May 19 1990. Photo by Jeffrey Asher/ Getty Images

During his first administration, Trump launched an initiative called Ending the HIV Epidemic in the U.S. and announced it during the 2019 State of the Union address.

“In recent years, we have made remarkable progress in the fight against HIV and AIDS. Scientific breakthroughs have brought a once-distant dream within reach,” Trump said in February 2019.

The president said the goal of the program was to eliminate the HIV epidemic in the United States within the next 10 years.

“We have made incredible strides. Incredible. Together, we will defeat AIDS in America and beyond,” he added.

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President Donald Trump’s latest comments on semiconductor exports sounded almost conciliatory — until they weren’t. Speaking recently on “60 Minutes,” the president said he would let Nvidia “deal with China” but drew a bright red line: Beijing could buy chips, just not the “most advanced” ones. The message was calibrated for maximum effect: permissive enough to please markets, hawkish enough to claim toughness. Nvidia’s stock jumped immediately — but China did not get what it wanted.

Days later, in a Financial Times interview, Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, warned that if the U.S. blocked his company from selling more of its advanced chips to China, it would “lose” the AI race. The argument was astonishing in its candor: Cut us off, Beijing wins.

As grateful as America should be for breathtaking innovations, an irreconcilable tension exists between national interest and fiduciary duty.

The comparison between a president sounding measured and a CEO trying to sound indispensable captures a dangerous inversion of power. Nvidia has become more than America’s most valuable company. It’s attempting to become its policymaker, shaping the boundaries of what Washington thinks possible in its competition with China.

To understand how one company reached that position, it helps to revisit what happened in Washington just days before Trump met Xi Jinping in South Korea.

Nvidia called it a GPU Technology Conference. Yet the event felt less like a developer’s conference and more like a tech-bro-meets-MAGA jamboree: free swag and a booming video hymn to American genius — from Thomas Edison to Donald J. Trump. Huang, leather jacket gleaming, strode out like a preacher to proclaim that the age of reindustrialization had arrived.

The D.C. version of GTC was not the San Jose GTC tech insiders have come to know. For the first time, Nvidia brought a full-blown edition of its developers’ confab to the capital, a strategic choice. The company does not merely want to sit at the table where policy is made — it wants to own it.

After hours of Super Bowl-style buildup — financiers whispering, tech CEOs hinting — attendees were herded into a dimly lit hall, where Huang unveiled a cascade of partnerships. The headline act that made sleeves roll up on both the policy bench and the brokerage floor was the Vera Rubin Superchip, billed as made in America and spoken of with the gravity reserved for national monuments.

It’s a dazzling feat of engineering: silicon that can be waved before a crowd as proof that America can still design, assemble, and scale. Expected to debut next year, the chip is music to policy wonks’ ears, a gleaming symbol of reindustrialization, and perhaps a psychological hedge against the fragility of Taiwan. For investors, it’s manna. As robots increasingly take charge, building chips in the U.S. will keep the supply chain close to home and safeguard companies against the whims of geopolitics.

Then, with the applause fading, an undercurrent of tension lingered, one that perhaps only the wonks could fully register. After that opening montage, capped by Jensen’s almost rhetorical question, “Was that video amazing?” the subtext became harder to ignore. And when he closed his remarks by thanking the audience “for your service and for making America great again,” it was impossible not to think of what the financiers were murmuring on the next stage over.

“Nvidia will — or should — ship more GPUs to China.” “Jensen’s flying straight to Korea after GTC to meet Trump.” “A deal’s coming.”

Those were among the refrains traded by figures like Cantor Fitzgerald’s C.J. Muse and Altimeter Capital’s Brad Gerstner. All this, of course, is contrary to the prevailing consensus among China-watchers that the notion of rendering Beijing dependent on Nvidia’s chips is fantasy. Cultivating indigenous capability by acquiring American technology by legal or illicit means has long been Beijing’s modus operandi.

Huang knows this. Still, his company has long worked to blunt export controls and push China-specific versions of its flagship Blackwell chip, the so-called B20. It’s a familiar playbook: First came the H100, then its “export-compliant” cousins, the H800 and H20. Each time, Washington tightens the rules; each time, Nvidia finds a workaround. But this must stop.

RELATED: Big Tech’s AI boom hits voters hard — and Democrats pounce

Photo by Ron Jenkins/Getty Images

The dilemma is simple but corrosive. As grateful as America should be for breathtaking innovations, an irreconcilable tension exists between national interest and fiduciary duty. Huang may sound bullish on “betting on America,” but the reality is starker: If his company could power the AI revolutions of both superpowers at once, it would add trillions to its market cap. He is pragmatic and coldly arithmetic. Build the best chips, profit from ubiquity. You don’t get where he is without knowing your math.

At GTC, I saw the divide play out in miniature. As Altimeter’s Brad Gerstner floated the idea that “logic is on the side of letting Nvidia compete with China,” I turned to a biotech researcher. Blunt and unamused, he said: “Bulls**t.” He went on to explain that, in his field especially, China’s ascent has been a wholesale rejection of the “make China dependent” fantasy. He wasn’t wrong: Under Xi Jinping, the Made in China 2025 agenda has rendered such dependency theories delusional.

Huang tries to thread the needle gracefully, extolling U.S. manufacturing while signaling an embrace of Chinese developers. As an American, it’s hard not to be charmed by his all-American chip. As a realist, however, one leaves with questions no press release can answer. In a way, the release of this patriot-approved superchip was meant to suggest, “See, now we can sell some Blackwells to China.” As charmed as one can be, the answer is still no.

One could have told the Roosevelt administration that cutting Germany off from nuclear materials would stifle innovation. Yet we did exactly that during the Manhattan Project. And we won. It may not sound like it, but this is the same choice we face today — only this race has even greater implications for the future of civilization.

The goal can’t be attempting to trap Beijing in “dependency.” The stakes are too high. The most prudent approach is to focus on surpassing them in innovation while closing loopholes that let Beijing do what it has mastered: Learn from us, then try to replace us.

Jensen Huang has every right to fight for his company’s profits. But foreign policy shouldn’t run on a corporate playbook. The U.S. needs innovators — not influencers — setting the terms of technological rivalry.

Editor’s note: A version of article appeared originally at the American Mind.

​Big tech, Nvidia, Foreign policy, Trump, Opinion & analysis