Much like gas-station sushi, David Brooks is hard to stomach at the best of times.

But his latest New York Times essay is the kind that makes you reach for the sick bag. He opens with the usual routine: an exasperated sigh, a long, self-important pause, and the unmistakable air of a man convinced he has cracked the cosmos — again.

A hidden faith saves no one, a timid faith shapes nothing, and a faith that folds under pressure is closer to cheap furniture than conviction.

He quotes a Czech priest, hints at deep wells of wisdom, and then meanders toward the real purpose of the piece: explaining, with mild exasperation, why Christians are once again disappointing him. This is nothing new. It’s a ritual at this point — a complaint that returns like spam you swore you unsubscribed from.

To be fair, Brooks isn’t stupid. He knows how to spin a story, how to climb onto the moral high ground without looking like he’s climbing, and how to crown himself the lone voice of reason in an age he insists is losing its mind.

But there is no missing the tone that hangs over almost every line he writes about believing Americans: a thin mist of condescension, settling somewhere between pastoral concern and a parent-teacher conference. He talks about everyday Christians the way a pretentious barista talks about someone ordering regular coffee — uncultured, embarrassing, and in need of enlightenment. And the tone, more than any point he makes, gives him away instantly.

Brooks claims to fear “rigid” or “pharisaical” Christianity. Yet the only certainties that radiate from his essay are his own. He divides the world into two armies — Christian nationalists on one side and “exhausted” secular humanists on the other — and then steps forward as the lone oracle who claims to see a path out of the fog.

Christians who vote for borders, who cherish the nation that shaped their churches, or who think culture is worth defending are waved off with his familiar, weary flick of the wrist. They’re told they practice a “debauched” version of the faith.

No evidence needed. Brooks’ opinion is treated as its own proof.

His description of these believers always follows the same script. They are angry, dangerous, and obsessed with power. They clutch their creed like a makeshift weapon, ready to wallop anyone who wanders too close.

In his telling, they never act from devotion, duty, or gratitude. They never look around their communities and see an America they love slipping away. They never mourn the millions taken before they drew a breath, the cracking of our shared foundation, or the slow burial of the sacred.

Instead, Brooks tells us they operate from “threat more than hope,” as if the country’s cultural decay were some far-fetched tale told for effect, rather than something families watch unfold every day in their schools, in their cities, and on their screens.

Brooks then pivots to his preferred theological register: the poetry of longing. He praises yearning, doubts, desires, and pilgrimages — all worthwhile themes.

But he uses them the way an interior decorator uses throw pillows: scattered for mood, never for structure. His spiritual reflections float past in soft, airy phrases that never touch the ground. This isn’t the faith of the Gospels, anchored in sacrifice and truth. It’s faith as fragrance — atomized cosmetic, evaporating faster than one of his metaphors. It asks nothing, risks nothing, and confronts nothing, which may be why Brooks finds it so comforting.

RELATED: Exposing the great lie about ‘MAGA Christianity’ — and the truth elites hate

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Throughout his essay, Brooks holds up a small circle of “wise people” as models of the faith America needs — Tomas Halík, Rowan Williams, and a handful of theologians who speak in clichés and move through the world like contemplative shadows. Their calm inspires him. Their pluralism delights him. Brooks treats their quietism as the apex of Christian maturity, as if the holiest life is lived at arm’s length, murmuring about mystery while the roof caves in.

What he never admits is what these figures actually represent: a brand of Christianity that thrives in seminar rooms, academic conferences, and anemic interfaith panels — spaces far removed from the daily battles most Christians face. Halík writes beautifully about longing. Rowan Williams writes elegantly about humility. But neither man spent his life in the trenches defending children from ideological capture in schools, or standing up to governments intent on shredding the family, or speaking plainly about sin in a culture that now calls sin a civil right.

Brooks misreads their vocation as the universal Christian posture when it is, at best, one posture among many.

The heart of the essay is its barely disguised contempt for ordinary Christians who believe their faith should shape the societies they inhabit. This is the point he never states outright but gestures toward with every paragraph.

Faith, to Brooks, is primarily personal, private, and utterly toothless. The moment it concerns the fate of a nation or the moral trajectory of a culture, he calls it nationalism. If a Christian speaks of stricter immigration policies, he hears xenophobia. If a parent protects his child from the cultural free-for-all, he calls it regression.

Brooks leans heavily on the aforementioned Czech priest and philosopher, Tomáš Halík, as if Halík were handing him a permission slip for a diluted Christianity. Halík writes movingly about interior struggle and authentic witness, ideas rooted in his years serving an underground church under communist rule.

But Brooks treats Halík’s reflections on the inner life as a blanket command for Christians to withdraw from the outer one. Halík speaks of sincerity; Brooks hears surrender. Halík points to the vast, ungraspable side of faith; Brooks converts it into a polite memo urging believers to stay in their lane.

And so Brooks gets the entire lesson backward. Halík survived a regime that tried to erase Christianity from public life. He never argued for Christians to silence themselves or retreat from cultural battles. Yet Brooks uses him as cover to criticize anyone who won’t float along with the cultural current.

What Brooks never admits is that what he calls “Christian nationalism” is not the fringe menace he imagines. For many believers, it is simply the instinct to guard the faith that built their communities. It isn’t a hunger for domination, but a love for the inheritance passed down to them. It isn’t outright hostility toward outsiders but gratitude for the civilization that formed them.

Brooks conveniently sidesteps all of this and builds a caricature he can berate, warning of a “creeping fascism” that lives entirely in his own mind.

The self-anointed sage wants Christians to trade their armor for aroma, to swap vigilance for vague platitudes, and to follow his favorite tastemakers into a future where faith survives only behind closed doors.

But Christians know better. A hidden faith saves no one, a timid faith shapes nothing, and a faith that folds under pressure is closer to cheap furniture than conviction. Brooks will disagree, naturally. He always does.

As so many times before, the smug sexagenarian takes a swing at American Christians. And once again, he misses the target by a mile.

​David brooks, Christian nationalism, New york times, Christianity, Christian, Faith 

The American dream is slipping away for many young Americans, as life becomes increasingly unaffordable — especially home ownership. Soaring home prices and interest rates and a housing shortage bar younger generations of people from purchasing a house. Today, the average age of a first-time home buyer is 40 years old.

Many ideas are being tossed around regarding how to bring home ownership back into the realm of possibility for young families — most notably President Trump’s polarizing 50-year mortgage proposal.

But Sara Gonzales, BlazeTV host of “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered,” says we’re ignoring a simple solution: eliminate property taxes.

Right now in the state of Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis (R) is aggressively pushing for the elimination of property taxes, condemning them as “rent to the government.”

Abolishing property taxes, says Sara, is a “standard conservative position.” “You should not have to buy a home and then spend 20, 30, 50 years paying off that home, and yet you still never truly own your home because you would still pay rent to the government,” she says.

And yet there are conservatives who oppose the elimination of property taxes, claiming it encourages older homeowners to hoard inventory.

“So you’re basically saying … we should what? Kick all the oldies out of the homes that they’ve paid for so that young people can buy them up? Like, I’m sorry, are we conservatives or are we not?” asks Sara.

Further, senior tax caps allow older homeowners to pay significantly less in property taxes than younger homeowners, meaning Boomers are already incentivized to not sell. But if we were to enforce higher taxes on our senior population, as some conservatives suggest, we’re now guilty, Sara argues, of the same thing we criticize socialists for — taxing the rich.

Another pro-property-tax argument is that the tax accounts for significant funding for education. But public schools, says Sara, aren’t something most true conservatives want to fund anyway because “they’re indoctrinating your children.”

If we really want to make sure the essentials, like police and fire services, are well funded, we should first look at eliminating all waste, fraud, and abuse. If it’s out of control at the federal level, then it’s almost certainly out of control at the local level, says Sara.

All in all, eliminating the property tax benefits everyone, says Sara. Not only will it prevent people from being forced to pay lifetime rent to the government, but when older homeowners eventually do die, younger families have a better chance of affording those vacant homes because they’re not inheriting enormous property taxes.

“Take this into consideration,” says Sara.

“Say you have parents who are wealthy because they’ve worked hard and they own a lot of land … that they would like to give to you when they die. Consider you will not even be able to keep your parents’ property or home with the astronomical property taxes that you will owe at the end of every year on land and a home that they already paid for.”

“If you’re young and you ever want to own a home, you should recognize that [property taxes are] a problem for everyone. So let’s solve the problem for everyone.”

To hear more, watch the episode above.

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

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

​Sara gonzales, Sara gonzales unfiltered, Blazetv, Blaze media, Housing crisis, Home ownership, Boomers, Property tax, Ron desantis, Abolish property tax 

Although there has been a long slew of adaptations, parodies, and spin-offs of “Frankenstein,” many fans of Mary Shelley’s famous novel were looking forward to the newest iteration by Guillermo del Toro, which just came out.

In the age of AI, gene therapy, and the modern aversion to death, the story of a scientist who gives life to a creature of his own design naturally resonates with most people. Moreover, a director who is known for his ability to craft fantastical narratives, gothic settings, and unworldly monsters seemed like the perfect fit for such a story.

What could have been a story of redemption and radical love is turned into one of violent horror and unavoidable tragedy.

But with such a tale from such a director at such a time, there was also a good chance the whole film could become an overwrought piece of woke propaganda. Would del Toro stay faithful to the source material, or would he indulge his worst tendencies and recreate “The Shape of Water” with Shelley’s basic premise?

Sadly, he opted for the latter.

Woke makeover

While showing his usual visual flare, del Toro and his writers nonetheless succumbed to transforming the romantic tale of man’s excesses and consequent fall from grace into a woke narrative of a marginalized victim suffering from an oppressive father figure. The monster is not a hideous abomination that goes on a killing spree to spite his creator, but is rather a misunderstood, sensitive outcast who deserves sympathy.

It is his creator, Victor Frankenstein, who is the real monster: Not only does he abuse his own creature, but he murders multiple people and lies about it.

In fairness to del Toro, he probably planned out the film a few years ago when such a script happily aligned with the woke spirit of the time. And he did win an Oscar for “The Shape of Water,” so he can’t be blamed too much for returning to the same formula. How was he supposed to know that this would all become tedious and unfashionable in 2025?

And yet for all that, it’s wrong to assume that the original novel lacked these themes entirely.

Original intent

While most fans and critics examine the science-fiction elements of the novel and the Promethean allegory of man’s creation running amok, an honest reading would show that the novel is first and foremost a Romanticist manifesto. The main character is neither Victor nor his creation but the Swiss Alps that provide the backdrop of every scene, monologue, and conversation. The main conflict is not Victor attempting to stop his monster from terrorizing his friends and family, but finding meaning and unadulterated joy in the world rendered cold and dull by Enlightenment philosophy.

Most importantly, the book’s main argument is the problem of loneliness and how it animates humanity’s darkest impulses. The movie actually deals with this idea somewhat, though the novel is fully based on it.

How else should the reader make sense of all three of the main characters (besides the Alps), who all suffer from profound loneliness? The first character to appear in the book is the ambitious explorer and scientist Robert Walton, who attempts to go to the North Pole. Besides detailing his progress to his sister in a series of letters, he also mentions his lack of a friend. This leads him to immediately take interest in the Swiss scientist Victor Frankenstein, who just happens to be in the Arctic, searching for his monster.

Frankenstein, in turn, also reveals his own introverted nature and consequent desolation.

RELATED: How Disney butchered ‘Snow White’ — and it’s worse than just wokeness

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Even though he has good friends, a loving father, encouraging teachers, and a bride waiting for him, Frankenstein seems to reject their company. Either he feels unworthy of such friends, especially after the mayhem inflicted by his monster, or he desires full control in his relationships.

More than anything, this antisocial stance seems to be the main inspiration for creating his monster. Even though many naturally assume he was driven by glory, power, and morbid curiosity, Shelley hardly mentions any of that. Instead she details Victor’s loving upbringing and beautiful surroundings, only to have him forget all this and conduct a weird experiment of bringing a monster to life.

Then, of course, there is the monster himself, who is quite open about his loneliness and resorts to terror to have a companion. Abandoned by Victor, the creature roams the countryside, fruitlessly searching for a human being who can stand to befriend him. Long story short, this doesn’t happen, so he takes revenge on Victor for putting him in this situation.

Alone, we break

Read through the prism of loneliness, the novel makes a surprisingly compelling case not only for cultivating friendship but also for the kind of dysfunction that results from the lack thereof.

This is especially pertinent for audiences today who are forced to cope with the mass atomization of modern life.

In terms of their social life, most young people in the developed world often resemble Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, Frankenstein’s monster, or some combination thereof. They feel misunderstood, have few outlets for their thoughts and emotions, and respond in similar ways to the characters: They seek internet fame, indulge in darker temptations, and even lash out against a world that seems to reject them.

Much like the literary critics and adaptors who miss this larger theme in their analysis of the smaller ones that result, today’s social commentators who remark on the pathologies of the youth do the same.

At the heart of all this dysfunction is loneliness. And behind the social crisis lies a spiritual crisis.

Had Frankenstein abided by Christian teaching, he would accept his limitations and work to overcome his personal misgivings of befriending and serving others. Instead of trying to build a companion for the monster, only to dismantle it in a fit of rage, Victor could have loved his creation, much as God does. Instead of the monster basing his morality on Goethe, Plutarch, and Milton — which all promote epic struggles and titanic egos — he could have picked up the much more available (and readable) Gospels, which stress forgiveness and humility.

Then again, this is Mary Shelley’s story, and she was far from a devout Christian. Similarly, del Toro is also an atheist and likely shares the same outlook on the Christian demands of friendship, virtue, and human creativity.

What could have been a story of redemption and radical love is turned into one of violent horror and unavoidable tragedy.

Created for fellowship

Still, even if such Romantic secular humanism makes for better dramatic tension and suspense, it elides the deeper truth that comes out of the story: Man is not meant to be alone.

Victor’s real crime was not his ambition or curiosity but forsaking everyone around him. It wasn’t an abusive father that led him to this (as the new film suggests) but his willful ignorance of the Father in Heaven. As such, he creates a personal hell with its very own devil.

Even if Shelley and del Toro miss this point, readers and audiences should take heed and confront the problems of loneliness and nihilism in the world around them.

​Woke, Frankenstein, Mary shelley, Netflix, Guillermo del toro, Movie review 

Many working in technology are entranced by a story of a god-tier shift that is soon to come. The story is the “fast takeoff” for AI, often involving an “intelligence explosion.” There will be a singular moment, a cliff-edge, when a machine mind, having achieved critical capacities for technical design, begins to implement an improved version of itself. In a short time, perhaps mere hours, it will soar past human control, becoming a nearly omnipotent force, a deus ex machina for which we are, at best, irrelevant scenery.

This is a clean narrative. It is dramatic. It has the terrifying, satisfying shape of an apocalypse.

It is also a pseudo-messianic myth resting on a mistaken understanding of what intelligence is, what technology is, and what the world is.

The world adapts. The apocalypse is deferred. The technology is integrated.

The fantasy of a runaway supermind achieving escape velocity collides with the stubborn, physical, and institutional realities of our lives. This narrative mistakes a scalar for a capacity, ignoring the fact that intelligence is not a context-free number but a situated process, deeply entangled with physical constraints.

The fixation on an instantaneous leap reveals a particular historical amnesia. We are told this new tool will be a singular event. The historical record suggests otherwise.

Major innovations, the ones that truly resculpted civilization, were never events. They were slow, messy, multi-decade diffusions. The printing press did not achieve the propagation of knowledge overnight; its revolutionary power was in the gradual enabling of the secure communication of information, which in turn allowed knowledge to compound. The steam engine unfolded over generations, its deepest impact trailing its invention by decades.

With each novel technology, we have seen a similar cycle of panic: a flare of moral alarm, a set of dire predictions, and then, inevitably, the slow, grinding work of normalization. The world adapts. The apocalypse is deferred. The technology is integrated. There is little reason to believe this time is different, however much the myth insists upon it.

The fantasy of a fast takeoff is conspicuously neat. It is a narrative free of friction, of thermodynamics, of the intractable mess of material existence. Reality, in contrast, has all of these things. A disembodied mind cannot simply will its own improved implementation into being.

RELATED: ‘Unprecedented’: AI company documents startling discovery after thwarting ‘sophisticated’ cyberattack

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Any improvement, recursive or otherwise, encounters physical limits. Computation is bounded by the speed of light. The required energy is already staggering. Improvements will require hardware that depends on factories, rare minerals, and global supply chains. These things cannot be summoned by code alone. Even when an AI can design a better chip, that design will need to be fabricated. The feedback loop between software insight and physical hardware is constrained by the banal, time-consuming realities of engineering, manufacturing, and logistics.

The intellectual constraints are just as rigid. The notion of an “intelligence explosion” assumes that all problems yield to better reasoning. This is an error. Many hard problems are computationally intractable and provably so. They cannot be solved by superior reasoning; they can only be approximated in ways subject to the limits of energy and time.

Ironically, we already have a system of recursive self-improvement. It is called civilization, employing the cooperative intelligence of humans. Its gains over the centuries have been steady and strikingly gradual, not explosive. Each new advance requires more, not less, effort. When the “low-hanging fruit” is harvested, diminishing returns set in. There is no evidence that AI, however capable, is exempt from this constraint.

Central to the concept of fast takeoff is the erroneous belief that intelligence is a singular, unified thing. Recent AI progress provides contrary evidence. We have not built a singular intelligence; we have built specific, potent tools. AlphaGo achieved superhuman performance in Go, a spectacular leap within its domain, yet its facility did not generalize to medical research. Large language models display great linguistic ability, but they also “hallucinate,” and pushing from one generation to the next requires not a sudden spark of insight, but an enormous effort of data and training.

The likely future is not a monolithic supermind but an AI service providing a network of specialized systems for language, vision, physics, and design. AI will remain a set of tools, managed and combined by human operators.

To frame AI development as a potential catastrophe that suddenly arrives swaps a complex, multi-decade social challenge for a simple, cinematic horror story. It allows us to indulge in the fantasy of an impending technological judgment, rather than engage with the difficult path of development. The real work will be gradual, involving the adaptation of institutions, the shifting of economies, and the management of tools. The god-machine is not coming. The world will remain, as ever, a complex, physical, and stubbornly human affair.

​Ai, Return, Tech 

Presidio Healthcare recently made history by launching the nation’s first pro-life, Christian health insurance option in Texas at a time when many families are experiencing both historic rate increases and decreasing subsidies in the Obamacare marketplace.

While the heart of our mission focuses on serving families with an affordable option that protects both their values and their financial security, the vision for how we accomplish that aim rests on a lesser-known Christian principle that I believe provides a road map for reforming our broken health care system.

Health care policy should focus on expanding options for families while empowering them to own their own health insurance.

That principle is called “subsidiarity,” which represents a system of values that puts families first — in contrast to our current system that ignores the individualized needs of Americans.

The Christian principle of subsidiarity states “that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest, or least centralized competent authority rather than by a higher and more distant one, whenever possible.”

The latest debate over Obamacare subsidies serves as a great example of how our current system prioritizes the higher and more distant authority (i.e., Washington, D.C.) over the least centralized authority (i.e., American families).

The Obamacare market was designed to provide subsidies for low-income Americans, which by itself does not inherently violate the principle of subsidiarity. Rather, the problem lies with the insistence that this one federally controlled market should serve as a one-size-fits-all solution for everyone, including middle-income Americans who do not qualify for adequate subsidies.

The centralized answer that Democrats offer requires the Obamacare market to be propped up inefficiently with more subsidies. The subsidiarity answer would propose decentralizing the market by allowing alternative risk pools regulated at the state level to serve the middle-income Americans with products designed for their needs.

To summarize the principle for a broader application: Health care policy should focus on expanding options for families while empowering them to own their own health insurance.

In a decentralized system, Americans would become smarter consumers of health care as they bear the responsibility of owning and paying for their own health care expenses. The impact would reach beyond the economic. The key benefit to subsidiarity is its preservation of each of our relationships to God through our individual decision-making responsibility.

If tomorrow’s health care shoppers were individuals and families (instead of governments and employers), private insurance markets would be forced to serve the Christian and pro-life values of families, as opposed to our current system of serving government agendas and large employer needs. Presidio is building toward that tomorrow and starting now in Texas.

RELATED: Medical ‘experts’ want to jab a needle through your God-given rights

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Unfortunately, there is a major roadblock to this future.

Ironically, the employer-sponsored marketplace and the single-payor Medicare program — two markets that conservatives often support — in many ways violate the principle of subsidiarity to a greater degree than the much smaller Obamacare individual market.

We need to be consistent if we want to reform our health care system. Employers control the health insurance decisions for close to 150 million Americans, and all of us are forced to pay into a federally centralized Medicare program that exhibits some of the worst elements of socialism, such as dictating prices that distort our entire system.

The spiritual impact is evident through the contraceptive mandate and employer decisions that force millions of Christians to be insured on products that cover abortion, abortifacients, contraception, and other immoral services. Through Medicare, we have collectively forfeited our health care autonomy to Washington, D.C., when we turn 65, creating problematic scenarios that could prioritize our federal budget over dignified treatment for end-of-life care.

We need to do more than just talk about Obamacare — and we need take action now.

The good news is that health care policymakers need to look no farther than to what the private market is already doing.

Presidio is part of a decades-long movement in the health care industry to launch innovative alternative services that serve families directly. This includes affordable non-Obamacare alternatives, health-sharing ministry plans, and, more recently, “ICHRA” benefit platforms that are moving employers out of the business of purchasing health insurance and into a defined contribution model where employees purchase and own their own insurance.

The road map is there. Government and employers can assist families in purchasing health insurance rather than purchasing it for them. Private market innovations would follow.

At Presidio, we are building toward a future where subsidiarity replaces centrally controlled markets and the pro-life values of Christian Americans drive pro-life health insurance options that help fund life-affirming care. We do not take federal subsidies, and we do not want your employer forcing you to have Presidio coverage.

As in all authentic Christian movements, we rely on individual families to help build Presidio, and we look forward to serving your needs while we expand our vision of a health care system in America founded on the principle of subsidiarity.

​Health care, Presidio healthcare, Christianity, Christian, Subsidiarity, Faith