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Plans for first Charlie Kirk statue revealed by formerly woke institution

A Charlie Kirk debate statue has been commissioned by a college that was formerly known to be a bastion of leftism.

Kirk has been honored across the country after his murder on September 10, when he was shot and killed by a suspect who allegedly admitted in text messages that he hated Kirk and that their differences could not be “negotiated.”

Since, Kirk has been honored by NFL teams and NASCAR drivers, for example, but it now seems the first statue is being commissioned in his honor.

‘She let her pink hair dye fade and her mullet grow out before returning to school.’

A mock-up of the memorial was shared online that showed a bronzed Kirk sitting at a table with a microphone, reaching his hand out across the table.

The endearing design was shared by the New College of Florida on Tuesday, which announced it would “commission a statue of Charlie Kirk to honor his legacy and incredible work after his tragic assassination last week.”

The school noted that the statue will be privately funded by “community leaders” and will “stand on campus as a commitment by New College to defend and fight for free speech and civil discourse in American life.”

While NCF is seemingly the first institution or group of people anywhere to commission a statue for Kirk, the school has not always been at the forefront of conservatism by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it was once heralded for being a safe place for LGBTQ-themed leftism.

RELATED: Stop blaming schools — the crisis starts in America’s homes

NCF, located in Sarasota, Florida, boasts itself as being “rooted in reason [and] rising with purpose,” but was described by a student in 2023 as “a tiny place of safety in this increasingly hostile state.”

The student, who identified as “LGBTQ,” told the New York Times that he or she was “praying that DeSantis would never find out about [the school]. But he did.”

Later that year, Gov. Ron DeSantis followed through on a promise to rid the school of its “woke indoctrination” policies and subsequently eliminated its diversity office and fired its diversity chief and academic librarian. The Times noted both of these faculty members were gay. More than a third of faculty was eliminated — around 36 or so — with 125 students voluntarily leaving the school.

One outgoing student said that the school had lost everything that was “good and charming,” while another remaining student was described as doing the following out of fear:

“She let her pink hair dye fade and her mullet grow out before returning to school,” the Times wrote. “For fear, she said, that administrators and new students would judge her.”

NCF has since increased its enrollment.

RELATED: Explosive alleged text messages between suspected Kirk killer and his transgender roommate obliterate liberal narrative

Candles and flowers are seen near a portrait of Charlie Kirk at a makeshift memorial during a candlelight vigil at Memorial Park in Provo, Utah, on September 12, 2025. (Photo by Melissa MAJCHRZAK / AFP) (Photo by MELISSA MAJCHRZAK/AFP via Getty Images)

According to a report by Fox 13 on Tuesday, NCF is seeing “record high enrollment.”

About 900 students are enrolled in the college for this semester, the most in the school’s history. With 300 new students, it marks the third year in a row that the school has reportedly exceeded enrollment expectations.

The location of the Kirk memorial statue has not yet been announced.

NCF was founded in 1960.

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Exclusive: GOP lawmaker warns Trump administration of looming China tech influence

Republican Rep. August Pfluger of Texas urged President Donald Trump’s administration to address the “grave concerns” regarding China’s global influence in tech, Blaze News has learned.

China is set to host the 2027 World Radiocommunication Conference, posing a threat to America’s national security and giving our adversary the opportunity to shape the global telecommunications landscape. In a letter obtained exclusively by Blaze News, Pfluger is urging Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick to address China’s looming influence or else “we risk being overtaken by our adversaries.”

‘We must use every tool at our disposal to counter China’s influence.’

“President Trump’s consistent leadership and support of an America First agenda to counter China is important now, more than ever,” the letter reads.

“Our leadership in technology and innovation is at risk, and our allies may increasingly turn to China for telecommunications solutions, eroding our influence and compromising shared security interests.”

RELATED: Congress takes aim at billionaires bankrolling left-wing ‘hate campaigns’ following Kirk assassination

Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Pfluger pointed to the many advantages China will have for hosting the conference and how it could threaten American tech dominance as well as national security.

“Hosting the WRC provides several significant advantages, including setting the agenda, guiding discussions, and influencing themes, thereby enabling the host country to exert substantial ‘soft’ influence over global telecommunications standards and policies,” the letter reads.

Some of these policies and regulations that will be determined during the conference include allocating new spectrum bands for mobile broadband as well as regulating satellite communications, according to the letter.

“China’s role as host thus raises concerns about potential impacts on U.S. leadership in innovation and open, secure communications,” the letter reads. “This, combined with the threat of espionage against government officials and participants, raises significant data security and national security concerns.”

RELATED: GOP lawmaker introduces bill barring illegal aliens from ‘sabotaged’ census

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

“We must use every tool at our disposal to counter China’s influence and ensure the United States remains at the forefront of global telecommunications leadership,” the letter reads. “As Members of Congress, we stand ready to provide the necessary support to assist the Administration in accomplishing these goals.”

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Homeland Security expert details step-by-step plan to label Antifa a terrorist group

On September 15, Vice President JD Vance guest-hosted a special memorial episode of “The Charlie Kirk Show” from the White House following the assassination of the Turning Point USA founder last week.

Among other officials, Vance interviewed White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who had some powerful remarks about the Trump administration’s plans to target and dismantle what he described as the “vast domestic terror movement” of left-wing networks that led to Charlie Kirk’s targeted murder.

“We are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks,” he said.

He then specified that the administration would go after “the organized doxxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people’s addresses,” as well as the leftist “messaging that’s designed to trigger [and] incite violence and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence.”

“It is a vast domestic terror movement, and with God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have … to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name,” Miller vowed.

To discuss the importance of dismantling the domestic terror groups fomenting violence, especially Antifa, Blaze Media editor in chief Matthew Peterson invited Kyle Shideler, director and senior analyst at the Center for Security Policy, to “Blaze News: The Mandate.”

Shideler, who warned about increasing political violence back when BLM was in its prime, says Miller’s comments indicate the administration is “on the right track.”

“The challenge, I think, that they’re going to have is getting the federal bureaucracy in alignment with what needs to be done. And first and foremost, they’re going to need to get the federal bureaucracy to accept that there is such a thing as far-left extremism,” he tells Peterson.

Currently, there’s just one catch-all category for “anti-government and anti-authority violent extremists,” Shideler explains. That single category encompasses everything from a far-right “lunatic survivalist somewhere in the woods who thinks the government is out to get him” to the people in “left-wing anarchist cells — your Antifa types.”

The problem with this broad category of extremism is that it allows the bureaucracy significant discretion in deciding which threats to prioritize, leading to inconsistent and biased enforcement.

The other issue is that left-wing extremism is often fragmented into silos, like pro-abortion extremism and environmental extremism, when in reality, these two groups are largely populated by the same people, says Shideler. He gives the example of left-wing activist Calla Walsh, who’s done everything from co-founding the sabotage group Palestine Action US and orchestrating direct-action protests targeting imperialism and capitalism to participating in BLM and environmental protests.

The way the current system is set up has Calla “spread out under a variety of different categories,” even though all her activism points at one motive: revolution.

“What we need to do is get the federal government to recognize a category of far-left violent extremism and put under that category all of your anarchists, autonomous Marxists, your Marxist Leninists, your Maoists, your violent socialists and the like and say, ‘These are all one thing; these are all a movement that is working towards revolution in the United States, that’s working towards the overthrow of the United States government,”’ Shideler proposes.

Dividing far-left activism into subgroups allows the government to ignore this grim reality, which almost certainly drove Tyler Robinson to target Charlie Kirk.

If we successfully create an all-encompassing category for left-wing extremism, the next step, says Shideler, is to “conduct a number of designations against Antifa-linked groups primarily in Europe, but across the world.”

While the most effective solution is likely to consolidate all Antifa-linked groups under a single Foreign Terrorist Organization, the government’s long-held practice of targeting smaller, specific groups complicates this idea.

“If you try to designate just Antifa as a single entity or movement, what I suspect you’ll find is that the bureaucrats will say, ‘We don’t know what that is; that’s not a thing that exists,”’ explains Shideler.

His recommendation is to designate foreign Antifa groups as terrorists first, then link them to international Antifa networks, before targeting U.S.-based groups connected to the network. “That will, in the long run, be faster and more effective,” he says.

To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.

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​Blaze news | the mandate, Blaze media, Blazetv, Antifa, Left wing extremism, Kyle shideler, Matthew peterson, Stephen miller, Jd vance, Charlie kirk 

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‘The counteroffensive begins’: Report exposes Soros’ Open Society funding of alleged pro-terror leftist groups

President Donald Trump indicated on Monday that his administration is poised to take action against violent leftist radicals and to bring racketeering charges against the liberal organizations that apparently support them.

Within hours of Trump revealing that a crackdown is imminent, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller stated on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” “We are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people.”

‘This is something that we can win.’

A new report from the Capital Research Center might make the administration’s job a little easier — at least in the way of identifying nodes in the nonprofit funding network that Democratic mega-donor George Soros has bequeathed to his son Alexander and in justifying potential action against them.

The 95-page report first obtained by Blaze Media details how George Soros’ Open Society Foundations has poured tens of millions of dollars into U.S.-based organizations that are allegedly engaged in activities the FBI has defined as domestic terrorism as well as into foreign outfits allegedly linked to designated foreign terrorist organizations.

Ryan Mauro, counterterrorism expert and Capital Research Center investigative researcher, told Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck on “The Glenn Beck Program” on Wednesday both that the findings in the report “are shocking” and “today, the counteroffensive begins.”

The Capital Research Center indicated that Open Society has awarded at least $23,275,000 to seven groups that allegedly “directly assist domestic terrorism and criminality on U.S. soil”; at least $50.57 million across 41 groups that have allegedly endorsed terrorist attacks and/or are directly linked to foreign terrorist groups or their known front groups; and nearly $10 million to five nonprofits that allegedly qualify as associates of terrorist groups or pro-terrorist groups.

Blaze News has reached out to Open Society Foundations for comment.

RELATED: Media tries to protect Antifa with tired al-Qaeda talking points

AMY OSBORNE/AFP via Getty Images

Among the seven groups identified in the report that are funded by Open Society and allegedly assist in domestic terrorism are:

the Sunrise Movement, a climate alarmist group that reportedly endorsed the violent Antifa-linked Stop Cop City campaign;the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of leftist BLM-associated organizations that condemned Israel after its attack on Oct. 7, 2023, by Hamas terrorists; andthe Center for Third World Organizing, which Mauro noted has consolidated three extremist groups under its so-called hub, namely the Minnesota-riot-linked Ruckus Society, BlackOUT Collective, and the Black Land Liberation Initiative.

Capital Research Center noted that its findings “could potentially form the justification for various accountability actions, including federal investigations and prosecutions, U.S. State Department and Treasury Department sanctions, revoking of tax-exempt statuses of Open Society and its grantees by the Internal Revenue Service, congressional investigations, and civil suits.”

“If you look at the IRS code, nonprofits are not allowed to be engaging in criminal activity,” Mauro told Beck, adding that they’re likely not permitted to even encourage criminal activity.

Beck, who expressed amazement “that these guys have gotten away with it for so long,” indicated that he would personally hand the report to President Trump.

Mauro noted further that by identifying the amounts obligated, the recipients, and some of the radical activities the recipients engaged in, all in one document, it is easier to understand “that this is an infrastructure. This is a movement. And as scary as that is, it also means it can be taken down. We can confront them, and this is something that we can win.”

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​Donald trump, Stephen miller, Open society foundations, George soros, Alexander soros, Soros, Open society, Terrorism, Antifa, Leftism, Politics 

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State Department cuts ties with Armed Queers-affiliated NGO

The FBI has been investigating whether trans-activist groups and other radicals had foreknowledge of the Charlie Kirk assassination plot. A law enforcement source confirmed to the New York Post that one of the radical leftist groups that investigators have been looking at is Armed Queers Salt Lake City.

This scrutiny of Armed Queers has evidently rattled some cages, prompting the State Department to take decisive action.

The radical group

Armed Queers SLC is a radical socialist outfit that stated in its now-deleted Instagram group that it was a “revolutionary LGBTQ organization dedicated to the defense, and success” of supposedly oppressed peoples.

‘We are taking aggressive action.’

A membership form for the socialist group identifies six principles, including “the armed and militant protection of queer and trans communities” and “trans liberation from the gender binary and biological essentialism.”

The group told Voyage Utah in a July 2024 interview, “We have organized, educated, and agitated within LGBTQ, anti-imperialist, and labor movements towards a socialist future.”

In addition to referring to training sessions in Cuba for its members “as a part of a yearly May Day Brigade,” the group has shared various radical sentiments and quotations on social media in recent weeks.

RELATED: Explosive alleged text messages between suspected Kirk killer and his transgender roommate obliterate liberal narrative

Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

For example, in a post titled “Black August,” the group shared a quote from George L. Jackson, a Marxist thug who was convicted of armed robbery and accused of murdering a prison guard, that read, “Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done; discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”

Following Kirk’s assassination, allegedly by a leftist with a trans-identifying boyfriend, Armed Queers began scrubbing and deleting its social media profiles.

The radical

Ermiya Fanaeian is a male pretending to be a female who as of last year indicated that he was an “active organizer” of Armed Queers and a student at the University of Utah. Where Armed Queers is concerned, Fanaeian is, however, apparently far more than just an organizer.

The LGBT gun rights group Pink Pistols confirmed on Monday that Fanaeian — who was among the LGBT activists who supported Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign in 2019 and at one point allegedly appeared on stage with the senator — was a University of Utah student who ran the Salt Lake City Pink Pistols chapter from 2020 to 2021.

“While initially welcomed, she began using the Pink Pistols name to promote broader political issues, violating our rule that we are a single-issue organization devoted solely to the safe, legal, and responsible use of firearms by the queer community,” Pink Pistols said in a statement. “In 2021, her group and Pink Pistols parted ways, and she renamed her organization Armed Queers of Salt Lake City.”

It turns out that Pink Pistols is not the only organization that has distanced itself from Fanaeian.

Blaze News has reached out to Sen. Warren’s office for comment.

The NGO

Utah Global Diplomacy is an NGO that has hosted international exchange programs of the State Department to welcome foreign nationals to Utah for short-term professional and cultural experiences. The outfit is supposedly guided by the idea that citizens have a responsibility to “help shape U.S. foreign relations ‘one hand-shake at a time.'”

The famous analyst DataRepublican highlighted on Monday that Fanaeian, who indicated in a now-deleted 2019 student profile that he was “originally from Iran,” was recognized by the nonprofit organization Utah Global Diplomacy in September 2022 with its 7 for 17 award.

RELATED: Rubio puts visa holders who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death on high alert

Photo by Franklin Jacome/Agencia Press South/Getty Images

Although Utah Global Diplomacy scrubbed the relevant award page and as of Wednesday had password-protected its entire site, an archived UGD page still refers to the radical’s receipt of the award, as does an Aug. 25, 2022, post on Instagram.

The award “recognizes young Utahns working to achieve the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) while exemplifying Utah Global Diplomacy’s core values of respect, social responsibility, and open dialogue,” says an archived page. “Each 7 for 17 award winner must demonstrate a commitment to meeting one (or multiple) of the 17 United National Sustainable Development Goals through novel, innovative, or unique means.”

The radical’s bio on the archived award page states:

Ermiya Fanaeian is a Trans liberation and Feminist political organizer whose work has included organizing around the abortion struggle, working with the ACLU to secure the rights of Trans youth in the education system, organizing to criminalize conversion therapy in the state of Utah, working on electoral campaigns, and creating research studying the conditions of gender oppressed people at the hands of state institutions.

DataRepublican noted, “SLC Armed Queers is not ‘adjacent’ to the honor that Ermiya Fanaeian got from Utah Global Diplomacy. Utah Global Diplomacy specifically awarded her for her work with trans people, of which SLC Armed Queers is key. This may be why they scrubbed their pages.”

Blaze News has reached out to Utah Global Diplomacy for comment.

The breakup

A State Department source confirmed to Blaze News that any ties to Utah Global Diplomacy, “which existed indirectly via an external implementor, are being completely severed and dismantled.”

This could prove greatly consequential for the NGO, as the bulk of its funding takes the form of government grants.

“We are taking aggressive action to ensure that any implementor that has any relationship whatsoever with this radical organization is completely cut off from any State Department engagement,” said the source.

Secretary Marco Rubio revealed this week that the State Department has also been revoking visas of individuals who have celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

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Benjamin Watson and Emmanuel Acho SLANDER Charlie Kirk

Famous NFL football players Benjamin Watson and Emmanuel Acho are jumping on the anti-Charlie Kirk bandwagon — and like everyone else, they’re taking the Turning Point USA founder out of context and smearing his character while they do it.

“Since hearing of the murder of Charlie Kirk and seeing such unjustifiable graphic violence my heart has been torn and my spirit uneasy. I was neither fan nor follower of Charlie, but I was aware of his influence. While respecting his humanity and right to dialogue, my critique of his words and opinions was pointed,” Watson wrote in a post on Facebook.

“I found Charlie’s verbal attacks on black men, women, and their achievement reprehensible and utterly inexcusable. His derogatory words were a form of violence and dehumanization. He routinely amplified stereotypes and platformed prejudice, giving license to masses with similar sentiments. He did this while routinely proclaiming the name of Jesus,” he added.

While Watson went on to call Charlie’s assassination an “evil, unconscionable act,” it doesn’t change that he also became one of the many actively slandering the Turning Point founder in his passing.

And BlazeTV contributor T.J. Moe is not a fan.

“I have a lot of disdain for Ben Watson for the damage that he’s done over the years, and this adds to it. You know, Ben Watson, I think, reads the Bible, at least contends to. He should know that Proverbs 6 states the things that God hates. One of them is a lying tongue, and he lied about every word of what he just said about Charlie Kirk,” Moe tells BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock on “Jason Whitlock Harmony.”

But Watson is not even close to the only former NFL player going after Kirk.

“Charlie Kirk’s death has led me to an uncomfortable conversation that I want to facilitate. To my white brothers and sisters, how would you hope your minority friends respond to the celebration of Charlie Kirk’s life when he has very publicly said things like this,” sports analyst Emmanuel Acho says before playing several out-of-context clips of Charlie speaking.

One of the clips showed Charlie saying “Cenk” to Cenk Uygur. Acho assumed Charlie was calling an Asian the “C-word.”

“He’s calling someone by their name. He’s not calling them a c***k. Acho couldn’t be bothered with doing that level of research as it relates to taking Kirk out of context at every turn and just leaning into sound bites,” Whitlock says.

“Engage with the actual argument,” he adds.

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Addicted to fatigue: Why we’re using the internet to trap ourselves in the crystals

The transformation of Twitter into X was certainly a watershed moment. But it was nothing compared to the transformation of X into a feeding tube for xAI.

Hold that thought in your head as I pivot for a minute to something that stuck out in my feed the other day: a worthy neologism. Many of us are starting to feel like even with the bazillion channels of wordy content on X, there is sort of nothing on. Another way of saying this is that we already know exactly what’s on; we’ve seen it all before.

When software exhaustingly consumes the world, we want to be bricked.

Rainmaker founder Augustus Doricko touched on this recently when he reflected (on X) that, as a Zoomer, the scriptedness of it all is taken for granted. “It’s all politicized, everything. All the time. I’ve never known anything but hyper polarized internet politics discourse. Zoomers know which side of an issue every influencer and politician is going to land on the moment they read the headline. Zoomers could practically write their commentary for them. … There are no surprising thinkers.”

Speaking as an Xennial, I relate — it really feels deranged to me that now a majority of my life has been spent unable to evade online discourse involving, to take a random example, Ezra Klein. Nothing personal — it’s just really evident that our political regime is still fixed around the principle that talking matters and that even the largest things are justified — can only be justified! — by people talking about them.

This approach has resulted in a fixity of “Voices” hardened all the more by the relentlessly taxonomical character of the digital medium, which flips Marx’s critique of capital on its head by solidifying even the most airy and ephemeral of things by locking them into place in the one huge fractal bracket of the internet: everything identified down to the smallest unit according to its classification. Like the Great Chain of Being but for transforming subjects into objects.

A bit creepy considering how much we associate digital life with disincarnation … but a strong reminder that to be incarnate is to be in the flesh, not merely to be matter; embodiment requires a body, a given body, given by God — not a golem, a cap table, an Excel sheet. All that “free” information flying around is more like a caged bird. The taxonomy is the tax — and the debtor’s prison.

RELATED: Wellness tonic or dangerous drug?

Photo by Cooper Williamson/Blaze News

You can hear the cries each day of people sure they have no choice but to spend inordinate hours on “this hellsite,” and while the perpetual gossip and envy and resentment and profane curiosity and so forth are certainly hellacious, the lack of surprise is a real killjoy — a special curse levied against the online intellectual, who can feel himself unaliving into a petrified rock crystal the minute he can’t find a new idea, a new insight, a fresh source of soyface, an of-the-moment mind-blower.

We all have our fatal weakness here. Speaking as a longtime online coiner of terms and concepts, I’m always monitoring the situation for fresh, vine-ripe terms and concepts to munch on, savor, share. And these are declining along with everything else, it seems, as the direction of all human-generated content flows toward the great maw crystallizing everything into the ultimate taxonomy. Zoomer slang can’t innovate fast enough …

And yet what to my wondering eyes should appear but a poaster coining a new term relevant to just this torment: “The algorithm is a military grade dopamine drip designed to subject us to levels of fatigue addiction beyond our comprehension.”

Many people might look at this and go yeah, yeah, we know, we know. But have you encountered the phrase “fatigue addiction” before? I didn’t think so … yet it so well captures the strange and uncanny character of our experience becoming unalived into mere objects by way of our virtual entombment in the great bracket of nonbeing.

As the “Naked Gun” reboot is out, I flash on that other spoof flick that probably won’t be remade — “Dracula: Dead and Loving It.” We all know how many people wake up, log on, and post obsessively about how exhausted they are. What is this? Yes, we are way too obsessed; many believe that only obsession is sufficient any more to provide any motile force to anything, which indicates just how petrified are the rock crystals we all already feel we are. Yes, we are therefore way too obsessed with obsession itself; but are we not also increasingly monomaniacal, toward an asymptotic point, about our own exhaustion? Are we not in the grip of a love of exhaustion?

There’s a phrase called “system working as designed” that we ought to see at work here. We consume vast quantities of drugs that make us exhausted and seek out meds that simulate exhaustion. We want to “hit the wall.” We want to sacrifice ourselves to “the grind.” We want it to be “so over for us.” We envy the objects that overshadow us everywhere we turn. We don’t want to find our identities forever in oppositional ideology. We want to find them in rocks. In sand. Real ones, that don’t have to think all the time, like our hyperactive silicon does. When software exhaustingly consumes the world, we want to be bricked.

In the end, however, at the end of this trail of petrification, we must encounter the final source of our will to paralysis: fear — the fear of life itself and its source. Yes, go back to Proverbs to see that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom; but few today seem fearful at all of God’s punishment, whereas many seem absolutely terrified of the implications of being created in the image of an incomprehensibly loving God. But only confronting this fear can show the way out from the labyrinthine entombment of addiction to fatigue, to the experience of the life going out of you and the rock crystal creeping in.

​Tech, Culture