There is a certain kind of person, at a certain kind of barbecue, who announces, with the flat authority of Scripture, that white is not to be worn after Labor Day. No one has ever produced this law. It’s enforced like a grudge: the offense long forgotten, the point being the enforcement.

That, it turns out, is the whole personality of the holiday: a house built on a foundation nobody can locate, in honor of a man history can no longer confidently name.

Labor Day has spent a century accumulating quirky social rules no legislature passed but nearly everyone obeys anyway.

The first Labor Day — not yet official, just an idea a union decided to act on — took place on September 5, 1882, in New York City. Someone willed it into being. Who, exactly, that person was is where the record gives out.

Credit for organizing it sits between Peter McGuire, a carpenter and the co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, and Matthew Maguire, a machinist and secretary of the Central Labor Union. While their unions were rivals, their surnames were just one letter apart, as if fate couldn’t be bothered to keep them straight.

A former U.S. Department of Labor historian admitted in 2011 that she still couldn’t say which one deserved the credit.

What is known is that it cost something. Workers reportedly forfeited about $75,000 in lost wages to march that day — the Central Labor Union even fined anyone who skipped it. Roughly 10,000 walked from City Hall to Union Square.

Even while most of the world marks the labor holiday on May 1, the U.S. wanted no part of it. A Haymarket Square rally in Chicago that began on May 1, 1886, ended in a deadly bombing three days later, turning May Day into a symbol of radicalism.

In 1894, President Grover Cleveland specifically pushed September into law instead so the holiday wouldn’t become a memorial to the Haymarket radicals.

From that origin — sacrifice, spectacle, and a little deliberate amnesia — Labor Day has spent a century accumulating quirky social rules no legislature passed but nearly everyone obeys anyway.

RELATED: The ‘tradition’ behind Nathan’s hot-dog eating contest is a fake news PR stunt

Aladdin Color Inc./Getty Images

For one, the white clothes were never really a rule so much as a gatekeeping test, likely invented by old-money New Yorkers of the Gilded Age terrified of being confused with the flanks of the industrial nouveau riche nipping at their heels.

Fashion historians trace it to Newport summers, where white linen signaled you had servants to launder it and no hard labor to dirty it.

After Labor Day, pools close with the solemnity of a curfew, though the reason behind that practice — the school calendar — is rather dull. Roughly a third of the country’s 309,000 public pools face shortages each year since so many lifeguards are teenagers who vanish the moment the school bell rings.

Mattresses also tend to go on sale at this time, but mostly because someone once noticed a day off is a day to shop — 30% to 50% across major brands.

And repetition, given enough years, effectively becomes law.

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​Chicago, Labor day, Union, Politics 

The towering figure of Anna Klobuchar Clemenc has returned to the streets of Calumet, Michigan, 70 years after she died.

Standing at 6’2″ tall, the woman known as “Big Annie” became the face of the copper miners’ strike in Copper Country, the northwestern counties of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula where copper mines sprang up in the middle of the 19th century.

On Christmas Eve 1913, the plight of the strikers turned unthinkably tragic.

The conditions in the mines were brutal. With shafts reaching more than a mile underground, the darkness was deep and thick, and the cost of miners’ equipment, including the candles for their hats, was deducted from their wages.

Shifts sometimes lasted 10 or 12 hours, six days a week, and almost always involved back-breaking physical labor. According to one report, nearly one out of every three miners suffered serious injury and one out of 200 was killed on the job.

Below are photos taken from inside Quincy Mine, located about 11 miles south of Calumet. The Quincy copper mine operated more or less continuously from 1846 until 1945, and a private organization now offers tours.

Photos taken by Blaze News

By 1913, the development of a new drill had changed the pay structure at the mines to compensate for time rather than productivity, resulting in a dramatic reduction in miner pay, according to the Daily Press. On July 23 of that year, nearly 9,000 copper miners in the region went on strike.

Big Annie, of course, was not one of them. However, she often led the way in their daily parades, carrying a giant American flag and demanding an eight-hour workday, higher wages, and better conditions.

Then the wife of a miner and the foundress of the Western Federation of Miners’ Women’s Auxiliary no. 15, Big Annie was eventually dubbed the “Heroine of the Copper Country Strike” and even an “American Joan of Arc.” She was arrested multiple times and served time in jail.

During one particularly contentious run-in with law enforcement, Big Annie reportedly shouted: “Kill me. Run your bayonets and sabres through this flag and kill me, but I won’t move. If this flag will not protect me, then I will die with it.”

The strike was at best minimally effective. The governor sent in the Michigan National Guard almost immediately, a notorious strike-breaking firm from New York arrived as well, and while the strike did disrupt operations, so-called scabs and imported foreign labor kept the copper mines going to some extent.

Then on Christmas Eve 1913, the plight of the strikers turned unthinkably tragic.

Big Annie and the rest of the Women’s Auxiliary hosted a Christmas party in the Italian Hall in Calumet for the striking miners and their families. The event was festive and even featured Santa and some gifts donated by union members and other businesses.

But at around 4:40 p.m., a man suddenly interrupted the revelry by shouting, “Fire! Fire!” His cries prompted a stampede downstairs for one exit, and 73 people were trampled to death in the stairwell, 59 of them children.

There was never any fire, and the alarmist was never identified. Folk singer Woody Guthrie memorialized the deadly incident in his song “1913 Massacre.”

Afterward, the strike limped along for another four months but officially ended without formal resolution on April 13, 1914.

Mining companies in the area did eventually implement an eight-hour workday and boosted wages, though some scholars argue that those changes were part of a larger labor reform movement throughout the country rather than the result of the strike.

Big Annie moved to Chicago shortly after the strike ended and died there in 1956 at the age of 68. While there’s no doubt she brought spirit and resolve to the strikers and their families, her legacy is a bit mixed.

Two of her three marriages ended in divorce. She divorced her first husband, miner Joseph Clemenc, just after the end of the strike and then married Frank Shaws, an editor of a socialist Slovenian newspaper.

Like Shaws, Big Annie was also a socialist. The Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame characterizes her as:

devoted to the active participation of women outside the traditional confines of the home. Having graduated from eighth grade, she was a relatively well-educated woman at that time. Clemenc was an avid follower of Eugene Debs, Mother Mary Harris Jones, and the tenets of socialism. It was her independent nature and strong-willed character that inspired many men and women to take a stand for justice.

Still, WLUC-TV recently described her as “a symbol of persistence and the mining history that built Calumet,” and residents there have never forgotten their native daughter.

On August 22, they unveiled a life-size bronze statue of Big Annie, complete with a base made of Calumet street bricks dating back to 1913. A parade celebrating the occasion drew large crowds and included the pep band from nearby Michigan Technological University.

RELATED: First rule for surviving Michigan winter? A daily walk with my kids

Courtesy of Visit Keweenaw

The statue project was a labor of love all its own. Locals spent years and raised over $150,000 to honor Big Annie, who was inducted into Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame in 1996 and Labor’s International Hall of Fame in 2013.

“If it wasn’t for people like Annie, who were so strong, I would have a hard time being a union member myself,” Bricklayers Union Member Adam Saari told WLUC-TV, “because the labor standards would not be the same.”

“I helped work on the statue, and I’m also someone who works in the mines,” said Bryan Latto, according to WLUC. “Our unique Upper Peninsula history is something that only we can preserve, so it’s something that we’ve got to do ourselves, otherwise nobody else is going to do it for us.”

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​Michigan, Copper, Upper peninsula, Politics 

President Donald Trump announced on Aug. 12 that one of his “most trusted aides, Karoline Leavitt,” was departing the role of White House press secretary after 19 months so that “she can spend more time with her beautiful young children and family.”

Leavitt, who gave birth to her second child on May 1, noted, “Serving as the White House Press Secretary over the past year and a half has been the honor and adventure of a lifetime.”

‘You’re a left-wing hack. You’re not a reporter. You’re posing in this room as a journalist.’

Unlike with her lesbian predecessor, Americans may soon come to miss Leavitt. After all, the unflappable Republican was responsible for a number of memorable moments. Three in particular stand out.

1. ‘They are criminals’

Just days after Trump retook office, a reporter noted Immigration and Customs Enforcement had already made roughly 3,500 arrests, then asked, “How many have a criminal record versus those who are just in the country illegally?”

Leavitt signaled right away that she wasn’t going to join the liberal media in downplaying the crime of stealing into the United States.

“All of them,” said Leavitt, “because they illegally broke our nation’s laws, and therefore they are criminals as far as this administration goes.”

The former press secretary acknowledged that after four years of the Biden administration, “It’s a big culture shift in our nation to view someone who breaks our immigration laws as a criminal, but that’s exactly what they are.”

2. ‘Left-wing hack’

A year later, Niall Stanage, a White House columnist from The Hill, quoted then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as saying that ICE was doing “everything correctly.” After noting that some Americans have been arrested by ICE and invoking the name of Renee Good — an anti-ICE radical who was fatally shot while driving her SUV into an ICE agent — Stanage asked, “How does that equate to them doing everything correctly?”

RELATED: Karoline Leavitt rips into WaPo for ‘BS story’ about Trump and Hegseth

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It didn’t take long for Leavitt to suss out Stanage.

“Why was Renee Good unfortunately and tragically killed?” asked Leavitt.

Stanage replied, “Because an ICE agent reacted recklessly and killed her unjustifiably.”

Leavitt delivered her diagnosis: “OK, so you’re a biased reporter with a left-wing opinion. … You’re a left-wing hack. You’re not a reporter. You’re posing in this room as a journalist, and it’s so clear by the premise of your question.”

“You shouldn’t even be sitting in that seat,” added Leavitt.

The former press secretary continued to castigate Stanage, suggesting that he had a blind spot for the Americans killed by the very illegal aliens whom ICE works to detain and deport.

3. Maternal selection

President Trump revealed in October 2025 that he was planning to hold a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest, Hungary, “to see if we can bring this ‘inglorious’ War, between Russia and Ukraine, to an end.”

The Huffington Post’s S.V. Dáte pressed the White House on why the capital of a friendly NATO country that’s a three-hour flight away from Moscow had been chosen as the destination for the meeting, writing, “Is the president aware of the significance of Budapest? In 1994, Russia promised, in Budapest, not to invade Ukraine if it gave up the nuclear weapons it inherited when the Soviet Union dissolved. Does he not see why Ukraine might object to that site? Who suggested Budapest?”

The tone of the query clearly rubbed Leavitt the wrong way. She answered, “Your mom did.”

“Is this funny to you?” said Dáte, evidently unaware that it would soon be funny to a great many Americans.

Leavitt later noted, “For context, S.V. Dáte of the Huffington Post is not a journalist interested in the facts. He is a left-wing hack who has consistently attacked President Trump for years and constantly bombards my phone with Democrat talking points.”

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​Karoline leavitt, White house, Donald trump, Liberal media, Press secretary, Politics 

After walking away from Islam, content creator Eternal Bread of Life thought she had found peace in New Age beliefs. Drawn to practices like tarot cards and manifestation, she spent years pursuing what she believed was healing, self-discovery, and enlightenment.

She tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey that her transition from Islam to witchcraft began when she started questioning what the Quran said was normal, like Muhammad’s child bride or his curse on women who “remove their hair from their eyebrows.”

“I was getting my eyebrows threaded, and so then this made me feel really guilty, and it also just made me feel frustrated and sort of resentful,” she says, “because like why would God care so much to the point that we’re cursed for doing that?”

She tells Stuckey that once she became a New Ager, she believed in “past lives, reincarnation, chakra balancing, meditation, mindfulness, psychic readings, [and] tarot cards.”

“I did find a lot of peace in it. Because, you know, there is a concept of trying to find your higher self. You know, doing shadow work to, like, heal the parts of yourself that are more broken or that need work,” she explains.

“Manifestation was also a big thing. And so I did find a lot of peace in it,” she adds.

Astrology was one of her favorite New Age beliefs, as she felt it related most to Islam.

“God created the planets, and there is some truth to astrology,” she says.

“Were you reading any particular books on the subject? Were they just kind of friends influencing you? How did you kind of go down that witchcraft-New Age rabbit hole?” Stuckey asks.

“It was mostly influencers online. You know, people who seemed very well versed in that kind of stuff,” she answers.

“I just always — because I had been taught the Bible was corrupted, the Quran is the final revelation, it’s the word of God, I never took it seriously. I never considered it.

“They basically drill it into you that Allah has no son. Jesus was just a prophet. When somebody’s telling you, like, ‘Oh, you know, Jesus loves you, Jesus, is God and He’s the son of God,’ you already have those guards up in your mind as a Muslim,” she explains.

However, when she did venture into New Age beliefs, others in the space reversed course and became Christians.

“They started to encounter Jesus in visions, or they had supernatural experiences, and then they immediately denounced all the New Age practice and they became a Christian,” she explains.

“I thought if I was ever going to go back to an Abrahamic religion, it would be Islam,” she continues. “So I wasn’t understanding. Why, like why is it Christianity?”

After her favorite New Age creator went on a meditation retreat with Joe Dispenza and had a vision of Jesus during meditation three separate times, her tune changed.

“He said, ‘Open your heart to me,’ and then she had … crazy experiences after that. So then after hearing her testimony, I was like, ‘Okay, I will give Christianity a chance,’” she adds.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Astrology, Islam, Muhammad, New age, Quran, Tarot cards, Witchcraft, New ager, Allie beth stuckey, Blazetv show 

The battle for the soul of the Republican Party and the America First coalition is already under way. The midterm convention in Dallas this week gives anxious voters a chance to see what the party thinks it is fighting for now — and what comes next.

Democrats are building a case around what might be called Republican DEI: data centers, Epstein, and the Iran war. The examples differ, but the attack line is the same. Republicans, Democrats say, are beholden to special interests and major corporations, indifferent to the struggles of ordinary Americans and increasingly consumed by self-dealing and vanity projects.

Republicans have a chance to get their groove back before the midterms — the last federal election cycle that will shape Trump’s presidency.

Politics is a contact sport, and the Democratic Socialists of America are ascendant. Their critique will not be answered by dismissing it or by pursuing policies that seem to validate it.

The accusation is simple: Republicans protect the people who finance them. They will do unpopular things if donors want them done and avoid popular things if donors object. That critique has worked before — remember Mitt Romney’s collapse — and it can work again.

The Dallas convention is an opportunity to reconnect the Republican Party with the insurgency Donald Trump launched in 2015: opposition to a special-interest-dominated GOP, a focus on the economic and cultural condition of forgotten Americans, and resistance to mass migration that intensified those pressures.

Somewhere along the way, that focus shifted — in policy and in tone. Consider President Trump’s post last week on Truth Social, touting data centers: “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor.”

That sounds uncomfortably close to Barack Obama’s notorious quip about struggling small-town Pennsylvanians who “cling to guns or religion” because their communities had been left behind. Obama’s mistake was not noticing the economic pain. It was treating the people living through it with contempt. Republicans should not repeat it.

RELATED: The left uses primaries. The right wastes them.

id-work/iStock/Getty Images

Data centers are polling disastrously across party lines. Candidates are flipping positions and racing to oppose them. Put aside the merits of any individual project. The political signal is obvious: Americans do not trust the political and economic system to protect them from another massive technological transformation.

Their anxiety is not a messaging problem. It reflects lived conditions. Many Americans have watched factories close, wages stagnate, housing costs soar, communities deteriorate, and successive technological revolutions enrich people somewhere else. When they hear promises that AI infrastructure will make everyone richer, they remember how often “everyone” turned out not to include them.

That is why the socialist critique has traction. Too many Republicans reinforce it by behaving like the government-relations arm of Fortune 100 companies. Americans who feel abandoned by institutions will rage against the machine — and increasingly, against the machines themselves.

So Dallas arrives at the right time. To borrow an underrated movie title, Republicans have a chance to get their groove back before the midterms — the last federal election cycle that will shape Trump’s presidency. The convention should answer a basic question: What and whom does the Republican Party stand for?

RELATED: Republicans keep losing because they won’t take hostages

Win McNamee/Getty Images

The answer does not require a new slogan. It requires remembering the old promises. Trump’s rise was built on reindustrialization, immigration enforcement, hostility to corrupt special interests, and a conviction that government should pay more attention to the people who live in hollowed-out towns than to the institutions that profited from hollowing them out.

That agenda should again be squarely focused on working Americans whose finances have worsened, whose communities have been transformed, and whose confidence in the country’s institutions has collapsed. Reindustrialize. Enforce the border and remove the millions of people who have no lawful right to remain. Break the grip of special interests over the political class.

The midterm convention is an opportunity to assure voters that the Republican program is still about getting their country back — not telling them they are backward or poor for objecting to what Washington and corporate America have planned for them.

​Iran war, Mass migration, Midterm convention, Dsa, Socialism, Dallas, Texas, Republicans, Opinion & analysis, Donald trump 

They say diamonds are forever, but so are humans. We do not stop existing at the death of our bodies. And that is why the death of Gloria Steinem should cause us to think seriously about more than her political legacy as a leftist activist.

Steinem died Wednesday at age 92. She will be remembered as one of the most influential feminists of the last century, a co-founder of Ms. magazine, and a leader in the movement that made abortion a defining element of modern feminism.

Gloria Steinem’s death should remind us that human beings are forever. That makes killing infinitely more serious than our culture wants to admit.

But there is another person whose life must be remembered when we remember Steinem: the unborn child she aborted.

Steinem became pregnant at 22. She had broken off an engagement and was preparing to leave for India. Abortion was illegal in Britain except in limited circumstances, but a physician, John Sharpe, helped her obtain one.

Decades later, Steinem dedicated her memoir, “My Life on the Road,” to Sharpe. She remembered his words to her: “You must promise me two things.” One was that she not reveal his name. The other was: “You will do what you want to do with your life.”

Those words summarize an entire moral revolution.

But what about the other life? What did that child want to do with his or her life?

That child never went to India. Never went to school. Never chose a career. Never fell in love. Never held a child. Never traveled, wrote a book, changed political parties, found religion, rejected religion, made mistakes, sought forgiveness, or grew old.

The philosophy supposedly centered on “choice” began by taking every choice away from someone else. There is no higher level of selfishness than to end another person’s life so that person does not get in the way of your own plans.

What does this tell us about the human heart?

Steinem once said, “I didn’t go to school until I was 12, so I missed a little bit of social conditioning.” She considered freedom from conventional social expectations liberating. That theme ran through her life: question inherited rules, throw off imposed roles, and determine your own destiny. In its most radical form, modern feminism treats human rules as mere social constructs and “being yourself” as acting on your desires without discipline or correction.

RELATED: Chelsea Clinton put a price tag on abortion

Anthony Kwan/Getty Images for MEBO Group

There is something attractive about that message. Human beings should question unjust traditions. But there is a darker possibility. What if the moral law we are overthrowing is not merely “social conditioning”? What if some acts really are wrong regardless of what society says? Steinem’s questioning was not merely philosophical curiosity. It echoed the sin of Genesis 3: the desire to become one’s own god, even to claim power over the life of another human being.

The most frightening capacity of the human mind is not ignorance. It is self-justification. We can take something terrible and give it a noble name.

Steinem did not merely defend her abortion reluctantly. She later described it as taking “responsibility for my own life.” She said she tried to make herself feel guilty by imagining how old her child would have been. It is as if Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov had stopped midway through “Crime and Punishment,” still convinced that murder could elevate him above ordinary morality.

That is chilling precisely because the child disappears from the moral calculation.

Her life. Her responsibility. Her choice. Her future.

But another human being had a life too.

What does this say about the movement that followed her?

Steinem did not keep this reasoning private. She helped make it a political philosophy.

Millions of Americans were taught to describe abortion in the language of liberation, autonomy, and reproductive freedom. The unborn child became almost linguistically invisible. We learned to talk endlessly about the woman’s future while refusing to talk about the future being deliberately ended.

That is how moral revolutions work. They do not normally begin by convincing people to celebrate evil as evil. They rename it as something good.

Murder becomes “choice.”

The destruction of a human life becomes “health care.”

And denying another human being her entire future becomes “doing what you want with your life.”

RELATED: ‘That far’ always becomes here

Mike Coppola/Getty Images

The lesson of Steinem’s life is therefore larger than Steinem. She became influential because millions of people found that reasoning persuasive. A culture embraced the astonishing proposition that equality could be advanced by denying the most defenseless human beings even the equality of being allowed to live.

And now comes the question death forces upon us.

Christians believe Gloria Steinem still exists. We also believe her child still exists. Death does not make our actions disappear. It removes our ability to distract ourselves from them.

Imagine the question that child could ask: Mom, why did you kill me? Why was your future worth more than mine? Why did you get to “do what you want to do with your life” while deciding that I would never get to do anything with mine?

And widen the circle. What of the millions whose deaths were justified by the political movement Steinem helped lead? What happens when slogans about “reproductive freedom” meet the human beings whose lives those slogans helped extinguish?

Gloria Steinem’s death should remind us that human beings are forever. That makes killing infinitely more serious than our culture wants to admit.

And it makes repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation with God infinitely more urgent.

The great question is not whether history praises us after we die. It is whether the God who gave life agrees with what we did with it. Steinem now stands before His judgment seat.

​Abortion, Christianity, Death, Feminism, Gloria steinem, God, Judgment, Opinion & analysis, Repentance, Sin 

Twenty-two years ago, something extraordinary happened in American movie theaters.

Across the country, audiences sat in near silence as the final hours of the Lord’s life unfolded before them. There were no superheroes, no elaborate special effects, and no English dialogue. Instead, we watched a brutally realistic depiction of a scourged and bleeding man carrying a cross through the streets of Jerusalem toward His execution.

Every person watching the film also carries a reality we prefer not to contemplate: With every passing day, we move closer to our own death and our own face-to-face encounter with the living God.

I saw “The Passion of the Christ” four times on the big screen — and I was hardly alone in going back more than once. Each viewing was emotionally overwhelming. I shed plenty of tears, but none more than during this scene, as Jesus is beaten nearly beyond recognition.

Shared encounter

Mel Gibson’s 2004 film became a cultural phenomenon. It ultimately earned more than $610 million worldwide and, for 20 years, remained the highest-grossing R-rated movie in domestic box-office history. More importantly, it became something increasingly rare in American culture: a shared encounter with the story at the heart of Christianity.

Now, “The Passion” is back.

From September 10 through 17, the film returns to theaters nationwide, newly remastered in 4K with Dolby Atmos sound. Audiences will also see an exclusive behind-the-scenes preview of Gibson’s long-awaited sequel, “The Resurrection of the Christ: Part One,” scheduled for release in May.

For those of us who saw “The Passion” in 2004, its return offers an opportunity to revisit a remarkable cinematic experience. But nostalgia isn’t the most important reason to go.

An entire generation has never experienced this film in a theater.

The oldest members of Gen Z were only grade-schoolers when Gibson’s epic debuted. Many were toddlers or not yet born. They’ve grown up in a radically different culture from the one that encountered “The Passion of the Christ” 22 years ago.

An urgent invitation

They should see it.

Not simply because Mel Gibson made a powerful movie, but because of whom the movie is about: Jesus Christ. The Word incarnate. The man who walked willingly toward Calvary, stretched out His arms on a cross, and gave His life for humanity.

That is exactly what makes this rerelease different from the return of some beloved Hollywood classic. We aren’t simply being invited to revisit a movie. We are being invited to contemplate an event that changed human history.

And just maybe we need that invitation now more than ever.

Look around.

Wars rage. Natural disasters bring scenes of devastation into our homes. Human life is discarded through abortion and euthanasia. Families are fractured. Loneliness, addiction, and despair afflict millions. Technology connects us instantly, yet people seem increasingly incapable of understanding one another.

The world is shaking. What will awaken us?

RELATED: Mel Gibson’s long-awaited biblical sequel is finally happening

Amanda Edwards/Getty Images

Confronting the familiar

Christianity offers a startling answer. A crucified man.

The central image of the Christian faith is not a throne, a sword, or a display of worldly power. It is God giving Himself away.

“For God so loved the world,” Scripture tells us, “that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16).

“The Passion of the Christ” forces us to confront what those familiar words mean.

The scourging is difficult to watch. The road to Calvary is exhausting. The Crucifixion is horrifying, and that is precisely the point.

Sin is not trivial. Love is not mere sentiment. Our redemption came at a price.

Every person watching the film also carries a reality we prefer not to contemplate: With every passing day, we move closer to our own death and our own face-to-face encounter with the living God.

Seen in that light, “The Passion of the Christ” is not entertainment. Instead, it’s a question: Who do you say Jesus Christ really is?

The only question

It’s a question every human being should struggle with. It’s precisely the question that has drawn Christian leaders like Cardinals Raymond Burke and Gerhard Müller, Rev. Franklin Graham, and Pastor Samuel Rodriguez to tout the film’s rerelease — and to encourage Christians to prepare spiritually for what comes next.

The original film also changed what Hollywood believed was possible. Its enormous success opened new opportunities for religious filmmaking and raised expectations for how biblical stories could be portrayed on screen. The renaissance that followed eventually gave us productions such as “The Chosen,” which has introduced the gospel to millions worldwide.

But “The Passion” remains unique; perhaps because it refuses to make Christianity comfortable.

It reminds us of Christianity’s astonishing claim: The Creator entered His creation. God became man. He suffered. He bled. He died.

For you.

And then comes the most important part. The story does not end at the cross. That’s why the forthcoming sequel matters.

Christ dies on Good Friday. But Sunday comes.

More than two decades after “The Passion of the Christ” first stunned audiences, its return offers our troubled culture another opportunity to stand at the foot of the cross.

​Abortion, Entertainment, Euthanasia, Gen z, Gospel, The passion of the christ, Mel gibson, The chosen, Christianity, Faith 

Imagine America in 2032. The forms remain. There’s still a Congress. Still a Supreme Court. We all carry on with our campaigns, debates, yard signs, cable panels, and concession speeches. Children are still told they live in a democracy.

But the substance has changed. The Court has been expanded and brought to political heel. Election rules have been totally federalized. Mass mail voting is permanent. New states have added new senators. The bureaucracy is no longer merely hostile to the political opposition; it is fully “fortified” against removal. Banks, universities, corporations, platforms, and prosecutors all understand the same rule: Opposition is permitted, but only as theater.

Our road divides. Which future will it be?

A Republican may run. A conservative may speak. A dissident may complain. But the machinery effortlessly ensures none of it matters very much, if the voices are even heard.

This is the future now gathering inside the Democratic Party. Its energy has left the old, once-familiar liberalism of free speech, hard work, earthy patriotism, and equal citizenship. What pulses now is the politics of the DSA: racial spoils, censorship, open borders, anti-police politics, climate command economics, anti-Western foreign policy, and bureaucratic control.

The recent socialist victories in New York and Colorado are not local curiosities. They’re previews of coming attractions.

In this future, DEI returns, not as a national faculty lounge but as ruthlessly, preemptively enforced federal law. Race communism becomes the operating system of government, education, finance, hiring, medicine, housing, and contracting. Private property is no longer treated as sacred but as morally suspicious. Wealth taxes impose “fairness.” Reparations stake permanent claims against the dwindling producer class. Upward mobility vanishes for those lacking inside connections. “Privilege” means guilt, and guilt means punishment.

And yet America does not collapse all at once. Managed downward, its factories go elsewhere and its capital, fearing crushing exit taxes, simply hides. Energy costs are surcharged to the moon. Police retreat, schools decay, families shrink, and the dollar weakens. Our best people stop building and start hedging. And China takes full advantage.

The country still has symbols, ceremonies, flags, and slogans. But underneath them is a nation poorer and angrier, more censored, racialized, and frightened. A “managed democracy,” as the Russians call it, in which elections continue, but real political reversal becomes nearly impossible.

That’s one future. Now imagine another.

Civilization renewed

Populist nationalists hold Congress and the White House. The Court is preserved. Elections are secured. The border stays closed. The intelligence community and the administrative state are brought back under elected control. Equal citizenship replaces racial spoils. Cheap energy remains, and fuels, national policy. Building becomes honorable, durable, and beautiful again.

The wind at its sails, the country turns outward with confidence. The Monroe Doctrine is revived for the 21st century. China is pushed back from the Western Hemisphere. America finds and supports more Bukeles and Mileis — leaders who restore order, unshackle markets, defend sovereignty, and repel socialist decline and decay. Europe is no longer encouraged to censor its own people in the name of democracy. The peoples of Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, France, Poland, and the rest of the West are allowed to speak and vote without managerial supervision.

RELATED: A swarm of hidden Chinese bots are built to control what you think

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America also begins to think civilizationally again. We realize the West cannot afford to treat every historic Christian nation as a permanent enemy while China organizes the non-Western world into a rival economic and strategic bloc. A wiser American strategy, where possible and on terms favorable to American interests, aims to pull countries such as Russia back toward the broader family of Western civilization rather than leave them as raw material for Beijing’s empire.

Peace, trade, energy cooperation, commodity flows, technology markets, and a larger sphere of nations aligned against Chinese world dominance doesn’t solve America’s debt problem, but the resulting American economic growth can. Cheaper energy. Larger markets. More efficient and defensible force postures. It all makes for a less fragmented, much less deracinated West. If America is going to pay down its debt rather than inflate it away or surrender its sovereignty to creditors, it needs a bigger, stronger, more productive civilization behind it — not a shrinking coalition of guilt-ridden post-national states managing decline.

In this future, America wins.

Reclaiming our machines

Meanwhile, an irony lays in wait. AI and robots, the very technologies so often described as dehumanizing, may be what finally allow human beings to live human lives again. For two centuries, modernity has promised liberation while chaining families to commutes, paperwork, credential mills, medical costs, school failures, housing shortages, industrial drudgery, and the endless anxiety of keeping up. As a result, many Americans view another wave of highly hyped change with fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

But properly ordered, the machine can give time back for the soul. Robots can do dangerous, repetitive, exhausting work. AI can help tutor the child, assist the doctor, accelerate the engineer, guide the farmer, protect the soldier, and multiply the builder. Automation need not mean a cold world of isolated consumers watched by rigged algorithms. In a sane civilization, it can mean parents home earlier, children taught better, elders cared for longer, towns rebuilt faster, medicine delivered sooner, and ordinary people freed from scarcity enough to rediscover family, faith, friendship, craftsmanship, worship, and wonder. The machine, if governed by men who still know what man is for, can help restore the conditions of real life.

A return to the soul transforms our vision of the future. The menace and alienation drains away from images of robot aides in every classroom; robot surgeons and AI doctors; 3D-printed schools, hospitals, homes, and factories; and nuclear reactors providing clean, sovereign, abundant energy. With rebuilt American manufacturing, accelerated scientific discovery, and an economy where American workers once again build, supervise, own, maintain, secure, and profit from their ingenuity, the most productive economy in human history beckons.

No third way

And so our road divides. Which future will it be? There is no third option where the comfortable get to keep their illusions, and the machinery keeps tightening but liberty somehow survives. There is no version of the future in which the groups who want to rewrite the rules gain the power to do so and then politely decline.

That’s why the next two years of elections are not normal. They’re not just about which rear ends fill which seats. They’re about whether elected offices will lose the ability to change the direction of the country at all.

Whatever differences divide our friends and allies, we need to win now, while winning still means something. Or we can explain to our children and grandchildren why we stood by and watched the door close on their future.

​Tech, Socialism, Western civilization, Supreme court, Ai 

By the time you read this, my friend and managing editor Rob Eno and I should be somewhere in the Mountain West, headed southeast toward Dallas.

We are taking the scenic route.

The Republican Party is a house divided.

We took off Friday in a rental car from Inland Southern California. This was not entirely my idea. My doctor advised me not to fly for the time being, on account of a “blood pressure-induced event” in late March. Eno required remarkably little persuasion to turn a business trip into an expedition. He collects counties. He loves Buc-ee’s. He is weirdly excited about a 13-foot Sasquatch at a Terrible’s in Jean, Nevada.

We are also stopping in Moab, Utah, on purpose.

I have owned Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire” for years and have never read it — an oversight I have always assumed I would get around to correcting eventually.

So naturally, we’re going to Moab to pay homage to a writer I respect but haven’t read.

There will be plenty more levity along the way. I expect Rob and I will have developed three podcasts and sketched out a couple of book proposals before the trip is over.

The destination calls for a bit more gravitas, however.

We’re going to Dallas as part of Blaze Media’s coverage of the Republican National Committee’s first-ever midterm convention, a two-day spectacle at the American Airlines Center. President Trump will appear both nights. Vice President JD Vance will keynote the first night.

This is a big deal. Not necessarily because the convention needs to happen. Good Lord, no.

Nobody is being nominated for anything. There are no delegates fighting over a platform or credentials. Republicans are spending a princely sum of money to stage something resembling a presidential nominating convention two years before the next presidential election.

It’s political theater, pure and simple.

Donald Trump, of course, understands the business of show very well. He wants a spectacle ahead of a midterm election that could be very bad for Republicans.

Notice the conditional: could.

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Rob Eno

I offer no predictions. The conventional wisdom says the president’s party loses seats in a midterm. Republicans have a razor-thin House majority. Trump has political problems. Nobody likes the war in Iran. Nobody likes the high cost of living. Nobody wants to pay $20 for a burrito, assuming such a thing exists. Republicans know they need to persuade voters that the country is moving in the right direction. Those anxieties are part of the reason Dallas is happening at all.

But Democrats possess a remarkable talent for self-immolation.

We have seen it with Graham Platner in Maine. We may be watching it in Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed has spent precious weeks creating problems for himself with Jewish Democrats that Republicans would be foolish not to exploit.

Then again, Democrats can be ruthlessly effective when they choose to be. They have killed candidacies that became liabilities and cleared paths for stronger nominees. Anyone who remembers what the party establishment did to Bernie Sanders in 2016 — or how quickly Democrats jettisoned Joe Biden in 2024 — should hesitate before assuming they will simply stand around while Republicans win.

The Republicans have problems of their own, and they run deeper than any generic ballot.

Like it or not, the Republican Party is very much a house divided.

What remains of the Bush-Romney establishment still possesses considerable institutional power, especially in Congress. It is conservative in the least attractive sense of the word: hidebound, risk-averse, and frequently several election cycles behind its own voters.

MAGA defeated that establishment without entirely replacing it.

Trump transformed the Republican electorate. He changed its language, its priorities, its geographic base, and its relationship with the working class. But he also made himself indispensable to the coalition he created.

That’s dangerous.

Trump is 80. The Constitution bars him from another term. Sooner rather than later, Republicans will need to answer a question they have spent a decade avoiding: What is Trumpism without Trump?

RELATED: Who gets the GOP when Trump is gone?

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If the answer is “nothing,” the Republican Party is in much worse trouble than any poll can measure.

Maybe Dallas will provide a glimmer of an answer. Maybe JD Vance will be the heir. Maybe, just maybe, economic nationalism, immigration restriction, and a less interventionist foreign policy can become a durable governing program rather than the preferences of one extraordinary political personality.

Or maybe the convention will simply be a very expensive show about Donald Trump.

Eno and I should have a better idea by Wednesday.

But first we need to traverse the mountains and the desert.

And see the Sasquatch.

​Donald trump, Graham platner, Jd vance, Joe biden, Midterm convention, Opinion & analysis, Republican national committee, Working class, Foreign policy, 2026 midterms, Dallas, Mitt romney, George w. bush 

The Western church has stepped back from the political and cultural fights shaping our world — and in a conversation with BlazeTV host Nick Freitas, Christian apologist Frank Turek explains why it’s necessary that changes.

“Why do you think that the church has retreated from what we might more broadly call the political world or even just the cultural fights that we see? Why do you think the Western church in particular seems to have kind of just washed their hands of that fight and not all of them,” Freitas asks Turek.

“We don’t want to say anything offensive because we want people to hear the gospel,” he adds, asking, “Why do you think the West took this position?”

Turek explains that the West “dove into anti-intellectualism about 100 years ago when it didn’t think it could answer Darwin.”

“So instead of engaging the culture, it retreated from the culture and just created its own Bible colleges and seminaries,” he says.

“It’s all blind faith,” he adds.

And Jesus’ own words reveal one of the most powerful reasons Christians should remain engaged in politics rather than turning a blind eye.

“He said, ‘You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free,’” Turek says. “Now, that implies if you don’t have the truth, you’re in bondage. So we have to be engaged. And unfortunately, many in the church think, ‘Oh, we ought not to get involved in politics because that’s going to detract from the gospel.’”

“In fact, when pastors say to me, ‘You know, I don’t get involved in politics, I just preach the gospel.’ I say back to them, ‘I guess you don’t think the gospel is very important then.’ And they say, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ I say, ‘Because politics affects your ability to preach and live the gospel,’” he explains.

“Why don’t you go to North Korea and try and start your church?” he recalls asking. “It’s not going to happen. Why? Because politics affects your ability to preach and live the gospel. That’s number one.”

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

Start watching Nick Freitas NOW at blazetv.com and use the promo code NICK40 for $40 off your BlazeTV+ subscription.

​Frank turek, Nick freitas, North korea, Pastors, Western church, Christian apologist, Jesus, Blazetv show, Bible