Chick-fil-A is living a lie by being closed on Sunday.

And let me cut you nicer-than-God folks off at the pass if you have a problem with that, because CEO Andrew Cathy is the one begging for approval from the pagans at NBC News, not me.

The more I ponder this, the more certain I am that Andrew Cathy’s performance might be the most pathetic interview I have seen all year that doesn’t include Candace, Tucker, or Talarico.

Last year, Chick-fil-A rang up nearly $24 billion in U.S. sales, up 5.2% from 2024. So times are neither hard nor getting harder, and Cathy isn’t in the difficult position of having to eat a journalist’s trash sandwich to save people’s jobs. The breadlines aren’t filling up with former peddlers of delicious chicken sandwiches and waffle fries. The lights are staying on at Casa del Cathy.

So what gives? I thought I was watching a replay from 2012 when I saw Cathy getting cross-examined last week by NBC’s “Today” illuminati. Why would Chick-fil-A’s chief possibly care what those gaslighters think about him in the year of our Lord 2026? Was this a throwback to Mitt Romney’s “not part of my campaign” dodge during the original Chick-fil-A fight? It is election season, after all. Time to replay some classics.

But no. This was Andrew Cathy, apparently having learned nothing from the humiliation rituals his father, Dan, endured almost a decade and a half ago. Since then, much of the cultural right has rejected Romney’s awkward and fake moral preening in favor of Trump’s mean tweets and actual results. Yet Andrew still squealed. Even R. Lee Ermey’s drill instructor in “Full Metal Jacket” might be at a loss for words before such willful weakness.

How does Cathy not understand that we don’t have to do this any more? Unless he actually prefers the world’s feckless and flaccid approval to God’s. Whatever the case, can I get the name of Chick-fil-A’s PR firm so I can make sure nobody I know in the Christian conservative space ever hires it? Thanks.

Nobody asked for this. No crisis required it. Chick-fil-A voluntarily showed up on “Today” to be hazed by people who have hated the company for years.

A wise man once asked what good it does to gain the whole world but lose your soul. But if you aren’t living by what you hear at church on Sunday, you may as well open the chicken store for an extra day and sling some product! You aren’t going to embarrass yourself for free, are you?

I mean, you grew by only 5.2% last year. Maybe a robust 6% or 7% could have spared you the Soviet-style struggle session. But at a measly 5.2%, you’ve probably got to hedge your bets when you hear that “Did God really say?” whisper in your ear.

RELATED: Outrage ensues after Christian Chick-fil-A CEO invites LGBTQ+ activists to try CFA’s delicious chicken sandwiches

Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

My goodness. The more I ponder this, the more certain I am that Andrew Cathy’s performance might be the most pathetic interview I have seen all year that doesn’t include Candace, Tucker, or Talarico. I’m offended by it. I’m angry at it. I’m saddened by it.

It is the stuff of existential loserdom: a very comfortable “Christian” “man” going to the spirit of the age for repentance and absolution. That is blasphemy. That is an abomination. And since the salvation Cathy seeks from his enemies will never be granted, it is also just plain stupid.

Times really are hard for some of Chick-fil-A’s regular customers, but not for Cathy. And yet he signed up for this emasculation anyway.

What a waste of a platform. What a waste of a testimony.

​Andrew cathy, Boycott, Chick-fil-a, Church, Mitt romney, Nbc news, Opinion & analysis, Today show, Pagans, Christians, Conservatives, Blasphemy, Public relations 

Since 1950, the National Book Awards — now overseen by the National Book Foundation — has recognized the best in American literary talent, honoring the likes of Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and J.D. Salinger.

In recent years, however, the foundation’s judges appear to have prized politics over quality, at least in the category of nonfiction.

‘The National Book Award has become a DEI checklist.’

In 2023, for example, the award went to an Indian activist’s “retelling of U.S. history.” In 2024, the prize went to a book that the foundation said “holds the U.S. to account for its cruelty.” Last year, the foundation’s handpicked judges gave the nonfiction award to an Egyptian-born critic for his long-winded attack on the West.

Among the titles longlisted for this year’s award in the category of nonfiction is a work of agitprop about the supposed evils of white paint — a book which Steven Tucker, writing for the Federalist, noted was ironically printed on white paper.

Book publisher Simon & Schuster says in its description of “A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint” by Columbia University associate professor Wendy Walters:

As the default color of our built environment, [white paint] asks us to believe that it’s neutral — that it has no signifiers or, perhaps more troublingly, that what it does signify, whether it be calmness, cleanliness, blankness, or purity, is unassailable and value-free. In this expansive, impassioned examination, cultural critic Wendy S. Walters interrogates all that we have taken for granted about the substance that colors, or fails to color, the structures and objects that surround us.”

The race-obsessed author said in a 2021 video for Creative Capital — the outfit that gave her a grant to write the book — that her anti-white project “comes from a genuine and visceral dislike of white paint, a feeling that is at times overwhelming for me, and according to the estimations of others I know, a reaction that is possibly irrational.”

When probing her “possibly irrational” dislike of the color white and use of white paint, Walters supposedly “discovered numerous examples of the way that it figured into systems of erasure, exclusion, violence, and the masking of power in the social and natural world.”

RELATED: Three straight white guys walk into a poetry reading …

Derek Davis/Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images

Walters complained about an instance where white paint was allegedly used by supremacists to deface Houston’s Rothko Chapel and another instance where a rainbow crosswalk in Canada was painted over in white.

Ex-Washington Post book critic Ron Charles noted in his review of Walters’ book, “At times, it feels as though Walters selected the entire world and typed Command-F ‘white.'”

“Early on, she claims, ‘This is a book about white paint, not about whiteness,'” Charles continued. “But that’s like claiming Moby-Dick is about whales, not about obsession.”

Walters has a son with her white husband, author Dan Charnas, but she still managed to crowd around 350 white pages with justification for her hatred of white paint.

While this lengthy justification was panned in a New York Times book review on Thursday, it may ultimately be awarded next month by National Book Foundation judges.

Walters’ placement on the National Book Awards’ 2026 longlist is par for the course.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote in late September, “By my count, in the past decade, nine of the 10 winners of the National Book Award for fiction belonged to a minority group. In the nonfiction category, 10 of 10. Bluntly, the National Book Award has become a DEI checklist: Only authors with preferred identities, preferred topics, and preferred politics stand any realistic chance of winning.”

Blaze News did not immediately receive a response from Walters or her publisher.

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​Whiteness, Anti-white racism, Politics 

There are three high bars in the modern literary trade — writing a good novel, getting it published, and selling it to the public.

I’ve cleared the first two with my new political-thriller mystery, “The Camelot Trail,” which comes out November 17. Now I have to clear the third.

I committed another contemporary heresy in ‘Paper Tigers’: I gave the character I politically disagree with dignity and wit.

That last bar used to be lower once you cleared the first two. Publishers, even smaller ones, had a built-in promotional pipeline. They would set up radio interviews and nationwide book signings and send review galleys to genre-specific media like Analog for science fiction, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for mysteries, and Romantic Times for, yes, romance novels.

But that was the 20th century, when reading was still commonplace and before the internet atomized audiences. The publishing business has changed in other ways too.

Heroes wanted

At the turn of the millennium, “Harry Potter” triggered a reading boom among young and old alike. J.K. Rowling established her fantasy universe with a strong male lead, and boys showed up in force. A 2006 Scholastic study found that 57% of boys ages 5 to 17 had read “Harry Potter,” compared with 51% of girls.

The best-seller lists of the 2000s were also thick with male-driven thrillers and mysteries from Lee Child, Dan Brown, Vince Flynn, John Grisham, Harlan Coben, and others. Their readership was hardly confined to men. Men and traditional women still appreciate alpha males.

Yet over the next decade, publishing and Hollywood increasingly came to regard the traditional male hero as something requiring correction.

I noted the latter tendency eight years ago in my first article for the American Spectator. Marking the 10th anniversary of the action-thriller hit “Taken,” I wrote that a film about a heroic white father rescuing his kidnapped daughter from Albanian sex traffickers would never be greenlit in 2018. Radical feminists would reject the original story as patriarchal toxic masculinity.

Their “Taken” remake, I joked, would depict the father as a cretin while the minority-race mother kicks white male ass to save their mixed-race gay son from a white-supremacist Christian cult. Whether the resulting movie would be laughed off the screen would matter less than the message.

Male jail

Consider Rachel Zegler explaining Disney’s new “Snow White”:

“She’s not going to be saved by the prince,” Zegler said. “And she’s not going to be dreaming about true love. She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.”

So get with the program, all you silly girls dreaming about true love and Prince Charming, and you useless boys with no hero to emulate or damsel to rescue.

They can still find both archetypes in books from independent publishers.

Publishing itself is overwhelmingly female. The Association of American Literary Agents’ 2023 membership survey found 82.1% of respondents identified as “cis women,” versus 14% as “cis men.” The organization’s DEI committee explicitly describes agents as “gatekeepers” and says part of its mission is to advance AALA as an “anti-racist organization.”

The AALA does not, of course, publish a sign reading STRAIGHT WHITE MALE HEROES NEED NOT APPLY. But if you are a straight white male writing novels about masculine heroes and sexy women, you can draw your own conclusions.

I did.

Heretic’s tale

I’ve written five books, including what I immodestly consider a Great American Novel, “Paper Tigers.” It’s about two copy aides at the Washington Post who discover that chemistry trumps ideology. My Christmas romantic fantasy, “The Christmas Spirit,” has become a Yuletide perennial among some readers.

So why haven’t you heard of either book?

Because they were put out by small independent publishers willing to offer readers things the majors increasingly seem embarrassed by — in my case, romantic tough guys and beautiful feminine women who appreciate the opposite sex.

By 2020, I had little expectation that those once-unremarkable elements would win me a top agent, let alone a mainstream publisher. And I committed another contemporary heresy in “Paper Tigers”: I gave the character I politically disagree with dignity and wit.

That’s rather important in a romantic comedy. It may also help explain why Hollywood has largely abandoned the kind of romantic comedy in which men and women are permitted to like one another.

The trade-off with boutique publishers is promotion. They simply don’t have the budgets and machinery of the majors.

RELATED: Hard-boiled detective fans should follow ‘The Washington Trail’

Lou Aguilar

The thrill is gone

Which brings me back to “The Camelot Trail.”

It is book two of my political-thriller mystery series featuring young Washington private detectives Mark Tristan and Neil Cork. In “The Washington Trail,” they tackle what begins as the simple case of a beautiful UNC co-ed dumped by her D.C.-based fiancé. The intrigue escalates into a deadly political conspiracy.

A political thriller has to be timely.

“The Washington Trail” came out in August 2024, and the story takes place in February of that year. But I wrote it in 2023, when Donald Trump had what appeared to be a likelier future as a prisoner than as president. I had to anticipate the political situation a year ahead, knowing that a single contrary development could derail months of work.

I submitted the manuscript that October. Aethon Books accepted it and offered me a contract for two more novels in the series.

By the time “The Washington Trail” appeared the following summer, its plot was still on the cutting edge.

Then real life started behaving like a political thriller.

I turned in the second book, “The Camelot Trail,” last June, in time for what I hoped would be a lucrative pre-Christmas release.

The Aethon editors balked. They apparently considered the book too political to have broad commercial appeal — which I understood to mean too politically incorrect — and gave me a choice: Soften the politics or take back full rights to the series, including de-publication of “The Washington Trail.”

Blazing a ‘Trail’

I had to weigh the two options carefully.

“The Camelot Trail” follows Tristan and Cork as they bodyguard an expatriate English literature professor forced to flee Britain in fear for his life. His Excalibur Movement, urging a return to Arthurian chivalry among young men, has drawn threats from Islamists, feminists, and a British government increasingly hostile to him. He finds refuge in America, but a massive Excalibur rally planned for the National Mall once again makes him a target.

Softening the politics would have required a full rewrite, with no chance of making the Christmas season.

Finding another publisher could cost me the same window.

I chose option two.

I contacted World Castle Publishing, the publisher of “The Christmas Spirit,” which has sold well for the company every Christmas. On the strength of that book, World Castle agreed to keep “The Camelot Trail” on the original schedule and republished “The Washington Trail” this summer.

“The Camelot Trail” comes out November 17.

Now I really have to clear that third bar.

​Aethon books, Culture, Entertainment, Heroes, Lifestyle, Lou aguilar, Male hero, Publishing, The camelot trail, The washington trail, Woke, Books 

In June, the Veterans of Foreign Wars celebrated the left-wing holy of holies: LGBTQIA+ month. They paid tribute to those who fall under the ever-expanding umbrella of sexual identities and genders.

Framed as a gesture of inclusivity, the decision instead placed the VFW squarely on the opposing side of the demographic it has served for more than 125 years.

Having the right to say something does not automatically make saying it a good strategic decision.

Much of my career has been centered on reputation management and communications strategy. A painful lesson to learn the hard way is that the quickest way to lose influence is to pick unnecessary fights with your allies.

If the fight isn’t in defense of your core mission or identity, why go there and risk losing your base?

Every organization has a God-given right to say what it wants, when it wants. But the VFW seems to have forgotten something important about its members. According to Pew Research, 63% of veteran voters identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, compared with 35% who support Democrats.

Veterans are Americans. They fought for freedom, including the freedom of people whose beliefs and identities are different from their own. That does not mean they have to enthusiastically embrace every cause associated with the modern Pride movement or accept being branded intolerant and backward for questioning its politics.

Many veterans have legitimate concerns about taxpayer-funded gender-transition procedures, ideological brainwashing in classrooms, and military policies that could affect national security. By wading into this controversy, the VFW risks alienating its membership and its most important public policy audience: the GOP.

That is a spectacularly unnecessary political gamble, especially in an election year. The VFW could end up paying dearly if more disillusioned veterans decide to tear up their membership cards.

The VFW does not have to embrace every socially conservative position, nor should it abandon veterans who are not a part of its conservative majority. It should recognize that picking sides in contentious cultural debates carries risks, particularly when its overriding responsibility is to secure practical benefits for veterans.

Unfortunately, the communications problems extend well beyond Pride Month.

The organization has also managed to find itself in an extraordinary confrontation with Republican lawmakers over the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act, a sweeping legislative package combining more than 60 veterans-related measures.

The legislation would improve access to health care, expand support for caregivers, strengthen suicide prevention programs, and address longstanding problems within the Department of Veterans Affairs.

These are the exact issues the VFW exists to champion.

RELATED: The CDC is hiding the data on armed citizens

James Carroll/Getty Images

A Mission Roll Call survey found that approximately 71% of respondents supported TCAVA.

Its concerns are not entirely without merit. Veterans deserve fair compensation for service-connected conditions, and any proposal affecting future benefits warrants careful scrutiny. But why scuttle a sweeping package of potentially transformative reforms over provisions that could be amended?

Surely the sensible response is to fight for a better bill rather than risk throwing the whole thing onto the legislative scrap heap. Instead, the dispute has descended into a damaging public confrontation.

In July, Republican Representatives Mike Bost (Ill.) and Jack Bergman (Mich.) requested a Department of Veterans Affairs review of the VFW’s accreditation to assist veterans with benefits claims.

The VFW has every right to challenge politicians. Its independence is vital, and lawmakers should not threaten its accreditation simply because they dislike its position on legislation.

But having the right to say something does not automatically make saying it a good strategic decision. The VFW should be hammering out compromises, winning amendments, and building coalitions.

Instead, it is flying the flag of a movement many of its members oppose and getting involved in ugly public feuds with folks who are supposed to be on the same side. Who benefits from that? Certainly not the veterans waiting for better health care, improved benefits, and meaningful reform.

The VFW’s history deserves respect. Generations of veterans have depended on its advocacy, and its influence in Washington once helped secure important victories for those who courageously served their country.

That makes its current predicament all the more frustrating.

With Republicans controlling Washington at the moment, there is a golden opportunity to secure meaningful legislative victories. The VFW needs to stop fighting unnecessary battles and concentrate its firepower on the issues that really matter.

​Democratic party, Identity politics, Republican party, Public policy, Veterans of foreign wars, Lgbtq, Pride, Gop, Take care of america’s veterans act, Veterans, Opinion & analysis 

Sometimes an issue’s best barometer is external to it. Such is the case for the climate-change agenda and the box-office bombing of Tom Cruise’s current movie, “Digger.” Both agenda and movie are losing their audiences.

By now everyone has heard of the dual drubbing Tom Cruise’s “Digger” is receiving. First, it was panned by critics. Now, it is being ignored by audiences. Together, these have garnered the movie negative box-office headlines and put it well on its way to making the list of all-time money-losers.

Although the canary may not be dead in climate change’s coal mine, it is no longer singing.

Both outcomes are surprising. Critics have been very kind in the past to Tom Cruise and his projects. And the public has been kinder still, making him one of Hollywood’s biggest movie stars.

More surprising than either is the fact that one of the world’s biggest stars and one of the world’s most discussed issues would come together in such a pratfall.

Yes, there have been notable examples where the climate-change agenda seemed to show signs of wobbling. Bill Gates released a famous statement last year that said the “doomsday view of climate change” was “wrong.” Gates suggested acceptance and talked about working to address climate change’s impact (“to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies”) rather than continue seeking to reverse it.

This June, Jamie Dimon issued a warning to Europe, home of climate change’s greatest adherents and policy implementers, that these countries were killing themselves economically. As Dimon noted that Europe’s GDP had fallen from 90% of the U.S.’ to just 70%, the connection was unmistakable.

Not long ago too, the U.N. dropped the severest estimate of climate change’s potential impact from its impact projections.

All were telltale signs of shift, but they were easy to miss or dismiss, especially considering the enormous coverage that the climate change agenda has received and the huge financial resources committed (an estimated $1 trillion in the U.S. alone) to it.

RELATED: Don’t let anyone spoil ‘Digger’ for you

Image courtesy of Warner Brothers

It is safe to say that climate change has been the most consistently uninterrupted major issue for policymakers and the public alike for decades now. Everyone knew which way the wind was blowing, and almost everyone sought to burnish their green bona fides accordingly.

Overlooked, though, was the shift that was occurring beneath the headlines. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and especially since the Iranian conflict began, the focus has been on the price of oil, not its usage. Lost in this contemporary focus was any serious mention of getting away from oil. Neither was mention made that, from a climate-change devotee’s perspective, higher oil prices are a good thing.

The focus has all been on the negative impact of higher oil prices, on the need for getting them lower, and on the need for making oil supply routes more secure.

As important as all these underground indicators of the climate-change agenda’s retrenchment are, “Digger” may be an even more important one. The combined failure of one of Hollywood’s biggest studios, one of the world’s biggest stars, and one of the world’s (until recently, at least) biggest issues may be a signal that the public no longer cares so much. It has moved on.

“Digger” and climate change: a related occurrence in an unrelated area. It calls to mind another familiar analogy of the canary in the coal mine. Although the canary may not be dead in climate change’s coal mine, it is no longer singing.

​Audiences, Bill gates, Climate change agenda, Digger, Hollywood, Oil prices, Public, Public opinion, Tom cruise, Europe, Box office, Jamie dimon, Gdp, Green energy, Ukraine war, Canary, Opinion & analysis 

A mother’s grief is deeply personal — but a video of Christine Wells Wonsley twerking at a remembrance celebration for her 18-year-old son, Nolan Wells, is only conjuring more questions about her motives following his death.

“In late August, they celebrated his birthday and had a remembrance party, I believe, at her home or some home of a family member,” BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock says. “And someone has leaked the video that we’re playing right now of her dancing and twerking and celebrating with, I don’t know, a dozen women or so.”

This video, he says, “does not look like a mother … mourning the death of her son.”

“This to me is not a good look,” he continues. “And I know a lot of people will say, ‘Hey … she can dance … that’s not disrespectful to the remembrance of her son.’ And I get the whole ‘everybody grieves differently’ crowd.”

“But your 18-year-old son drowns, you believe he was murdered, and you’re having a remembrance six, seven weeks later for his birthday and you’re twerking. It’s not a good look in my opinion. It’s significant, in my opinion,” he adds.

April Chapman agrees, noting that in the beginning, she had “wanted to give this woman the benefit of the doubt.”

“But very early on, I made it clear and apparent that connecting with Al Sharpton and Ben Crump and then looking at the race grievance cartel and the character of the people that are screaming justice for Nolan Wells, it told me a lot about the underlying character and disposition of who these people were,” she tells Whitlock.

“And then you see this video,” she adds.

The video, Chapman explains, was given to journalist Sarah Fields by someone who was at the party, “who is now seeing for themselves that this person is a fraud.”

“This woman is playing in our face. She is not grieving,” she says.

“Now, many of us really are grieving in the sense that Nolan Wells, by any stretch of the imagination, and from observation, seemed to be a very good kid,” she continues.

However, every mother whom Chapman has spoken to has said that she wouldn’t “be able to pick [herself] up off the floor.”

“‘I wouldn’t be able to do all these interviews. I would be in a state of depression and just grief because I’m trying to figure out what happened to my son,’” she recalls them saying.

“And then we see a video like this,” she adds.

Want more from Jason Whitlock?

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​Al sharpton, April chapman, Ben crump, Christine wells wonsley, Jason whitlock, Nolan wells, Blazetv show