New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) has made “dignity for everyone” a central pitch for democratic socialism. But when it comes to explaining how he would deliver on that promise, Mamdani answers with silence.

And in recent interviews with Jon Stewart and Theo Von, Mamdani continued to evade the real answers while touting empty platitudes.

“Look, Theo Von is not an economist. That’s not his role,” BlazeTV host Nick Freitas tells Dr. Charles Steele of Hillsdale College. “So, I don’t expect him to ask a lot of probing questions, but I expected a little bit more out of Jon Stewart because both of them essentially asked what democratic socialism was.”

“And Zohran Mamdani’s response to Jon Stewart was, ‘It’s just choosing to wake up every day and fight for the dignity of everyone,’” he continues, adding that when he was speaking to Theo Von, Mamdani explained democratic socialism as “believing in providing kind of a certain quality of life and the dignity of all individuals.”

“And,” Freitas says, “that it’s, quote, ‘the government’s job to make that happen.’”

“What does Mamdani really want to do?” he asks Steele. “How does he plan to make good on these kinds of grandiose promises?”

“He’s a very smooth talker,” Steele responds. “I think he’s very effective. I think he really is either well-trained or really understands how to sound persuasive, but he sounds good. No specifics, nothing like that about how he would accomplish any of the things.”

“We want dignity, and we want everybody to be wealthy and do well and all this sort of thing,” he continues. “Oh, good. But how do you do that? What are the nuts and bolts of your program?”

That’s what he will not get into,” he continues. “Deep down, the DSA is Marxist, fundamentally. If you look at what they advocate, what their end state that they talk about in their latest platform, as they call it, it’s really … what we would think of as being a Marxist utopia.”

“And it’s a fantasy. It’s a dream. They can’t actually achieve it,” he adds.

“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 NICK for $20 off your BlazeTV+ subscription.

​Jon stewart, Nick freitas, Theo von, Zohran mamdani, Democratic socialism, Dr charles steele, Blazetv show 

An 8-year-old Illinois girl vanished while walking to church in 1960 and was later found shot to death in a wooded area — sparking a chilling murder mystery that remained unsolved for more than 65 years.

Now, a stunning breakthrough in the decades-old cold case has led investigators to a very unlikely suspect: a Chicago police officer who spent nearly 30 years investigating sex crimes and homicides.

‘And as far as we’re concerned, he’s a murderer who was acting as a police officer.’

On Nov. 12, 1960, Gloria Kowalewicz left her family’s home in Chicago’s West Englewood neighborhood to go to church just three and a half blocks away, the Chicago Tribune reported.

Kowalewicz had just received her first Holy Communion, and a nun at St. Mary of Mount Carmel Church urged her to receive the sacrament every day for two weeks.

On the day she went missing, Gloria’s mother, Esther Kowalewicz, dressed Gloria in a pink-and-brown checkered dress and blue leotard before kissing her goodbye and watching her walk away. It would be the last time Esther saw her young daughter alive.

Gloria never reached the church. Hours later, her body was discovered in a secluded spot in the suburbs. Gloria was shot twice in the head. She also had bruises on her neck.

A driver for a laundry company discovered the Chicago girl’s body in a ravine in Palos Park, more than 15 miles southwest of Gloria’s home.

Investigators determined that Gloria had been killed in the area where she was found because of the large amount of blood at the crime scene.

Police discovered a bloody trail from a nearby road to the crime scene. Investigators made plaster casts of tire tracks found nearby.

Investigators recovered Gloria’s shoes, her purse, and a single bullet casing near her body. Police discovered fingerprints on the strap of Gloria’s purse and on her Bible. Gloria’s coat was found several miles away.

Police interviewed more than 1,300 people, but the extensive investigation failed to identify the killer.

“The search bogged down, mired in a morass of tips and futile investigations and arrests,” stated a Chicago Tribune story published six months after Kowalewicz was murdered. “The tangible clues have been sifted and submitted to microscopic examination, all to no avail. Somewhere, perhaps in the same neighborhood, the criminal still walks the streets.”

The cold case remained unsolved for more than 65 years before advances in DNA testing and investigative genetic genealogy helped police identify a suspect this year.

Chicago Police cold-case detectives said they believe Gloria’s killer was one of the very people sworn to protect her — a Chicago police officer, the Tribune said.

Following a years-long investigation involving ballistics tests, fingerprint comparisons, DNA tests, and data from family tree websites, detectives identified their suspect as Thomas Francis McInerney — who was a 24-year-old police officer at the time of Kowalewicz’s murder.

RELATED: Woman missing for over a year found buried beneath garage after chilling tip from suspected killer’s friend: DA

The Tribune reported that McInerney was the son of a Cook County Jail corrections officer, whose parents lived only a few blocks away from the Kowalewicz family home.

McInerney — also a U.S. Army veteran and paratrooper in the Rangers — worked for the Chicago Police Department until 1987. He died in Las Vegas on Aug. 30, 2006.

The Tribune said McInerney’s family could not be reached for comment.

McInerney’s obituary stated:

He retired from the City of Chicago Police Department after 28 years of service as a homicide detective. He then worked for the Federal Public Defender’s Office in both Las Vegas and Reno as an investigator until retiring in 2004. He was honored as the Outstanding Federal Defender Investigator in 2003 and received numerous commendations during his years with the Chicago Police Department.

Kevin Bruno, chief of detectives at the Chicago Police Department, stated:

When you look at the level of work that went into this investigation throughout these six-plus decades — from that initial group of detectives that did everything they could to move this forward, to different detectives picking this up and trying to move it forward, to, finally, this group here — putting in all this time and effort and taking advantage of technological advances to finally bring this case to closure, it just shows you that we don’t forget, and these guys never stopped. The fact that he was a police officer is deeply troubling to all of us that have made a career out of this most noble profession. But at the same time, it’s not something we’re going to minimize or shy away from. And as far as we’re concerned, he’s a murderer who was acting as a police officer.

Adam Kowalewicz, who was born only a few months before his sister was abducted and killed, told the Tribune: “Now I know my mom and dad’s souls can rest. Gloria can rest.”

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​Cold case, Dna evidence, Chicago police, Crime 

A high school student’s post about the sex scandal at Cornell University led to a massive student protest in California.

The rape allegations from a woman against a group of college students at Cornell has led to a national debate about consent and alleged misogyny in the justice system.

A parent of a student cheerleader claimed the player was not allowed to attend a team dinner as a punishment.

A captain of the Piner High School football team in Santa Rosa posted a brief comment in support of the accused students.

“Free the Cornell 7,” he wrote on Instagram earlier this month, according to SF Gate.

On Friday about 200 students responded by walking out of class to demand that the student face discipline over the comment. A parent of a student cheerleader claimed the player was not allowed to attend a team dinner as a punishment.

The team had to forfeit a game Saturday against Archie Williams High School, and the official reason given was player safety due to lack of healthy players. The head coach told the Press Democrat that the team had only five healthy linemen. Other schools have had similar problems from lack of student participation.

Some are connecting the forfeiture to the student protests and the controversy over the captain’s post.

Piner High School and Santa Rosa City Schools did not respond to requests for comment from Blaze News.

The former Cornell student at the center of the rape allegations has filed a civil lawsuit against the university after the Tompkins County district attorney determined no crime was committed and filed no criminal charges. On October 2, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) appointed state Attorney General Letitia James (D) as special prosecutor in the case.

Critics of the alleged victim say her text messages very soon after the sexual encounter prove she consented despite being intoxicated.

RELATED: #IAmJaneDoe goes viral — but TikTok isn’t a courtroom

Others claim her case was dismissed far too quickly because of systemic bias against women’s allegations.

The Prospectors’ football team record falls to 2 wins and 4 losses after the forfeiture.

They will play Healdsburg on Friday in a home game.

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​Cornell university, Rape allegations, Football, California, Politics 

PORTLAND, MAINE — Maine’s chief financial watchdog wants a promotion.

Matt Dunlap, the Democrat running against Republican former Gov. Paul LePage in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, has spent nearly five years as state auditor. During that time, Somali-run home-care agencies have drawn tens of millions of dollars from MaineCare out of offices where nobody seemed to work.

Dunlap didn’t tackle the issue until a major scandal forced his hand.

‘Mainers can’t trust him with their tax dollars, and they won’t trust him with their vote.’

When Dunlap sought the auditor job in 2020, after more than a decade as secretary of state, he admitted he was “utterly unqualified” for it. Maine law gave Dunlap nine months to earn a professional auditing credential.

He failed the test.

Dunlap had to forfeit the office as a result, though then-state Senate President Troy Jackson (D), now running against Republican Sen. Susan Collins for U.S. Senate, gave him the job back in November 2022 after he finally passed.

Dunlap’s office is responsible for annual single audits, a federally required review of all Maine spending that uses national dollars. That includes evaluating whether Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services has effectively safeguarded against improper billing for Medicaid, called MaineCare in Maine.

MaineCare’s payments to providers, including home health care companies, are part of the federal spending Dunlap’s office audits.

In September, Blaze News found dozens of home-care offices in Portland, Westbrook, and Lewiston that were empty during posted business hours. Some had Minnesota phone numbers, and calls made to them either routed to voicemail or to dead lines.

Many of those apparent ghost companies successfully billed the state on Dunlap’s watch.

RELATED: Fraud, fraud, and more fraud: How Maine became a Somali scammer’s paradise

Benjamin Roberts/Blaze News

The Maine DHHS polices MaineCare’s providers. It is the agency responsible for actually reviewing providers’ bills, auditing them, and clawing back overpayments. Dunlap’s office is responsible for auditing the DHHS, testing whether the department’s safeguards actually work and reporting when they don’t.

Yet while Gateway and other suspicious providers billed tens of millions to MaineCare, and state health officials identified numerous overpayments, Dunlap never flagged a problem with how MaineCare reviews bills. His office only spoke up in March 2026, three months after the Gateway scandal broke.

Gateway Community Services took $28.8 million from MaineCare between 2019 and 2024, overlapping with Dunlap’s stint as state auditor.

It was state health officials, not Dunlap’s office, who caught Gateway after a review of 15,000 claims dating back to March 2021 apparently turned up nearly $1.1 million in overpayments.

Maine cut off Gateway’s payments in December 2025. Dunlap’s office didn’t flag MaineCare’s oversight of its providers until an audit in March 2026, three months later.

Federal investigators, not Dunlap’s office, were the ones who found that Maine made at least $45.6 million in improper MaineCare payments for autism services.

A former Gateway employee told the Maine Wire in May 2025 that he witnessed records being falsified, and his whistleblower claims went nationwide that December.

The state did cut off Gateway’s payments soon after, and in May, the DHHS affirmed “credible allegations of fraud” against the company, upholding the suspension. The suspension isn’t a criminal finding but a freeze on Medicaid disbursements that allows investigators to review the case.

The overbilling, however, is confirmed. State health officials reviewed 15,000 Gateway claims from March 2021 to December 2022, a stretch that began on Dunlap’s watch, and are seeking to recoup nearly $1.1 million. Earlier reviews found the company was overpaid about $660,000 from 2015 to 2018.

Gateway missed its deadline to appeal the ruling in July.

And Gateway is not the only company facing scrutiny.

Community Home Health Care in South Portland pulled in $47,986,855 between 2019 and 2025 before its payments were suspended this year, months after the Maine Wire paid its office a visit. Five agencies operating out of 203 Anderson Street in Portland, a building they share with a Somali money-transfer branch, took in $13,774,554. Another three at 640 Brighton Avenue collected more than $11.6 million.

That’s over $100 million to 10 companies, much of it paid out while Dunlap was the state’s top auditor.

Golden Home Care was ordered to repay $1,676,126 after a 2024 audit, but the repayment order was later canceled. Luna Home Care never paid back its $262,120 and has billed MaineCare another $1.69 million since. Even when the state did catch overbilling on its own initiative, it seemingly couldn’t hold onto the money.

Dunlap’s office didn’t flag MaineCare’s oversight of its providers until March, three months after Gateway’s payments were halted.

RELATED: Retiree radicalism: Behind the scenes with Maine’s anti-ICE activists

Benjamin Roberts/Blaze News

In its 2025 single audit, Dunlap’s office found that MaineCare’s Program Integrity Unit, which is supposed to review Medicaid payments after they go out the door, “could not provide documentation of the methodology” it uses to verify claims. Maine paid $3.2 billion to roughly 10,600 Medicaid providers that year, and auditors said they “could not determine the completeness” of the unit’s oversight.

The audit warned that the unit’s program “may not provide adequate monitoring of all Medicaid services, resulting in potential noncompliance with Federal regulations.”

The report also notes that there were no “Prior Year Findings,” meaning Dunlap’s office did not previously raise the issue. The office considered this a “significant deficiency” in MaineCare monitoring.

That same report doesn’t estimate how much improper billing may have slipped through, and it never mentions Gateway.

The clearest evidence of the auditor’s issues came from the agency he was auditing. In its written response, the health department, which runs MaineCare, said the auditor’s office hadn’t raised concerns since 2015 about how the unit chooses which payments to check. It called the criticism a “newly found position.”

The department was trying to wave off the audit.

Instead, it confirmed that the auditor’s office had never raised this concern before, including in the years Gateway was billing the state.

“Matt Dunlap’s record tells Mainers everything they need to know: He is an incompetent bureaucrat who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near taxpayer dollars,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokeswoman Maureen O’Toole told Blaze News. “Mainers can’t trust him with their tax dollars, and they won’t trust him with their vote.”

Dunlap is neck and neck with LePage in their congressional race, Blaze News’ Poll Watch platform shows. Dunlap had a 3.3-point lead over LePage as of Friday.

Dunlap, the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, and the office of Attorney General Aaron Frey did not immediately respond to Blaze News’ requests for comment.

This story was reported in collaboration with the Maine Wire’s Jon Fetherston.

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​Attorney general, Health and human services, Politics 

The United States is a wonderfully strange place that has entered a remarkably bizarre era.

The Wall Street Journal recently noted the growing appeal of big, muscular arms among women. On its own, it sounds like a harmless, somewhat ridiculous trend. But the veiny flexes are only the most visible part of a broader cultural shift.

The female body becomes another declaration of independence: stronger, harder, more imposing, less vulnerable.

Look around any busy gym in America, or spend five minutes scrolling Instagram, and the directives handed down to young women seem to have completely flipped. Women were once told they should no longer have to conform to male expectations to achieve genuine success. Internet culture somehow turned that promise inside out. Now the fashionable ideal increasingly resembles a female version of masculinity: bigger muscles, more tattoos, even the deliberate rejection of conventional beauty rituals through shaved heads.

The ideal is no longer merely to be desirable. It is to look completely untouchable.

‘Resistance’ training

This transformation has acquired an unmistakably political dimension. Writing in the Washington Post last year, columnist Karen Attiah described gaining 20 pounds of muscle through powerlifting. Attiah argues that muscles and femininity are perfectly compatible and reports receiving plenty of admiring attention from men. But her conception of femininity is heavily politicized. Connecting women’s growing enthusiasm for muscularity to abortion restrictions, male violence, and the revival of traditional gender roles, she wrote, “At a time when the rights of women, particularly Black women, are under attack, we need to return to the basics — to be grounded in our agency, physical power, and transformational energy.”

Attiah is hardly alone. Writing in Women’s Health last year, personal trainer Lacee Lazoff declared that lifting weights is a feminist act of rebellion. She described grunting, developing calloused hands, and lifting heavy weights as ways of defying traditional expectations of femininity. Even a trip to the gym, apparently, can become another skirmish in the war against the patriarchy.

There is a curious irony here. For decades, feminists argued that a woman’s worth should not be determined by her appearance. Now, in certain feminist circles, appearance has become a political statement in its own right. A muscular back is an act of resistance. A shaved head is a declaration of independence. Even the size of a woman’s biceps can apparently tell us something about her commitment to dismantling the patriarchy.

Women were supposed to be liberated from having their bodies scrutinized. Instead, they are being invited to turn those bodies into ideological billboards.

Trying on toxicity

Fitness culture is especially enthusiastic about this transformation. Building a wide back, heavy upper trapezius muscles, a thick neck, and bulging biceps is sold not simply as exercise but as empowerment. The female body becomes another declaration of independence: stronger, harder, more imposing, less vulnerable.

The disconnect becomes even stranger when you consider the way masculinity itself is discussed. Traditional male behavior is endlessly scrutinized for signs of toxicity, aggression, dominance, and emotional repression. Yet many of the same outward qualities — toughness, physical intimidation, extreme independence, indifference to approval — are celebrated when women cultivate them.

Somehow, masculinity becomes problematic in men and empowering in women. Female strength once meant endurance, patience, wisdom, competence, fortitude. A mother could be extraordinarily strong without feeling compelled to acquire the neck of an Olympic weightlifter. Increasingly, however, strength must be visible before it counts — and preferably visible on Instagram.

RELATED: Stallone’s ‘Steps’ looks back on the long, brutal road to ‘Rocky’

United Archives/Getty Images

Muscle mates

Women spend hundreds of hours dragging heavy sleds, curling dumbbells, counting grams of protein, and sculpting bodies designed to project an aura of absolute self-sufficiency. Add the sleeve tattoos, buzz cuts, and permanent don’t-talk-to-me expression, and the aesthetic communicates something before a word has been spoken: I require nothing from anyone.

Perhaps that feels liberating. But it leaves remarkably little room for femininity. And then comes the sales pitch that may be hardest to swallow: that men are supposed to find the whole package irresistible.

Human attraction is obviously more complicated than a checklist, and plenty of men like athletic women. But cross-cultural research on mate preferences has consistently found that men place greater importance on physical attractiveness in a long-term partner than women do. Both sexes, meanwhile, value qualities such as dependability and emotional compatibility. There is little reason to believe that a new fashion for bulging biceps has fundamentally rewritten these preferences.

None of this means women should organize their lives around pleasing men. It does mean we should stop pretending male attraction has been culturally reprogrammed because an influencer said “strong is sexy.”

If you’re a female reader skeptical of the point, consider the inverse. Would you feel genuinely attraction to a man who deliberately adopted every traditionally feminine aesthetic he could find? Imagine him stepping out in floral sundresses and pearl anklets. Picture him borrowing your crop tops, straightening his hair, spending two hours applying liquid eyeliner before heading to a sports bar, then asking whether he should start carrying a tiny micro-purse for his perfume and lip oil.

Perhaps somebody is into it; most women probably aren’t.

Sexual difference has proven remarkably stubborn despite decades of attempts to explain it away. Men and women can obviously borrow from one another, and nobody is suggesting that women should avoid barbells or men should avoid moisturizer. But a culture supposedly devoted to freeing women from male standards has arrived at a curious destination: It increasingly congratulates women for looking and behaving more like men.

To be clear, fitness is attractive. A strong, sculpted female body can be beautiful. But there’s a considerable difference between looking fit and looking as though you could throw your boyfriend through drywall.

​Female masculinity, Femininity, Gender roles, Gym culture, Masculinity, Powerlifting, Women, Womens health, Mate preferences, Culture, Feminism, Lifestyle 

Actress Selma Blair was arrested after she allegedly tried to open the door on a plane flight and bit a flight attendant.

The 54-year-old was arrested Sunday after the Delta flight landed in New York, according to TMZ.

‘Delta has zero tolerance for unruly or unlawful behavior, as the safety of our customers and crew always comes first.’

She allegedly punched one attendant and bit another one.

The flight had taken off from the Los Angeles International Airport.

Blair’s representative released a statement to Variety.

“Selma experienced a medical emergency that led to the alleged conduct. Upon landing, she received immediate medical attention and is currently in stable condition.”

One of the two flight attendants reporting injuries was transported to a hospital for treatment.

Delta Airlines released a statement to Variety about the incident.

“Delta has zero tolerance for unruly or unlawful behavior, as the safety of our customers and crew always comes first,” the statement reads.

Despite the chaos of the alleged incident, the flight was not affected and landed ahead of time.

Variety reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into the incident, according to its sources.

Blair had a previous medical incident on a plane that she attributed to mixing a glass of wine with a pill.

RELATED: Actress Alyssa Milano caught spreading gun misinformation after Texas shooting

“It was horrible and frightening, and I had empathy for myself actually afterwards because it was actually so out of character for me, especially because I’m a mother,” she said at the time.

Blair is best known for her role in the movie “Legally Blonde.”

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​Celebrities, Selma blair, Tmz report, Crime 

In Shirley Jackson’s 1948 story “The Lottery,” a town selects one resident by chance and stones the victim to death. The killing is arbitrary by design, a ritual nobody can justify beyond the fact that it has always been done.

Much of the modern Western imagination now approaches capital punishment through a similar lens: not as justice, but as officially sanctioned cruelty. That suspicion fits an older philosophical claim associated with Thrasymachus in Plato’s “Republic”: Justice is “the advantage of the stronger.” Rulers make the rules, call them just, and use them to serve their own interests.

A culture that recognizes only victims, never sinners, will mistake punishment for cruelty and forgiveness for an unnecessary apology.

I have been surveying arguments for and against publicly broadcasting the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who murdered 13 people and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood in 2009. The Army has scheduled his execution by firing squad for Dec. 3. The Pentagon announced plans to livestream it, although President Trump has said he will decide whether the broadcast goes forward.

Thoughtful conservatives disagree about livestreaming an execution. To understand the objections, I asked people on X to list the arguments they had heard. What stood out was how often the discussion framed morality in terms of consequences rather than the goodness of justice itself.

The broadcast might make Hasan a martyr. Terrorists might use the footage to recruit. Children might encounter it online. It likely would not deter another crime.

Those concerns deserve consideration. But consequences do not exhaust moral reasoning. Consequentialism judges an action by its results. Utilitarianism, one version of consequentialism, weighs overall welfare against suffering. Under that framework, justice can become merely a tool for producing desirable outcomes.

As a philosophy professor, I want to ask a prior question: What if justice is good in itself?

Consider two tests. Would punishing a guilty murderer become pointless if it deterred nobody? Would punishing an innocent person become right if doing so deterred thousands? If your answers are no, you already recognize a moral standard that consequences alone cannot supply.

Justice means giving people their due. A worker deserves his paycheck because he performed the work. His employer cannot justify withholding it by explaining how much happier the company would be with the extra money.

The same principle applies to wrongdoing. Someone who deliberately murders the innocent deserves punishment. The murdered cannot be brought back. That does not mean nothing remains to be done.

Justice is not personal revenge. It is deserved punishment imposed under lawful authority. Justice requires established guilt, proportionate punishment, and limits on the state. It forbids punishing the innocent even when doing so would be popular or useful.

Justice is good in itself. Seeing justice done is a good thing to behold.

Yet our culture increasingly treats punishment as the villain. We learn the offender’s grievances, childhood wounds, and social disadvantages. The victims fade into the background. Understanding how someone became cruel may be valuable. Explanation, however, does not become exoneration.

RELATED: Why America’s enemies always target Western civilization first

The New York Historical/Getty Images

Michel Foucault’s influential “Discipline and Punish” examined punishment through the workings of power, discipline, and social control. That analysis encourages suspicion of institutions claiming to administer justice. But identifying abuses of power does not establish that justice itself is merely domination.

Indeed, if justice is nothing more than power, why condemn the powerful for being unjust? The person demanding recompense for a wrong appeals to something beyond the wrongdoer’s preferences. He expects us to recognize that he was owed better. He is claiming that the oppressor is objectively guilty.

None of this settles the livestream question. The state must justify both a punishment and the manner in which it carries that punishment out. Public accountability and acknowledgment of victims matter. So does the distinction between solemn judgment and entertainment, along with the prohibition against gratuitous cruelty.

The justice of Hasan’s punishment does not depend on how spectators respond to it. But neither does a just punishment automatically make every possible way of displaying it wise. The question is whether the state administers justice rightly.

The debate therefore reveals more than disagreement about a camera. It reveals uncertainty about whether anyone truly deserves punishment and whether it is good to see justice enacted. If justice must always prove its usefulness before we acknowledge its goodness, then justice has already lost its authority.

The effort to undermine human justice may also serve a larger purpose: undermining divine justice. Human courts are fallible and limited to this life. Their imperfection does not erase the idea of judgment; for Christians, it points beyond them to the perfect justice of God.

RELATED: If mental health experts can’t identify murderers, what’s the backup plan?

SeventyFour/Getty Images

When a culture treats every offender as ultimately an innocent victim, divine judgment will appear monstrous. God becomes the angry villain while the sinner is merely doing his best. A story long associated with Bertrand Russell captures the posture: Asked what he would say if confronted by God after death, Russell reportedly complained that God had not provided enough evidence.

Scripture presents a different picture. God’s revelation leaves humanity “without excuse,” and before His judgment “every mouth may be stopped.” It is right to stand in awe and fear of God as the perfect judge.

“The wages of sin is death.” Without that truth, the cross becomes unintelligible.

Christ was publicly crucified. He was innocent, yet Christians believe the sins of his people were laid on him. He paid the debt we owed and canceled the record that stood against us. A culture that cannot see justice as good in itself will specialize in justifying its sin and condemning the Judge. It will also lose sight of what the cross means for sinners.

A culture that recognizes only victims, never sinners, will struggle to understand either justice or grace. It will mistake punishment for cruelty and forgiveness for an unnecessary apology.

Justice is good in itself. Its goodness does not depend on applause, deterrence, or our comfort. Until we recover that truth, we will misunderstand both the courtroom and the cross.

​Capital punishment, Consequences, Courtroom, Entertainment, Execution, Firing squad, Forgiveness, Fort hood, God, Grace, Justice, Livestream, Pentagon, President trump, Punishment, Sin, Sinners, Victims, Opinion & analysis 

Near the beginning of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Digger,” oil baron Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise) is briefing the president and his Cabinet.

Digger, preoccupied with his terminally ill cat, has just set off a calamitous global environmental disaster and is meeting with the president to mitigate the fallout.

None of us, not even the most rational people, is immune to the power of emotional messaging.

The president, played by a slimmed-down John Goodman, is an over-the-top blowhard. He’s an amalgam of Donald Trump, both Bushes, and every villainous conservative politician in the history of cinema. He is flanked by a comically weak vice president, a square-jawed racist general, and a sycophantic Bible-thumping preacher.

It was funny, and I was mesmerized by the production design and cinematography. But I thought, “Why the lazy stereotypes?”

I knew Iñárritu was smarter than this, and I knew Tom Cruise wouldn’t settle for anything less than excellence. So why was the story driven by the lead character’s stupidity? Why were the other characters such hackneyed tropes? It didn’t make sense.

Then the plot twisted. My jaw dropped, and I spent the next two hours on the edge of my seat, hypnotized by what might be the greatest film of a generation.

“Digger” is an incredible film for many reasons. First, the entire cast is brilliant, and this is the best performance of Tom Cruise’s career.

There’s more to admire in the writing, Richard Johnson and Dennis Gassner’s production design, Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki’s heroic cinematography, the sound design and editing, and Jacqueline West’s costumes. Every aspect of the movie serves to complete the gestalt.

But what makes this film truly great is that it is unlike anything that has come before it. People ask whether it is comparable to “Dr. Strangelove” or “Citizen Kane,” but those are the wrong analogies. The closest comparison might be the moment in “The Wizard of Oz” when Toto reveals that the Wizard is merely an ordinary man behind the curtain.

Another curious thing about “Digger” is that it is executed so masterfully that it strikes an implicit bargain with its audience: Don’t spoil it. So I’m not going to ruin it for you.

And no, it’s not a movie about climate change or the oil industry. The environmental catastrophe is merely a plot device, and the stated climate science “facts” are laughably absurd, which I suspect is by design.

RELATED: Netflix ‘adapts’ Steinbeck’s ‘East of Eden’ — and Satan gets a sympathetic makeover

Emilio Madrid/Getty Images

“Digger” is a film about the power of storytelling, but not in the way you think. It is about the nature of performative political hate and how our elites shape the narrative to let us believe we’re winning even as the world around us falls apart.

The film is a devastating critique of politicized art, which has not only become normalized but has provided endless fodder for political commentators on both sides of the aisle.

But “Digger” can’t be easily categorized through an ideological lens. And since it is an indictment of the entire infotainment complex, small wonder critics gave it a lukewarm reception.

Warner Bros.’ marketing campaign didn’t do “Digger” any favors. Unable to reveal the real plot, the trailers were misleading. Tom Cruise’s promotional blitz could only concentrate on the film’s technical triumphs, of which there are many. It’s a shame more people didn’t turn out, but there is no way to explain the plot without revealing the twists, which don’t stop coming until the credits roll.

There’s a scene in the middle of the film where Digger offers the scientist Ganesh (played by the great Riz Ahmed) a piece of bluefin sashimi. Ganesh declines, citing moral concerns over declining bluefin tuna populations.

Digger tells Ganesh a story. It’s about the man who raised the tuna and how lovingly he cares for them. Among other things, the fish farmer gives the tuna daily massages and even sings to them.

Elated by the heartfelt story, Ganesh relents and eats the sashimi. But then we learn that the tale of the tuna farmer is a complete fabrication. Digger has no idea where the tuna came from. He just knows it’s delicious.

The point is that a good story, told artfully, can overcome rational resistance or moral objection.

RELATED: Did these 6 movies about Satan accidentally summon him to their sets?

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This is a lesson I learned working in media and advertising. First, take an emotion. It could be anything: love, hate, fear, jealousy. The specific emotion isn’t important.

What matters is surrounding that emotion with a story and then connecting the story to whatever product or concept you’re selling.

If you do it correctly, and if you tell the story artfully, you can get anyone to gladly swallow anything you put in his mouth. You can also get him to look the other way while you pick his pocket, make him chant for the death of a (most likely) innocent man, or trick him into mistaking cathartic laughter for victory.

Digger gives Ganesh a lesson in the basics of propaganda. And none of us, not even the most rational people, is immune to the power of emotional messaging.

That’s what “Digger” is about. The story is full of emotion, it is artfully told, and the ending will leave you elated.

But it will also give you a new sense of dread about the world outside the theater door, and perhaps you will begin to pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

​Advertising, Climate change, Climate science, Elites, Oil industry, Propaganda, Storytelling, Tom cruise, Media, Digger, Tropes, Cinema, Opinion & analysis 

On October 6, at an Ottumwa, Iowa, City Council meeting, former council member Matt Dalbey — a member of The Satanic Temple of Iowa — delivered the opening invocation. In it, he addressed the “dark father,” referred to the “Luciferian impulse to eat of the tree of knowledge,” and concluded with the words “It is done. Hail Satan.”

Despite the Satanic Temple’s claims to be non-theistic, local pastor Rick Bick called it a curse on the city that needed to be reversed.

BlazeTV host of “Strange Encounters” Rick Burgess agrees. Even though he believes the Satanic Temple “really is more of an agnostic movement” designed to test the limits of “freedom of religion,” he nonetheless takes invocations of Satan as matters of spiritual seriousness.

Council Member Bill Hoffman, however, disagreed with Bick, saying, “I’m a Christian man with Christian values. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to observe his First Amendment right. It just means that I want to use my rights not to observe that.”

Rick agrees with this sentiment too, but with a caveat.

“I’d certainly agree with that, but I think that we think that somehow freedom of religion would include something as dark and blasphemous as this, and honestly, if you look at the history of our country, it just never did,” he says.

“The Establishment Clause was designed for one thing and one thing only,” Rick explains, “that we would not have a government-sanctioned denomination of the Christian faith.”

“You find nowhere in our history — nowhere — that anybody outside of Christianity was ever allowed to have a devotion” or “pray,” he adds.

Our founding fathers, he says, made this clear.

“We know that Thomas Jefferson … didn’t believe in the miracles of the Bible, but even he said that the separation of the church and the state is a one-way wall and is protecting the Christian church from the government, not the government from the influence of Christian values,” Rick says.

“So for us to think that our Constitution allows for satanic prayer at any kind of government meeting is just not true. It was never the intent because [the founders] never did it. They didn’t even allow other religions,” he continues. “All that was allowed was Christianity, and this was more of a discussion that we’re not going to have an official denomination — not that anybody with any claim of a religious belief can now have the floor.”

As for Dalbey’s prayer, Rick believes it doesn’t matter if he worships Satan or not; the words he speaks still hold power.

“I would give him a stern warning,” he says.

“He’s playing with a very dark powerful force that is real, whether he believes it or not. And if you choose to be agnostic, well, then it’s the same thing as being a satanist, because there is no middle ground. You’re either for God and you stand with God and you believe in the one and only living God or you don’t.”

To hear more, watch the episode above.

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