DiJonai Carrington may have committed the most educational flagrant foul in the history of basketball.

I was discussing the episode with a friend who asked, “Do you remember roller derby?” I confessed I did not. “It was a sport where people enjoyed watching women beat each other up,” he said. I saw the connection immediately.

‘White privilege’ did not appear spontaneously in professional sports. It has an intellectual pedigree.

It reminded me of undergraduate classes in which feminists argued that women should run the world because they are more level-headed, calm, and compassionate than men. I had also watched some of those same people treat conservative colleagues with remarkable contempt. The theory and the behavior did not always match.

The WNBA has lately offered a rather vivid reminder that women, being human, are perfectly capable of aggression, rivalry, resentment, and the occasional refusal to accept responsibility.

During Saturday’s game between the Chicago Sky and Indiana Fever, Sophie Cunningham broke toward the basket for a layup. Carrington pursued her from behind and struck Cunningham across the head and neck. Officials reviewed the play, upgraded it to a flagrant 2, and ejected Carrington.

This was WNBA drama. Then higher education entered the game.

After her ejection, Carrington posted on Threads: “WHITE PRIVILEGE @indianafever.”

One has to admire the efficiency. Universities can spend an entire semester teaching students to interpret ordinary human interactions through racial categories. Carrington managed it before the game was over.

Predictably, people asked the obvious question: What precisely did Cunningham’s whiteness have to do with Carrington hitting her in the face?

Former NFL player Emmanuel Acho was among those who challenged Carrington’s invocation of white privilege. Carrington later said people had misunderstood her: She was not claiming the ejection itself was caused by white privilege, but pointing to what she regarded as a larger pattern of white players receiving different treatment. She defended her understanding of the subject by citing her education, including Stanford.

And there, buried beneath the WNBA drama, was the genuinely interesting story.

Carrington herself appealed to her education as authority for the framework she was using. That does not prove some Stanford professor taught her how to explain this particular foul. It does show how natural it has become for educated Americans to reach for concepts such as “white privilege” when interpreting conflict and punishment.

RELATED: Magical thinking just made the WNBA Draft

Melissa Tamez/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images

America’s universities have spent decades teaching students to interpret institutions and human behavior through racial categories. “White privilege” did not appear spontaneously in professional sports. It has an intellectual pedigree. Students encounter frameworks in which racial identity becomes a morally significant category through which achievements, punishments, disagreements, and disparities are interpreted.

Carrington apparently regards her education as establishing her authority on the subject. Fine. Then taxpayers and parents should pay attention to what that education teaches people to see.

Stanford is private, of course, but like many American universities, it receives substantial federal funding. Universities receiving federal money are subject to federal antidiscrimination law. That does not mean professors cannot discuss controversial theories of race. They obviously can. The serious question comes when theories move from subjects to be examined into institutional doctrines that classify people morally by race.

Imagine reversing the language. Imagine a university program teaching students to interpret the behavior of black classmates through a theory of “black privilege,” complete with generalizations about what black people characteristically possess, how they characteristically think, and what judgments should attach to them because of their racial identity.

Would anyone seriously maintain that race had nothing to do with it?

The Carrington episode also illustrates something universities rarely advertise about these theories: They can be wonderfully useful for avoiding personal responsibility.

In the classical university, education aimed at forming a good soul: one capable of wisdom, ordered toward what is good, and disciplined against vices such as hatred, envy, and bitterness. This did not mean the good person escaped persecution or injustice. It meant that injustice did not excuse becoming unjust in return. A good soul fears God, not men — or women.

Today’s university is different. It teaches students to locate wrongdoing in systems, structures, identities, and power. Once in a while those explanations are relevant. But they can also become a vocabulary for explaining away one’s own choices. For the philosophy students reading this, the contrast is Socrates versus Thrasymachus: seek the good, or reduce everything to power.

The old-fashioned response to committing a flagrant foul was fairly straightforward: “I went too far.”

The new response requires considerably more vocabulary.

One can discuss systems, privilege, disparities, power structures, historical patterns, and institutional inequities until the original question — “Why did you hit her in the face?” — disappears beneath a small graduate seminar.

That is one of the most corrosive temptations of identity ideology. It can supply an external explanation for almost every unfavorable consequence. If I succeed, I overcame oppression. If you succeed, you benefited from privilege. If I am punished, we investigate the system. If you are punished, justice has finally arrived.

Personal responsibility becomes strangely difficult to locate.

Carrington has also defended her aggressive play on the grounds that she will do everything she can to prevent an opponent from making a layup. Fair enough — except that this rather misses the point of organized sports.

Basketball is not defined as “do everything you can to stop the other person.” It has rules.

That’s what distinguishes basketball from rugby or a parking-lot fight.

RELATED: ‘She didn’t wait until it was easy’: Victim of brutal injury from male athlete praises Sophie Cunningham

Michael Reaves/Getty Images

You may contest the shot. You may block the ball. You may position yourself defensively. You may even commit an ordinary foul to force free throws. What you may not do is simply employ whatever technique seems most likely to prevent the basket.

Otherwise, why stop with a cross-face? Tackle her. Bite her. Kick her. Put her in a rear-naked choke.

Although, given recent WNBA highlights, perhaps I should stop giving anyone ideas.

The rules are not an obstacle to the game. The rules constitute the game. And that is precisely the moral lesson obscured by the ideology Carrington invoked.

Civil society works the same way. We do not get to suspend ordinary standards of conduct because we believe ourselves to be fighting injustice. We do not get to judge people by their skin color because an elaborate theory tells us doing so is enlightened. Anti-racism becomes corrupting when it licenses hatred, envy, or racial blame in the name of correcting hatred, envy, and racial injustice.

Carrington’s foul lasted only a moment.

Her explanation deserves more attention because it inadvertently reminded Americans that when racial ideology shows up on the basketball court, it did not necessarily begin there.

Someone taught the framework. Quite possibly at a university. And taxpayers help support the institutions where it flourishes.

Why are so many young Americans struggling to find lasting relationships? According to BlazeTV host Nick Freitas, the answer has a lot to do with the way modern dating has not only been influenced by feminism — but has been reshaped by the apps.

These apps, Freitas says, have created a “fake environment” where men get far less attention than women do.

“On Tinder, men’s average match rate is 5.26%. Women’s is 44.4%. So that’s an eight times difference, roughly. On Hinge, men swipe right on 61% of profiles. Women swipe right on 5% of profiles,” he explains.

“This part blew my mind. There’s a huge gender skew, like on Tinder, 67%-76% of the people on there are male. For Hinge it’s 60%-40%; for Bumble it’s 54%-46%,” he continues.

“On all these platforms where, again, we’re being told to go find people … it’s even worse, because one of the things that women typically need to truly be attracted to a man is they actually need to be able to be in proximity toward them,” he adds.

And an Institute for Family Studies study found that couples who meet in real life are much happier than ones who met online — and there’s good reason for it.

“Modern dating is already set up for failure, which is to say that you’re essentially putting on a performance for another human being. But your ability to perform outside of who you really are is far more limited in person than it is online, especially when we have all kinds of enhancements and filters and everything else that are going on,” Freitas explains.

However, as men and women begin to point the finger at each other for the growing issue of modern dating, Freitas points out that there’s something they both need to realize.

“As we go into this final phase talking about what should you be doing is men, you have every right to be pissed at the system that was set up for you,” he says.

“What I want you to understand is that it’s harder sometimes to understand how the women were also lied to because the women were lied to in a very, very different direction. You were put down by the system; they were built up by it,” he explains.

“But you were both lied to,” 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 NICK40 for $40 off your BlazeTV+ subscription.

Until now, Google Gemini has been an optional part of Android. Most of its features are locked behind the dedicated Gemini app, or you can choose to rely on Google Assistant as your on-device companion for fielding questions and completing tasks. That is all about to change, though, as Google officially prepares to retire its old assistant for an AI future, and it is coming sooner than you think.

Google brought Gemini to Android in early 2024. Since then, the company has progressively injected its AI into every corner of its operating system. The latest iteration, Gemini Intelligence, aims to take its chatbot a step farther by giving it agentic capabilities. At launch, the only way to set Gemini as your default personal assistant instead of Google Assistant was to manually make the switch in your settings. Many newer phones, however, default to Gemini straight out of the box.

You aren’t allowed to delete it from your phone. You can, however, take away its functionality.

Needless to say, if you have avoided Gemini like the plague thus far, your efforts are commendable, but your luck is about to run out.

Starting on September 4, Google will start rolling out Gemini support as the default personal assistant in all applicable Android models — devices with 2 GB of RAM or more that run on Android 9 or later. The process will take several weeks to reach everybody, so you may not lose access to Google Assistant immediately. However, once it is complete, Gemini will take over as the default assistant on your handset, whether you like it or not.

It’s not just your phone, either. The switch is coming to all devices in Google’s product ecosystem, including tablets running Android, car infotainment systems with Android Auto, smartwatches running on Wear OS, and TVs with Google TV or Android TV. In other words, you can’t escape it … but you might be able to turn it off, if you know where to look.

How to remove Google Gemini as the digital assistant on Android

To disable Gemini on a Samsung Galaxy device, open the Settings app, select “Apps” near the bottom of the page, and tap “Choose default apps” at the top. From there, tap “Digital assistant app,” and choose either an alternative to Google or select “None” from the options. Now, when you invoke the digital assistant on your phone, absolutely nothing will happen. Your digital assistant is effectively gone.

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/One UI 9.0 on Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8

For Google Pixel phone owners, open up the Settings app and choose “Apps” near the top of the page. Next, select “Default apps,” followed by “Digital assistant app,” and finally, choose “None” or an alternative option to Google, if applicable. Congrats, now your phone no longer has an AI-powered digital assistant!

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/Android 17 on Google Pixel 10 Pro XL

If you use an “other” branded Android phone, such as a Motorola, OnePlus, Nothing, etc., the process should be similar to the steps above. The main goal is to find the default apps section in your settings and change the digital assistant to anything other than Google. Once you do that, you’re free from Gemini! Well, sort of. There’s more …

How to remove Gemini from your Android apps

Google has also baked Gemini into many of your favorite apps, including Gmail, Maps, and Drive, but this should only work if you have Personal Intelligence enabled. To check, open the Gemini app on your phone, select “Personal Intelligence,” and then “Connected Apps.” From here, uncheck every app and service that’s enabled. There are a lot of integrations on this page, so make sure you scroll all the way to the bottom and get every single one.

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/Android 17 on Google Pixel 10 Pro XL

How to disable the Gemini app on Android

Now that we’ve fired Gemini from its digital assistant role and banished it from Google apps, there’s one last thing to do, and this one comes with an unavoidable caveat.

Some new phones these days, especially from Samsung and Google, come with the Gemini app installed by default, and you aren’t allowed to delete it from your phone. You can, however, take away its functionality.

RELATED: Google forced age restrictions onto Android. Are they right for you?

yourstockbank/Getty Images

To disable Gemini on Android, simply swipe into your app drawer and locate Gemini in the app list. Hold your finger on the app for several seconds to bring up the secondary menu, and choose the “i” icon that indicates “App info.” Next, tap on the “Disable” switch. You’ll get a warning message to try to convince you to change your mind. Ignore that, disable the app anyway, and you’re all set. You will no longer see Gemini in your app drawer, and it will cease to work.

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/Android 17 on Google Pixel 10 Pro XL

Reclaim your privacy from Gemini

As expected, it’s not easy to pry Gemini’s grubby claws out of an Android device. The service is ubiquitous, and as Google triples down on its AI strategy, it will only become more prevalent throughout its operating systems. However, if Gemini is not something you want anywhere near your phone and your data, these steps will help you reclaim some of your privacy and peace of mind.

Since the 1980s, Cliffe Knechtle has been evangelizing on college campuses as part of his “Give Me an Answer” ministry. His son Stuart joined him in 2015, and together the father-son duo continue to conduct their open-air Q&A sessions on campuses around the nation, addressing students’ questions and doubts with the explicit goal of sharing the gospel.

In the nearly five decades “Give Me an Answer” has been operating, Cliffe has had a front-row seat to observe college students devolve in many disheartening ways.

On this episode of “Relatable” with Allie Beth Stuckey, Cliffe and Stuart explain the three biggest factors that have changed since the dawn of the ministry — and which one has been the most disturbing.

The emotional fragility of students is something Cliffe didn’t have to consider back when the ministry began — but today, it is something he is forced to adjust to everywhere he goes.

“My dad grew up in Switzerland, and when he was 18, he sat up in the Alps with a gun, watching Hitler's Panzer divisions roll toward Switzerland. My grandpa, my dad's dad, was in the front lines with his gun,” he reflects. “Today, when Donald Trump wins the election, university students go to a crying room to get counseling.”

This hypersensitivity has been a challenging factor to adapt to, he admits.

“I'm so grateful for Stuart and for my wife, Sharon, because they've helped me understand that and helped me not be quite as harsh and quite as direct as I have often unfortunately been,” Cliffe shares.

The second shift he has seen is the growing belief in moral relativism — the idea that right and wrong are subjective.

“Moral relativism and sexual immorality has become so commonplace that if you stand against that, you are really, really weird,” says Cliffe.

The third shift he has seen is the rising conviction that science is the ultimate truth.

“Unfortunately, what has become too firmly entrenched is unless you can prove it scientifically, it's not true,” says Cliffe.

“It's fascinating to watch — one group is totally into relativism, and the other group is into unless you can scientifically prove it, it's not true,” he continues, “and so to be able to address both of those camps is a challenge.”

It is difficult, he explains, because the gospel, with a few minor exceptions, is largely opposed to moral relativism, and while the gospel of Jesus Christ is “based on evidence,” it is not based on "scientific proof."

But of all three shifts, Stuart finds the second — the rising belief in moral relativism — to be the most shocking.

He shares a story from one of his college campus visits where a large group of students followed him around, pressing the issue of euthanasia.

“When I started 11 years ago with [my dad], I did not see — for the first few years, at least — any type of devaluing of human life — the relativizing of human value like I do today,” he says.

“[At one campus], this group follows me — very, very progressive group — to a corner where I was eating a sandwich. And they corner me and they say, ‘Hey, how dare you say that you are going to try and save the life of a suicidal 16-year-old woman? That's devaluing her freedom and autonomy. If anything, you should aid her in her decision to kill herself,”’ Stuart shares.

Their certainty, he says, left him “shell-shocked.”

“They wouldn't say get a noose or, you know, push her off a cliff. They were more so saying, though, a type of euthanization like the elderly get, you know, whether it's a pill or something along those lines,” he says, “and so they pressed me for a good hour in a very angry way.”

“Personal autonomy and freedom is considered really the top idea and thing to pursue, even more so than the value of human life.”

To hear more about the Knechtles’ ministry, watch the episode above.

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.

I was lucky to grow up during the adolescence of the tech age. Sleepovers meant Super Smash Bros. with friends. The 2000s meant building free personal websites and poking around whatever new technology had just appeared. A lot of my formative experiences came from discovering what these tools could do.

Now I’m a young father, and I want my kids to have the same chance to enjoy technology’s creativity and connectivity.

The KIDS Act risks placing more sensitive information in more places while flattening the very different ways children use technology.

Of course, security was always part of the bargain. As technology has evolved, so have the vulnerabilities. But the KIDS Act approaches those risks with a sledgehammer — and may make children less safe in the process.

A basic cybersecurity principle is that services should collect as little data as possible — certainly no more than they can reasonably protect. The KIDS Act pushes in the opposite direction.

If gaming services and social media platforms must make legally consequential decisions based on a user’s age, more of them will need some way to verify it. That means more companies asking children and parents for sensitive information — and more databases that can be breached.

The risk is not merely that more data could leak. The data itself could become more sensitive. Liability concerns may be enough to incentivize some services to demand government-issued IDs, biometric information, or similarly intrusive identifiers.

We have already seen the danger of age-verification systems creating new troves of information. In the United Kingdom, a similar law helped drive broader age-checking requirements, and a later Discord data breach exposed identity documents held by a third-party verification provider. The point is not that every age check will produce a breach. It is that collecting information that was never needed before creates something new to steal.

The KIDS Act also sweeps very different online experiences into a one-size-fits-all framework. App-based games, console games, PC games, and social platforms do not expose children to the same kinds of interactions or risks.

Parents should be vigilant about how their children use all of them. But parents are better positioned than Congress to decide which spaces are appropriate for a particular child. When we hand that judgment to a clumsy legal framework, kids may either lose access to genuine social interaction or start bypassing the safeguards altogether — often ending up in less safe corners of the internet.

That matters because online connection is not fake connection.

RELATED: British Invasion: Inside the UK’s Orwellian plan to control YouTube

Anna Barclay/Getty Images

The lockdowns made this obvious. When governments shut down schools, workplaces, churches, and ordinary social life in 2020, millions of people turned to the internet because they had nowhere else to go. Friends used Zoom to play Dungeons and Dragons. Families bonded over Animal Crossing. For many, online spaces were not a replacement for real life so much as the only part of real life still available.

The lockdowns are over, but the lesson remains. Online communities can be frivolous, toxic, educational, creative, supportive, or all of those things at once — just like offline communities.

The harms of youth overexposure to social media are real. So are the benefits lawmakers risk sweeping away. People have used online communities to find life-changing information about rare medical conditions and to build what amounts to one of the largest educational ecosystems in the world.

The problem with the KIDS Act is not that Congress wants to protect children. Parents want that too. The problem is that the law treats more data collection and centralized rules as if they were synonymous with safety.

They are not.

As a parent who grew up online, I want my kids to have access to creativity, connection, and fun without turning their identities over to every service they use. My wife and I do not even post photos of our children online. Privacy is not an abstraction in our house.

Parents already have tools. Nintendo offers parental controls, and services such as Bark and Aura can help families manage devices and online activity without requiring the government to redesign the internet around age verification.

The KIDS Act pushes in the wrong direction. It risks placing more sensitive information in more places while flattening the very different ways children use technology.

Those of us fortunate enough to grow up with the opportunities the internet created should be careful about raising the digital ladder behind us — especially when the safety measure at the top may make the fall worse.

A rifle-toting male allegedly tried robbing a convenience store in Oklahoma City last month — but when the clerk said there was no cash, the suspect lowered the bar just a bit.

KOKH-TV reported that officers were called to a possible armed robbery at a convenience store near N.E. 63rd and Bryant Avenue on July 16.

'He’s a revolving door; he knows nothing will happen ...'

When police arrived at the scene, the station said a store employee told investigators a male wearing a gray mask over his head tried to rob him.

The employee said the suspect was carrying an AR-15-style rifle and demanded "$100 to $200," KOKH said, citing the incident report.

However, when the employee said he didn't have any money, the suspect grabbed about five Hostess snacks from the shelf and walked out, the station reported.

RELATED: Inmate hands judge 'wad' of counterfeit cash to pay bond — then actually tells judge to 'keep the change': Police

PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images

Authorities later arrested Tobias Braddy on a complaint of attempted robbery with a dangerous weapon, the station said.

WKRC-TV said Braddy was taken to the Oklahoma County Detention Center, but Blaze News last week checked the detention center's inmate list, and Braddy wasn't on it.

One commenter under KOKH's Facebook post about the incident said, "He’s a revolving door; he knows nothing will happen ..."

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Across Canada, Europe, and a growing number of U.S. states, assisted death is increasingly presented as relief from suffering. The Netherlands even uses “unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement” as part of its legal standard for euthanasia.

Before lawmakers and physicians define suffering as unbearable, they should listen to someone who has borne it.

No one can bear a lifetime of suffering at once. But the shepherd gives grace for the next 24 hours.

In a recent interview with my longtime friend Joni Eareckson Tada, she addressed California’s End of Life Option Act.

“It’s almost like people who feel they live with unbearable suffering can just move to California and end it all,” she said.

“Unbearable” does a great deal of heavy lifting in that sentence.

A diving accident at 17 left Joni a quadriplegic. Now turning 77, she has endured two rounds of breast cancer and decades of chronic pain.

By almost any ordinary measure, Joni has endured what lawmakers increasingly describe as unbearable suffering. Yet she is still here. Still serving. Still living a life of substance and consequence.

She has written more than 60 books, reaches more than a million radio listeners, and leads a worldwide disability ministry. Few living Christian voices speak more clearly to those who suffer.

At the end of our interview, I asked whether she would ever retire.

“No.”

Joni cited Paul, torn between departing to be with Christ and remaining because others still needed him. Heaven was “far better,” but the work was unfinished.

She does not minimize pain. She rejects death as its most compassionate answer.

I have spent 40 years beside my wife, Gracie, who has endured 98 operations, bilateral amputations, and relentless pain.

Joni sees unbearable suffering from the wheelchair. I see it from beside the wheelchair.

She sees the suffering person think, “My life has become a burden.”

I see the caregiver think, “This burden is mine alone.”

My own recent cancer treatment brought a familiar question to the front row: Who will care for the person I love when I no longer can?

As assisted death spreads, vulnerable people can hear another question beneath the language of choice: Would everyone else be relieved if I were gone?

That is where compassion can become something darker.

RELATED: Euthanasia and the lie of the ‘good death’

Mininyx Doodle/iStock/Getty Images

Death can begin to look like the answer to suffering we fear, consequences we refuse to bear, or lives that ask more of us than we believe we can give.

The prevailing creed is autonomy: I alone decide what suffering I will endure and what another person’s life may require of me. The same logic appears in abortion: No life may demand more of me than I am willing to give.

But once death becomes an accepted answer to suffering, the judgment does not remain entirely private. Families, physicians, insurers, and institutions inevitably begin weighing burdens, costs, prognosis, and quality of life.

They may call that compassion. Christian compassion asks something harder.

Compassion enters suffering. It does not eliminate the sufferer.

If suffering is merely random, eliminating the sufferer can masquerade as mercy. But if a sovereign God rules over this world, suffering is never meaningless or beyond His reach.

Christianity rejects that counterfeit compassion. We entrust ourselves to Christ and enter the burdens of others.

Human worth is not conferred by health, independence, or usefulness. God made us in His image. Paul calls members of Christ’s body who appear weaker “indispensable” (1 Corinthians 12:22).

But what sustains us when the pain does not end?

Joni’s answer is not willpower. Gracie’s answer is not optimism. They are sustained by Christ.

What does that look like?

No one can bear a lifetime of suffering all at once. But the shepherd gives grace for the next 24 hours. Psalm 23 does not promise a short valley. It promises we will not be abandoned within it.

Following Gracie’s 92nd operation, she returned to her hospital room tangled in tubes and IV lines. A young nursing assistant came in to check on her.

Still emerging from anesthesia, Gracie sensed something was wrong.

“How are you?” she whispered.

Tears filled the woman’s eyes as she confided that her marriage was in trouble.

Gracie threaded her hand through the lines and took the woman’s hand. Then she weakly quoted her friend Joni: “God permits what He hates to accomplish what He loves.”

Neither woman could see what God was doing. Neither believed He was doing nothing.

RELATED: The small mercy of a pressed pillowcase

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The woman’s shoulders straightened, and she breathed a little easier.

Gracie was one beggar showing another where she had found bread.

We do not become someone else’s savior. Even from within our own anguish, we can help people catch their breath and point them to the Savior who understands their suffering and whose purposes extend beyond what we can explain.

“Bear one another’s burdens,” Paul writes, “and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2).

That command applies to everyone who belongs to Christ. It cannot be outsourced.

If we say Christ is sufficient, visible obedience should follow.

Do we take Him at His word? If we do, how would anyone know?

They would see us entering the burdens of others.

Sometimes to sit. Sometimes to carry. At all times, to point to the Savior.

On a recent episode of his “Interesting Times” podcast, New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat interviewed Yale law and history professor Samuel Moyn.

One particular clip from the episode has gone wildly viral. In it, Moyn suggests that minors should have some stake in elections because decisions about the future impact them. But since the law prohibits their casting votes, another eligible class should be charged with casting those votes on their behalf.

But his most shocking claim came next.

When Douthat inquired about the parents of children being the ones to cast those additional votes, Moyn argued against the idea.

His reasoning? Parents aren’t the best ones to determine what’s in their kids’ best interest.

“Because there’s a divergence of interests between parents and children. And I think it’s likelier that young people — not people who are raising families — will have the best insight into the interests of children,” Moyn said.

“I think parents generally confuse the interests of their family with the interests of their children. Part of our goal, I think, as parents, but also as a society, is trying to make sure that children aren’t the hostages of their parents,” he added.

On this episode of “Live Free,” BlazeTV host and Lakepointe Church Pastor Josh Howerton exposes not only what he sees as the spiritual danger behind Moyn’s words but also how popular this toxic ideology has become in our current culture.

Moyn’s belief that what’s in children’s best interest cannot be determined by their parents, Howerton says, is “emblematic of thinking that is far more prevalent and far more influential in our culture than people realize.”

Moyn, he explains, is not some “fringe” thinker. “This is the person that’s training the most prominent legal minds in our nation,” he points out.

Moyn’s proposal to shift the proxy voting power for children away from parents and give it to young adults is the “demonic reverse image of Malachi 4:6,” says Howerton.

“Malachi 4:6 says that what the Spirit of God does ... is He turns the hearts of the children to the fathers and the fathers to the children. What unholy spirits do is they turn the hearts of the fathers against the children and the hearts of the children against the fathers,” he explains.

The three main “streams of progressivism” push this spiritually toxic ideology, says Howerton.

He then explains how each goes about poisoning the minds of kids against their parents:

Critical theory teaches children to “see their parents as racist oppressors that they have to oppose in order to stand on the side of justice”; queer theory “disciples kids to see their parents’ views on gender, marriage, and sexuality as bigoted and repressive, so they have to rebel against their parents to ‘be themselves”’; and hyper-therapy culture “disciples children to see their family of origin ... as the source of every problem that they ever have, so they have to go no-contact or separate from their parents to be happy.”

All three of these streams are specifically “designed to reverse-disciple children to turn the hearts of children against the fathers,” says Howerton.

Moyn’s proposal is simply “a fourth way” to do this, he argues.

Join BlazeTV+ and start watching Josh today at blazetv.com/JOSH. Use promo code JOSH40 to get $40 off your subscription.

If you were a kid in the 1960s or '70s, chances are you watched "Davey and Goliath" without ever seeking it out. It was just there. On Sunday mornings, when television offered slim pickings for a kid, you might stumble across a slightly stiff clay boy named Davey Hansen and his morose talking dog, Goliath.

“But, Daaavey ...” the dog would protest in his deep, reproachful voice whenever his owner was about to do something foolish.

An entire children's television plot about two boys looking forward to Holy Communion. Try pitching that one today.

Unless you paid attention to the opening credits — the Luther rose, the Lutheran Church credit, and the theme music, Martin Luther's “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” — you might not even have realized you were watching religious programming. Yes, Davey moved at a less frenetic pace than most children's fare, had no toys or breakfast cereal to sell, and usually learned a lesson before the credits rolled. Otherwise, it was just another kids' show.

Looking back, that's the remarkable part. A church-funded children's show could simply turn up on commercial television alongside everything else, with no explanation required.

'Gumby' gospel

In 1958, Franklin Clark Fry, president of the United Lutheran Church in America, committed an astonishing $1 million of church money to creating a television program for children. The church's original idea was to put a minister in front of a camera to deliver short sermonettes.

Fortunately, Dick Sutcliffe thought this sounded like terrible television.

Sutcliffe, a former newspaperman working in the church's broadcasting operation, didn't object to the content. As his daughter later recalled his verdict: “The theology is fine, but it's not good for television.”

Instead, he thought about his own young son. “What would I say to Mike about God?” he asked himself. “And how would I say it to him?”

Sutcliffe conceived a series of modern parables and hired Art and Ruth Clokey, the husband-and-wife team behind "Gumby," to make them. Ruth was herself the daughter of a Lutheran minister. Sutcliffe wrote the first script, and the Clokeys produced the 15-minute pilot, “Lost in a Cave,” in 1960.

"Davey and Goliath" premiered in syndication the following February and soon reached nearly 200 television markets — thanks to a distribution strategy hard for television stations to resist: The Lutherans gave it away.

Commercial stations got polished children's programming; the church got access to American living rooms. By 1973, an audience study estimated that "Davey and Goliath" was reaching 5.1 million people a week.

Imagine a mainline Protestant denomination attempting something that ambitious today.

God willing

"Davey and Goliath" was no "VeggieTales." Still, Davey's family went to church, and God came up a lot.

And the Christianity amounted to considerably more than “be nice.”

In the very first episode, “Lost in a Cave,” Davey hears his father say “God willing” and wants to know what he means. His father tells him that God cares about what happens to every one of us because he loves us.

Then Davey gets lost in a cave.

A guide searches for the injured boy and eventually rescues him. Back in the sunlight, Davey grasps the point of the whole adventure: The guide came looking for him when he was lost; God seeks and cares for us when we are lost too.

Other episodes went considerably farther. In “The Family of God,” Davey and his friend Jonathan are downright excited about receiving their first Communion. Another boy, Cisco, is decidedly less impressed: “Communion? Who cares?”

Davey and Jonathan spend much of the episode trying to convince him otherwise. Pastor Miller, meanwhile, visits the Hansen home to make sure Davey understands what he is about to receive, explaining the bread and wine in relation to Jesus' death on the cross and the unity of Christians as the family of Christ.

An entire children's television plot about two boys looking forward to Holy Communion.

Try pitching that one today.

More than the 'Davey face'

For all this God talk, "Davey and Goliath" was very much a product of mainline Protestantism, which by the early 1960s increasingly understood fighting racial prejudice as part of its Christian mission. The show addressed race and integration remarkably early.

Jonathan was black, and Cisco was Hispanic. Jonathan in particular was among television's early examples of a black child depicted simply as the close friend of a white child. “The Polka-Dot Tie,” from 1961, tackled racial prejudice, and later episodes made an increasingly integrated cast part of Davey's ordinary world.

Sutcliffe's daughter later offered a wonderfully concise explanation of her father's thinking: “Dad would say if we're going to talk about God loving all of us, we ought to get to see more than the Davey face.”

The social message still had an explicitly theological source. God loved everybody, so Davey's little clay world ought to have everybody in it.

RELATED: When Archie Comics found Jesus: Strange artifacts from a once-Christian culture

Albert L. Ortega/Sidney Morning Herald/Getty Images

Staying power

"Davey and Goliath" had surprising staying power. After the initial run of 39 episodes and four specials, the Lutheran Church in America funded another 27 episodes and two specials in the 1970s. The last original special aired in 1975, although reruns remained a Sunday-morning fixture into the early '80s.

Then even that began to change. According to the Associated Press, commercial stations discovered they could make money selling airtime around other religious programming — much of it produced by conservative Christians — rather than carrying the Lutherans' free little claymation show. "Davey and Goliath" gradually disappeared from mainstream television.

The United Lutheran Church had meanwhile become part of the Lutheran Church in America in 1962. Another round of mergers in 1988 produced the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Along with churches, pension obligations, and hymnals, the ELCA inherited an unusual piece of intellectual property: "Davey and Goliath."

And eventually it decided Davey was worth dusting off.

Snowboard synodality

The duo's first resurrection was an unlikely one. In 2001, the ELCA licensed "Davey and Goliath" for a Mountain Dew commercial that gently spoofed the characters' hopeless squareness. The joke worked precisely because viewers still recognized them. Better yet for the ELCA, the royalties helped finance a proper comeback.

In 2004, after nearly three decades without a new adventure, Davey and his dog returned in the hour-long "Davey and Goliath's Snowboard Christmas."

Davey now has two new friends: Sam, who is Jewish, and Yasmeen, who is Muslim. The three go snowboarding while comparing Christmas, Hanukkah, and Ramadan and learning to respect one another's religious traditions. ELCA staff worked with Jewish and Muslim scholars on the script.

ECLA communications director Eric Shafer described the resulting program to the Associated Press as “very much an interfaith show about the oneness of the three faces of Abraham.”

In 1961, Davey's lessons about how to treat other people proceeded from a specifically Christian account of reality: God, Scripture, church, Christ on the cross, Holy Communion. By 2004, interfaith understanding and inclusion had moved much closer to the center of what Davey's church wanted him to tell the wider world.

It might be asking a lot of a little clay boy and his talking dog, but "Davey and Goliath" remained in Lutheran hands long enough to become a potent symbol of American religious decline.

Somewhere between the cave and the snowboard slope, "Davey and Goliath" changed — from teaching Christian truths with a light touch to burying them beneath universalist platitudes. And in that journey, you can see American mainline Protestantism changing with it.

The conga line of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” guest hosts has us thinking the unthinkable: Do we miss the real deal?

Make no mistake, Kimmel’s Trump derangement long ago gave the comic osteoporosis of the funny bone. But a quick sample of this week’s guest host reminds us there are even worse options than the former “Man Show” star.

It appears that the creative team used AI to help design the Lobo character played by Jason Momoa.

Take “Black-ish” alum Anthony Anderson. To the actor’s credit, he hasn’t cried like a widdle baby like Kimmel sometimes does. Still, one of his recent monologues proved painful.

A sample?

Apparently, after the NATO summit last month, Trump hid inside a catering cart to sneak out of Turkey due to security threats. And let’s give it up. Let’s give it up to the Secret Service. Do you know how hard it is to sneak a pig out of Turkey? ... That’s the same way he used to get onto Epstein’s plane.

Comedy needs a kernel of truth to be funny. And as we’ve known for some time, Trump wasn’t a presence on Epstein Air, regular or otherwise.

Someone else was though. Remember when all the late-night shows piled on former President Bill Clinton for taking the Lolita Express a reported 26 times?

Somehow, Kimmel and co. forgot that news ...

AI/DC

There’s a morbidly funny “Simpsons” meme that captures the “piling on” of anyone who has already suffered enough.

“Stop! He’s already dead!”

Now, it’s "Supergirl’s" turn. The Warner Bros. bust flamed out this year with critics and moviegoers. It stalled the DC Comics franchise and put overseer James Gunn in the hot seat.

The clunker is facing new problems this week. A featurette sharing some behind-the-scenes magic from the movie revealed the production used AI to enhance the movie.

In particular, it appears that the creative team used AI to help design the Lobo character played by Jason Momoa.

That’s a no-no in Hollywood these days (even if more and more artists are copping to using the technology).

Team Warner Bros. yanked the video off of YouTube, but the news went viral all the same. Turns out Kryptonite isn’t the only thing Supergirl fears …

Presidential pardon

There’s a reason the legacy media is suddenly in love with all things “South Park.” It has nothing to do with Cartman, Butters, or the show’s no-holds-barred approach to comedy.

Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone pounced on President Donald Trump all last season. Hard. Relentlessly. Now, suddenly, the show has fawning articles across the media landscape.

Imagine that!

Deadline did the honors this week, recalling how the show has tackled American presidents over its 30-year run. Yet one leader got very little attention. Hmmm. As the trade rag writes:

"Curiously, Joseph Robinette Biden — 47th President of the United States — has never appeared in a significant role in 'South Park,' having had his animated cameo cut from [season 12 episode] 'About Last Night …' There were fewer seasons during his presidency, so that may be why."

Fewer seasons. Yeah, that’s the ticket. It has nothing to do with the creators ignoring a leader with obvious cognitive decline or a vice president known for her word salad spinning …

With cancellations like these ...

Blacklists ain’t what they used to be.

Once upon a time, a communist sympathizer would be hounded out of Hollywood. Or worse.

In recent times, all it took to get blacklisted was suggesting you voted for President Donald Trump. James Woods hasn’t had a major starring role in a decade, meaning La La Land would rather ignore his two Oscar nominations to make sure a free thinker didn’t grace the movie set.

And of course, he’s far from alone. Cheryl Hines’ bustling career dried up the moment her husband, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., joined team Trump.

Now, ex-“Scream” actress Melissa Barrera is complaining about her blacklisting for her anti-Israel musings.

“There are a lot of people that got fired for basically saying Palestinians deserve human rights and they shouldn’t be getting bombed and attacked in this way.”

“Basically” does a ton of heavy lifting in that quote. Except that’s not why a microscopically small group of stars, including Barrera, suffered professional punishment. Nor does it explain why she’s so ... busy ... all of a sudden.

Her recent credits include “Your Monster” (2024), “Abigail” (2024), “The Copenhagen Test” (2025), and the upcoming “Black Tides” and “The Collaboration.” Plus, she just made her Broadway debut earlier this year.

Worst. Blacklisting. Ever.

“A diplomat who says ‘yes’ means ‘maybe,’” the great French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand is supposed to have said. “A diplomat who says ‘maybe’ means ‘no,’ and a diplomat who says ‘no’ is no diplomat.” Whether Talleyrand actually said it hardly matters. The spirit is right: Diplomacy, like politics, is the art of the possible.

Put another way, diplomacy is the art of getting what you want without needlessly making it impossible for the other side to give it to you.

For the first time in decades, an American secretary of state has a plausible path to the pantheon.

By that standard, the United States has produced few truly great diplomatic tenures in the past half-century. There have been capable secretaries of state and important agreements, but remarkably few achievements with the durability of the great settlements of earlier eras.

Madeleine Albright's tenure remains inseparable from NATO expansion and the deterioration of relations with post-Soviet Russia. Colin Powell's is shadowed by his 2003 presentation at the United Nations and the Iraq War. Condoleezza Rice brought competence, but no settlement that transformed America's strategic position.

Hillary Clinton's much-advertised “reset” with Russia aged badly. John Kerry helped produce the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Iran nuclear deal, both of which were abandoned by the first Trump administration. Rex Tillerson never found his footing. Mike Pompeo was more effective, but his major diplomatic projects did not fundamentally reorder America's position abroad.

Antony Blinken helped oversee AUKUS with Britain and Australia, an important strategic arrangement, though more an extension and deepening of existing alignments than a new diplomatic architecture.

America's earlier history offers a much higher bar. Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, William Seward, Hamilton Fish, John Hay, George Marshall, George Kennan, and Henry Kissinger helped shape American diplomacy in ways that outlasted the administrations they served.

Their work changed not merely the headlines of the day but America's long-term position in the world.

A few years ago, almost no one would have guessed that Marco Rubio might be the next American diplomat with a plausible claim to join that company.

When Trump nominated Rubio for secretary of state, commentators wondered whether he would moderate the president's more unpredictable foreign-policy instincts. Old Republican voices, sidelined after Trump's rise, and left-leaning academics alike expected friction between Trump and a man long identified with the GOP's interventionist wing.

That prediction has not held up.

RELATED: Trump is continuing JFK’s war on communist subversion

The senator Trump mocked became his best diplomat Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto/Getty Images

On his second day in office, Rubio told State Department personnel that their mission was to ensure American foreign policy remained centered on the national interest: whatever makes the country “stronger, safer, and more prosperous.”

He added that conflict would sometimes be unavoidable, but never at the expense of national security, the national interest, or America's core values.

The language signaled a break from the old habit of treating international approval as an end in itself.

That shift can be dismissed as political adaptation. It is also evidence that Rubio has absorbed something larger: The pre-Trump Republican foreign policy consensus is gone, and a new one is being built in its place.

At the Munich Security Conference this year, Rubio delivered a broadside against unfettered free trade, deindustrialization, mass migration, and an international order detached from the interests and identities of the nations expected to sustain it.

He also spoke explicitly about the shared language, religion, culture, and ancestry connecting Europe and America — language difficult to imagine from a secretary of state only a few years ago.

The record is becoming more substantial.

In 2025, Rubio played an important role as NATO members agreed to a new 5% defense spending commitment by 2035. He has kept open the possibility of negotiations with Iran, even amid anger from some Israelis over the administration's approach.

He has repeatedly pursued efforts to bring Ukraine and Russia toward negotiations after years in which diplomacy between the two sides largely stagnated.

And on Venezuela, Rubio has been credited as a central figure in the administration's campaign against Nicolás Maduro, a dramatic reversal in U.S.-Venezuela relations.

On Cuba, Rubio has paired pressure with calls for political change and dialogue, while also speaking directly to the Cuban people.

Rubio has therefore become something unusual: a secretary of state who is not merely influential inside the administration but increasingly visible to the public.

In 2026, he has at times seemed to eclipse nearly every other Cabinet official in political stature. His popularity among Republican voters is especially striking for a secretary of state, an office that usually produces prestige without a mass constituency.

Barely 18 months into his tenure, that does not yet make Rubio a great secretary of state. It does make the possibility serious.

RELATED: Gen Z is reopening America’s cold cases

Bettmann/CORBIS/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

The unanswered questions are enormous: Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Ukraine, North Korea, and the Ortega regime's recent actions in Nicaragua could all complicate or diminish his record.

Durability is the test. A diplomatic achievement that vanishes with the next administration is not much of an achievement at all.

But Rubio has already helped push NATO toward higher defense commitments, pursued talks over Ukraine, increased pressure on Cuba and Venezuela, and strengthened Washington's effort to counter Chinese influence around the Panama Canal.

If those gains endure — and if he can turn today's openings into settlements that survive Trump — Rubio's legacy will look very different from that of the secretaries of state who preceded him.

The pantheon is not his yet. But for the first time in decades, an American secretary of state has a plausible path to it.

And why stop there?

For years, influencer Nara Smith has been celebrated online as the glamorous face of the "tradwife" movement, attracting millions of followers with videos showcasing homemade meals, family life, and domestic routines.

However, during a recent appearance on "Call Her Daddy," Smith pushed back, insisting she never saw herself as a traditional homemaker.

And BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey isn’t buying it.

Stuckey points out that Smith went “on a podcast that is so opposed to the values” that she displays and trashed “the category” that she makes her living embodying.

“For her to be like, ‘No, I’m a boss babe,’ and ‘how dare you categorize me as this.’ This is the trend and the category that has made you what you are, Nara Smith,” Stuckey says. “And for you to go on this degrading sex podcast and trash that, I don’t like it.”

In a clip from her appearance on the podcast, Smith tells host Alex Cooper that she was used “as the poster child for the tradwife movement,” which she found “very bizarre.”

“I don’t prioritize being a homemaker. I’m a working mom,” she said.

“Do I love cooking because it’s my passion and because I kind of have to do it given my autoimmune? Absolutely. But that’s a passion of mine. It’s a hobby,” she continued. “It’s not something that I need to be doing."

"Primary caregiver for my kids? No. My husband and I split it 50/50.”

“I don't think a tradwife would be cooking in like Schiaparelli, you know, or a Moschino look straight off the runway. Like, I don't think that's what a tradewife would do,” she added.

“I just think that this is gaslighting,” Stuckey comments.

“I think that she knew very well exactly the trend that she was capitalizing on, and now that we have books like ‘Yesteryear’ saying that this is problematic, she’s like, ‘No, no, no, what? That was never me,’” she continues.

“Maybe you didn’t mean for it to be, or maybe you now don’t want it to be, but that is what you were doing, and that is what you were playing upon,” 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.

For months now, BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales has been on the ground in Texas exposing alleged H-1B visa fraud — knocking on doors of ghost offices, confronting company owners, and uncovering shell companies used to import foreign workers. Her reporting has helped spark state investigations, lawsuits from Attorney General Ken Paxton against dozens of suspect firms, and growing federal attention.

Investigative reporting like Sara’s takes time, resources, and a team willing to keep digging when the answers aren’t easy to find. By subscribing to BlazeTV+ with code SARA, you’re directly supporting independent journalism and helping give Sara and her team the resources to keep asking the questions that need to be asked.

And now, buttressed by your support, Sara’s back again with another explosive H-1B exposé. The Texas native sets her sights on Dallas resident Mohammed Abbas, who has allegedly been scamming people with the promise of sponsoring green cards and H-1B visas.

“My team received tips from multiple people, unrelated, who say that they were scammed by one person who promised to sell them sponsorship for either green cards or H-1B visas. These people were charged thousands of dollars for this. One of the victims even said he paid $60,000, but the sponsorship never came through,” says Sara.

“Oh, and here's the thing,” she adds. “It's illegal to take payment from people to sponsor them for visas.”

Once she identified Mohammed Abbas as the alleged scammer at the center of the tips, Sara set out to confront him.

“He owns a number of companies. … All of them sponsor a bunch of H-1B visas,” she explains, “and guess what: They're all conveniently located in the very same suite at an office building in Dallas, which also you're not allowed to do.”

When Sara failed to locate Abbas in his office suite, she attempted to track him down at home — but to no avail.

She was successful, however, at calling him on the phone, but he didn’t give up his cards easily. When Sara confronted him about allegedly selling green cards and H-1B visas, he assured her that any fraud allegations against him were “not true.” But when Sara inquired about where she could speak to him in person, he refused to give a straight answer and eventually hung up.

Sara wasn’t surprised by his denial. Abbas’ “marketing agency,” Molabs Media, she says, has several red flags. Not only does his company sponsor several H-1B visas for seemingly unrelated tech jobs, but it also “took out hundreds of thousands of dollars in PPP loans,” which she says were later forgiven.

While Sara never heard back from Abbas, she did get a call from his lawyer, who was unhappy that she was digging into his affairs. Their contentious conversation ended in the lawyer hanging up as well.

She then turned her sights on Abbas’ alleged partner, a woman she identifies as Rachel Samuel, who apparently served as a “recruiter.”

“She spent years posting want ads all over LinkedIn, and when they got a bite, she would reach out to these people to arrange payment. And in WhatsApp messages we received, she is often seen sending the wire information for where they needed to send the money, either to Mohammed's bank account in Pakistan or to the bank account in the United States,” Sara explains, noting that “some of these victims never got their money back even when the cases were clearly rejected.”

Samuel, she says, also had her own company (located in the same office suite as Abbas’ companies) that sponsored H-1B visas. “Its right to do business was terminated in Texas, but despite that, she continued sponsoring visas,” she says, adding that she tried to locate Samuel at her personal residence but was unsuccessful.

Sara then went back to Abbas’ Dallas office suite, and this time, she could see people in the office, but despite her knocking, they refused to look at her or open the door.

While the day ended with Sara’s team being escorted out of the office by police, the quest to bust Abbas was far from over.

Sara later returned with Department of Labor Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito. To see how it ended, watch the episode above.

Sara’s investigation doesn’t end here, and neither does the work it takes to uncover stories like this. If you want to help make the next investigation possible, subscribe to BlazeTV+ with code SARA and directly support the independent journalism that keeps Sara and her team in the field, asking questions and demanding answers.

A 50-foot bronze statue of the pagan god Prometheus is rising out of the Texas dirt near SpaceX's Starbase, holding a torch over the launch site that is supposed to carry mankind toward the stars. The symbolism is not exactly subtle.

Prometheus, the Greek Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity, has long represented man's acquisition of knowledge and technological power. The French classical foundry Atelier Missor, which is behind the project, says the completed statue will stand at Starbase "holding high the torch of the West." The statue is apparently not a SpaceX commission or some monument Elon Musk ordered for himself. Atelier Missor reportedly financed the project itself and is assembling it on private land near Starbase as a tribute to technological progress.

It is tempting to love the whole thing. After decades of public art that seems deliberately designed to be ugly, alienating, or incomprehensible, here are artists building an enormous, muscular figure from classical mythology. Atelier Missor is openly hostile to the abandonment of monumental Western art, and its founders have sculpted Hercules, Joan of Arc, and Napoleon while talking without embarrassment about beauty, heroism, civilization, and great men. Its website declares that "gigantic titanium statues" will "guide us to a beautiful future," while the atelier describes itself as a classical foundry "on its way to building a new Rome."

You are not the beginning of the world. You are an heir.

Good. I would rather live in a civilization that builds rockets and enormous bronze statues than one that tears its statues down and lectures its children about the shamefulness of their inheritance. Atelier Missor's revolt against deliberately ugly public art is refreshing, and SpaceX is doing things that would have sounded like science fiction not very long ago.

But if Prometheus is going to hold the "torch of the West," we ought to ask whether he is carrying the right torch. He represents an important strand of Western civilization, perhaps one of the dominant strands of the modern West, but he does not represent the whole thing.

There is also something unmistakably Randian about the spectacle, and not merely in the philosophical sense. The enormous idealized body, the heroic pose, the industrial backdrop, and the celebration of human power all recall the visual world associated with Ayn Rand's novels, especially the iconic cover art created by illustrator Nick Gaetano for editions of "Atlas Shrugged," "The Fountainhead," and "Anthem." Those images helped give Rand's books a visual identity built around monumental human figures, architecture, industry, and individual striving. Put Prometheus beside a launch complex, and the resemblance is hard to miss.

Ayn Rand would have recognized the type

The resemblance gets stranger once you actually open the books.

The protagonist of Rand's "Anthem," Equality 7-2521, lives in a suffocating collectivist society where individual achievement has been suppressed. He secretly studies science, rediscovers electric light, defies the ruling authorities, escapes into the wilderness, discovers the word "I," and chooses a new name for himself: Prometheus.

Prometheus is central to Rand's treatment of the heroic individual. The Ayn Rand Institute's discussion of "Anthem" describes the character's discovery of the individual self as the foundation for his rejection of collectivism and embrace of egoism. He comes to regard his own reason, judgment, will, and happiness as authoritative rather than looking outside himself for sanction.

Now the visual resemblance takes on a philosophical dimension too. A colossal, idealized male figure stands beside rockets, holding mankind's stolen fire aloft while a technological enterprise reaches beyond the Earth. It is not hard to see why this imagery feels so natural to a culture rediscovering the appeal of heroic individualism, industrial power, and men who refuse to be told that something cannot be done.

RELATED: The rockets are still blowing up. So why is Elon laughing on his SpaceX earnings call?

Joshua Lott/Washington Post/Getty Images

That does not make the comparison an insult. Rand understood something real about civilization that our managerial class has spent decades trying to suppress. Societies need exceptional people. Progress often depends on stubborn men and women who ignore the consensus, refuse to accept that something cannot be done, and build the thing anyway. Bureaucracies rarely invent the future, and committees are not known for producing cathedrals, transcontinental railroads, moon landings, or reusable rockets.

The problem comes when one virtue becomes an entire philosophy of civilization. The West is not reducible to heroic individual will, however badly we may need more of it.

The old stories were more suspicious of fire

There is something especially strange about turning Prometheus into an uncomplicated symbol of technological optimism, because the Greeks themselves did not tell his story that way.

Yes, Prometheus gives humanity fire. In "Prometheus Bound," he also claims credit for teaching mankind numbers, writing, medicine, navigation, mining, and other useful arts. In the surviving text, fire becomes more than warmth. It becomes the foundation of civilization itself.

But then Prometheus gets chained to a rock, which is a fairly important part of the story and one that tends not to make the inspirational posters.

In Hesiod's telling, Zeus' response to the theft of fire includes Pandora and the suffering that follows her arrival among mankind. The Prometheus myth was never simply an ancient Greek version of "move fast and break things." It wrestled with power, rebellion, knowledge, suffering, and the possibility that acquiring a new capability does not automatically give mankind the wisdom to use it.

The Greeks were hardly alone in associating technological power with rebellion and danger. Genesis contains a curious detail that is easy to pass over. Cain, after murdering Abel and going into exile, becomes a builder of cities. A few generations later, his descendants are credited with some of the basic technologies of civilization. Genesis 4 associates Jabal with livestock and tents, Jubal with musical instruments, and Tubal-cain with the forging of bronze and iron.

The biblical text does not say that metallurgy or music are evil. Scripture is much too interesting for such a simple lesson. But it does place the rapid development of civilization inside the line of Cain, alongside violence, pride, and Lamech's boast that he has killed a man for wounding him.

The ancient Book of Enoch makes the connection darker still. There, rebellious heavenly beings descend to mankind and teach forbidden knowledge, including the working of metals and the manufacture of weapons. The resemblance to Prometheus is hard to miss. In both stories, beings who rebel against the heavenly order hand mankind powers he did not previously possess, and those powers do not arrive without consequences.

These traditions are not telling identical stories, but they are asking a remarkably similar question: What happens when man's technical ability races ahead of his moral ability?

Later Western writers understood the problem perfectly well. Mary Shelley did not subtitle her novel "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus" because Victor Frankenstein was an uncomplicated civilizational hero. He is brilliant enough to acquire a power humanity previously lacked, but not wise enough to understand what he is unleashing.

That seems like a fairly relevant warning for a civilization simultaneously developing artificial intelligence, editing genes, building autonomous weapons, attempting to settle other planets, and giving increasingly powerful machines control over more of ordinary life.

The question is not whether man should have fire. Obviously he should. The question is whether possession of the fire makes him wise enough to decide what ought to be burned.

The West is something we inherited

I have a particular bias here. Part of my work with Chapter House is devoted to putting old books back into the hands of families and students, which means I spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about phrases like "the Western canon" and "Western civilization."

The more time I spend with those books, the less satisfying it becomes to define the West by any single principle. It is not merely individualism. It is not merely Christianity. It is not merely Greek reason, Roman law, technological progress, free markets, republican government, or the heroic individual. It is the long and often uncomfortable argument among all of them.

RELATED: Will America need a Caesar?

chudakov2/iStock/Getty Images

That is why recovering Western civilization cannot mean taking the modern cult of progress, stripping away the diversity consultants, and giving it bigger muscles. That is still modernity, only with much better aesthetics.

The reaction that produced this new fascination with classical statues, technological power, masculinity, conquest, great men, and civilizational vitality is understandable. Western societies spent decades teaching ambitious young men to be less ambitious, powerful nations to apologize for exercising power, artists to sneer at beauty, and institutions to regard excellence with suspicion. Naturally, a counterculture emerged that likes Roman statues, rockets, weightlifting, the conquest of Mars, and men who actually accomplish things.

There are much worse rebellions.

At its worst, however, the Promethean vision says that human will, liberated from artificial constraints and armed with sufficient technology, can conquer whatever stands in its way. The Randian variation substitutes the heroic individual for the managerial bureaucracy, which is often an enormous improvement, but it still leaves unanswered the most important question a civilization can ask: Toward what?

The civilization that produced SpaceX also produced Socrates. It produced Roman law, monasteries, universities, cathedrals, families, guilds, constitutional government, and a Christian moral order that insisted there were things even kings were not permitted to do. Western civilization honors the man who acts, but it also asks what he owes. It honors reason while recognizing limits, admires strength while asking strength to serve something beyond itself, and celebrates individual genius while reminding the genius that he inherited a world he did not create.

A civilization composed entirely of Howard Roarks would probably erect some spectacular buildings. I am less certain anyone would want to live there.

There is an irony here because Atelier Missor founder Missor Movahed's own conversion to classical art contains exactly the humility missing from a purely Promethean worldview. As he has told the story, he was a nihilistic young man until an encounter with the monuments of Paris forced him to confront the achievements of generations before him. Standing beneath the Vendome Column, he felt as though Napoleon were asking him who he was to judge centuries and millennia of civilization.

That is a profoundly anti-Randian insight. You are not the beginning of the world. You are an heir.

Yet the monument now chosen to carry the "torch of the West" is the great mythological rebel who steals divine power and hands it to mankind. That tension is more interesting than either condemning the statue or worshipping it.

Keep the statue. Remember the warning.

Prometheus should stay at Starbase. In fact, it is hard to imagine a more appropriate place for him.

Rockets are controlled fire, and spaceflight is mankind refusing to accept one of the oldest boundaries nature imposed upon us. SpaceX's entire reason for existence is bound up with looking at supposedly immovable technological constraints and asking why they cannot be moved. A gigantic Prometheus standing beside Starbase makes almost too much sense.

But perhaps he belongs there as something richer than a mascot.

Build the rockets. Cast the bronzes. Raise monuments again. Recover the confidence that allowed Western civilization to build ships, cities, cathedrals, laboratories, railroads, skyscrapers, and spacecraft. Reject the dreary managerial philosophy that mistakes timidity for wisdom and decline for virtue.

Just do not confuse the power to build with the wisdom to know what ought to be built. Human beings need ambition, courage, invention, and the occasional madman who refuses to take no for an answer, but they also need inheritance, duty, restraint, and a moral order capable of telling that madman when the answer really should be no.

Prometheus gave man fire. The West spent the next several thousand years arguing about what man should do with it.

The fire alone is not our civilization. That argument is.

Flock cameras — the automated license plate readers that photograph passing vehicles to capture their license plates, make, model, color, and other details, turning them into searchable records — are popping up all over the country. Proponents argue that they help solve crime and keep Americans safe, but is that actually true?

According to Glenn Jacobs, mayor of Knox County, Tennessee, the answer is no. He argues that Flock cameras actually endanger Americans by putting them under constant surveillance, giving the government a complete record of every citizen’s movements.

On this episode of “Kibbe on Liberty,” Matt Kibbe sits down with Jacobs to discuss why he believes Flock cameras are a dire threat to privacy and the Fourth Amendment.

“The more I've researched [Flock cameras], the more I dislike them and consider them a very dire threat to our privacy and to the protections guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment,” says Jacobs.

Kibbe, calling Flock cameras “Orwellian,” is concerned that such surveillance will turn America into China 2.0.

“How is this any different than kind of a Chinese surveillance system?” he asks.

Jacobs indicates that it’s not all that different. Flock cameras, he explains, are marketed as license plate readers, but “they do a lot more than that.”

“With the Flock system, it is literally harvesting data. Every car that goes by, it pulls their license plate, but it also uses AI to develop a vehicle footprint,” he says.

“So it's your license plate, but also make, model, color, distinguishing features, roof racks, bumper stickers, all these different things that then go into a database and remain there for 30 days or more, depending on the policy of that particular agency. Then it can be searched through without a warrant for whatever,” he continues.

The lack of established parameters around Flock cameras also gives Jacobs serious pause.

“In Tennessee there's no state rules about how this can be used, and there's no federal guidelines either, so what's happened is this technology has gone out there and it's — until now, it's kind of flown under the radar,” he says.

Then there’s public opinion to consider. As Americans find out more and more about Flock cameras, the opposition has only grown.

“These things are not popular at all, and the more people learn about them, the more they literally hate them,” says Jacobs.

For example, it’s coming out that Flock cameras can gather enough data to form “a pattern of your movements.”

Jacobs illustrates the danger of such power with a hypothetical.

“They could say, you know, Glenn goes to the gun range at least once a week, twice on Sundays. If this happened during COVID, you know, he goes to anti-COVID meetings and rallies. All of a sudden they have a profile on me,” he says.

“No, we do not have an expectation of privacy when we're in public places and on public roads, but the Supreme Court has ruled that without a warrant, your movements can't be tracked like that. They ruled that in Carpenter v. United States in 2018,” he continues, predicting that it’s a matter of time before the Supreme Court will “squash” Flock cameras.

“But in the meantime, it's just important that people are aware that these are not your grandma's license plate readers. These are something much much different,” he warns.

To hear more, watch the episode above.

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Artificial intelligence has become a national political issue and increasingly a local one. Communities across the country are fighting over the massive data centers needed to power the AI boom. Environmental groups warn about water consumption. Ratepayers worry about electricity bills. Workers fear the technology will undermine their livelihoods.

The backlash crosses ideological lines, and many of the concerns deserve to be taken seriously. But too often, the debate begins and ends with a terrifying number stripped of the context needed to understand it.

As AI advances, America will face difficult choices. The only way to make them intelligently is to start with the facts rather than with numbers selected for maximum panic.

There are genuine questions surrounding AI — privacy, surveillance, censorship, individual autonomy, and concentrated power among them. But three of the most common criticisms of AI and data centers are often overstated.

Claim 1: Data centers are consuming all our water

Stories about data-center water use often begin with numbers designed to shock. One project may use millions of gallons a day. Another state may be projected to consume billions of gallons annually. In a water-stressed community, those figures can absolutely matter.

But scale matters too. A 2026 analysis published by the Florida Water and Pollution Control Operators Association estimated that all U.S. data centers combined accounted for roughly 0.3% to 0.4% of total daily U.S. water withdrawals, based on 2021 figures.

Cooling methods also vary dramatically. Some facilities rely heavily on evaporative cooling. Closed-loop and air-cooled systems can use far less water. Location, water source, cooling design, and the condition of the surrounding system matter enormously.

Industrial comparisons help restore perspective. Data centers are hardly unique in consuming large volumes of water. U.S. golf courses use roughly 30 times as much water annually, while California almond production alone has been estimated at well over 100 times as much.

That does not mean a poorly located data center cannot strain a local supply. It means “millions of gallons” is not an argument by itself. The relevant question is whether a particular facility imposes a meaningful burden on a particular water system.

Claim 2: Data centers are consuming all our power

The electricity numbers are enormous too. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that U.S. data centers consumed about 200 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2025, roughly 4.7% of total national electricity consumption.

From there, critics often assume that more data-center demand must translate directly into higher household bills. The evidence is less straightforward. Some research suggests that recent data-center growth has had only a limited effect on retail rates, while broader inflation and energy-policy choices may explain more of the increase consumers have seen.

That does not mean new data centers are costless to the grid. Poor rate design can shift infrastructure costs onto ordinary customers, and badly planned projects can strain local capacity. But the obvious answer to rising demand is not simply to suppress demand. It is to build more abundant, reliable power.

RELATED: AI is coming for your job, your voice ... and your worldview

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The AI boom may be creating exactly that incentive. Amazon recently acquired an 8,000-acre site in Texas for a data-center project that could include up to 7.65 gigawatts of on-site natural-gas generation. Microsoft, meanwhile, signed a deal tied to the restart of Three Mile Island to supply roughly 835 megawatts of nuclear power.

America spent decades making it harder to build reliable energy. If AI demand helps reverse that habit, that is not obviously a national disaster. It may be the pressure needed to start building again.

Claim 3: AI is going to displace all our jobs

Of the three claims, job displacement deserves the most caution. I have written before about the real possibility that AI could eliminate certain jobs, especially entry-level positions. Long-term forecasts are difficult because nobody knows how capable these systems will become. Still, history gives us reason to distrust the most apocalyptic predictions.

In 2016, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton argued that people should stop training to become radiologists because machines would soon outperform humans at reading medical images. A decade later, radiology is hardly disappearing. Research shows the number of active U.S. radiologists rose over the past decade, salaries increased, and workloads expanded along with the use of medical imaging.

That may be an example of “Jevons paradox”: When technology makes a resource or service cheaper and more efficient, total demand can rise. A recent medical paper applied the idea directly to AI and physicians.

The same possibility applies beyond medicine. If AI makes a programmer five times more productive, it is tempting to assume the economy will need one-fifth as many programmers. But economies are not static. If software becomes dramatically cheaper to produce, businesses that could never afford custom software may suddenly buy it. New applications become economical. Entirely new product categories can emerge.

None of that guarantees that every displaced worker will land comfortably in a new job, or that every profession will grow. Technological change creates winners and losers. The point is narrower: Productivity gains do not translate mechanically into equivalent job losses.

RELATED: The next fight over freedom will run through AI models

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The concerns we should consider

None of this means AI is safe or harmless. The strongest concerns may simply be different from the ones dominating the headlines.

As AI becomes embedded throughout society, these systems could shape what information people see, how institutions make decisions, and how individuals interact with government and business. Massive data collection could strengthen surveillance. Ideological biases could be embedded in algorithms. Dependence on AI could weaken personal autonomy and concentrate decision-making power in governments and corporations.

Those questions deserve more attention than sensationalized claims about water, watts, and workers.

As AI advances, America will face difficult choices. The only way to make them intelligently is to start with the facts rather than with numbers selected for maximum panic.

The goal should be to preserve individual liberty, privacy, transparency, personal autonomy, and constitutional principles while allowing innovation to flourish. Exaggerating the easy concerns only makes the difficult ones harder to confront.

Things have gone from bad to much worse for a 19-year-old Florida male who allegedly put a gun to the head of a man delivering banana pudding of all things earlier this month.

According to an arrest warrant, a food delivery man on Aug. 6 was dropping off an order of banana pudding in the 20300 block of Northwest 34th Court in Miami Gardens when Jabari Thomas and another man — 20-year-old Demetrius Tromain Travis — tried to rob him, WTVJ-TV reported.

'Threw his life away for a couple of bucks! Make it make sense ... smh.'

Thomas got into the back seat of the victim's car and at one point allegedly put a gun to the delivery man's head, the station said, citing the warrant.

The suspects also were trying to access the delivery man's CashApp when the victim pulled his own gun and opened fire, WTVJ reported, citing the warrant.

Travis was shot in the leg, chest, and face, the station said, adding that he was airlifted to a hospital where he was pronounced dead.

The delivery man stayed at the scene and wasn't charged, WTVJ added.

Witnesses said a second suspect was seen fleeing the scene and running toward a white vehicle, the station said, adding that police issued a "Be On the Lookout" for the car.

The vehicle later was found in Miramar, police told WTVJ, and Thomas was taken into custody.

Thomas is facing charges for armed robbery — as well as second-degree felony murder, the station said.

RELATED: Teen thug points gun in face of Marine Corps veteran, demands his car keys. But punk definitely picked wrong victim.

Why the murder charge? WTVJ said Thomas is being blamed for Travis' death because the killing happened during the alleged armed robbery.

Thomas appeared in court in Miami-Dade on Wednesday where he was ordered held without bond, the station said, adding that he could face life in prison if he's convicted.

Commenters under WTVJ's Facebook post about the incident were incredulous:

• "Threw his life away for a couple of bucks!" one commenter exclaimed. "Make it make sense ... smh."
• "Felony murder charges are the best," another user quipped.
• "Chair," another commenter bluntly stated.

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For 80 years, American science has operated under the Vannevar Bush model that was established in the wake of World War II. In his 1945 report, "Science, the Endless Frontier," Bush argued that the government should fund “curiosity-driven basic research,” with panels of peer scientists choosing which projects deserved financial support.

His goal was not merely to subsidize scientists’ intellectual whims without regard for visible applications, but to secure American technological supremacy by developing fundamental knowledge before its practical uses were apparent.

In practice, however, Bush’s vision mutated into a bloated, risk-averse bureaucracy split between government and universities, stifling the very innovation it was designed to foster.

By funding researchers directly with stable, modest support, we can recreate the fertile conditions that historically produced revolutionary advances.

After eight decades, the weaknesses of Bush’s project-grant model are clear. As the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy points out in its new report, academic researchers spend up to half their time writing, formatting, and defending grant proposals rather than actually doing science. Moreover, because review panels naturally gravitate toward proven concepts, researchers are incentivized to propose incremental work that is guaranteed to succeed, often because they have already accomplished it.

The human cost of Bush’s model is staggering. The average age of a researcher receiving his first major independent grant from the National Institutes of Health has crept into the mid-40s — as the report notes, that is older than the average age of recent Nobel Prize winners when they made their breakthrough contributions.

We are forcing the brightest minds of academic science to spend their most creative decades acting as junior collaborators to insiders. The result is steady incremental progress, at least according to peers, but none of the breakthroughs that define true scientific revolutions.

Indeed, the OSTP is arguably much too kind to Vannevar Bush’s scheme: As the careful reader of the report may realize, the technological and scientific progress that powered the American century was produced almost entirely by alternative models based on missions set by the political leadership and their politically accountable deputies.

I propose a fundamental change in how we cultivate intellectual capital. We should largely zero out the current project-grant system for basic research and replace it with a radically simpler philosophy for supporting unguided curiosity: fund people, not projects.

Although the recent OSTP report accurately identifies the bureaucratic rot and systemic sclerosis within our current grant-making framework, we must extend its logic to its necessary conclusion. The report correctly asserts that federal science funding must be politically accountable; in a democracy, the public’s resources must be directed toward the public’s interests by those the people actually elect.

RELATED: Fauci is yesterday’s fight. Medical freedom is today’s.

Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg/Getty Images

To realize this ambition, Congress should circumvent this ossified establishment with a bold “metascience” pilot: 535 10-year research fellowships — one formally appointed by every member of the House and Senate. This gives lawmakers direct buy-in. It also dismantles the peer-review cartel, replacing the sterile consensus of risk-averse panels with the robust, structural accountability that the OSTP now recognizes as essential.

These fellowships would be awarded sequentially over a five-year rollout period, amounting to 107 new fellowships per year. Each selected fellow would receive a competitive, stable salary alongside modest lab support — say, capped at 100% of the salary — and would be placed with program help at an institution after winning, much the way Rhodes Scholarship winners are placed at an Oxford college.

This funding intentionally excludes substantial infrastructure, which would be funded through mission- or goal-based schemes.

The 10-year horizon of these fellowships is essential. Under the current three-year grant cycle, scientists must immediately begin worrying about their next funding application the moment their current one is approved. A decade of guaranteed support provides the freedom to take on the biggest and most fundamental problems and pursue unexpected insights.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which funds researchers with grants of $10 million over seven years, bets on people rather than projects. It has produced a higher proportion of innovative, high-impact research by a wider margin than the project-based approach. Similarly, the OSTP report notes that the long-running NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, which funds students independently of their advisers and institutions, has produced over 40 Nobel laureates.

The selection mechanism must bypass the ossified academic science establishment. Recent Ph.D. graduates (or equivalent independent researchers) would submit their theses and publications, along with a brief vision statement, directly to a joint House-Senate committee. Committee staff, drawing freely on outside experts and advanced analytical tools, would rank the candidates. To guide this process, the committee would set rotating annual priorities.

The actual appointments would be assigned by a randomized lottery tied to congressional seats. When a member’s turn arises, he can either select a qualified applicant he believes in, or he can accept the top staff-recommended name from the staff-ranked list for that year.

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While most members would likely defer to the staff ranking, letting them pick fellows if they want avoids inbreeding, gives politicians buy-in, and replicates the highly successful system of congressional nominations to military service academies. For the sake of scope and efficiency, this fellowship scheme centralizes the ranking of candidates at the committee level.

High-capital “big science” fields would continue to be funded directly by their institutional customers, such as mission agencies, the Department of Defense, or private industry. Small goal- or mission-oriented projects would be funded through a wide variety of models, along the many lines proposed in the OSTP report. The congressional fellowships are exclusively for the independent thinkers with the greatest apparent potential — the future Einsteins.

By funding researchers directly with stable, modest support, we can recreate the fertile conditions that historically produced revolutionary advances.

I estimate the cost of this pilot program during its rollout phase at roughly $35 to $40 million per year for the 107 new fellows, with modest administrative overhead. In the context of a federal research budget in the tens of billions, this is a tiny fraction of what we currently spend on the peers’ preferred marginal projects and their administration.

After five years, once all 535 fellowships are awarded, Congress can assess the program, as it should assess all research funding programs, before deciding whether to renew, modify, or expand it.

It is time to move beyond the bureaucratic legacy of the Bush model of peer review and project-based funding. The congressional fellowships would identify the most promising researchers of their generation and give them the freedom and time to think instead of writing grants. To advance Vannevar Bush’s endless frontier, we need simpler, more humane, and more exciting approaches to American innovation.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.

Ohio law enforcement officials said that the three suspects in the alleged torture and murder of a 7-year-old boy had planned in advance to kidnap and kill him.

Hamilton County Prosecuting Attorney Connie Pillich said in a media briefing Thursday that officials had text message evidence from the Signal encryption app about the alleged plot.

'They failed miserably as parents. Instead, they committed atrocious acts, causing this child to suffer terribly.'

7-year-old William Evans-Ellis was found dead, bound and wrapped with duct tape in a closet at his mother's apartment in Oakley that she shared with two other people, as previously reported by Blaze News.

Pillich revealed that the boy had been dead for a day before his body was found. She also said that the three suspects had taken a dog to a veterinarian the day before he was found, which raises suspicion that he was already dead when they left.

Police arrested 38-year-old Kaitlin Evans, the boy's biological mother, as well as 23-year-old Nessa Keaney and 33-year-old Kirby Rankin. The three were indicted on more than a dozen charges that include aggravated murder, murder, kidnapping, and felonious assault.

Keany and Rankin have been described as women by the media, but police records indicate they are both biological males.

The coroner's office found the child had died of blunt force trauma to the head and had numerous other injuries indicating prolonged and severe abuse.

"This child was failed by the adults who were supposed to protect him," said Pillich. "The child was only 7 years old. He was vulnerable, he was dependent on the adults around him, and he deserved to be protected from harm. Instead, he endured horrific abuse and ultimately lost his life."

Among the injuries listed were a broken bone, bruises too numerous to count, possible burn marks, and water torture.

"This is a horrific, monstrous, unfathomable act," Pillich added. "They failed miserably as parents. Instead, they committed atrocious acts, causing this child to suffer terribly."

The charges carry a possible sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

RELATED: Florida woman brutally beat man to death with a hammer — and left a note saying 'PEDO Touches Children'

"This case has been heartbreaking and deeply disturbing from the beginning," Pillich said. "Nothing can undo what happened to the child, but we can make sure his death is fully investigated and that those responsible face the consequences in court."

The three suspects are each being held on a bond of $1.1 million. The attorneys for the two males have formally requested competency evaluations.

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Glenn Beck believes that President Trump has the power to reset the world order — but his success all depends on one critical thing.

“What do you think that that success hinges on? Like, what's the if?” BlazeTV host Liz Wheeler asked him on “The Liz Wheeler Show.”

“God,” he replied tearfully.

Change can only happen, Glenn says, if people adopt the humble heart posture of “Your will, not mine.”

To illustrate his point, he shares a heartfelt story from his son’s childhood.

“My son was ... probably 8 or 9, and he was afraid to do something, and I brought him into my office,” Glenn recounts, describing how the walls were filled with pictures of his personal heroes.

“I said, ‘Son, I know you're afraid to do something, but why do I have all of these pictures of these people on my walls?’ And he said, ‘Because they were all heroes, and they did the hard things, and they weren’t afraid,”’ he continues.

Glenn then gently corrected his son: “I've read the diaries of these people. I've studied these people. ... All of them were afraid. ... They were risking everything they loved — every single one of them. But they did it anyway because there's something bigger than them.”

That bigger something was “truth.”

“If we can humble ourselves enough to get to the point to where it's more important for me to fight this now, to fight for the truth, so my children don't have to do it, and I'll take on the consequences ... we save the world — not just the nation. We save the world,” says Glenn.

But this selfless mission requires something: “a deep abiding faith in God.”

And the world is depending on America to have that faith so that it can stand for truth.

“After talking to all of these leaders over in Europe, it's clear to me, and they said it to me, ‘America is the only hope. Without America, we are all lost,’” Glenn tells Liz, reflecting on his recent trip to the U.K. where he attended a Tommy Robinson rally.

“We're the only hope. Will we remember that? Be grateful for what we do have, and stand to protect it so our children have a chance at a more peaceful world tomorrow,” he says.

To hear more of Glenn’s powerful take, watch the video above.

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