Charlie Kirk: The American Socrates



I am the Turning Point USA faculty adviser at Arizona State University. As a philosophy professor, what Charlie Kirk was doing stood out to me immediately. It also stood out to the ideologue professors who didn’t like being questioned. That’s why they tried to stop him.

Charlie did something no one thought possible. He walked into the heart of the modern university — where the left claims to hold the keys to knowledge — and did what their professors should have been doing all along: He asked questions. He challenged assumptions. He demanded clarity. He gave logical arguments.

Charlie wasn’t there to score points or win applause. He cared about students’ souls.

He was the American Socrates.

Modeling the Socratic dialogue

Like the Athenian philosopher, Charlie confronted those who claimed to be wise. He took questions — hundreds of them — on camera for all to see. Students asked about gender, economics, faith, and politics. He asked if they could rationally defend their views.

Again and again, Charlie turned the tables, and we saw that the content of the leftist classroom is irrational.

On gender ideology, he exposed what I call the “transsexual heresy,” showing students that reality — not ideology — defines what it means to be a man or a woman. He warned against letting confusion dictate truth. Objective reality matters, and he ensured that students knew it. The mentally ill should not be able to dictate to the rest of us what reality is. And anyone who doesn’t know basic things, such as the difference between a man and a woman, isn’t ready to teach students.

On economics, he dismantled Marxist clichés students had absorbed from their professors, showing that personal responsibility — not socialism — is the bedrock of human flourishing. They came at him with Rousseau, stating that private property and “the system” force the “oppressed” to live lives of crime. In one video, a student told him the poor and marginalized have to become criminals, and Charlie demolished this by simply asking if they have free will. It was brilliant, and everyone watching knew it.

On Christianity, he confronted the narrative that faith is merely patriarchy and white supremacy in disguise. The background narrative is that these professors hate the Bible. Professors had planted these lies in the minds of students to prevent them from reading it.

An untold multitude of students had their faith shipwrecked by such professors while their parents paid the tuition. The unbelieving profs thought they had sufficiently salted the ground and planted tares in the field. Charlie tore them out, root and branch, preparing the ground for the gospel itself to be heard.

The professors’ ire

And that’s why the professors despised him.

I’ve been in those faculty meetings. I’ve heard professors laugh about “deconstructing” the faith of Christian students. I’ve watched them assign books praising witchcraft while condemning Christianity as “oppressive.” I’ve seen them try to ban Charlie Kirk from speaking on campus by declaring him a “white supremacist.”

ASU “honors faculty” successfully prevented him from speaking at the honor college even while they held events on the benefits of witchcraft — while the outlet Jezebel bragged about hiring “Etsy witches” to hex him. If the witches hated him this much, it tells the good guys he was on to something.

The spiritual battle lines could not be clearer.

Charlie wasn’t there to score points or win applause. He cared about students’ souls. He stood in the breach against professors who see students not as young men and women searching for truth, but as recruits for their ideological crusades. He laughed at the degree programs that promised jobs for students such as “radical advocate.” He was there because he believed those students were worth saving from the godless ideologies peddled in classrooms.

Blatant hypocrisy

When Charlie was murdered, some on the left rushed to say, “Let’s all calm down.” There is no moral equivalency here between the right and the left. Yet the left is the one who heated it up by calling him a white supremacist. The left controls the American university, where conservatives and Christians are called “fascist white supremacist patriarchs worse than Hitler” all day and night.

Where was that call for calm after George Floyd’s fentanyl overdose? Violence erupted. Cities burned. Professors excused it all. They used class time to tout Black Lives Matter.

But you won’t see TPUSA students burning cities BLM-style. They will do what Charlie taught them: Use logic and reason to expose falsehoods. Like the students of Athens after Socrates’ death, they will remember the example of the man who confronted their professors — and won.

And those professors will live knowing they were weighed in the balance and found wanting. They are the baddies.

Socrates’ prediction still stands

Before his execution, Socrates told his accusers they would face a heavier judgment than the one they inflicted on him. They killed him to silence him. But his death only proved their ignorance and wickedness. They were unable to give an account to explain themselves and were exposed as living the unexamined life.

The same is true here.

Charlie’s death will not silence him. It will amplify his example. Students will keep questioning. They will expose the foolishness of professors who despised Charlie’s example. And those radical professors will carry the shame of knowing they tried to cover ignorance with hatred.

RELATED: Why Charlie Kirk’s assassination will change us in ways this generation has never seen

Photo by Rebecca Noble/Getty Images

As a Christian pastor, I know Charlie saw that souls were at stake. Charlie publicly professed Christ to be his savior, and the ideological professors know it also. They saw students giving their souls in faith to Christ rather than John Money and hated it.

Now those professors think Charlie is silenced, but they must live with their own darkness. They can repent — or they will live in that darkness forever and face the judgment of God. The blood of martyrs has always been the seed of revival.

May the Lord use Charlie’s life — and yes, even his death — to raise up a generation of students who love truth, pursue wisdom, and refuse to bow to the false gods of the modern university. Let’s question godless professors to reveal to everyone watching that they don’t know clear truths about God and what is good.

Charlie Kirk was the American Socrates. The leftist professors hated him for it. And they will never escape the questions he taught a generation to ask.

How liberals let America’s colleges collapse into illiberalism



America’s colleges and universities ought to advance the public interest by serving as bastions of old-fashioned liberalism. If they did, they would champion free speech. They would establish communities of scholarship, teaching, and learning grounded in civility, toleration, and equality under law. And they would transmit knowledge about the sciences, social sciences, and humanities while cultivating students’ capacity to ask questions, listen attentively, examine evidence, formulate their opinions, and persuasively convey their views.

Instead, America’s colleges and universities purvey illiberalism by punishing dissent from campus orthodoxy, rewarding intolerance, treating individuals unequally under the law, and politicizing the curriculum.

The recovery of liberal education in America depends not least on liberals’ recovery of liberalism.

For decades liberals have dominated higher education in America. Why did they transform, or fail to prevent the transformation of, the nation’s colleges and universities into institutions advancing illiberal education?

Several hypotheses spring to mind.

A progressive revolution

One possibility is that liberals subordinated education to the promotion of progressive priorities. Convinced that they discovered the guiding principles for politics, the formulas for generating fair and effective public policy, and the mechanisms for implementing it, liberals demoted rigorous study of America, the West, and the world.

They marginalized messy and time-consuming debates about competing principles and rival preferences. They disseminated what they regarded as the final word about political norms, practices, and institutions. Instead of assisting students to gain appreciation for their civilizational inheritance, they concentrated on equipping them to change the world in accordance with progressive theories of justice and jurisprudence.

Another possibility is that liberals suffered from a ruinous mix of conformism, complacency, and cowardice. Formally committed to a diversity of perspectives — while identifying diversity with an openness to the varieties of progressivism — liberal professors in the 1970s welcomed a new generation of graduate students to campus who espoused a variety of left-wing doctrines. These students viewed scholarship and teaching as politics by other means.

In the 1980s, liberal faculty tenured the post-1960s generation of scholars. In the 1990s, liberals stood idly by as the recently tenured professors institutionalized political correctness by promulgating speech codes, truncating due process for students accused of sexual misconduct, and exploiting the curriculum to inculcate progressive doctrine.

In the 2000s, with the students of the post-’60s generation professors entering the professoriate, faculty discovered new weapons to enforce uniformity of opinion, including trigger warnings, microaggressions, and bias-response teams. Few were the liberals who challenged these illiberal measures or contested the illiberal slogan, “Speech is violence,” that justified them. Most campus liberals held their tongues for fear of that dreaded censure: “conservative.”

RELATED: Harvard’s hypocrisy hits the courtroom

Photo by Cassandra Klos/Bloomberg via Getty Images

In the 2010s and 2020s, with critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs ripening into full-blown progressive wokeism, conventional campus wisdom proclaimed that “silence is violence.” Liberals evaded accusations of complicity with violence by openly embracing the fashionable theories according, which concluded that America is racist to its core, necessitating that government and private-sector organizations give decisive weight to race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender in allocating rights, responsibilities, and benefits.

A third possibility is that liberals confused sophistication in moral reasoning with sound ethics. Under liberal supervision, college courses on moral reasoning proliferated. These typically provide students with fanciful moral dilemmas, like whether you should pull a switch to divert a runaway trolley from striking five people tied to the track onto another, which would kill one immobilized baby. Or students were served divisive public policy questions about abortion, affirmative action, and same-sex marriage.

Professors invite students to apply a variety of theoretical perspectives — from which professors typically exclude traditional conservative considerations — to resolve the moral dilemmas or settle the public-policy debates. Such courses in moral reasoning foster the delusion that the moral life consists of clever reasoning in support of progressive ends rather than in the exercise of courage, self-restraint, integrity, generosity of spirit, friendship, and the other moral virtues. Moreover, they reinforce the prejudice among professors that only those who equate progressive moral reasoning with moral excellence deserve faculty appointments, administration positions, and a respectful hearing in the public square.

Liberals reclaiming liberal education

It would be useful for liberals to examine these hypotheses — and others — that endeavor to explain one of the great failures of liberalism over the last 75 years: the demise on liberals’ watch of liberal education in America.

Cass Sunstein appears well-suited to the task. A longtime Harvard Law School professor, Sunstein is a distinguished and remarkably prolific scholar, by far the most cited in legal academia. He has written widely and influentially on law, politics, and economics. He possesses substantial government experience, having served from Sept. 2009 to Aug. 2012 as the Obama administration’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. And he is the author of a short and lucid new book, “On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom,” that restates liberalism’s core convictions and maintains that it deserves the allegiance of Americans of diverse viewpoints and persuasions.

Explaining where liberals went wrong in governing American universities is inextricably connected to understanding liberalism and defending freedom. Yet the closest Sunstein comes to even acknowledging the problem is the anodyne remark that liberals “do not like the idea of orthodoxy, including on university campuses.” That, however, is like saying that corporate executives who bankrupt their companies don’t like losing money. The issue is how those in charge contribute to their organization’s downfall.

“Liberals,” Sunstein states, “prize two things above all: freedom and pluralism.” Liberal freedom means in the first place that “people are allowed and encouraged to establish their own path, to take it if they like, and to reverse course if they want to do that.” Pluralism follows because people, possessing different backgrounds, skills, and interests, will choose different paths or alter course by their own lights. Liberalism so understood forms an enduring part of the American creed.

America’s colleges and universities purvey illiberalism by punishing dissent from campus orthodoxy, rewarding intolerance, treating individuals unequally under the law, and politicizing the curriculum.

However, Sunstein writes, “More than at any time since World War II, liberalism is under pressure — even siege.” New right critics “hold it responsible for the collapse of the family and traditional values, rampant criminality, disrespect for authority, and widespread immorality.” Intellectuals on the left decry liberalism’s inability “to handle the problems posed by entrenched inequalities, racism, sexism, corporate power, and environmental degradation.”

Sunstein’s book responds to the “urgent need for a clear understanding of liberalism — of its core commitments, of its breadth, of its internal debates, of its evolving character, of its promise, of what it is and what it can be.”

Liberalism, he observes, has roots in the premodern virtue of liberality, which encompasses generosity, openness, and public-spiritedness. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the thinking and practices that acquired the name liberalism in the 19th century came to be associated with religious toleration and limited government.

In 20th- and 21st-century politics, some liberals emphasized negative rights, or freedom from coercion particularly by government; others stressed positive rights, or entitlements to government assistance — in housing, education, and health care. In academic political theory, John Rawls developed the leading account, which views liberalism as centrally concerned with basic political principles to which all reasonable citizens should agree; other academic liberals hold that liberalism consists in promoting autonomy as the highest human ideal.

Sunstein celebrates liberalism as a big tent and fighting faith while preferring a progressive liberalism that revolves around John Stuart Mill’s “experiments of living.” Believing that the state should assist citizens to experiment adequately, Sunstein favors a government that, under limited circumstances, counters citizens’ expressed preferences to enhance their deliberations and make their choices more reasonable. He considers measures that extend from government information campaigns, accurate labeling, and mandatory seatbelt laws to tax incentives, cap-and-trade systems, and fuel-economy mandates.

Sunstein’s sophisticated yet accessible discussions of the rule of law, free speech, markets, regulation, and government’s role in ensuring the material and moral bases of security and opportunity provide a welcome corrective to the proliferating misunderstandings of the liberal tradition along with its many faces and supple sensibilities.

Missing the mark

His brief for freedom also reinforces liberal narrow-mindedness and smugness.

First, Sunstein mischaracterizes liberalism’s core. It is not, as he asserts, experiments of living, but rather, as John Locke and America’s founders affirmed, the conviction that human beings are by nature free and equal. This conviction sustains liberalism’s big tent, which hosts, among others, those like Sunstein who are drawn to experiments of living.

Second, Sunstein dismisses and deflects liberalism’s critics, right and left, rather than learning from them. This is costly because liberalism’s critics have much to teach about liberalism’s tendency, like all schools of political thought and all regimes, to carry its principles to an extreme.

RELATED: Students are trapped in mandatory DEI disguised as coursework

Photo by filo via Getty Image

Liberalism’s vices include the dissoluteness bound up in the tempting belief that opposition to coercion entails overcoming the imperatives of morality. It also fosters the complacency that stems from overreliance on formal procedures to mete out justice. And it is steeped in the arrogance that assumes liberals have refuted faith and supplanted rather than supplemented classical teachings on ethics and politics. Brushing off critics, Sunstein fails to explore the extent to which liberalism finds itself “under pressure, even siege” because of its own shortcomings.

Third, Sunstein idealizes liberal character. He depicts liberals as secular saints neither deficient in certain virtues nor prone to specific vices. Yet to take one telling example, liberals, as Mill argues in “On Liberty” and elsewhere, tend to disregard the wisdom stored up in traditional writings, inherited beliefs, and established institutions.

Sunstein’s disregard of essential wisdom stored up in the modern tradition of freedom — particularly its early appreciation of freedom’s dependence on biblical faith and classical political philosophy — converges with the biases of many of his left-liberal friends and colleagues. This disregard begins to explain his and their failure to connect liberal education’s demise to liberals’ departures from the liberal tradition in its richness and fullness.

The recovery of liberal education in America depends not least on liberals’ recovery of liberalism.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

Cracker Barrel’s Retreat Proves The Right Has Cultural Power If They’re Willing To Use It

Conservatives hold more cultural power than they may realize. The question is: Will they continue to use it? Weeks after abandoning its plans to ax the infamous Uncle Herschel from its iconic logo, the southern restaurant chain Cracker Barrel announced Tuesday that it is not moving forward with the sterile redesign of its dining rooms […]

Heritage Foundation's Kevin Roberts: Conservatives must get 'uncomfortably honest about our present crisis'



Heritage Foundation president Dr. Kevin Roberts emphasized in his Tuesday speech at the National Conservatism conference in Washington, D.C., that America's true source of greatness is the family and that conservatives unapologetically oppose that which serves to weaken it — even if championed by fair-weather friends within the Trump coalition — and defend that which serves to strengthen it.

Roberts, whose organization's so-called Project 2025 caused so much consternation on the left last year, further stressed the need for conservatives both to get "uncomfortably honest about our present crisis" and to reject the "temptation to separate the personal from the political, to believe that our private lives are of no concern to our public work," as "that separation is a lie."

'The family's decline is not a law of nature; nor is it an unstoppable force.'

Roberts, among the first speakers at this year's NatCon, noted at the outset of his speech that whereas the stability of the great empires of yesteryear's Europe rested on the monarchs' bloodlines and on the strength of their thrones, America "bet her future on something humbler yet infinitely stronger" — "on what Chesterton called 'the most extraordinary thing in the world': an ordinary man and an ordinary woman bound in covenant love, passing on their faith and virtue to ordinary children."

"We staked it all on the American family," continued Roberts. "The family is the seedbed and safeguard of our grand experiment in ordered liberty — the source and summit of our political order, the true origin of our exceptionalism."

Roberts noted that whereas America's political architecture is still outwardly intact — "the Constitution that gives our body politic its structure remains in its glass case at the National Archives" — "the American family, the spiritual heart and soul that animates that Constitution, has grown weak, fractured, and hollow."

RELATED: Family or fallout — experts assess the threats now facing the nuclear family

Photo by Lambert/Getty Images

The Heritage Foundation president noted that the weakening of American families — evidenced by a declining marriage rate, delayed marriages, an all-time low fertility rate, a staggeringly high number of abortions, and crushing loneliness among young Americans — was no accident but rather "the result of a deliberate campaign to uproot the most fundamental institution of human life."

"You can call this campaign liberalism or enlightenment, rationalism or modernity — the name doesn't matter," said Roberts. "What matters is realizing that our current crisis has been centuries in the making."

Roberts indicated that American conservatives are now in a position to do something about this crisis, which was brought about with the help of radical feminists and industrialists who dragged the mother out of the home; eugenicists like Margaret Sanger who promoted the notion that "children are a burden"; and educational activists like John Dewey who "shifted children's formation from home and church to state institutions."

"The family's decline is not a law of nature; nor is it an unstoppable force," said Roberts. "It's the product of human choices — and human choices can change."

"The American people have entrusted us with the power of government. They are asking us to make America great again. They are urging us to usher in a new golden age in American life. To honor their request, we have one clear task," said Roberts. "We must do intentionally what the founders did instinctively: stake our future on virtuous and ordinary mothers and fathers."

'[Prudence] demands that we ask of every policy, every proposal: Will this strengthen the American family?'

Roberts suggested that it's not enough to seek an end to DEI and Pride flags; to combat the "uniparty" interventionists' prioritization of the "family of nations" over the families of Americans; and to rethink policies that work on the assumption that "maximizing GDP is an overriding and unspoken goal."

Conservatives must take back their homes and live by example — entering into marriage, embracing its commitments, and remaining faithful through its trials; welcoming children into the home and giving them the love, discipline, and kitchen-table education they need to prosper; and ruling with prudence, which Roberts noted is the "opposite of ideology."

Roberts noted that prudence "recognizes that the interest of the family and the national interest are not merely aligned — they are one and the same. [Prudence] demands that we ask of every policy, every proposal: Will this strengthen the American family? Will it advance the common good of the American people? Will it cultivate the virtues without which liberty cannot endure?"

RELATED: 'Woke right' smear weaponized by liberal interlopers against MAGA conservatives, populists — and Arby's?

Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images

"If the answer is no," continued Roberts, "even if the proposal aligns with some past ideological commitment, prudence requires that we reject it."

'Prudence is not a retreat from conviction.'

Tariffs, for example, may have been imprudent years ago but, based on the needs of the family today, may be prudent now, suggested Roberts. He suggested further that conservatives ruling with prudence may simultaneously demand the deregulation of certain industries such as construction — in the interest of helping young couples afford homes — but greater regulation of other industries, such as pornography, sports betting, and social media, which adversely impact children and the family.

"Prudence is not a retreat from conviction. It's the application of conviction to reality," stressed Roberts. "In this moment, conviction and reality both tell us the same thing: The surest test of any policy, any law, any reform is whether it fortifies the institution upon which the future of our nation stands."

Roberts' apparent willingness to upset libertarians and strike at the liberal status quo is par for the course at the National Conservatism conference, a project of the Edmund Burke Foundation chaired by Israeli-American philosopher Yoram Hazony.

The project defines "national conservatism" as "a movement of public figures, journalists, scholars, and students who understand that the past and future of conservatism are inextricably tied to the idea of the nation, to the principle of national independence, and to the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing."'

There have been several NatCon conferences in recent years both at home and abroad. Past guests and speakers include Vice President JD Vance, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.), Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), elements of Blaze Media, and a host of international leaders of various political stripes.

The momentum and influence enjoyed by elements of the national conservatism movement have not gone unnoticed by liberals, who have lashed out in various ways, some more forceful than others.

Last year, for example, police stormed the NatCon conference in Brussels on the orders of a leftist mayor who appeared eager to shut down the event.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

The woke party’s favorite costume: Moderation



I usually enjoy David Harsanyi’s critiques of the left. But in a recent column, he drew a distinction I can’t accept. Quoting Rahm Emanuel’s plea for Democrats to rally behind “Build, baby, build!” Harsanyi praised politicians he believes embody a centrist alternative to the party’s radicals: Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Virginia gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, and North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein.

Harsanyi presented these figures as the future of a Democratic Party that might rediscover moderation. He contrasted them with open socialists like New York City's Zohran Mamdani, whom he regards as the party’s worst tendencies made flesh. In his telling, Beshear, Spanberger, Shapiro, and Stein represent a kind of Democratic “loyal opposition” that conservatives should welcome.

Abigail Spanberger shows how the Democratic ‘moderate’ label works: not as a rejection of cultural radicalism but as a smoother delivery system for it.

That picture collapses under scrutiny. On social questions, the supposed moderates fall squarely in line with the party’s most zealous activists. Beshear, though personable and pragmatic on some issues, is an LGBTQ fanatic who promotes woke causes across Kentucky. Spanberger has been a reliable ally of the gender-identity movement and has now gone so far as to support biological men competing in women’s sports. Stein in North Carolina vetoed four separate bills meant to curb DEI excesses and limit radical gender programs in his state.

These aren’t minor disagreements tucked around the edges. They reveal a deeper truth: The “moderates” whom Harsanyi and Fox News commentators now flatter are not moderates at all. They dress the same ideology in calmer rhetoric. Spanberger, the supposed pragmatist, sounds indistinguishable from Tim Walz or Mamdani when she explains her social positions.

So why do some on the right elevate them? Because these Democrats don’t call themselves socialists, don’t chant slogans for Hamas, and don’t traffic in the same racial agitation as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jasmine Crockett, or Omar Fateh. But the distinction is cosmetic. On gender, DEI, and race politics, the so-called moderates embrace the same policies.

This misreading exposes a larger problem on the right. For years, the Republican establishment avoided direct confrontation on cultural issues, preferring to rally donors around national defense, Israel, or deregulation. On marriage and gender, Republicans surrendered the ground years ago. When the Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, Conservatism Inc. shrugged. Now, some seem relieved to pretend “moderates” in the Democratic Party represent a saner alternative. They don’t.

And the Democrats know it. Clinton-era strategists at the Third Way think tank now tell their party to tone down the woke jargon and talk more about housing or infrastructure. But Third Way doesn’t advise abandoning cultural radicalism — only camouflaging it. The goal is simple: Keep core constituencies like college-educated white women and black urban voters while soothing independents with bread-and-butter messaging. Beshear, Stein, Spanberger, and the others know their futures depend on that balancing act.

This is where Republicans must stop indulging illusions. They will be forced to fight on this terrain whether they like it or not.

RELATED: Radical left poised to redefine America’s cities

Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

In Virginia, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears — a black conservative who supports Trump’s immigration policy and holds traditional views on marriage and gender — trails Spanberger despite Spanberger’s increasingly open embrace of the left’s cultural program. In Northern Virginia’s suburbs, her positions do not hurt her. They energize her base. The clearer she becomes, the more firmly those voters rally to her side.

That is the lesson Republicans cannot ignore. Spanberger shows how the Democratic “moderate” label works: not as a rejection of cultural radicalism but as a smoother delivery system for it. Sears, to her credit, understands the stakes. She knows she cannot avoid the social questions. If she does, she loses. Her only path forward is to expose Spanberger’s record and force voters to confront it.

What’s happening in Virginia is the same fight Trump is waging nationally — against a cultural left entrenched in the administrative state, NPR, and the universities. These battles connect. They will not fade, and the right cannot win them by pretending “moderates” exist in the Democratic Party.

If Republicans cling to that illusion, they won’t just lose a governorship here or a Senate seat there. They will lose the defining fight over culture, identity, and the moral core of the nation. The Democrats’ so-called moderates are not the antidote to radicalism. They are the mask that allows it to advance.

DC’s crime problem is much worse than you think



After building a reputation for cutting federal jobs in Washington, D.C., the Department of Government Efficiency is now tied to an expansion of federal authority.

President Trump announced Monday he would take over Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department and deploy the National Guard — an unprecedented move that came less than a week after photos of a shirtless, bloodied 19-year-old former DOGE employee went viral. The president declared August 11 “Liberation Day” and vowed to end violent crime and homeless encampments in the nation’s capital.

Our nation’s capital should project security and order to the nation and the world. It must be made safe again.

Trump’s detractors immediately pointed out that violent crime, including shootings and homicides, has been falling in the district. They’re right — on paper. Violent crime is down 26% this year, according to the city’s own numbers. But those figures are under scrutiny after accusations that officials manipulated the data.

Homicides, which are harder to fudge, are down 12%: 99 killings through August 11 compared to 112 during the same period in 2024.

Numbers alone, however, can’t capture the lived reality. Having spent the last year of my 15-year career in D.C. at the city’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention, I spoke with residents desperate for change. One man told me he and his pregnant wife dove to the floor when a bullet smashed through their window. Another woman worked with neighbors to demand more police patrols. Their frustrations highlight the fact that crime isn’t just a local issue but a hyperlocal one.

One activist I met has kept a memorial wall for homicide victims in his apartment since the 1990s. Some of the kids he mentored, he said, cherished the photos and videos because they were the only images they had of their fathers. In D.C., more than 60% of murders happen in just two of the city’s eight wards — far from tourist landmarks and high-end retail stores. Last August, a Democrat council member from one of those neighborhoods called for the National Guard himself after a wave of shootings.

Yet, those communities — overwhelmingly poor and black — rarely drive the political conversation about crime. Conservatives, like progressives, focus on the violence and vagrancy near their offices, homes, and favorite restaurants. That’s not a criticism; it’s human nature.

Everyone wants to feel safe where they live, work, and visit. But people from places where one murder makes front-page news can’t easily grasp how easy it is to grow numb to constant violence and disorder.

RELATED: Legacy media’s bogus defense of DC’s safe-streets narrative crumbles under scrutiny

Photo by STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images

The left has its own contradictions. Leftists had no problem with the FBI combing through a NASCAR garage when they thought driver Bubba Wallace had been the target of a hate crime. More than 90% of D.C.’s homicide victims are black, yet racial inequality in violent crime barely registers among self-described antiracists.

Likewise, in 2021, commentator Roland Martin demanded a federal crackdown on “white domestic terrorism.” But he didn’t explain how many murder victims in D.C., Baltimore, St. Louis, Memphis, Philadelphia, Atlanta, New Orleans, or Chicago were killed by skinheads or neo-Nazis.

Whether the federal takeover will reduce crime remains to be seen. Conservatives frustrated by the government’s inability to produce the Epstein files might be overestimating how quickly crime can be cleaned up. Real change will require coordination across every level of government.

Still, my hope is simple: that whatever is done in D.C. will make it safer for residents, workers, and visitors alike. Our capital should project security and order to the nation and the world. It must be made safe again.

The anti-reality crowd’s new anthem: ‘You can’t make me!’



Our digital age has brought many benefits. Lately, though, I’ve noticed how it’s enabled the spread of a persistent malady.

Call it the digital-era version of “spaniel selective hearing.”

Sometimes it’s willful ignorance. Other times it’s just denial. Either way, it’s intellectual evasion wrapped in self-satisfaction.

In her book ”The Invaders,” paleoanthropologist Pat Shipman explains that modern humans and dogs have been partners for 40,000 years. Over time, we developed specific dog breeds optimized for various jobs like herding, protection, and hunting. Once firearms became common, even ordinary people could hunt waterfowl. So we developed spaniels with excellent noses, all-day energy, non-territorial instincts, and a gentle, cooperative temperament.

The latter qualities were especially important: You and I might bring our personal gundogs to the field to hunt together, so each one needed to be attuned to its human and not challenge the other for turf control. Today we see their sweet spaniel faces with big eyes and their love of people in homes and as therapy dogs.

But something changed.

Back then, spaniels were often kennel-raised and fed once a day. They depended on their humans, so they stayed alert and focused. Today’s dogs? They’re beloved pets — well-fed, spoiled, and sometimes a little too independent.

This phenomenon was dubbed “spaniel selective hearing”: the condition in which your dog “can’t hear you” because it would rather be doing something else. It’s real. And it’s made worse by how cute and cuddly these dogs are otherwise.

In today’s world of digital abundance, I’m seeing the human version of this problem — and you probably are too.

You share an article that lays out certain information and reaches a conclusion. Immediately, someone in your circle dismisses it outright, saying, “The author is a partisan,” simply because she disagrees with him.

RELATED: When the mainstream media’s left-wing bias costs them credibility

SvetaZi via iStock/Getty Images

Press further, and she will respond with three “neutral” links — maybe NPR, the New York Times, or one of those permanently anti-Trump conservatives who call themselves principled.

Then, if the facts from your original article prove difficult to refute, she might pivot. She might offer her own “analysis,” which, oddly enough, ends up reinforcing the exact same claims made by the author she just dismissed.

But don’t expect your interlocutors to admit that. Why?

Because they’re neutral. Because context doesn’t count. Because you can’t make them go there.

Sometimes it’s willful ignorance. Other times it’s just denial. Either way, it’s intellectual evasion wrapped in self-satisfaction.

Like spaniel selective hearing, this rapidly spreading malady is the product of abundance — in this case, the overabundance of digital information and opinion pieces by a plethora of people with a wide range of actual expertise and insight.

Maybe we should call it “deflective data deployment” or “convenient data fencing.” Or, better yet, “I won’t go there, and you can’t make me!” syndrome.

Whatever we call it, we need to call it out.

We need a label that diagnoses this behavior. Confronting it is the first step toward reviving healthy public discourse and breaking us out of our echo chambers.

Can young right-wing men save themselves from 'cultural death'?



Young men have been shunning the left to show an interest in religion, the right, and traditional lifestyles at promising rates — but that doesn’t mean our country is in the clear.

Particularly because, of all members of society in America, young, white, Christian men face the biggest uphill battle when it comes to the culture wars raging all around us.

BlazeTV host Steve Deace is well aware.

“It is true that if you are a young, white male, particularly one who is a Christian and either desires to be married to a woman and have children with her or already is, virtually every institution that matters in this culture has you marked for cultural death,” Deace says.

“You are on a most-wanted enemies list,” he adds.


In order to change this, Deace says we need to "confront this racialism” in the church and “call it out for the demonic evil that it is.”

“If we don’t, these young men will reject the church out of disdain for the social stigma they are receiving for nothing other than the lack of melanin in their skin,” he says.

“You’re just not going to be able, for any prolonged period of time, [to] tell white men, as they see a black young man stab to death another white young man, and raise and make money off of that crime, that heinous crime. You can’t just tell them, ‘Well, shucks, nothing’s happening here. Move on.’ That’s just not sustainable,” executive producer Aaron McIntire agrees.

“When you are being castigated … if you're being discriminated against … you’re not just going to let that go. History has shown that just can’t go on into perpetuity,” he adds.

While Deace doesn’t believe that our own form of racial idolatry is the correct response, he does believe it will be the response if this continues.

“A petty criminal who probably died of a fentanyl overdose gets global days of remembrance, with protests and riots all over the freaking world. … This black kid over some form of acknowledgement of diss or beef culture stabs one of his classmates right in the heart and raises $100K, crowdfunds $100K in just days off of it,” Deace says.

“If we don’t correct that, the opposite form of racial idolatry is exactly what we are going to get,” he adds.

Want more from Steve Deace?

To enjoy more of Steve's take on national politics, Christian worldview, and principled conservatism with a snarky twist, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

NYT condemns the right for obsession with ‘thinness’: ‘Marriage, babies, fitness, protein — it's all one very narrow image’



Unbeknownst to many, the New York Times has a podcast called “The Opinions,” which features columnists, staff writers, guest essayists, and editors diving into various issues and ideas.

In the latest episode titled “Why the Right Is Obsessed with Thinness,” Times opinion editor Meher Ahmad and opinion writer Jessica Grose discussed how being thin and fit is an unhealthy right-wing obsession.

BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales analyzes several audio clips from the interview.

In the first clip, Ahmad opens the podcast with the following preamble: “There's been a resurgence in explicit ‘be thin’ messaging in culture. With the Ozempic boom, we see the body shaming of actresses like Sydney Sweeney and red carpets that were already filled with thin actresses becoming even thinner. On the right, there's been a focus on body size that's sort of been bundled up not just with health and wellness, but with religion, morals, and politics.”

“Being skinny is related to Christianity, I guess,” scoffs Sara.

In the second clip, Grose argues that conservatives are elevating thinness as a response to the body positivity movement.

“I think it's a reaction to the body positivity movement, which I would say peaked about 10 years ago, and it was the idea that weight is not tied directly to health and that you can be healthy and not real thin. It was never predominant,” she says.

“That's not what the body positivity movement has ever been,” Sara corrects.

“The leaders of the body positivity movement said things like, ‘Fat is fit, BMI is not a measure of wellness, healthy at every size, body size does not indicate health.”’

“We can have a debate on what people deem beautiful ... but you can't tell me that being morbidly obese is actually healthy, and yet, that is the lie that they tried to put on young women.”

In the third clip, Grose argues that conservative influencers aim to be attractive and physically fit because those endeavors align with conservative values, especially traditional gender roles: “It's all traditional gender roles, right? I mean that litany of things ... like marriage, babies, fitness, protein — it's all one very narrow image, and anyone who is not conforming to that image is sort of outside the circle.”

“We do see fewer female leaders across the board, I would say Democrats and Republicans, and so the idea that women should be physically smaller goes along with the idea that they are not going to be the ones out front taking up space,” she added.

“It's just so funny listening to them talk about, oh, conservative women, they just want to be physically smaller so they can take a backseat to all the powerful men. OK, well, I don't know, I think that we're doing OK as a whole here,” scoffs Sara, displaying a collage of beautiful conservative women who have large platforms and a lot of influence, including Alex Clark, Riley Gaines, Candace Owens, Lara Trump, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), and Nicole Shanahan, among others.

To hear more audio clips and more of Sara's analysis, watch the episode above.

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

To enjoy more of Sara's no-holds-barred take to news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Why the Sydney Sweeney ad perfectly illustrates one truth about the left



Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle collaboration has not only taken over internet discourse for its sensuality — but also because it’s a young blonde woman clad in denim who is proud of her blue eyes and blonde hair, which she cheekily calls her “jeans.”

While BlazeTV host Steve Deace is well aware that the sensuality behind the ad is a sin, what he finds interesting is that those who have not only gone beyond sin but normalized it are the most outraged by the ad.

“A devolution in our day, is we have gone from sinfulness, I believe, to demonic influence. And the difference between the two ... is that our sinfulness takes the natural desires, instincts, ambitions, and talents that God gives us and seeks to exploit them beyond the boundaries God put in place for them to be best practiced and utilized,” Deace says.

“What American Eagle is capitalizing is, by today's standards, somewhat tame, although other eras would have been greatly more offended,” he explains, though he notes that even if “you’re on the wrong side” of that particular debate, the debate still centers around morality and God.


“Demonic influence is no longer when we seek to exploit the natural talents, desires, ambitions, and instincts that God gives each of us, but we now deny them. And this is now where we go the other way,” he says.

While conservatives might debate each other over whether or not the ad is too sensual to show, the left has already promoted and surpassed sinful sensuality — but oddly draws the line when it comes to Sydney Sweeney.

“The spirit of the age that has promoted that sensuality, its simps, its acolytes, are now condemning this Sydney Sweeney ad. How do you make sense of this?” Deace asks.

“It’s too salacious, but at least it’s hetero. That’s exactly why the spirit of the age is losing its mind. ‘How dare you do anything even if it is sensual,’” he mocks, “Even if it is what in other eras would have been considered perversion.”

“‘How dare you do anything that points to objective truth, objective good, and objective beauty?’” he adds.

Executive producer of the “Steve Deace Show,” Aaron McIntire, agrees.

“As you pointed out, the real enemy that we are up against, the real opponents on this mortal coil that we’re up against, they certainly feel like they are attacked, like they’re being attacked. They certainly see this as some sort of cultural shift, and they don’t like that. They don't like it when they’re not in control,” he says.

“The spirit of the age would rather enslave you than kill you. I’ve always said that. And the moment that they start to feel like, ‘We’re not as close to enslaving you,’ or ‘We don’t have as much control as we thought,’ they start to throw fits,” he adds.

Want more from Steve Deace?

To enjoy more of Steve's take on national politics, Christian worldview, and principled conservatism with a snarky twist, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.