The $997 'sovereign baby' scheme that could leave your children fighting to prove they exist



Rebellion against the administrative state used to entail packing up, moving to a log cabin in Montana, and trying your best to survive off the land. Now all it takes is a Venmo account and decent internet.

As Wired recently reported, Kristin LaHargoue, a Utah-based influencer who goes by “Minister Veda,” caters to a hyper-specific, delusional niche: convincing people that it is patriotic not to register their children with the government. On Instagram (@veda.revival), she posts videos of her family traveling internationally without birth certificates or Social Security numbers for her children. In her view, registering a baby with the government is an unforgivable surrender of parental freedom.

The great escape from the administrative state still requires the administrative state to stamp your little blue book.

Her business model is simple: commodified chaos. For $997, LaHargoue offers personal coaching on how to obtain a passport for an unregistered child, including guidance for dealing with Department of State officials. If that's too pricey, another option is available. For $497, she sells a downloadable bundle to navigate the bureaucratic minefield.

The problem, of course, is that the parents aren't the only ones who must live with the consequences.

Off the record

Wired highlighted the real-world fallout through the story of Sarah Ashley Townsend. Raised by a sovereign-minded mother without a birth certificate or Social Security number, Townsend spent her childhood largely isolated from ordinary society. At 16, she repeatedly struggled to get a driver's license. In her early 20s, she discovered that supposedly having her documents straightened out had not solved the problem. When she gave birth to her own son, officials couldn't establish her birth records, and his birth certificate had to be amended twice.

Townsend was 22, newly postpartum, and running around Maryland collecting notarized documents just to get her son the paperwork her own mother had denied her.

This sovereign baby concept isn't new. Its roots trace back to William Potter Gale, a former Army lieutenant colonel who founded Posse Comitatus in Southern California around 1970. Gale preached distrust of the federal government, insisting that county sheriffs were the highest lawful authority and that Washington had vastly exceeded its constitutional powers. His followers rejected federal taxation and claimed the right to resist authorities they considered illegitimate.

Posse Comitatus helped inspire later sovereign-citizen groups, whose members developed increasingly inventive theories about secret government contracts, fictitious legal identities, and the supposed power of declaring oneself exempt from ordinary laws. Some issued bogus liens against judges and public officials, attempting to weaponize paperwork against the very institutions they rejected. Others refused to recognize courts, taxes, or government authority, sometimes with violent consequences.

The underlying fantasy remained remarkably consistent. Reality was supposedly negotiable, provided one knew the right words and possessed enough contempt for the rules everyone else had to follow.

Monetizing paranoia

Today's influencers have traded backwater meetups and photocopied manifestos for selfies in front of Barcelona's Sagrada Família. Take Minister Dionne, who peddles a $555 "Status Correction" package. Or Marisse Vista, whose $7,777 "Sovereign Conception Program" promises such delights as ancestral clearing and womb activation. Yes, it's absurd, but it perfectly captures the current zeitgeist, with online chancers monetizing paranoia.

Now, to be clear, I am no fan of the paperwork police, and I am all for parents being free to make the best decisions for their children. But the claim that birth certificates make newborns government assets relies on the long-discredited straw man legal theory. According to this fantasy, a birth certificate creates a separate legal identity that the government uses as collateral for its debts. By declaring themselves separate from this fictitious identity, believers supposedly escape government authority. Courts have repeatedly rejected the theory, yet influencers continue peddling it as gospel.

They claim to be selling rebellion. What they're really selling is a bureaucratic nightmare.

The irony is that the passport procedure itself is perfectly legitimate. The State Department allows applicants without conventional birth certificates to establish citizenship through secondary evidence, including baptismal records, early school records, family Bible entries, and affidavits. This exists for people who genuinely lack ordinary birth records, not as some secret sovereign-citizen loophole.

LaHargoue and her peers frame opting out of government records as grand independence, but it is pure hypocrisy. These influencers reject the obligations of a functioning society while demanding its perks and protection abroad. Having declined to obtain the usual documents, they must then assemble alternative paperwork and persuade the very government they supposedly reject to issue a passport.

The great escape from the administrative state still requires the administrative state to stamp your little blue book.

RELATED: How to thrive without a Social Security number

Print Collector/Getty Images

Sovereign headache

As Wired reported, one woman who purchased LaHargoue's instructional material eventually obtained a passport for her infant without a birth certificate. She submitted baptismal records, a family Bible, an affidavit, and a newspaper birth announcement. After considerable back-and-forth, the State Department approved the application.

In other words, parents are paying hundreds of dollars to navigate an elaborate government procedure made necessary by their refusal to follow a much simpler one.

A New York family lawyer told Wired he has seen an increase in parents attempting to reject or undo their children's official identification documents, while a law enforcement consultant described motorists refusing to show identification because they insist they are merely "traveling" rather than driving. Healthy skepticism is one thing. Pursuing a fantasy of total independence that only creates problems for you and your loved ones is another. Freedom is fantastic and necessary, but it doesn't mean freedom from consequences.

When a boy or girl grows up and runs into trouble opening a bank account, getting a driver's license, signing a lease, enrolling in college, or finding a job, the opportunist who cashed that fat check is long gone. The parent may get a fleeting rush of anti-establishment heroism; the child, however, is left with an endless headache, forced to spend years proving to the clipboard class that he is who he says he is — and that he actually exists.

Skip Travel Sports And Put Your Sons In Little League

Like many aspects of American life, little league baseball is suffering. Saving America, in a small way, means saving little league.

What is culture? Look around your dinner table.



What is culture?

That is a big question. It trips up a lot of people. Often, we tend to think of high culture when attempting to answer. Art, literature, and the stuff of the academy are what comes to mind. Yes, of course, that is culture and very important culture. But it is not all of culture. There is also folk culture and the ways of your people. That sounds hokey or old-fashioned in our day and age, but it doesn’t need to be, and that is not how it’s meant, at least not in this case.

The cake you make because your grandmother used to make it was everyday culture for her, just like the way you and your son go fishing every Friday afternoon.

Folk culture can mean a lot of things, but in the most general sense it is taken to mean the ways of the common people. The things they eat, the things they do, the things they believe, the way they speak, the way they marry, the way they die, the things they are afraid of, the things they valorize, and anything else that isn’t so much taught or studied.

Family matters

At the most basic level, your culture is what you consider to be normal.

That is a very simple definition that is easy to understand, and it is applicable at just about every level. The definition applies equally to rich and poor, big countries and small ones, the hinterland and the metropolis. It applies to even smaller units like families. Certainly, a family’s culture is related to its broader people’s culture, but it is also distinct. Each family is different, and each family has its own culture.

This is important to consider, because when we think of culture as only being high and academic, we separate ourselves from our own folk culture. We turn ourselves into spectators or passive observers rather than active participants. We downgrade ourselves and think of ourselves as “culture-less,” when in fact, every single person on earth, by virtue of having grown up somewhere with some family, has a culture — that which they consider to be normal.

Rooted in routine

When you wake up in the morning, how do you greet your wife? How do you say good morning to your kids? What do you do after that? What is the routine you have kept up for the past 20 years? What is the prayer you say before you sit down for breakfast? What kind of clothes do you wear?

How about the way you talk to the people you work with? Do you open the door for women? Do you insist that someone you just met should go first, just to be polite? What do you say and what don’t you say? What do you think is nice and what do you think is rude?

At home, what do you do for dinner? What does your wife make? Or perhaps what do you make? Do you eat together? Do you pray before? What is the rhythm of the meal? Do you sit and talk afterward? Do you have coffee or dessert? Or is that only on the weekends?

Afterward, do you read a book or watch television? Do you work some more, or are you done for the night? Do you listen to music? If so, what kind? Do you have a drink, or do you abstain? When do you go to bed? And when do you wake up and start it all over again?

All these things are so small and mundane that you probably don’t even think of them as anything other than your daily routine. And they are that, of course, but they are also little points of culture. It is these mundane things — and 10,000 other ones — that add up to what we know as life.

RELATED: Do you wear your shoes in the house?

Glen Asakawa/Getty Images

Home truths

Often, we don’t realize how potent these little points are until we leave home at 18. We move away from mom and dad and meet other people with other ways, and we realize the obvious fact that everyone doesn’t eat the same things on the holidays, wake up at the same time, eat dinner the same way, have the same manners, or live the same way. It is often in close contact with others that we fully realize who we really are, who we aren’t, and what little things make us that way.

The reason all this talk of mundane routine and family culture matters is because we very easily forget how important these little things are. We focus all our efforts on high, hard-to-reach culture and forget that it is the everyday moments that come to shape the world our children consider normal.

The cake you make because your grandmother used to make it was everyday culture for her, just like the way you and your son go fishing every Friday afternoon or the way you all have dinner together every Sunday evening no matter what.

These traditions may seem too ordinary to be worth thinking about. But the things your children grow up considering normal are the very things they may one day pass along to their own children. That is how culture survives, and it is something every family takes part in, whether they realize it or not.

Report: Islamic Groups Urged Violence, Called America ‘Satan’ — And Got $47 Million From Taxpayers

Abdul El-Sayed has appeared at a number of the mosques and institutions listed.

The strange, dark story of how John 3:16 infiltrated American sports



You don't have to be a Christian to know John 3:16.

You may not know exactly what the verse says. But if you've watched enough American sports, you've probably seen the citation: on a sign behind the goal posts, beneath Tim Tebow's eyes, or this summer, written on the Pride caps of three San Francisco Giants pitchers.

Convinced that the rapture was imminent, he wanted to warn the world before it was too late.

For decades, six characters and a colon have served as American sports' unofficial Bible verse.

Why this one? The answer begins long before television and eventually involves Martin Luther, D.L. Moody, a rainbow-wigged publicity seeker, Google, a hostage crisis, and a controversy this summer over Bible verses written on baseball caps.

The gospel in miniature

John 3:16 appears during Jesus' nighttime conversation with Nicodemus in the Gospel of John:

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

Christians noticed early that the verse managed to pack an extraordinary amount of Christianity into a single sentence. Around the turn of the fifth century, John Chrysostom marveled that although John wrote concisely, "each word had much significance." From the verse, he drew God's love for sinful humanity, the giving of the Son, faith, salvation from destruction, and the promise of eternal life.

Martin Luther later became famous for calling John 3:16 "the gospel in miniature." By the 19th century, the verse had become especially important to evangelical preaching. The English evangelist Henry Moorhouse preached on God's love from John 3:16 repeatedly during a visit to D.L. Moody's church in Chicago. Moody later described the experience as transforming his understanding of God's love.

It was hard to compress the Christian message much further than John 3:16.

Then came the perfect way to distribute this message: live television.

Enter the Rainbow Man

Rollen Stewart initially had nothing to say about Jesus. He wanted to be famous.

According to Sam Green’s 1997 documentary, "The Rainbow Man/John 3:16," Stewart discovered the power of television during the 1977 NBA Finals in Portland. Wearing a rainbow-colored Afro wig, he danced for a cameraman filming the crowd and managed to get himself onto the broadcast.

During the 1977 NBA Finals, Stewart discovered that television offered a shortcut to celebrity. There was no need to get cast in anything if he simply went where the cameras were already going and made himself difficult to ignore.

So he put on a rainbow-colored Afro wig and started showing up at major sporting events. He danced for the cameras and learned to anticipate where they would point next.

"Once I saw the red light, I was hooked," he later recalled.

Soon the Rainbow Man was everywhere, and Stewart became surprisingly sophisticated about getting himself into the picture. At football games, he positioned himself between the goal posts, where the field-goal camera would find him. At baseball games, he appeared behind home plate. At the Masters, he maneuvered himself over Jack Nicklaus' shoulder as Nicklaus prepared to tee off.

Best of all, he carried a small battery-powered television. Stewart could stand inside a stadium, watch the broadcast he was attempting to infiltrate, and adjust his position according to what the director was putting on the screen.

He wasn't even much of a sports fan. "I despised sports," he admitted years later. The games were useful because television covered them live.

After the 1980 Super Bowl, Stewart returned to his hotel room depressed. He had spent years trying to become famous and discovered that being famous wasn't doing much for him. He turned on the television, encountered Bible prophecy teacher Charles Taylor, and subsequently became a born-again Christian.

The rainbow wig stayed. But Stewart now had something besides himself to advertise.

John 3:16.

6 characters and a colon

The choice was unusually well suited to what Stewart was doing. Christians had spent centuries treating John 3:16 as the gospel in miniature: In the King James Bible, the verse takes 25 words to move from God's love for the world to the promise of everlasting life. Stewart figured out how to shrink it even further. Forget the verse itself. All he needed were six characters and a colon, large enough to read on television. The viewer could look up the rest.

In 1984, Christianity Today reported that Stewart had displayed his banner at eight football stadiums in five days. He appeared at professional golf tournaments, championship basketball games, the World Series, football bowls, and even the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana.

The fact that many viewers had no idea what John 3:16 meant didn't bother him. It was part of the idea.

"If they don't know what John 3:16 means, most people will eventually try to find out," Stewart told the magazine. "And some will pick up their Bibles and begin reading it."

Television networks charged advertisers enormous sums to reach the audiences watching America's biggest sporting events. Stewart had figured out how to place his message inside the same broadcasts without buying airtime at all.

Live sports made the scheme possible. A network could edit an entertainment program before broadcasting it. It couldn't edit a field goal before showing it. If Stewart got himself behind the goal posts before the kick, by the time the director realized what was happening, John 3:16 was already in America's living rooms.

Eventually, the networks and sports organizations became less cooperative. Camera operators tried to frame Stewart out, while stadiums restricted his banners. By 1986, Christianity Today reported that all but one of the NFL's 28 teams had prohibited them.

At Washington's RFK Stadium, the fight became a federal lawsuit after security prevented Stewart and an associate from displaying John 3:16 banners. Elsewhere, Stewart devised Scripture banners that could be worn like ponchos and exposed by spreading his arms.

"They'd have to undress us to take away our gospel signs," he said.

By then, however, the mysterious citation was becoming part of the scenery of American sports.

Did anybody actually look it up?

There was an obvious question about Stewart's entire enterprise: Did anybody sitting at home actually do what he hoped?

Mike Kerrigan did.

The Charlotte attorney was about 11 when he kept noticing the Rainbow Man during football games. Eventually, he asked his father what John 3:16 meant.

His father didn't know either.

"Let's look," he said. They opened a Bible.

Kerrigan still remembered the moment decades later, when he wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal in 2024. Stewart had predicted that an obscure biblical citation on television might make someone curious enough to find a Bible. In at least one living room, that is exactly what happened.

Unfortunately, Stewart's own story didn't end nearly as happily.

Rainbow's end

His life began to unravel toward the end of the 1980s. His marriage collapsed. His money disappeared. His religious beliefs became increasingly preoccupied with elaborate predictions of an imminent apocalypse.

Television remained his constant companion. Living in cheap Los Angeles hotels, Stewart later described watching as much as 18 hours a day: Christian broadcasters, daytime talk shows, news magazines, reality television, and more preachers at night. He called it being "fed by the media."

Eventually, appearing on television was no longer enough. Stewart began trying to create events that would force television to cover him.

In 1991, authorities accused him of setting off foul-smelling devices at several Southern California locations, including the Crystal Cathedral, Trinity Broadcasting Network studios, and a Christian bookstore.

Then, on Sept. 22, 1992, he took over a room at a Hyatt hotel near Los Angeles International Airport with a gun. Two day laborers escaped. A hotel maid locked herself in the bathroom. Stewart covered the windows with religious messages and demanded a lengthy live press conference. Convinced that the rapture was imminent, he wanted to warn the world before it was too late.

Green's documentary includes an audio recording of Stewart speaking with a police negotiator during the standoff.

"I've watched the cops, you know, cop shows and tried to get a handle on what's going on," Stewart explains.

"Maybe you look at a little bit too much TV," the negotiator replies.

"I watch a lot of it."

After roughly nine hours, police stormed the room and arrested him. Stewart was sentenced in 1993 to three life terms with the possibility of parole.

From the family Bible to Google

Once the Rainbow Man was gone from sports television, the signs persisted.

On Jan. 8, 2009, Florida played Oklahoma for the national championship. Gators quarterback Tim Tebow had spent the season wearing Philippians 4:13 — "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" — on the eye black beneath his eyes.

For the championship game, however, he decided to switch to John 3:16. Coach Urban Meyer was horrified. A superstitious man, Meyer wasn't about to tamper with a winning formula. "That verse got us here!" he protested, according to Tebow's later recollection.

Tebow explained that John 3:16 expressed the essence of his Christian faith. Meyer relented.

Florida won the national championship, and Tebow had an advantage Rollen Stewart could only have dreamed of: The cameras were trying to find him.

During the game, viewers began searching the citation online. By the following morning, "John 3:16" had become Google's hottest search term.

Twenty-five years earlier, Stewart had imagined people seeing the citation and going to find a Bible. Well, now they had Google.

The story subsequently acquired an almost suspiciously neat postscript. On Jan. 8, 2012 — exactly three years after the national championship — Tebow led the Denver Broncos against the Pittsburgh Steelers in an NFL playoff game. Denver won on an 80-yard touchdown pass on the first play of overtime.

Tebow had thrown for exactly 316 yards. Because he completed 10 passes, he averaged 31.6 yards per completion.

RELATED: What Fulton Sheen understood about fame that today’s Christian influencers don’t

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

The verse that wouldn't leave sports

By 2011, the connection between John 3:16 and televised sports was so familiar that a proposed Super Bowl commercial was built around it.

The ad showed football fans watching a game on television. The broadcast zoomed in on a quarterback with John 3:16 written beneath his eyes.

"I'll look it up," one of the fans says, reaching for his smartphone.

Fox declined to air the commercial under its policy against advertisements from religious organizations intended to advance particular beliefs or practices.

The citation continued turning up elsewhere. In 2012, a Texas school district became embroiled in a legal fight over cheerleaders putting Bible verses on the banners through which their high school football team ran onto the field.

And this summer, San Francisco Giants pitcher Landen Roupp employed a version of Stewart's old tactic — with a different Bible verse.

During the team's June 12 Pride Night, Roupp wore a special rainbow-logo cap but wrote "Gen. 9:12-16" across it, partially covering the logo.

Two other Giants pitchers, JT Brubaker and Ryan Walker, also added biblical citations to their caps.

Roupp had chosen the passage in which God establishes the rainbow as the sign of His covenant with Noah, promising never again to destroy the earth with a flood.

The Giants' rainbow logo had acquired an unexpected biblical footnote.

MLB warned the three pitchers not to repeat the inscriptions, explaining that its uniform regulations prohibit unauthorized messages of any kind. The league emphasized that its warning "had absolutely nothing to do with the content of the message."

Roupp was unapologetic. "That's just kind of something I believe in, and I stand firm in that," he told reporters.

There was no indication that Roupp had taken inspiration from Stewart. But the resemblance was striking. Nearly half a century after the Rainbow Man first appeared on television, a baseball player had put another biblical citation in front of the cameras, leaving viewers to discover the verse for themselves.

Can Nice Guys Win?

Spencer Cox would like you to know he is not running for president. "No, really," the Utah governor insists at the beginning of Off Ramp, a book introducing readers to his upbringing, governing philosophy, and vision for the nation's future. Sure, dude.

The post Can Nice Guys Win? appeared first on .

Raised To Be Resilient

When the story of Karyann Parkinson—a Virginia mom convicted of child abuse for letting her five-year-old walk alone to a nearby pond—went viral last month, I didn't know what to think. Of course, the authorities' reaction was disproportionate; trusting your kid shouldn't be a crime. But as a parent, I wondered whether I would be […]

The post Raised To Be Resilient appeared first on .

A Not-So-Alien Idea

"A rabbi, a priest, and an imam walk into a research program funded by NASA to talk about the intersection of God and aliens," quipped Business Insider after NASA gave more than $1 million to Princeton's Center of Theological Inquiry to study how the world's religions might respond to the discovery of extraterrestrial life. Scholars […]

The post A Not-So-Alien Idea appeared first on .

Alice Unchained

In the summer of '71, as rock royalty played for charity at the Concert for Bangladesh in New York, a band of cretinous dirtballs emerged from the Midwest's teenage wasteland with a breakout album that made mincemeat of the fashionable save-the-world vibe. It was titled Love It to Death, and the cover showed the group preening in the glare of a searchlight: menacing, androgynous-looking ghouls who'd apparently made Halloween a 24-7 proposition.

The post Alice Unchained appeared first on .

STARSTRUCK: Late-night hacks gush over Dems as midterms loom



They don’t even try to hide it anymore.

Late-night hacks are now full-on DNC pitchmen in the days leading up to the midterm elections. The only thing missing? Door hangers and lawn signs.

Imagine an agent handing a Hollywood star a script written by a prominent 'conservative influencer.' They might fire him or her on the spot.

Maybe they’ll have them by 2028?

Jimmy Kimmel threw softballs at Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) this week while gushing over leftist Senate candidates Abdul El-Sayed and James Talarico.

To quote Robert Plant, “Does anybody remember laughter?”

And then there’s Jon Stewart, destroying his legacy in the grand Howard Stern style by going full Dem pitchman on his latest “Daily Show” monologue.

“Send a message to this reckless s**tshow of an administration,” he barked on Monday, the only day of the week he now works. Stern, too, is down to a once-a-week schedule.

The old Stewart might at least have found a way to make a pro-Democrat message funny ...

Parrish the thought

Wait. I thought she was merely "Jenny from the Block"?

Jennifer Lopez is throwing her weight around, according to reports tied to the upcoming Netflix film “The Last Mrs. Parrish.” Lopez and director Robert Zemeckis (“Back to the Future”) are butting heads on the project.

Allegedly. Page Six has the skinny on the film, which the site says has tested poorly. Netflix, Lopez, and Zemeckis united long enough for share an official statement denying every aspect of that account.

That's Hollywood these days. Another behind-the-scenes kerfuffle that could be more entertaining that the film itself ...

Breaking snooze

When the Nazis rose to power in Germany, a few brave souls dared to resist. Sophie Scholl distributed anti-Nazi leaflets until the Gestapo caught her and sent her to the guillotine. Dietrich Bonhoeffer joined the resistance against Hitler and ended up on the gallows. Claus von Stauffenberg planted a bomb in Hitler's headquarters and was executed by firing squad.

But where are such courageous citizens now that America has been crushed beneath the size 12 Florsheim cap-toe Oxford of Der Orange Man? Who among us will risk everything to take a stand?

Kathy Griffin, that's who. At least that's how we imagine the thinking behind her latest unsolicited political screed, which equates voting GOP to keeping fascists in power.

"Can any of you guys not sleep because of fascism? Me too. I'm obsessed with it."

May we recommend a glass of warm milk, Ms. Griffin? Believe us, nobody wants to deprive you of your beauty rest.

Aaron can handle the truth

In Hollywood, we’ll take any sign of self-awareness. Enter Aaron Sorkin. The far-left filmmaker’s scripts are so smart and engaging even some conservatives praise his pen. Sure, “The West Wing” was pure Democrat fantasy, but it was snappy and fun.

As a director? Well, let’s just say he’s a great screenwriter. Sorkin’s latest film, “The Social Reckoning,” came and went at the box office without leaving a mark. He wrote and directed the film, a not-so-subtle attack on both Facebook and President Donald Trump.

Now, Sorkin is questioning his directorial chops.

"There are parts of screenwriting — important parts — that can be taught and can be learned, but there are parts that can’t be. And those parts that can’t be? That’s usually what we mean when we use the word 'talent.’ I’m very worried that the parts of directing that I’m not good at are those parts that you can’t learn.”

Hey — admitting it is half the battle ...

Rom-con?

Hope Skydance asked for a receipt.

The company formerly known as Paramount Skydance just completed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, bringing the fabled film studio and its valuable franchises under the same corporate roof. DC Comics. "Harry Potter." "The Lord of the Rings" saga.

And potentially, a heaping helping of red ink.

World of Reel reports (citing unnamed sources quoted by Page Six) that Warner Bros.' 2026 theatrical releases are projected to lose more than $800 million. Think major duds like “Digger,” “Supergirl,” and “The Bride!” Ouch. And more ouches may be coming next year.

Upcoming titles like “Panic Carefully” and “Paris Paramount” (ironic?) arrive with massive budgets. The latter should be the most expensive rom-com ever made.

Why would any rom-com break the budget? That’s Hollywood accounting, and Paramount is learning about it the hard way ...

RELATED: FALLING STARS: Hollywood woke-erati on the outs as Skydance soars

Bloomberg/Roy Rochlin/Mondadori Portfolio/NBC/Getty Images

Write wing

Imagine an agent handing a Hollywood star a script written by a prominent "conservative influencer." They might fire him or her on the spot.

Or not?

“Confession,” coming to select theaters on Nov. 11 along with the company’s streaming site, stars Rob Lowe, Nick Nolte, James Franco, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Dean Norris (“Breaking Bad”).

The screenwriter? Ben Shapiro.

The film is set in 1938, and Lowe stars as a professor accused of harboring anti-Soviet thoughts. His former student (Franco) is tasked with breaking his spirit.

It’s no secret that stars are punished for having right-leaning views. Just ask Oscar-nominee James Woods, who hasn’t had a sizable film role in more than a decade.

“Confession” could be a dud or a winner. It almost doesn’t matter. Seeing recognizable faces sign up for a project that spoke to them, ignoring the cultural fallout that might ensue, is a positive sign for the culture.