Even in these days of hotter summers and disappearing traditions, a few fall rituals remain reassuringly predictable: back-to-school sales, postseason baseball, and the annual uproar over an offensive Halloween costume.

This year, it was Target's turn.

For generations, poverty among rural Southern whites had been treated not simply as an economic condition but as evidence of something wrong with the people themselves.

A screenshot circulating on social media showed a child model wearing a “circus clown” getup from the retailer's Hyde and EEK house brand. Critics said the face mask, miniature top hat, and gloves — not to mention the child's pose — evoked blackface and 19th-century minstrelsy. Target quickly pulled it.

The Rev. Jamal Bryant, the Georgia pastor who spent the previous year leading a boycott of Target over its retreat from DEI initiatives, called it “a profoundly harmful symbol of racism.” Target followed with a corporate apology: “As a company, we know we got this wrong, and we are deeply sorry. The costume is offensive and should never have been part of our assortment.”

The resemblance to Jim Crow-era imagery was vague enough to give Target the benefit of the doubt. The individual elements of the costume have lost enough of their original meaning that a designer could plausibly assemble them without recognizing that they once belonged to a caricature of a particular people.

But the cultural memory of minstrelsy remains strong enough that once the connection was pointed out, the resemblance was clear enough to make pulling it the right call.

We retain a similar sensitivity to the old caricatures of most ethnic groups, even when the stereotypes themselves have receded from everyday life. But there is one old American caricature that has become so detached from the people it once mocked that most of us no longer recognize it as an ethnic caricature at all.

Hillbilly Highway

Walk into almost any big-box store or scroll online retailers this month, and you will find it: the frayed overalls, the missing front tooth, the corncob pipe, and a jug of moonshine. A quick Google search shows that “trailer park,” “redneck,” and “hillbilly” costumes abound. You can even dress as Joe Dirt, Ricky from "Trailer Park Boys," or Joe Exotic from "Tiger King."

No corporate statement has ever called such costumes “especially hurtful.” No brand has ever pulled any one of them and promised to look closely at how it happened. It's simply a costume built on the presumed backwardness, dirtiness, and moral degeneracy of the people once called “hillbillies,” sold with little awareness of the history behind the stereotype.

That history includes a largely forgotten mass migration — and the prejudice and discrimination that followed it. At roughly the same time that millions of black Southerners were heading north and west in the Great Migration, another vast movement was under way. Historian Max Fraser estimates that as many as 8 million whites left the Southern countryside for the factory towns and cities of the industrial Midwest, along what became known as the “Hillbilly Highway.”

And that was only part of a much larger exodus. Historian James Gregory estimates that nearly 20 million white Southerners left the South over the course of the 20th century, compared with close to 8 million black Southerners. Yet while the Great Migration became a familiar part of the American historical narrative, the parallel movement of white Southerners largely faded from national memory.

Southern man

My own family were part of that migration, moving from Western Kentucky to Gary, Indiana, in the 1950s. They weren’t hillbillies, technically — Western Kentucky sits roughly 300 miles from Appalachia — but that distinction meant little once they got north. To the people already there, a Southern accent did all the sorting a map wouldn’t.

That the migration was remarkably successful seems hardly to have mattered. Chad Berry’s oral histories of the Southern whites who migrated to Midwestern mill and factory towns found that most achieved the economic stability they had sought, even as their new neighbors continued to stereotype them as violent, drunken, lazy, unclean, and sexually dissolute.

Richard Dorson captured the prejudice in "Land of the Millrats," his study of the industrial communities around Gary. Driving through nearby Whiting with a local man named Ed, Dorson was told why trailers carried a particular stigma: “This is a Southern white area. Hillbillies live in the trailers. So there's prejudice attached to trailers, 'cause that was the first housing available to Southern whites in the community. So trailer equals hillbilly.”

The prejudice could have more tangible consequences. Historian Anthony Harkins found that job listings announcing “No Southerners need apply” and restaurants refusing to serve “hillbillies” were not uncommon in Northern cities receiving Appalachian migrants.

Gabriel Gigliotti

White trash

But the contempt those migrants encountered in the North had much older roots. For generations, poverty among rural Southern whites had been treated not simply as an economic condition but as evidence of something wrong with the people themselves.

In her book "White Trash," historian Nancy Isenberg traces that tradition from colonial descriptions of the poor as “waste people” through the antebellum contempt for the supposed moral failings of “poor white trash” and into eugenic theories that treated poverty and “feeble-mindedness” as hereditary defects.

Appalachian journalist James Branscome made this case explicitly more than 50 years ago, in a 1971 manifesto called "Annihilating the Hillbillly." By portraying Appalachians as backward, ignorant, and responsible for their own poverty, he argued, coal operators, government agencies, and the national media diverted attention from the economic arrangements that had enriched outsiders while leaving much of the region poor.

The hillbilly, in other words, provided a convenient explanation for poverty: The problem was the people. And when millions of those people left the rural South, found industrial work, and built more prosperous lives elsewhere, the stereotype followed them anyway.

Yokels only

Today the hillbilly survives mostly as a seemingly harmless comic trope. The caricature migrated from comic strips like "Snuffy Smith" and "Li'l Abner" to television's "Hee Haw" and "The Beverly Hillbillies." More recently it was "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo" and "Duck Dynasty." Cletus and Brandine Spuckler are still turning up on new episodes of "The Simpsons," more than 30 years after Springfield introduced its "slack-jawed yokel."

It might be harder to laugh if we still connected those characters to the people the caricature once described.

The history isn't particularly ancient. In 1958, Time quoted sociologists describing poor Southern whites as “vicious” and more difficult to assimilate than other minority groups. A Wayne University survey of Detroit residents published in 1952 found “poor Southern whites; hill-billies” the second-most frequently named group when residents were asked which people were “not good to have in the city.” Twenty-one percent named them, compared with 13% who named black residents; only “criminals and gangsters,” at 26%, ranked higher.

These were the people who left Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia for the mills of Gary and East Chicago and the auto plants of Detroit. They didn't bring backwardness north with them. They brought labor. Many found the economic security they had gone looking for and became part of the working class that built the industrial Midwest.

Eventually, they also became less visible. Their children and grandchildren lost the accents, left the trailer parks, moved into the middle class, and blended into the rest of America. The people disappeared into the country while the character remained behind.

That is the history the Halloween costume no longer evokes.

None of this requires another corporate apology. But corporate sensitivity reveals something in what it notices — and what it doesn't. Some old caricatures still carry a social cost. Others remain fair game.

I don't know what my own family heard when they migrated more than 300 miles north to Gary. They're gone now, and they didn't leave that part written down. That's part of the point. The costume survived. Their story didn't.

I finally understand why everyone loves going to the dentist

How do you feel about the dentist? Do you look forward to your appointments? Do you enjoy the cost of cleanings and whatever work needs to be done? Do you enjoy the shaming the hygienist thrusts upon you when you tell her you have been flossing twice a day and she looks at you like you are lying?

I think I know your answers without even knowing you.

In the middle of the procedure this past summer, as my tooth was being hollowed out with vibrating steel, my dentist said he loves doing this kind of work the most.

We all basically feel the same about the dentist. We begrudgingly go because we have to. The consequences of not going are more frightening than lying on your back with your mouth open for 45 minutes while someone picks away at your teeth with little metal tines. A toothache is worse than an hour in the chair numbed up, and a bad smile is worse than a couple hundred bucks a year for regular cleanings.

But still, we all kind of hate the dentist.

Tooth hurty

Though I have to say that lately I have been coming around to the guy behind the mask who comes in for five minutes at the end of the appointment just to tap on a couple of teeth before telling me what I need fixed next. I suppose it’s because over the past few years I have been giving more thought to the benefits and blessings of modern medicine.

When I was younger, I kind of thought they were exaggerating at the dentist’s office about what needed to be done or how crucial it was to fix something. And while I still think there are probably dentists out there who recommend more than is necessary and very much enjoy clients willing to pay for whatever they suggest, I trust dentists more than I have at any other time in my life.

It might sound crazy, but I actually look forward to going to the dentist these days.

I had a crown done this past summer. I ate a lot of candy when I was a kid and never brushed quite as much as I should have. I guess I thought my teeth would last forever. (Narrator: They don’t.) So over the years I had fillings where I had munched on Gobstoppers, Skittles, Shock Tarts, M&Ms, Laffy Taffy, and Now and Laters a little too enthusiastically. Then those fillings cracked and I had them replaced. Finally, this past summer, one of those fillings reached the end of the road, and a crown was necessary.

Crowning achievement

You might not believe me when I tell you I was excited to get that crown done, but I was. I had a crown done by the same dentist for the same reasons a few years earlier, and it went great. He numbed my mouth, went to work, and I left with a beautiful white tooth a few hours later.

The same thing happened this past summer. He numbed me, drilled out the remainder of the filling, had the crown made in their on-site lab, and then fastened it on top before sending me on my way with another beautiful tooth.

Lying there with my mouth open, with vibrating drills rattling my teeth, I thought about how amazing the technology is that makes this kind of operation possible and painless. The assistant used some sort of laser technology to scan my mouth after everything was cleared out, and the crown was finished less than 90 minutes later.

Imagine telling our ancestors that.

I shudder to think about what it was like sitting with a toothache 200 years ago. I don’t need a degree in dental history to imagine it was rather unpleasant, to put it mildly. And so, as much as I naturally want to hate the dentist and his menacing tools, the more I think about the world before the modern DDS, the more I realize I quite like him in 2026.

Cheng Xin/Getty Images

Drill, baby, drill

In the middle of the procedure this past summer, as my tooth was being hollowed out with vibrating steel, my dentist said he loves doing this kind of work the most. As a naturally inquisitive person, I asked him why.

He told me he loves the transformation. He loves carving out all the decay and old filling and making it better than it was before. It was the most excited I’ve ever seen him.

Being at the dentist is an intimate experience. We lie there and let a couple of people we don’t know very well hunch over us and get really close to our faces while they dig around in our mouths, and we are helpless the entire time. It can be kind of embarrassing.

“Oh God, they are looking in my mouth with magnifying glasses. Did I brush enough this morning?”

In some way, needing a crown feels like a failure. I didn’t brush well enough, and now I need my tooth fixed. It’s almost like you want to apologize to the dentist.

But hearing my dentist talk about how much he loves doing this kind of work was enlightening. It humanized the man behind the mask.

He’s not a psychopath, despite his love for drilling into teeth all day long. There’s a beating heart inside the DDS. He wants to help. It took me a long time to realize it, but I think I might like the dentist more than any other doctor I see.

Sure, he bears bad news. But he can fix almost all of the problems he diagnoses. That’s more than most doctors can say.

Thirteen-year-old me wouldn’t believe it, but 39-year-old me actually likes the dentist.

Alabama: The anti-caliphate

Massachusetts, birthplace of the American Revolution, is considering a new experiment in identity politics. Companion bills in the Massachusetts House and Senate — H.3351 and S.2134 — would establish a permanent commission dedicated to the interests of Muslims in the state. Among its duties would be to “identify and recommend qualified American Muslims for appointive positions at all levels of government, including boards and commissions.” Muslims make up a small percentage of the state’s population of roughly 7 million.

The legislation suits Massachusetts’ identity-politics obsession. It slides effortlessly alongside previous steps to protect the rights of Jews, gays, Asians, and blacks. Except now, lawmakers are proposing to put the state’s imprimatur on one of the world’s most rapacious and cruel belief systems.

The history of Muslim-majority societies offers ample material for examining the relationship among Islam, religious freedom, political authority, and the treatment of minorities.

The proposal should alarm Americans even more than the election of Zohran Mamdani or the proposed development of the Meadow, a mosque-centered, all-Muslim enclave in allegedly red Texas.

Block and tackle

On August 11, former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville, a sitting U.S. senator and Republican candidate for governor of Alabama, clapped back at the Massachusetts proposal. He posted on X that no such legislation would ever emerge on his watch in the Yellowhammer State.

Coach Tuberville should do more than post platitudes. If elected, he should seek legislation making Alabama the first state in the nation to formally declare Islamic teaching inimical to the history and tradition of Alabamans and force a constitutional debate over how far a state may go in protecting its religious heritage. And he should be willing to block and tackle for this policy all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Declaration of Independence does not define religious belief alongside its four mentions of a Creator. The Constitution likewise offers no comprehensive definition of religion. American courts have generally avoided establishing a single definition that would determine which faiths count as religions and which do not.

The “history and tradition” approach used by the Supreme Court in other constitutional contexts — most famously in Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion on gun rights in Heller (2008) — offers Tuberville a provocative model for the argument we propose. Heller did not concern religious liberty, and its test does not govern the First Amendment’s religion clauses. But history and tradition are hardly irrelevant to constitutional interpretation.

The Alabama way

And the history and tradition of America is deeply Christian. More directly, much of it is Protestant Christian. That is especially true in Alabama, which became a state in 1819 after settlement largely by migrants from other Southern states who brought with them overwhelmingly Protestant religious traditions. Earlier Spanish and French settlement left a Catholic inheritance, particularly around Mobile.

Recent Alabama history gives Tuberville two bright lights to follow. The first is former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore. Moore was removed from office in 2003 after refusing a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building. He was suspended from judicial office again in 2016 over an order concerning same-sex marriage after the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision. The latter position, by the way, was broadly consistent with the view Barack Obama publicly professed before 2012. As the nation’s biblical foundation crumbles, courts are reconsidering some disputes over Ten Commandments displays, while polling suggests support for some gay-rights positions has plateaued or declined from its peak. Whatever one thinks of Moore himself, arguments once treated as beyond the pale have not disappeared.

The second beacon is Hoover, Alabama, where the Planning and Zoning Commission last December unanimously recommended denial of a rezoning request that would have allowed the Islamic Academy of Alabama and a Muslim prayer center to relocate to Meadowbrook Corporate Park. City planning staff cited concerns including compatibility with the comprehensive plan, traffic, and occupancy projections. The academy subsequently withdrew its application before the Hoover City Council could make the final decision.

The issue should resonate with Tuberville because his erstwhile hometown, Auburn, will soon face its own debate. Tuberville should make clear what role, if any, he believes the state should play when Alabama localities confront such controversies.

Coach Tuberville's playbook

In Montgomery, Tuberville could begin by forcing a debate over a history lesson the late Charlie Kirk gave in 2024: America’s founding political culture was overwhelmingly Christian and, more particularly, Protestant. Religious tests existed in a number of states during the founding era. Charles Carroll of Maryland was the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence; Daniel Carroll of Maryland and Thomas Fitzsimons of Pennsylvania were the only Catholic signers of the Constitution.

Second, Tuberville and his legal team should explicitly ask a question existing constitutional law does not answer in the way we would like: How much authority does a state retain to defend its particular religious and cultural inheritance against an ideology it regards as hostile to that inheritance?

Current First Amendment doctrine places formidable limits on what Alabama could do. That is precisely why such legislation would constitute a constitutional challenge rather than an ordinary exercise of existing state authority. The bill could state Alabama’s historical relationship with Christianity and argue that the people of Alabama possess a legitimate interest in preserving that inheritance. Doing so would provoke a major confrontation over the First, 10th, and 14th Amendments and the Supremacy Clause — and force Americans to debate whether existing constitutional doctrine adequately equips states facing potentially existential cultural change.

Third, Alabama could explore the constitutional limits of legislation preventing state courts from substituting foreign or religious law for state and federal law. Any such statute would have to be carefully written: Religious principles can arise in contracts, wills, arbitration, and other private arrangements protected by existing law. The objective should be to establish unequivocally that Alabama courts are governed by Alabama and federal law, not to pretend that current First Amendment doctrine permits the state simply to outlaw references to Sharia.

Finally, Alabama should require serious academic instruction in the Bible’s influence on Western civilization and American history in its public schools, consistent with constitutional limits on devotional instruction. The state cannot do better than to examine the curriculum developed by Hillsdale College.

Silver Screen Collection/Kent Nishimura-Pool/Getty Images

Verse of the sword

The larger argument concerns Islam itself. Islamic scripture and jurisprudence contain teachings concerning nonbelievers, warfare, conversion, tribute, and political authority that deserve far more scrutiny than contemporary American discourse generally gives them.

Quran 9:5 and 9:29 are among the passages at the center of centuries of argument over jihad and the treatment of non-Muslims. Islamic scholars themselves have long debated naskh, or abrogation — the doctrine that some Quranic revelations supersede others — including the relationship between earlier passages associated with Muhammad’s period in Mecca and later revelations from Medina.

Muslims disagree sharply about what those passages require today. That disagreement should be acknowledged rather than used as an excuse not to examine the texts at all.

What Alabama cannot plausibly do under existing First Amendment law is simply declare Islam “fighting words” and suppress it on that basis. The Supreme Court’s fighting-words doctrine is far narrower than that. But Tuberville could force the more difficult political and constitutional question underneath the phrase: What happens when Americans believe a religious ideology contains not merely private theological claims but a political program fundamentally at odds with the constitutional order?

That is the debate Alabama should provoke.

From X to executive

The history of Muslim-majority societies offers ample material for examining the relationship among Islam, religious freedom, political authority, and the treatment of minorities. Tuberville need not pretend that current constitutional doctrine already gives him the answer. His opportunity would be to ask the question aggressively enough that courts, lawmakers, and voters have to confront it.

Tuberville’s response to Massachusetts was what you do on X. But it was a quip for no gain compared with what a laser-focused, fearless, conservative Christian governor could attempt in office. In Matthew 21:42, Jesus quotes Psalm 118:22 and affirms that He is the cornerstone of the faith.

Make Alabama the cornerstone of America’s anti-caliphate wall.

How Governor Tuberville acts, if voters give him the job, will reveal whether the SEC’s famed Riverboat Gambler has the team and the guts to play smash-mouth legal football.

Automakers were ready to kill the gas car. Buyers had other ideas.

Remember when the gasoline engine was living on borrowed time?

Automakers were announcing ambitious electric-vehicle plans, governments were setting targets and deadlines, and consumers were repeatedly told that the future of the automobile had already been decided. The only real question seemed to be how quickly we would get there.

Gasoline vehicles weren't merely going to lose market share. At some brands, they were supposed to disappear.

Cadillac was among the most aggressive. The company said it planned to become an all-electric brand by the end of this decade. Its own website still declares that every new Cadillac model introduced in the United States by the end of the decade will be electric.

Something interesting happened on the way to that all-electric future: People kept buying gasoline-powered cars.

So many, in fact, that Cadillac is preparing a whole new generation of them.

Revving up

GM CEO Mary Barra confirmed this summer that Cadillac's next generation of internal-combustion vehicles will begin arriving in 2027. The lineup is expected to include a new CT5 sedan and new versions of the XT5 and XT6 crossovers. The XT6 is particularly interesting because Cadillac discontinued it after the 2025 model year. Now it's coming back with a gasoline engine.

The XT5 got a reprieve too. Cadillac had been expected to kill the gasoline-powered crossover but instead extended production of the current model and approved a new generation for the U.S. market. Cadillac said it was making "necessary adjustments" to its portfolio to meet customer demand.

There's that word again: demand.

Because while automakers have been adjusting their product plans, American EV sales have been sending a message of their own.

Money talks

Look at August. Despite a record increase in hybrid sales, Kia sold just 712 EV6s, down 60% from August 2025. Hyundai sold 28 Ioniq 6 sedans — yes, 28 — a 97% decline. Its much more popular Ioniq 5 fell 51%.

Ford's numbers were even more dramatic. Mustang Mach-E sales fell 72.5% to 1,989 vehicles. Ford sold only 148 F-150 Lightnings, down 95% from the same month last year.

Honda sold 1,788 Prologues, down about 81% from August 2025. Honda has already confirmed that Prologue production will end after the 2026 model year.

Subaru's Solterra dropped almost 87%, although that one comes with a major caveat: Subaru's newer Trailseeker and Uncharted EVs helped push the company's total EV sales up for the month, and limited Solterra inventory may have contributed to its collapse.

That's why I wouldn't judge the EV market by one model or even one month's sales. Some of these vehicles are being discontinued. Others are being replaced. And August 2025 is an unusually difficult comparison because buyers were rushing to take advantage of the federal EV tax credit before it disappeared.

Market correction

But zoom out and the picture is still striking. According to the National Automobile Dealers Association, battery-electric vehicles accounted for 10.1% of new-vehicle sales in August 2025. One year later, their share had fallen to 6.2%. Overall new-vehicle sales weren't collapsing either. August sales were actually up 1.5% from the previous year on a seasonally adjusted annualized basis.

So Americans didn't suddenly stop buying cars. They became less interested in buying EVs.

That doesn't mean the electric car is dead. Far from it. Cadillac currently offers five EVs, and manufacturers continue to spend billions developing electric vehicles. Some individual EVs are selling well, and Subaru's August numbers show exactly why you have to be careful about declaring an entire technology a failure because one nameplate plunges.

But that's very different from what consumers were being told just a few years ago.

The industry's transition to EVs was often presented as inevitable and, more importantly, imminent. Gasoline vehicles weren't merely going to lose market share. At some brands, they were supposed to disappear.

Bloomberg/Getty Images

Sales force

Cadillac is a wonderful example. It didn't merely say it wanted to sell more EVs. It said it planned to be all-electric by the end of the decade. Now the company is developing another generation of gasoline-powered Cadillacs that will arrive with only a few years left on that clock.

Why? Because car companies eventually have to sell cars.

Consumers don't buy corporate transition plans. They buy vehicles that fit their lives, budgets, and driving habits. For some people, that's an EV. For others, it's a hybrid. And plenty still want an ordinary gasoline-powered car or truck. Manufacturers are finally acknowledging that reality.

I don't have a problem with electric vehicles. Build good ones. Make them affordable. Improve the charging network. Give consumers enough range and enough choices, and let them decide whether an EV works for them.

What I object to is deciding the answer first and expecting the customer to fall in line afterward. The auto industry spent years telling us where the market was going. Now the market is talking back. And judging by the gasoline-powered Cadillacs headed our way, somebody in Detroit is finally listening.

'View' host questions Patrick Clancy's divorce: 'You know, in sickness and in health'

We’ve reached peak “View,” and we still have three months to go in the year.

Even a Rosie O’Donnell reunion couldn’t top the insanity on a single “View” episode this week. Wednesday’s installment had co-host Sara Haines wishing that Lindsay Clancy’s husband had honored the whole “in sickness and in health” line from their wedding vows.

He won’t be the first person daffy enough to write checks for Gaza dwellers. The terror group that runs Gaza is notorious for taking the money and running, Woody Allen style.

That’s a real thing.

The same episode saw co-host Sunny Hostin bragging that she had been a holdout juror in the 1991 trial of Daniel Rakowitz, the “Butcher of Tompkins Square Park.” Rakowitz — who murdered and dismembered his roommate — was ultimately found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Hostin now says she recognized that Rakowitz was psychotic and persuaded the other jurors “one by one” to come around to her view. Yes, she’s proud of that legacy. The only problem is that contemporaneous reporting — including Hostin’s own comments at the time — makes her heroic 35-year-old recollection considerably messier.

“The View” capped off the episode with co-host Joy Behar bemoaning that we won’t have a woman president anytime soon.

That’s a 10 out of 10 even on the Russian judge’s scorecard of perfect “View” episodes. No notes ...

Box-office 'bomb' for Hezbollah

The man who gave us “What Is a Woman?” and “Am I Racist?” is back with another must-see documentary. Director Justin Folk took a break from frequent collaborator Matt Walsh to shoot “Paging Hezbollah,” the kind of documentary no Hollywood studio would touch.

Folk’s film breaks down the “Trojan Horse”-like campaign to give bomb-laden tech to Hezbollah leaders, one of the most devious strategies ever assembled.

Standing by for Javier Bardem and Macklemore to boycott the film in 3 ... 2 ...

'Saw' turns it up to 11

Just as with horror villains, no horror franchise is ever dead-dead.

Even that recent horrific “Exorcist” reboot didn’t stop the franchise from rebooting itself anew. Now it’s “Saw’s” turn.

To be fair, the first “Saw” film from 2004 was ingenious and creepy, but subsequent editions defined the “torture porn” era. No thanks.

Nostalgia still reigns supreme, so a new “Saw” film is in the offing. The only upside? Horror veterans James Wan (“The Conjuring,” “Insidious”) and original “Saw” scribe Leigh Whannell are back to produce the 11th film in the saga.

Sick of Jigsaw and his gruesome game nights? A better alternative might be a couple of well-made “Saw” spoofs that imagine sharing an office and an apartment with the series' sinister "star" Billy the Puppet.

NBC/CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

Macklemore's Palestine-apalooza

Does he even care where the money will go?

Far-left rapper Macklemore is making the most of his career revival. He previously made a stink by lecturing fans as the opening act for apolitical superstar Ed Sheeran. Now riding that publicity wave, he’s going on his own tour.

The catch? All ticket sales will go to the Palestinians. Oh, really.

He won’t be the first person daffy enough to write checks for Gaza dwellers. The terror group that runs Gaza is notorious for taking the money and running, Woody Allen style. Even if he means well, celebrities have a lousy track record of making sure donating funds go where they should.

Just ask the folks behind Fire Aid.

“It’s 2026. Being apolitical during a genocide doesn’t work anymore,” he said in a statement tied to a tour that will start in Dublin, Ireland. That country is notorious of late for its unbridled anti-Semitism.

We’ll leave it at that.

Perhaps he’ll spend his down time reading what the word “genocide” actually means ...

Cruise fears box-office burial

The Last Movie Star could be in trouble.

Tom Cruise’s October 2 release, “Digger,” had all the Oscar buzz heading into the fall ... until people actually saw it. The “first reactions” pieces tied to the satire were all over the map, with plenty of people calling it a dud.

Remember, “first reaction” stories almost always skew positive, sometimes cartoonishly so. So this is a bad sign. Now the film’s box-office hopes are similarly shrinking.

Cruise clearly hopes this outlandish role — he plays an oil tycoon blamed for causing an eco-disaster — would snag him that long-coveted Oscar.

If the word of mouth gets any worse, he may have to settle for a Razzie.

Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan shares Christian faith, claims music industry is afraid of God talk

Although there was admittedly a 20-year period when he refrained from entering a church, Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins fame has since openly emphasized the importance of his Christian faith and having a relationship with God.

On the latest episode of his podcast, "The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan," the rocker discussed with Stryper frontman Michael Sweet the importance and risks of maintaining that faith and relationship while navigating the music industry — an industry where people appear, according to Corgan, to be "very comfortable talking about everything but God."

'God is the third rail in rock and roll.'

While he hailed from a Christian family, Sweet suggested that he experienced a period of aversion to religious messaging, particularly when first getting into the industry.

That changed, however, when a friend of the band visited their studio and declared, "I'm a Christian now. ... I know you guys have gone down that [other] path, and you're not now, but listen, if you give your band to God, He's going to do things that you never even dreamed of," Sweet recalled.

"It kind of blew my mind," said Sweet, adding that he heeded the counsel and the band ultimately became explicitly Christian.

"As musicians, we're certainly aware of other people's opinions," said Corgan, "especially at that particular time, making that kind of decision and say[ing], 'OK, now we're going to sort of represent that.' Not, 'We're going to hide it in our lyrics and sort of just play along.' Like, 'We're going to come out and say this is who we are, this is what we believe in.'"

Ricardo Rubio/Europa Press/Getty Images

Corgan, whose band has sold tens of millions of records, stressed that becoming overtly Christian is a "huge decision."

"It was scary," responded Sweet.

"You know what you're risking. You're not just risking some guy from another band making fun of you," said Corgan.

"This may blow our whole dream."

Sweet suggested that there was "brief" skepticism, for instance, behind the scenes at Enigma Records about signing a group whose songs included lines like, "Jesus is the way."

"Business is business, so I get it," said Sweet, whose band ultimately signed with Enigma in 1983.

Corgan said with confidence that his band "didn't get signed at different times" because of corporate sensitivities to social pressure and potential reputational damage.

"Signing a heavy metal band that's singing about Jesus in 1984 or whatever — that is very outside the line that was going," said Corgan.

The Smashing Pumpkins co-founder noted later in the episode that Christianity is "part of the fabric of the nation whether people like it or not." He also claimed that "this idea that our most popular forms of music are overly leaned towards vice I think says more about artists' sociopathy than it does reality."

Corgan repeated an observation he made in a previous interview, namely that "God is the third rail in rock and roll."

Given that the majority of Americans are still Christians, the musician is puzzled why, for so many artists, "God [is] antithetical to the part of marketing who you are."

"Fear," said Sweet.

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Director finds faith in the wild with Brad Pitt’s ‘Heart of the Beast’

David Ayer took a Zen-like approach to his canine lead actor.

The veteran director behind “Fury,” “End of Watch,” and “The Beekeeper” worked extensively with Uber, a German Shepherd at the heart of his new film.

'I feel like traditional storytelling is going to have its place more than ever now, in values and ways of living that bring hope. I think audiences really respond to that.'

Uber plays a wounded combat dog named Odin fighting for survival alongside fellow veteran Brad Pitt in “Heart of the Beast,” which hits theaters today. And making sure Uber hit his marks took the patience of Job.

'Trained' actor

“The dog’s wonderful and capable and trained and really in his own way a character actor ... but not necessarily the most cooperative,” Ayer tells Blaze News. “You learn to accept the dog as a dog is ... it’s a real lesson in patience and also acceptance and surrender to the situation.”

Pitt’s character, seeking solace after years in combat, crashes his small plane in the Alaskan forests. That leaves him and his faithful companion struggling to survive in inhospitable terrain.

“I’ve always been inspired by Jack London and tales of wilderness and survival,” he says of his initial reaction to the script. “This had something deeper, the connection with the dog ... these parental relationships. This idea is that no matter what, I’m going to protect you and keep you safe."

The story struck something within Ayer.

“I lost my father at a young age. Something in the script brought up that grief, allowed me to look at it in a different way. ... It really broke my heart open in a way it hadn’t been before,” he says.

Spiritual endurance

“Heart of the Beast” isn’t a faith-based movie, but the director sees the story in deeply spiritual terms.

“These things we carry in our hearts, the damage that life and the world that it is can do to us ... it’s important to have hope, important to have faith, something outside of yourself. If you sit in your pain, it can overwhelm us,” he says, adding the film is a “simple portrait of spiritual endurance.”

To get there, Pitt met with military veterans to prepare to play his character, a soldier adjusting to civilian life on his own terms.

“He sat there with a notebook, hearing their stories ... what they felt and what they carried, the successes and the loss and the wisdom, the life wisdom they gained from these experiences,” Ayer says. His star, who he previously collaborated with on “Fury,” didn’t put on any A-list airs.

“There’s movie stars who are movie stars. Brad’s an actor first ... he was throwing himself down on the ground again and again [for select scenes] ... shivering on set, refusing to warm up so he could stay in it. He became a leader for us,” the director recalls.

Faith forward

Ayer’s work reflects a complicated bond with law enforcement (“Dark Blue,” “End of Watch”), but it’s also impressively diverse. Think vigilante romps (“The Beekeeper,” “A Working Man”), Superhero fare (“Suicide Squad”), and sci-fi adventures (“Bright”).

He sees his film choices as an evolution, showing people who are “broken in the world and how we fix that in ourselves.”

“In order to heal, we have to move heart first,” he says. “One of the most important things to have in our hearts is faith, that becomes the mechanism through which we can really endure everything.”

Ayer is one of Hollywood’s busiest directors, and he suspects he’ll soon have company in the filmmaking space.

“As technology evolves, it’s going to give more people access to tell more stories,” he says, a change that could bring mid-level movies back in vogue. The industry currently binges on big-budget IP films and micro-indies, but he envisions a return to the “amazing middle ground” of movies like “Pretty Woman” and “Jerry Maguire” that once captivated audiences.

That, in turn, could spark another positive trend.

“You look at the success of Hollywood, and for 100 years, we were really a great cultural ambassador to the world and showing an aspirational lifestyle, an aspirational way of being in the world,” he says. “If you look at the current slates ... not everything has been in that more traditional vein. I feel like traditional storytelling is going to have its place more than ever now, in values and ways of living that bring hope. I think audiences really respond to that.”

MAC & QUEASE: Kraft's latest cheese-flavored collaboration has even Canadians recoiling

Our neighbors to the north are accustomed to defending some unusual culinary choices: ketchup chips, poutine, Hawaiian pizza. But Kraft Dinner may finally have produced something even Canadians aren't sure they can stomach.

The iconic mac and cheese is heading into an unlikely new frontier: cream soda.

'Debate what it could possibly taste like, and then satisfy your curiosity ...'

MAID to order?

The limited-edition KD x Solly's Cream Soda combines traditional sweet cream soda with what the companies describe as a "hint" of the "familiar" cheesy flavor of mac and cheese.

And judging by the reaction online, that hint may be more than some people can handle.

Responses ranged from labeling the concoction "disgusting" to "abysmally disgusting," while others wondered why Canadians seemingly enjoy suffering so much.

"Isn't Canada dealing with enough? Why do this to them?" one X user asked.

Another social media user questioned whether the drink was an extension of Canada's assisted-suicide program.

KRAFT HEINZ CANADA/Solly’s Cream Soda

Sip club

But disgust may be part of the point.

Kraft Heinz itself seems well aware that the idea of downing a refreshing can of fizzy macaroni and cheese sounds bizarre.

"A soda might be the last place you would expect to find KD, which is exactly what made teaming up with Solly's Craft Soda so much fun," Kraft Heinz head of marketing and strategy Daniel Lundberg said in announcing the product.

"It's something to crack open with friends, debate what it could possibly taste like, and then satisfy your curiosity with that first sip," he added.

In other words, the question isn't merely whether cheese-flavored cream soda tastes good. It's whether you can resist finding out.

Solly's founder Adin Wener called developing the drink "an amazing challenge" and conceded that the finished product is "wonderfully strange" — while insisting that, somehow, it works.

Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star/Getty Images

'Flavour' saver

This isn't KD's first attempt to turn its familiar blue-box dinner into something considerably less familiar. The company has previously introduced KD Ramen and even KD Mac & Cheesecake.

Carbonated cheese, however, appears to have crossed a new line even for Canadians accustomed to the most radical experiments in snacking.

"Cheese soda is disgusting but ketchup chips is one of the best flavours," one user wrote.

The limited-edition KD x Solly's Cream Soda launched September 23 on Amazon.ca and Solly's website and will arrive at participating retailers, including Walmart, in early October while supplies last.

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Welcome to the new traffic stop, where it's your word against AI's

Imagine being accused of a crime because a camera spotted your car near the scene. The camera wasn't wrong. Your car really was there. But you didn't commit the crime.

The police, however, are so confident in their technology that they seem to be treating your guilt as an open-and-shut case.

Isaacs said she was home asleep when troopers arrived at 4:45 in the morning and told her she had killed three people.

Chrisanna Elser doesn't have to imagine it.

Camera shy

Elser was accused of stealing a package after doorbell footage captured a woman taking it from a home. Police then searched Flock camera records for vehicles in the area around the time of the theft. They found Elser's Rivian and concluded that she was the woman in the doorbell video.

They had the wrong woman. Elser really had driven through the area that day, but she was there for a noon appointment with her tailor, more than a quarter-mile from the house where the package was stolen. Her Rivian's cameras showed her driving through without stopping.

She spent days assembling her own evidence — including location information and video from her vehicle — to show what she had actually been doing. The summons was eventually voided.

In Elser's case, the Flock camera hadn't failed. It had identified her vehicle in the area. The technology supplied one piece of the puzzle. The mistake was treating that piece, along with the doorbell video, as enough to identify the person who committed the crime.

That's an important limitation of license plate readers. They can tell police that a particular vehicle was photographed in a particular place. They can't tell them who was driving it, why it was there, or what the person inside was doing.

But what happens when the information going into the system is wrong?

False flagged

Automotive journalist Tim Esterdahl found out while driving a Range Rover Sport press vehicle in Nebraska. A Flock alert identified the vehicle as stolen, and police pulled him over. Esterdahl doesn't fault the officer, who was responding exactly as he should have to an alert for a potentially stolen vehicle.

It apparently started with a Jaguar Land Rover manufacturer license plate that had gone missing during a film production in California. Only one specific New Jersey fleet plate had been reported missing. But somewhere between that report and the Flock system, Esterdahl wrote, the information appears to have been broadened to include multiple manufacturer plates sharing the same beginning and ending characters.

Esterdahl's Range Rover had a different plate. It was flagged anyway.

Things got worse from there. Because the Range Rover was a manufacturer-owned press vehicle that had never been sold or titled through a state DMV, its VIN didn't appear in the law-enforcement database the officer was using. Esterdahl had insurance paperwork, ownership documents and authorization to drive the SUV, but sorting everything out still took about 90 minutes.

Esterdahl wasn't even the first automotive journalist stopped over the same Jaguar Land Rover fleet-plate issue.

Whether the data is accurate and someone draws the wrong conclusion from it, or bad information makes its way into the system in the first place, the result can be the same: An innocent person has to untangle the mistake.

TATTLETALE EXPRESS: School buses may soon become America's largest mobile surveillance network

VIEW Press/Getty Images

Behind bars

And it doesn't stop at inconvenience. Just ask Lindsey Isaacs.

In October 2025, a hit-and-run crash on I-4 in Florida killed three people. A Flock camera three miles away had recorded Isaacs' black Dodge Durango just two minutes before the crash.

But other evidence pointed elsewhere. Witnesses had given conflicting descriptions of the Durango, including a maroon one with a partial plate that didn't match Isaacs' plate. Investigators later found maroon paint transfer on one of the vehicles struck in the crash. Isaacs' Durango was black, only two months old, and showed none of the significant damage investigators said the vehicle involved in the crash should have sustained.

Isaacs said she was home asleep when troopers arrived at 4:45 in the morning and told her she had killed three people. Her Durango was impounded. Months later, she was arrested on eight felony charges and spent 13 days in jail.

Her attorney eventually showed prosecutors photographs of the undamaged SUV, and an inspection found it in essentially showroom condition. The charges were dropped in May. Authorities later arrested another woman driving a maroon Durango.

Think about the chain of events. A Flock camera accurately recorded Isaacs' vehicle three miles from the scene two minutes before the crash. Investigators took that data point and built a case around it despite evidence pointing to a different vehicle. Months later, Isaacs was in jail.

A license-plate reader doesn't know who committed a crime. It knows that a vehicle passed a camera. The danger comes when the certainty of the technology gets transferred to conclusions the technology itself can't support.

Fooled by tools

I'm not arguing that police shouldn't use license plate readers. They can be useful investigative tools. But there is an enormous difference between using a camera hit as a lead and treating it as proof that the registered owner committed a crime.

On August 26, Sen. Josh Hawley launched a Senate investigation into Flock Safety, seeking information about its data collection, retention, access, accuracy, and sharing practices. The investigation cited a network of more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states processing more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month.

That's a lot of information about where Americans' cars are going.

Most of the drivers of these cars aren't involved in crimes. They're going to work, taking kids to school, stopping at stores, and coming home. If government agencies are going to have access to a network this large, the public should know how the information is being used.

How long is it kept? Who can search it? Which agencies can see it? What safeguards are in place when a plate is misread, a database contains bad information, or investigators draw the wrong conclusion from an accurate camera hit?

And don't make this solely about Flock. Replace Flock with another vendor tomorrow, and the questions remain the same.

Follow the money

If taxpayers are told these systems make communities safer, show them the contracts. Show them the pricing, retention policies, access rules, and accountability provisions. If a private company provides technology that becomes part of government enforcement, there needs to be a clear answer about who is responsible when its information contributes to a false accusation.

I'm not against police using technology. I'm against treating technology as infallible.

A camera is a tool, not a judge. A database is a tool, not a verdict. And a license plate identifies a vehicle, not necessarily the person behind the wheel.

Sometimes bad information makes its way into the system. Sometimes the camera gets everything right but investigators draw the wrong conclusion from what it shows.

When that happens, the person on the receiving end can spend 90 minutes on the side of the road, days trying to clear her name or, in the worst case, nearly two weeks in jail.

Show me the evidence. Show me the accountability. And if the system gets it wrong, show me who pays.

'I think they're demons': Why JD Vance refuses to downplay supernatural evil

Love him or loathe him, but one thing is certain about Vice President JD Vance: He’s one of the most unique and bold political figures we’ve seen in the modern era.

And this proclamation has nothing to do with his tenor, tone, or party proclivities. Amid the normal cacophony of political chaos, Vance has offered a remarkably consistent narrative — an open discussion of evil, the demonic, and even aliens — that we have never quite seen from a sitting politician.

Vance paraphrased a claim first popularized by French poet Charles Baudelaire — "the devil's great trick is to convince people he never existed."

We have certainly not observed it in a vice president, arguably the second-most powerful position in the entire world. Typically, people in such prominent roles are intensely buttoned up and even pretentious, watching every word and making carefully crafted proclamations.

Personal encounters

But Vance has taken a starkly different route, specifically when it comes to conversations about combustible and seemingly bizarre topics like aliens, demons, and evil.

Rather than treating these matters as too ethereal to discuss in the mainstream, he has been talking about them with relative ease. Vance has discussed evil in broad terms, and he has even said he feels it personally in his role as vice president.

Most recently, he told influencer Bryce Crawford that he has sensed spiritual darkness from various world leaders. For the typical, run-of-the-mill politician, any question about evil would most certainly be met with a secular and safe response. But Vance went much deeper.

“People that are around you sometimes give you a very, very bad feeling," the vice president told Crawford. "Definitely, I've been in meetings with world leaders where various issues are being discussed, and somebody will say something or somebody will make an observation, and I will feel a certain darkness about it.”

Vance continued, “It sort of sets off every spiritual alarm bell in my body."

He also went on to say that there are even locations like Gettysburg, where past history with the Civil War and death has led him to feel “a very dark spiritual energy.”

Aliens ... or demons?

This was hardly the first time Vance dove headfirst into such conversations, with intentionality and ease.

Earlier this year, conservative commentator Benny Johnson asked the vice president about the UFO files, and the conversation took some fascinating turns, veering into Vance’s personal perspective about the origins and nature of aliens and unidentified flying objects.

"I don't think they're aliens,” Vance said of supposed extraterrestrials. “I think they're demons anyway.”

When pressed further, Vance dove deeper into his personal explanation for what is truly happening behind so many alien claims that keep making their way into the mainstream.

"I think that celestial beings who fly around, who do weird things to people — I think that the desire to describe everything celestial … to describe it as aliens — I mean, every great world religion, including Christianity, the one that I believe in, has understood that there are weird things out there, and there are things that are very difficult to explain," Vance said.

"And I naturally go — when I hear about, sort of, extra-natural phenomenon — that's where I go to is the Christian understanding that, you know, there's a lot of good out there, but there's also some evil out there.”

Vance paraphrased a claim first popularized by French poet Charles Baudelaire — "the devil's great trick is to convince people he never existed."

MELISSA MAJCHRZAK/AFP/Getty Images

Spiritual warfare

A few months later, Vance again tackled the topic with podcaster Joe Rogan, further arguing that he believes what many perceive as aliens are actually demonic entities.

"Just because I believe in the supernatural doesn't mean I believe in everything supernatural,” he said. “But if we're talking about an extraterrestrial being that is human-like but not human, that contains effectively infinite powers and is torturing human beings, you can call it an alien if you want.”

And Vance wasn’t done there. He added, "But I think there's a lot of historical precedent to call that a demon.”

The vice president’s conversations have been truly remarkable, considering few politicians would ever be caught opining about such matters. He’s probably the most outspoken vice president in history — and certainly the most outspoken in modern times — on matters of spiritual warfare and evil.

There are a few compelling reasons that this deeply matters. In a world where people are hyper-obsessed with the material, Vance is open to fully understanding spiritual matters that are very likely impacting our culture and world.

And if those matters are impacting our world, we are left wondering how we can possibly confront, fix, or heal anything if we reject the notion that a spiritual component is at play.

Vance not only considers these issues, but he is also actively opening up a conversation about them. He deserves a lot of credit for acknowledging the spiritual war so many others have chosen to ignore.

Hillbilly Highway

Southern man

White trash

Yokels only

Tooth hurty

Crowning achievement

Drill, baby, drill

Block and tackle

The Alabama way

Coach Tuberville's playbook

Verse of the sword

From X to executive

Revving up

Money talks

Market correction

Sales force

Box-office 'bomb' for Hezbollah

'Saw' turns it up to 11

Macklemore's Palestine-apalooza

Cruise fears box-office burial

'Trained' actor

Spiritual endurance

Faith forward

MAID to order?

Sip club

'Flavour' saver

Camera shy

False flagged

Behind bars

Fooled by tools

Follow the money

Personal encounters

Aliens ... or demons?

Spiritual warfare

We’ll keep you informed with top stories for conservatives who want to become informed decision makers.