I’m tired of the “exposing the left” phase of conservative politics. I’m ready for the “implement what’s right” phase. Anyone want to join me?

For the past two weeks, President Trump, congressional Republicans, and conservative media have focused relentlessly on Anthony Fauci and the damage done during COVID. Fine. Fauci deserves scrutiny.

This is what medical freedom requires: informed consent, transparent data, meaningful long-term follow-up, and an absolute rejection of mandates or coercion.

But Fauci is no longer in charge. Republicans are.

That’s why it is maddening to watch the same party denounce Fauci while refusing to confront the policies and products that defined his era. Trump continues to praise the COVID shots. Republican senators confirmed Dr. Erica Schwartz, who disciplined soldiers in the military for not getting the COVID shots. And the Trump FDA is moving forward with Moderna’s dangerous mRNA influenza vaccine for adults 50 and older.

If the lesson of COVID is merely that Fauci was bad, then we learned almost nothing.

The real question is whether government will once again approve and promote a novel platform without demanding the kind of evidence skeptics were told not to ask for last time.

Respiratory viruses present a difficult vaccine target because they mutate rapidly and immunity can wane. Critics of the COVID vaccination campaign have argued for years that these characteristics can produce disappointing or even counterproductive results under some conditions — concerns I have written about again and again.

Even Fauci acknowledged part of the underlying problem. In a 2023 paper, he wrote that current vaccines against respiratory viruses often produce “incomplete and short-lived protection” and that genuinely better vaccines would require “outside the box” thinking.

That should have prompted humility. Instead, the federal government is now considering another mRNA respiratory vaccine, this time for influenza.

The problem is not that every vaccine is bad. The problem is that after COVID, regulators should be demanding unusually strong evidence before expanding the platform into another mass-market respiratory product.

The evidence deserves scrutiny.

A 2025 Cleveland Clinic preprint, which I highlighted, reported that employees who received that season’s influenza vaccine experienced a higher cumulative incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza during the study period. The preprint was observational, not a randomized trial, and it should not be treated as the final word. But its findings are exactly the kind that should trigger more investigation, not less.

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A Canadian study of the 2018-2019 flu season likewise found negative vaccine effectiveness in certain age groups and discussed the possibility that vaccine mismatch interacted with pre-existing immune imprinting.

And a 2005 JAMA Internal Medicine analysis questioned whether rising influenza vaccination coverage among the elderly could explain the decline in influenza-related mortality over previous decades.

None of those papers, standing alone, proves that influenza vaccination is harmful. Together, they underscore a simpler point: The science of respiratory virus vaccination is complicated, and regulators should stop pretending otherwise.

That is especially true for mRNA.

Newly released material from Fauci’s files shows that Nobel laureate Drew Weissman warned Fauci in February 2021 about mouse data showing lipid nanoparticles reaching the placenta and fetus after administration during pregnancy.

Animal data does not automatically predict human harm. But it does raise obvious questions about biodistribution — questions that should have been answered aggressively before officials demanded public confidence in the platform.

Now the FDA’s briefing document for Moderna’s mRNA influenza vaccine shows another reason for scrutiny. In the agency’s review, grade 3 systemic reactions were substantially more common among mRNA vaccine recipients than among recipients of a conventional influenza vaccine.

That does not establish that the product is broadly unsafe. It does establish that the newer platform is more reactogenic in the trial population, and it makes the quality and duration of the safety database more important, not less.

The FDA document also acknowledges that the available safety database is too small to detect rare adverse events such as myocarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and other neurological events.

That is not an accusation. It is the limitation of the evidence the FDA itself describes.

And this is where the political hypocrisy becomes impossible to ignore.

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Republicans cannot spend one week demanding accountability for Fauci and the next tell Americans to trust the same institutional habits that made the COVID era so destructive: compressed debate, zero transparency, contempt for dissent, and an assumption that uncertainty should be managed through public relations campaigns rather than openly discussed.

Myocarditis after mRNA COVID vaccination is a recognized adverse event, although public health agencies continue to describe it as “rare” and concentrated most heavily among adolescent and young adult males. Whatever one believes about the overall risk-benefit calculation, that experience alone should have permanently raised the evidentiary bar for another mRNA product intended for broad use.

This is what medical freedom requires: informed consent, transparent data, meaningful long-term follow-up, and an absolute rejection of mandates or coercion.

It also requires conservatives to stop treating Fauci as a substitute for governing.

Fauci is yesterday’s issue. Trump and congressional Republicans have the controls now. If they believe the COVID era was a catastrophe, then prove it by changing the rules that made it possible. Demand stronger safety evidence. Protect informed consent. End coercive vaccination policy. Force regulators to disclose uncertainty rather than bury it. Otherwise, all the hearings, subpoenas, and Fauci outrage amount to nothing more than political theater.

The point of exposing past mistakes is to stop repeating them.

The FCC finally cuts local TV loose

Washington has forced local television stations to compete in a 21st-century media market under rules written for the 20th century.

Americans pay the price whenever outdated regulations make it harder for local broadcasters to invest in better news coverage, stronger emergency alerts, and new technology.

The future of local television should not be determined by regulations written before streaming, smartphones, and digital competition transformed the media landscape.

The Federal Communications Commission has now taken an important step toward fixing that mismatch by replacing a rigid, one-size-fits-all approach with a more flexible, fact-based review process.

The principle is simple: Regulation should respond to today’s marketplace, not yesterday’s assumptions.

Local television still matters. Americans rely on hometown stations for storm warnings, election coverage, school closings, and stories that national outlets rarely cover. Yet, like local newspapers before them, many stations face serious financial pressure.

More than half of U.S. television stations operate at a loss even as they continue providing essential public service.

To survive, broadcasters need investment. They want to upgrade transmission systems, strengthen emergency alerts, expand local journalism, and deploy next-generation broadcast technology.

But investment requires scale, and investors are understandably reluctant to fund companies that federal policy artificially prevents from reaching more than 39% of American households.

That ownership cap was created for a different era, when Americans watched one of three television networks and broadcasters dominated the video marketplace.

The market changed. Washington’s rules did not.

Americans now consume news and entertainment on smartphones, tablets, laptops, streaming services, social media, and podcasts. Broadcasters compete with Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, cable networks, and digital platforms capable of reaching essentially every American.

Local broadcasters, however, remain constrained by a federal ownership cap designed before the internet transformed the media business.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has warned that America should not repeat the mistakes made with local newspapers.

That warning deserves attention.

Washington watched thousands of local newspapers disappear while old business models collapsed and investment arrived too late. Communities never stopped needing local journalism. The economics simply stopped supporting it.

Local television should not be next.

Critics of the FCC’s order warn that loosening ownership restrictions could weaken localism. That is a legitimate concern, but it should be tested against evidence rather than treated as an argument for preserving the status quo indefinitely.

The politics of the moment also matter. Because the reform comes from a Republican FCC, opponents can dismiss it as simple deregulation. Yet media-ownership debates have shifted with partisan control before, and Democrats have supported modernization efforts of their own when they held power.

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Localism should remain the objective. The 39% ownership cap is only one regulatory tool.

There is little evidence that fixing the national ownership limit at 39% — rather than 50%, 75%, or some other figure — produces more local news, stronger emergency coverage, or better community service.

Good public policy should ask whether a regulation produces measurable benefits, not whether it has survived for decades.

If policymakers want stronger local journalism, they should focus on the conditions that make it possible: investment, innovation, modern technology, and financially sustainable business models.

Emergency communications make the point especially clear.

During hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, and other disasters, local broadcasters provide information that can save lives. Those capabilities depend on modern infrastructure, skilled journalists, reliable transmission systems, and continuing investment — not on an arbitrary national ownership ceiling.

The FCC’s decision does not guarantee that every station will thrive. Nothing can.

But it gives local broadcasters something they have lacked for too long: greater freedom to attract investment, modernize operations, strengthen emergency communications, and build sustainable local-news organizations.

Government should not freeze one industry in time while every competitor is free to innovate.

The future of local television should not be determined by regulations written before streaming, smartphones, and digital competition transformed the media landscape.

Local communities are best served when their broadcasters have the freedom to grow, compete, and invest in the journalism Americans still depend on.

Socialism’s favorite bait-and-switch

The Democratic Socialists of America are no longer hiding the ball.

In July, the organization published a manifesto calling on the United States to "establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people.”

Public ownership does not give power to the people. It gives power to the government — and asks the people to trust that government never to abuse it.

That is not a proposal for higher taxes, tighter regulation, or a larger welfare state. It is a demand to replace private ownership of America’s largest companies with government ownership.

The language is designed to sound appealing. Why should a handful of billionaires control enormous corporations while everyone else gets left behind? Why shouldn’t “the people” own those companies instead?

No more greedy executives collecting fortunes while workers earn far less. No need to nationalize every business — only the “essential” industries deemed too important to operate for profit or remain in private hands.

It sounds reasonable. It sounds as though power would finally be taken from wealthy corporations and returned to society.

But that is nearly how Fidel Castro sold communism to the Cuban people.

History shows that “ownership by the people” usually means control by the government. The public does not acquire power. Politicians and bureaucrats do.

Castro did not introduce himself as a communist promising state control over every part of Cuba’s economy. He said he was fighting corruption, inequality, and concentrated wealth. Private property and capitalism became the villains. The solution was to place the country’s most important industries under the control of “the people.”

The rhetoric sounded fair and humane. Wealthy owners would lose power, and ordinary Cubans would gain it.

The first part happened. The second did not.

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Power was taken from private owners, but it never reached ordinary Cubans. It accumulated in the hands of the state. Today, Cubans live under political repression, chronic scarcity, and widespread poverty.

“Nothing belongs to you. It all belongs to the government,” Rosa Garcia, a survivor of Castro’s Cuba, recalled in an interview with Young Americans Against Socialism.

Garcia watched the transformation firsthand. She remembers Castro assuring Cubans that his revolution was not communist. Many believed him. Some hung signs on their doors reading, “This house is yours, Fidel.”

As government control expanded, private property rights disappeared. So did the ability to obtain goods, build wealth, or make basic economic choices without permission from the state.

When Garcia’s family later applied to leave Cuba, government officials came to their home and inventoried everything they owned to ensure they took nothing with them. Utensils, clothing, and household possessions all belonged to the government.

That is the reality behind the dreamy language of collective ownership. What supposedly belongs to everyone is controlled by the people who run the state.

Public ownership also carries enormous economic costs.

Private property gives people a reason to create, invest, innovate, and serve customers. Every smartphone, laptop, lifesaving medicine, digital platform, and other product we rely on exists because someone had the freedom to take a risk and the opportunity to profit from success.

Before Castro’s revolution, Cuba ranked among Latin America’s more prosperous countries. Today, it is one of the region’s poorest, with nearly 90% of its population living in severe poverty.

Take away private ownership, and you do more than redistribute wealth. You weaken the incentive to build businesses, develop technology, create jobs, and produce the prosperity those activities generate.

Supporters of democratic socialism will reasonably object that modern America is not revolutionary Cuba. The United States has stronger institutions, a different political culture, and constitutional protections Cuba did not preserve. Public ownership of one enterprise does not automatically produce a one-party communist state.

That distinction does not eliminate the underlying danger.

Nationalization begins with the easiest targets: highly profitable companies, billionaires accused of earning too much, and industries politicians label too important to remain privately owned.

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Once society accepts the principle that government may replace private ownership whenever politicians decide an owner is too rich or a company is too important, no clear limiting principle remains.

Why stop with the largest corporations?

Every industry placed under public ownership gives government officials more authority to decide how resources are used, which services are available, and who receives them.

Cuba’s history shows how quickly control of a few “key industries” can become a broad assault on private property. America would be foolish to assume the same principle could be embraced here without the same temptation to expand it.

Public ownership does not give power to the people. It gives power to the government — and asks the people to trust that government never to abuse it.

Welcome to Witchcraft State University — bring plenty of sunblock

As a modest contribution to the general welfare, I have once again taken on a task that state universities, despite their ever-expanding bureaucracies, seem unable to perform: helping parents and students decipher the course catalog before they accidentally enroll in an ideological boot camp.

This year’s expedition into Arizona State University’s listings produced a familiar discovery.

The challenge is recognizing ideological conformity when it hides beneath academic jargon and historical subject matter.

For fall 2026, ASU offers eight courses with witchcraft, magic, or the occult in the title — and exactly one with Christianity.

Think about that for a moment.

At one of the largest public universities in the country, students can choose from a small festival of courses on witchcraft, while Christianity receives a single titled course.

The predictable defense is already forming: These are history classes. They merely study witchcraft as history; they do not promote it.

If only the syllabus cooperated.

One ASU syllabus from this summer says the course will examine how the identity of the heretic and the witch was constructed against its binary opposite, the “orthodox” Christian. It then turns to “religious Othering,” especially “the female as Other,” and asks students to explain how centuries-old witch persecutions continue to shape their own lives.

A student scrolling through the catalog may think, “Witchcraft? That sounds like an interesting history class.” What the description does not announce plainly is that the course has already selected its moral and political framework before the first reading begins.

Allow me to translate the academic dialect into ordinary English.

The syllabus contains three ingredients that appear with remarkable regularity across what I call the oppression-studies curriculum.

First, orthodox Christianity is cast as the principal villain. The word "orthodox" is not merely descriptive. It identifies the force against which everyone else must be understood. Those troublesome Christians, always insisting that the Word of God is true.

Second, history is organized around a fixed binary of oppressors and oppressed. The key term is “Othering.” Outside the university, the word means little. Inside it, “Othering” functions as a philosophical skeleton key.

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Whatever the subject — witchcraft, colonialism, literature, economics, architecture, or even mathematics — the conclusion is expected to fit the same template: One group possesses power, another is marginalized, and scholarship consists of exposing the machinery of oppression.

Questions about whether Christianity is true, whether Christ is who Christians say He is, or whether salvation is real disappear from view. The course’s operating question is not “What is true?” but “Who has power?”

Third, the historical narrative must be applied directly to the present. Medieval Europe is not studied merely to understand medieval Europe. Students must show how the old oppression continues now.

History becomes raw material for a contemporary moral narrative in which Christians are still preventing women from having a little fun — even if that fun occasionally involves necromancy. Dead people need friends too.

Once you learn the pattern, whole sections of the catalog become easier to read.

The subject often matters less than the interpretive framework. Whether a course concerns witchcraft, fairy tales, Shakespeare, climate, coffeehouses, or design, the destination frequently remains the same. Society is assumed to be organized by systems of oppression, and every topic marches toward that conclusion.

That’s precisely why parents and students need help reading college catalogs.

Course descriptions are often written in a dialect that obscures more than it reveals. The average 18-year-old has no reason to know that terms such as “Othering,” “lived experience,” “deconstructing,” “intersectionality,” “hegemonic,” or “dialectic of oppression” may signal not simply a topic but an entire philosophical system.

Learning to recognize those signals is an exercise in intellectual discernment.

At the most elementary level, discernment means making distinctions. Ideas have presuppositions. Professors never merely present facts; every course is organized around assumptions about reality, morality, human nature, and truth.

For Christians, some distinctions remain basic. The Word of God? Yes. Communion with Satan? No. That binary is not about power. It is about truth and goodness, and it should not require four credit hours to sort out.

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Once students grasp that first level of discernment, they are prepared for the next: watching how quickly the narrative shifts when necessary.

One day, witchcraft is presented as a genuine spiritual tradition unjustly maligned by Christianity. The next, it is described as a social category invented by Christians to oppress women.

Those claims are difficult to reconcile, but reconciliation is beside the point. Both preserve the same moral architecture: Christians remain the oppressors, and everyone else becomes the oppressed.

The hardest courses to identify are not those that openly advertise ideology. Those are easy enough to avoid. The greater challenge is recognizing ideological conformity when it hides beneath academic jargon and historical subject matter.

The sooner students learn to decode that language, the sooner they can decide where to spend their tuition dollars and intellectual energy.

College is expensive enough without paying thousands of dollars to hear that orthodox Christianity is the principal menace of Western civilization — and discovering only after the drop deadline that you accidentally enrolled in Witchcraft 101.

Shiloh Hendrix took the bait — prosecutors took it too far

I don’t love Shiloh Hendrix as a First Amendment martyr. Then again, most First Amendment martyrs aren’t especially lovable.

Maybe Hendrix is a great gal in person. I don’t know her. But on April 28, 2025, she was at Roy Sutherland Playground in Rochester, Minnesota, with her toddler when an 8-year-old black boy allegedly took an applesauce pouch from her diaper bag. Hendrix chased him, retrieved the pouch, and, according to witnesses, repeatedly called him the Very Worst Word in American English™.

A free country doesn’t need to convert every ugly human encounter into a criminal proceeding.

The row got the attention of Sharmake Omar, a Somali immigrant who began recording her on his phone. Hendrix told him it was “none of [his] f**king business” and walked away. Omar challenged her to say the word again.

Hendrix obliged.

“F**k you, n*****. N*****, n*****, n*****.”

Omar posted the video online, sans asterisks. Fifteen months later, an Olmsted County jury acquitted Hendrix of disorderly conduct toward the child — and convicted her of disorderly conduct toward Omar.

Say what?

For good or ill, Hendrix has now joined some august company: Eugene V. Debs, Charles Schenck, H.L. Mencken, Upton Sinclair, Henry Miller, Clarence Brandenburg.

The First Amendment has always had lousy taste in clients. Still, Hendrix hardly belongs in that group. Schenck went to prison for distributing anti-draft leaflets with the Bill of Rights printed on one side. Sinclair was arrested for reading the First Amendment aloud. Brandenburg, a Klansman, gave us one of the great protections for political advocacy.

Hendrix doesn’t even rise to the level of “F**k the Draft.” She got angry in a park, took the bait, and said an ugly word over and over.

Should she have exercised more self-control? Probably. But since when did criminal law punish bad manners?

Which brings me to Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire.

The 1942 Supreme Court case gave us “fighting words”: face-to-face insults punishable when likely to provoke an immediate breach of the peace and forming “no essential part of any exposition of ideas.”

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Libertarians mostly hate Chaplinsky. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression calls the doctrine “quaint” and notes that the Supreme Court has not upheld a fighting-words conviction in 80 years.

True enough. Give government power to punish offensive speech, and it will abuse it. That’s why I’m against hate-speech laws. But that does not require pretending every noise made by a human mouth is an “argument” worthy of First Amendment protection.

Hadley Arkes, the constitutional scholar who has influenced my thinking for decades, suggests an admirably simple test:

The soundness of the test can be confirmed again instantly whenever we give a panel of people this set of words and ask if they can identify the terms clearly established as terms of insult, as opposed to words that may be on the borderline of insult, or perhaps even terms of approval and commendation: 1) kike, 2) wop, 3) n*****, 4) urologist, 5) meter maid, 6) saint. People will not show the slightest puzzlement here in fixing on the words used as insulting or "fighting words."

Exactly. Nobody wonders whether “urologist” is the slur. A blind man could see the difference.

“F**k you, n*****” directed at a black man advances no proposition about race. It is an epithet. Threats, extortion, perjury, provocation — all are words, and all can be actionable.

I made a related argument 16 years ago in Snyder v. Phelps. Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church had every right to preach that America was damned. I argued that they did not have the right to commandeer a dead Marine’s funeral. Mencken called the boundary “the last limits of the endurable.”

So two cheers for Chaplinsky.

But that’s a long way from concluding that Hendrix committed a punishable offense.

She was carrying her child and walking away. Omar was recording and baiting her. He practically announced the consequence: The internet was going to see this. It did. Hendrix was identified, doxxed, and condemned by millions.

Omar had counter speech. He had a camera. He had the internet. He won.

Why did the state need to pile on?

Nothing about the encounter suggested an “imminent breach of the peace.” Yet the jury convicted Hendrix for insulting Omar while acquitting her over the nastier conduct alleged toward the 8-year-old.

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Hendrix’s attorney, Brian Karalus, says the judge excluded exculpatory evidence and mishandled witness disclosures. He called the proceeding a “fraud” and a “circus” and has filed an appeal. Maybe the appellate court says he is wrong, but I hope he wins.

Chaplinsky does not give prosecutors a permission slip. The state still must prove that these words, in this context, were likely to provoke a fight in the moment.

That’s what angers me about this case. It was needless.

Hendrix behaved badly. She said something vicious to a little kid and allowed herself to be provoked when she should have kept walking.

At the same time: So what? A free country doesn’t need to convert every ugly human encounter into a criminal proceeding.

Again, two cheers for Chaplinsky and the “fighting words” doctrine. It’s good law. We should keep it and use it — sparingly. But thank God for every last constitutional protection Shiloh Hendrix has coming to her.

Fauci mistook the microphone for a throne

For one extraordinary moment, Anthony Fauci had the attention of the world.

For someone working in public health, epidemiology, and infectious disease, that kind of audience was almost unimaginable. A field normally confined to laboratories, medical journals, and government briefings suddenly occupied every household, with Fauci standing at its center.

Others will now have to rebuild the public’s trust in public health. That work will require humility, candor, and a willingness to answer questions without treating the questioner as an enemy.

He had the credentials, the access, and the attention of a frightened public. Imagine what he might have done with it.

I am willing to believe noble aspirations drew Fauci into public health. It is largely unglamorous work performed by people concerned with disease prevention, sanitation, research, and the countless measures that help people live longer and healthier lives. Public health is one of America’s noblest forms of stewardship.

Yet at the field’s most visible and consequential moment, Americans increasingly saw less of a champion for that calling than an indefatigable champion of Anthony Fauci.

A large ego does not necessarily prevent faithful stewardship. A cherished calling, however, can bring even an enormous ego to heel by reminding the steward that the work was never chiefly about him.

Fauci’s media choices reinforced the opposite impression. He became a familiar presence on CNN and MSNBC (now MS NOW) while the country’s highest-rated cable news programs aired on Fox. If persuading skeptical Americans truly mattered, why not spend at least as much time with the audience most skeptical of him?

Truth does not require friendly lighting. Someone confident in his work should be willing to face hostile questions and answer evidence with evidence. Fauci could have engaged Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that way. He might not have persuaded Paul or millions of skeptical Americans, but the public could have watched the exchange and learned from it.

Good teachers do not treat questions as threats to their authority or grounds for censorship. They use questions to explain, clarify, and sometimes reconsider.

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Americans initially accepted Fauci’s guidance because of the authority of his office. Over time, persuasion gave way to institutional pressure. OSHA imposed a vaccination-or-testing mandate covering roughly 84 million workers before the Supreme Court blocked it. Meta reported removing more than 20 million pieces of content and 3,000 accounts, pages, and groups under its COVID-19 misinformation policies.

Those decisions were not Fauci’s alone. They nevertheless formed the climate in which he told CBS that his critics were “really attacking science because I represent science.”

That was the moment stewardship gave way to something else.

I am not an epidemiologist. My authority to write this comes from more than 40 years of accompanying my wife through scores of operations, intensive care, amputations, complications, and consequential medical decisions. At times, Gracie could not speak for herself.

I have watched her medical challenges confuse, frustrate, frighten, and even humble some of the finest surgeons one could hope to meet. I have also watched those physicians respond by working harder to explain what they saw, acknowledge what they did not know, and guide us through their decisions.

We have disagreed and, at times, argued. The respect remained mutual. The physicians knew medicine. I knew Gracie. Good care required both.

Those rooms taught me that medical authority does not eliminate questions. It creates an obligation to answer them. Uncertainty honestly disclosed earns more trust than certainty falsely projected. Condescension and concealment have no place in examination rooms, intensive care units, or public health.

Scripture provides a simple standard: “It is required of stewards that they be found faithful” (1 Corinthians 4:2).

For a time, Fauci’s voice, opinions, assurances, and even his jokes traveled around the world. But the microphone has passed to others, as microphones always do.

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The man who once had so much to say was eventually left repeating essentially the same answer 111 times. Invoking the Fifth Amendment is not evidence of guilt. Yet Fauci had already received a full and unconditional federal pardon covering any offenses arising from his official service between January 1, 2014, and January 19, 2025.

The pardon proves nothing by itself. Proof and trust, however, are not the same thing.

I would be hard-pressed to entrust Gracie’s care to a physician protected by a pardon reaching back six years before I had ever heard his name.

Americans have the right to notice the contrast.

Others will now have to rebuild the public’s trust in public health. That work will require humility, candor, and a willingness to answer questions without treating the questioner as an enemy.

Anthony Fauci mistook bright lights for stature. They never made him larger. They only magnified his shadow until it fell across the noble calling he had been entrusted to serve.

Cancel culture fired Shane Gillis — America hired him back

In July, Shane Gillis made comedy history, selling more than 77,000 tickets and setting records for the largest audience for a comedian and the most tickets sold for a solo stand-up act. The achievement put him past names like Kevin Hart, Steve Martin, and German stand-up Mario Barth.

It also came just seven years after cancel culture nearly killed his career.

Shane Gillis did not beat cancel culture by becoming less offensive. He beat it by becoming too successful to cancel.

In 2019, shortly after Comedy Central named him an “Up Next” comedian, Gillis landed the job every comic dreams about: a spot on “Saturday Night Live.” Then old clips surfaced of him doing a mock Asian accent and using a racial slur. Other clips featured supposedly unacceptable jokes about gay people. Within days, SNL fired him. Gillis later described the experience as painful enough to make it hard to “trust people ... for a while.”

The timing was brutal. Gillis was fired during what we now recognize as peak woke, when careers could vanish because somebody with a Twitter account dug through 10 years of jokes and found the wrong sentence.

He was hardly alone. Sarah Silverman faced backlash over an old blackface bit. Dave Chappelle was attacked for mocking Michael Jackson’s accusers. Kevin Hart’s old tweets were dragged back into the spotlight. Suddenly the internet had discovered a tremendous new power: If enough people pretended to be offended at once, they could get somebody fired.

For a while, almost everyone played along.

That was always the secret of cancel culture. It was never a magical force. It was a consensual ideology. It worked because institutions submitted to it, employers feared it, and ordinary people convinced themselves that refusing to obey would make them the next target.

Words became temporarily unsayable. Leftists rewrote definitions and then declared that only certain people were allowed to use them. “Gone with the Wind” was pulled from streaming. James Gunn and Gina Carano lost jobs. People learned to keep their mouths shut because being called racist, sexist, or homophobic could cost them a career.

The woke mob did not win because everyone agreed with it. It won because too many people were afraid to laugh at it.

Now, two presidencies removed from peak woke, the whole thing looks much sillier. Plenty of celebrities once declared untouchable have returned to the mainstream. Land acknowledgments and pronoun rituals have become punch lines. “Culturally insensitive,” the kind of phrase that helped sink Gillis, sounds increasingly like a relic from a very stupid age.

So people post offensive jokes, recycle old podcast clips, and celebrate that “woke is dead.”

I would not start planning the funeral.

Cancel culture isn’t dead. It’s hiding.

Conservatives have every reason to feel confident right now. Republicans control Congress and the presidency. The administration has attacked “diversity, equity, and inclusion” throughout the federal government. The Supreme Court has handed down major victories protecting women’s sports. It can be tempting to believe the culture could never slide back to 2019.

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But Donald Trump was president in 2019 too.

The first and second Trump administrations are very different, but Trump’s presence by itself does not prevent a woke resurgence. Cultural power does not live only in Washington. It lives in entertainment, universities, corporations, HR departments, newsrooms, and the countless people who decide whether the mob gets rewarded for showing up.

Gillis’ comeback is encouraging precisely because he did not wait for those institutions to forgive him.

Podcasts gave him somewhere else to go. After SNL fired him, Gillis joked that he could just appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast and everything would be fine. And he was right. Audiences increasingly learned that independently produced shows could be funnier, more honest, and less filtered than legacy television.

That shift reached well beyond comedy. Podcasts became a major force in the 2024 election. Trump and JD Vance used long-form appearances to show voters their humor and personalities outside carefully managed television interviews. Kamala Harris’ refusal to sit down with Rogan only reinforced the contrast. In the peak-woke era, scripted liberal slogans might have been enough. By 2024, they sounded canned.

Comedy is often the canary in the coal mine because comedy requires tension, risk, and the possibility that somebody will be offended. A culture that cannot tolerate a joke will eventually struggle to tolerate an argument.

Gillis rebuilt his career, but comedians are still testing the limits. Jerry Seinfeld said the “extreme left has suppressed the art of comedy,” then later walked that back by saying culture moves and a comedian’s job is to adapt. David Spade criticized L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom for “killing Hollywood” and took heat for it. Nate Bargatze was slammed simply for attending Trump’s UFC event at the White House.

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That is what hiding looks like. The old cultural reflex is still there, waiting for institutions to become afraid again.

Woke politics will not return because somebody waves a magic wand. It will return one concession at a time: one employee fired to stop a controversy, one joke declared beyond the pale, one institution deciding it is easier to surrender than tell an angry mob no.

That is why conservatives should resist the temptation to declare victory and go home. Free speech survives only when people keep using it. Comedy survives only when comedians keep telling the joke. Culture stays open only when institutions refuse to hand professional hecklers a veto.

The late, great Norm Macdonald understood this better than most. Early in his career, he joked: “People were beginning to talk about me, and that’s always good news. As Adolf Hitler once said, all publicity is good publicity.”

Shane Gillis did not beat cancel culture by becoming less offensive. He beat it by becoming too successful to cancel. That’s worth celebrating. It is not a reason to stop paying attention.

Christian retreat is becoming political defeat

Gretchen Whitmer is probably the most successful Democrat politician Michigan has produced in a generation. Yet her endorsement just got rolled by an Islamist in my native state’s Senate primary.

How? Why?

It is time to smash the idols before they smash us. Either we let the Lion of Judah out of His cage — or we learn what fills the vacuum.

One of the things we’ve discussed on my BlazeTV show is that if you go back to the beginning of our now 250-year-old country, the founders repeatedly drew on the covenantal language they saw in the Bible between Old Testament Israel and God.

The Sinai covenant. The Ten Commandments. The blessings and curses of Deuteronomy. “Choose life, that you and your offspring may live.” The men who constructed this nation returned to these themes again and again because they understood something fundamental about a people hoping to endure: Obey God, and He will provide for and protect you.

In the New Testament, under the priesthood of every believer, Christians are called to become “living sacrifices” to God and then to our neighbors. That is how the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.

Think of a light in the pitch dark on a summer night. The bugs cannot help being drawn to it. In the same way, our unbelieving friends and family, our unbelieving neighbors, even unbelieving nations should be drawn to the light of a people living faithfully before God. That is part of the Great Commission laid out in Matthew 28.

We are meant to be a shining city on a hill for the cause of Christ.

So when the Declaration of Independence closes with the founders appealing to the “Supreme Judge of the world” for the rectitude of their intentions, they are not merely adding religious ornamentation. They are invoking Almighty God as judge of their cause. If their revolution is unrighteous, then let Him strike it down.

Days of fasting and thanksgiving were common among the founders for the same reason. They understood themselves as accountable to something above themselves.

Yet now Islam is here, taking ground and making demands.

What does that tell us?

One of the marks of a covenantal people under divine discipline in the Bible is that they are overrun by foreigners and foreign gods.

Uh-oh.

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I do not know how much time we have left to turn this fate around. But lying to ourselves about it will guarantee that we have none.

This is Romans 1. God has removed His restraining hand and is allowing the American freak flag to fly at full mast.

Dearborn, Michigan. Minneapolis, Minnesota. Madison, Wisconsin. New York. California. The WNBA. You name it. We suck.

Paul describes something similar in his first letter to the church in Corinth, a congregation planted in the middle of a notoriously lascivious pagan culture. Corinth’s reputation for depravity was so notorious that moral decadence itself became associated with the city.

Paul then confronts one church member engaged in a form of sexual immorality so scandalous that, as Paul says, even the pagans would not tolerate it. His command is severe: Remove the man from the church and deliver him “to Satan for the destruction of the flesh.”

What does he mean?

Paul is demanding that the sinner face the consequences of his rebellion rather than allowing the church to become a nicer-than-God incubator for it. Making sin comfortable gives the sinner no incentive to repent.

So ask yourself: Do you belong to a church that behaves the way Paul prescribes?

And can the answer possibly be yes anywhere near Dearborn, Michigan — or any place becoming like it?

As we discussed last year on my show, Mayor Mamdani in New York was not an outlier. He was a herald of things to come in a land with an ungrateful and undisciplined church.

Since 9/11, the United States has admitted almost 4 million people from Muslim-majority countries. That alone would have tempted previous generations to sin in the opposite direction of our current surrender.

After Pearl Harbor, the Greatest Generation responded to Japan’s attack with the grotesque injustice of rounding up Japanese Americans and placing them in internment camps. That was evil.

But today we have raced to the opposite extreme. Rather than treat individual Muslims unjustly, we refuse to recognize Islamism as a rival civilizational and political force at all. We rebrand Islam as a “religion of peace” while importing more people from Muslim-dominated cultures in a quarter-century than live in my entire home state of Iowa.

Blaze Media Illustration

Where once there was overreaction, now there is willful blindness.

We are issuing Babylon an invitation.

Someone will always rule. Something will always be worshipped.

So we must stop fooling ourselves that bad politics or mental illness is the deepest enemy we face. Those are symptoms. What we are actually confronting is rival religion. And the only thing that defeats bad theology is good theology.

My fellow Americans, communism and Islamism are both ascendant in our land. It is time to smash the idols before they smash us. Either we let the Lion of Judah out of His cage — or we learn what fills the vacuum.

Birth tourism is only the beginning

When the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order in Trump v. Barbara, it settled for now in the courts who becomes a citizen at birth. It did not settle — and could not settle — whether American citizenship may be bought and sold.

It remains well within the power of Congress and the president to shut down the contracts, clinics, agencies, and visas that convert foreign money into American citizenship — without amending the Constitution or defying the court. Until the court revisits the issue, the political branches are solely responsible for overseeing the marketplace, and they have no excuse to delay.

Why buy a visa when you can commission a citizen?

If you doubt that such a marketplace exists, meet the Simpson triplets.

Nearly 20 months ago, Kyla Simpson of St. Augustine, Florida, gave birth to triplet boys as a gestational surrogate for an intended parent she had never met: a single man in China. He never came. Not during the boys’ two months in the NICU, not through the year and a half the Simpsons raised them, and not even when one of the triplets died of RSV.

When the man from China sent two strangers in a black SUV to collect the boys, Simpson refused. Then, she moved to terminate his parental rights, and he resurfaced with a lawyer and an emergency pickup order, which a Florida judge granted. The surviving twins, 20-month-old American citizens, now sit in state care while his attorneys obtain travel documents.

Why would a Chinese man pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for children he has never crossed an ocean to meet? Because he wasn’t buying children. He was buying American citizens.

A surrogate-born child of a foreign national receives a birth certificate, Social Security number, and passport at birth. When the child reaches age 21, he can petition for green cards for his parents and siblings, turning one commissioned pregnancy into chain migration for an entire family, at a fraction of the cost of the half-million-dollar EB-5 investor visa.

Why buy a visa when you can commission a citizen?

Birth tourism in overdrive

This citizenship-for-sale system has three serious dangers.

First, the burgeoning international surrogacy industry is a clear example of immigration fraud and abuse. For example, within days of President Trump signing the executive order on birthright citizenship, the agency Surrogate First issued workaround guidance for prospective parents, explaining that for international clients, “the certainty of their child obtaining U.S. citizenship at birth is a significant factor” in choosing America.

Likewise, Creative Family Connections advertised a “2-step birth certificate process” to guarantee citizenship for the children of foreign clients regardless of executive action. Prior to that, another agency pitched surrogacy as cheaper than the EB-5 investor visa.

Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images

The co-founder of one California agency told NPR that dual nationality would be “a win-win situation for your children.” A fellow agent admitted many of her clients were “high-level Communist Party officials and celebrities” seeking American citizenship for their children.

Second, the international surrogacy industry is a national security threat that intensifies every year. Children with American passports who are raised under Chinese Communist Party rule can vote as adults in U.S. elections, join our military, work in sensitive research, and even run for president.

Beijing exploits every vulnerability American citizenship offers, whether the parents intend it or not. Why would it ignore this one?

Third, the industry is a child-welfare catastrophe. Authorities found 21 surrogate-born children in the home of a former CCP official tied to immigration fraud and smuggling — discovered only after an infant arrived at a hospital with severe head trauma in Arcadia, California. Chinese billionaire Xu Bo has reportedly commissioned 100 children and counting through American surrogates to build a personal dynasty.

According to data in the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s own journal, surrogacy cycles commissioned by foreign intended parents surged 78% from 2014 to 2019, from 2,758 to 4,905 embryo transfers a year, with Chinese nationals the largest customer base at 41.7% — quadruple the next country.

More than 107 Chinese-owned surrogacy agencies operate in Southern California alone, many with Mandarin-only marketing and some listing offices in mainland China, where surrogacy is illegal. Indeed, international commercial surrogacy is merely the newest wing of a larger operation. Conventional birth tourism results in an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 annual U.S. births to Chinese nationals — a phenomenon that, according to investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, Chinese sources themselves describe as massive.

Since 2013, he estimates that more than one million “U.S. citizens” are being raised in China because their mothers came here to give birth.

Pulling up anchor

Yes, the Trump v. Barbara majority misread the 14th Amendment, whose author said it excluded “persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens.” A future court should revisit the issue, with the Simpson case as Exhibit A. In the meantime, however, there are concrete actions Congress and the executive branch can take to address birth tourism.

Close the state loophole with federal law. Earlier this year, Florida became the first state to prohibit surrogacy contracts with foreign nationals from adversarial nations, including China, Russia, Iran, and others. But the law does not stop Florida citizens from working with a California-based agency.

We need federal action to shut this market down. As Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) proposed via the SAFE Kids Act and Rep. Scott Perry (R-Penn.) introduced via the Preventing International Surrogacy Exploitation Act, Congress should ban international commercial surrogacy outright by prohibiting foreign nationals from contracting with American surrogates or agencies.

Notably, the vast majority of developed nations — aside from the United States and Ukraine — already have a law like this in place.

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Cut off the travel and count the trade. Congress and the State Department should deny visas to anyone traveling to the U.S. to commission or collect a surrogate-born child. They should also mandate federal reporting, through the CDC or another agency, of every commercial surrogacy contract and resulting live birth, including the client’s nationality.

There is no reason to regulate the export of technology more carefully than the export of our own citizens.

Make the buyer, not the baby, pay the price. Heritage Foundation Vice President Roger Severino has proposed the boldest remedy. Vice President JD Vance has already endorsed Severino’s plan to end birth tourism citizenship in U.S. territories, which China has exploited.

Every solution so far has focused on the “anchor.” Severino’s plan, by contrast, targets the “boat.” Under existing law, the president has broad authority to bar any class of foreign nationals whose entry he deems detrimental to U.S. interests.

He should use that power to give every foreign national without permanent residency who has a child on U.S. soil a simple choice: Relinquish the child’s American citizenship, or never legally set foot in the United States again.

This doesn’t remove citizenship from the children. But it does mean that the parents who refuse would become permanently ineligible for any visa, asylum, refugee status, or temporary protected status; any lottery or family-based entry; or any future path to residency or citizenship, including through marriage to an American.

The Supreme Court says these children are citizens. Very well — then act like it.

American citizens should not be purchased for export, warehoused unclaimed, or shipped beyond the reach of American courts. The 14th Amendment was written so that no one born on American soil could be bought or sold. It’s time to extend that same protection to children born via international commercial surrogacy schemes.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.

Abortion by mail is putting women in grave danger

U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) recently asked the Department of Justice to open a criminal investigation into the abortion group Plan C.

According to Hawley’s complaint, Plan C teaches Americans how to obtain chemical abortion drugs in violation of state law and advises users to conceal their activity through privacy-focused browsers, virtual private networks, and encrypted email.

Lawmakers are rewarding an industry that treats the isolation of women as empowerment and the removal of medical oversight as progress.

The complaint raises a larger question: How much risk is the abortion industry willing to impose on women and girls in pursuit of unrestricted access?

Recent cases have shown how easily men can obtain mifepristone online and use it to coerce or drug women. Yet the industry continues pressing to remove safeguards, minimize medical supervision, and treat mail-order abortion as ordinary consumer health care.

Congress, meanwhile, recently allowed taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood to resume, despite sustained public opposition to federal support for the abortion provider.

That decision is especially troubling after the New York Times reported last year that Planned Parenthood was “in crisis.” The story described understaffed clinics, poor conditions, inadequate care, and botched procedures. Planned Parenthood has offered little public evidence that those problems have been corrected.

The pattern is difficult to ignore. Again and again, the abortion industry’s demand for fewer restrictions comes at the expense of basic standards of safety, medical care, and accountability.

Republican lawmakers should follow Hawley’s lead. Organizations that facilitate illegal access to abortion drugs or help users evade state safeguards should face scrutiny. Congress and the administration should also restore protections abandoned in recent years.

Chemical abortion offers the clearest example of what deregulation has produced.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration removed the long-standing in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone. Women and girls may now obtain the drug through online providers without first seeing a doctor.

That convenience carries serious risks.

YouTube/AAPLOG Pro-Life Medical Experts

Mifepristone can produce dangerous complications when used later in pregnancy or by women with certain medical conditions. It cannot treat an ectopic pregnancy, which may become life-threatening without prompt diagnosis. An online questionnaire cannot perform an ultrasound, conduct a physical examination, or reliably detect coercion.

Many online providers do not require proof that a patient has received an ultrasound or an in-person medical evaluation.

My colleague Dr. Christina Francis, a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist, recently tested one such system. She told an online abortion provider that she was 13 years old and had a history of ectopic pregnancies, cesarean sections, an intrauterine device, and other serious complications.

Any one of those disclosures should have prompted further screening. Her stated age alone should have raised immediate concerns about abuse, consent, and parental involvement.

Instead, the provider accepted her payment and mailed the drugs.

Women and girls have a right to understand what can go wrong before they are left to experience the consequences alone.

The mail-order system has also enabled horrifying acts of coercion and abuse.

An Army captain was convicted after impregnating a subordinate and giving her mifepristone without her consent. A Texas attorney repeatedly slipped abortion drugs into his wife’s drinks. In Louisiana, a young man used his girlfriend’s information to order mifepristone and then isolated and pressured her into taking it. An Ohio doctor forced the drug down his girlfriend’s throat.

Those are just the cases that became public. How many other women have suffered in silence? How many have lost pregnancies without knowing that a partner drugged them? How many were pressured into abortions while isolated from family, doctors, or anyone positioned to recognize the abuse?

Mail-order abortion removes the very people most likely to detect coercion: physicians, nurses, clinic staff, parents, and trusted family members.

It also leaves women to manage bleeding, pain, fear, and possible medical emergencies without direct supervision.

Research cited by pro-life advocates indicates that many women report feeling pressured into abortions they did not want or that conflicted with their values. Whatever the precise scale, coercion is a real and documented danger. Policies should make it easier to detect, not easier to conceal.

Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

Yet prioritizing access over safety increasingly appears to be a feature rather than a bug of the abortion industry’s model.

Plan C says it seeks to “transform access to abortion in the U.S. by normalizing the self-directed option of abortion pills by mail.” That mission statement emphasizes access and normalization. It says nothing about medical screening, coercion, abuse, or the risks of taking the drugs without an examination.

A website that teaches users to order abortion drugs secretly and evade state laws does not merely serve women seeking abortions. It may also serve abusers looking for a discreet way to obtain drugs they can use against women.

The beneficiaries are obvious: organizations that sell or distribute the pills and men willing to use them as instruments of coercion.

Lawmakers have tolerated this system for too long. They have permitted the weakening of medical safeguards, restored funding to Planned Parenthood, and resisted efforts to require in-person care for chemical abortion.

They are rewarding an industry that treats the isolation of women as empowerment and the removal of medical oversight as progress.

Hawley and a growing coalition of pro-life groups are right to demand accountability.

Congress and the Justice Department should investigate organizations that knowingly help users violate state law. Federal regulators should restore meaningful medical safeguards for mifepristone. Lawmakers should also ensure that minors, abuse victims, and women with dangerous medical conditions are not abandoned to an online form and a package in the mail.

Women and girls deserve better than an abortion system built around secrecy, isolation, and plausible deniability.

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