Is it possible there exists an ancient mystery that lies behind the events of the modern world, an object connected to everything from the rise of Adolf Hitler to the spread of Marxism, socialism and communism, the two world wars, nuclear destruction, the Cold War, and even the future of the world?

Could a mystery that began in the last book of the Bible be a key to some of the greatest evils and calamities ever to fall upon our world? It sounds like something out of a movie, a science-fiction novel, or a Hollywood fantasy — but it’s real.

Thus Hitler addressed the enormous Nazi rallies at Nuremberg from a structure deliberately modeled on the ancient monument some have identified with the ‘throne of Satan.’

For more than a decade, the Pergamon Altar — a massive monument built more than 2,000 years ago in what is now Turkey — has been inaccessible to visitors as Berlin’s Pergamon Museum undergoes a vast renovation. When the museum partially reopens next year, the altar will once again be revealed.

‘Satan’s throne’

To most visitors, it will be an archaeological treasure, admired for what it reveals about a long-gone civilization. But the altar has another history — one that begins in the last book of the Bible and, I believe, runs through some of the darkest events of the modern world.

The ancient city of Pergamon was one of the great centers of the Hellenistic world. In the second century B.C., its rulers constructed a monumental altar on its acropolis, on a foundation roughly 35 meters square. A huge staircase led upward through a colonnaded structure, while a marble frieze depicted a violent cosmic struggle: the Olympian gods crushing the rebellious giants.

Centuries later, Pergamon would appear in the book of Revelation.

In a message to the Christians living there, Christ declares: “I know where you dwell, where Satan’s throne is.”

What exactly was “Satan’s throne”?

Scholars have proposed several possibilities. Pergamon was a center of pagan worship and of the Roman imperial cult. But one interpretation has long identified the phrase with the city’s enormous altar, whose architecture itself resembled a giant throne.

I believe that identification is significant.

Sinister discovery

With the advent of Christianity and the passing of the ancient world, the altar fell into ruin. Eventually parts of it were incorporated into later structures, and for centuries it disappeared from history.

Enter a German engineer named Karl Humann. Humann first encountered the ruins in the 1860s while working in the Ottoman Empire. He saw ancient marble sculptures being broken up and burned for lime and alerted the museums in Berlin. With permission from Ottoman authorities, German archaeologists began excavating Pergamon in 1878.

They soon uncovered the remains of the great altar.

Thousands of fragments emerged from the earth, including much of its enormous sculpted frieze. Under arrangements with the Ottoman government, the finds were transported on the backs of animals, then by ship and train, until pieces of the ancient altar began arriving in Berlin in 1879.

What would we expect to happen with the return of “Satan’s throne” to the world?

Germany had now become its new home. And as the ancient altar was being pieced together there, an old evil was taking a new and ominous form as well: anti-Semitism. In 1879, as pieces of the altar began arriving in Berlin, political agitator Wilhelm Marr popularized the term Antisemitismus and founded the League of Antisemites, helping transform a centuries-old hatred into a modern racial and political movement.

Altar of anti-Semitism

A decade later, in 1889, Adolf Hitler was born. The coincidence alone proves nothing. But the two threads — the ancient altar taking shape again in Germany and the country’s increasingly racialized anti-Semitism — would converge with remarkable literalness after Hitler came to power.

After coming to power in 1933, Hitler commissioned his chief architect, Albert Speer, to transform the Nazi Party rally grounds at Nuremberg. Between 1935 and 1937, Speer constructed the massive grandstand at Zeppelin Field. His architectural model was the Pergamon Altar.

Thus Hitler addressed the enormous Nazi rallies at Nuremberg from a structure deliberately modeled on the ancient monument some have identified with the “throne of Satan.”

From that stage, Hitler raged before the world as his regime plunged Europe into war and carried out the Holocaust and the murder of millions.

And this was not the end of the altar’s strange journey.

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Andrew Jones/Anadolu/Getty Images

Stalin’s prize

As the Third Reich collapsed in 1945, the Red Army entered Berlin and took possession of the altar’s friezes. Along with enormous quantities of German cultural property, they were carried east into the Soviet Union, where they remained for more than a decade. The ancient sculptures that had traveled from Pergamon to imperial Germany and witnessed the rise and fall of Nazi Germany had now passed into Stalin’s Soviet Union.

In 1958 and 1959, the Soviet Union returned approximately 1.5 million cultural objects to communist East Germany, among them the frieze panels of the Pergamon Altar. By 1959, they were once again on display in Berlin — this time behind the Iron Curtain.

Pergamon. Imperial Germany. Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union. Communist East Germany.

And this is only part of the mystery. In my book “The Altar of Pergamon: The Mystery of the Dark Angel and the Future of the World,” I explore what I believe are further connections between the altar and the forces and events that shaped the modern age — Marxism and communism, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the Atomic Age, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and even events that may yet shape the future of our world.

Pergamon’s return

When I wrote it, I had no idea that the altar itself would soon be revealed to the world again. But I believe that timing is itself part of the mystery.

It can be hard for our modern sensibilities to grasp the possibility of such a thing as a “throne of Satan” altering the course of history. But the connections are grounded in concrete facts and remarkable historical convergences — more than 200 of them.

Though we like to imagine that we are in control of the world’s destiny and that we can solve our problems through our own resources, powers, and technologies, the Bible tells us something else: There is more to the world and to our lives than what we can see with our eyes. There is another realm, a spiritual realm, that can shape the course of our lives and our world.

What will happen when the altar is once more revealed to the world? We cannot say. But the ancient object connected to some of the greatest evils and cataclysms of the modern age may not be finished with history yet.

​Adolf hitler, Albert speer, Ancient greece, Antisemitism, Bible, Book of revelation, Christianity, Cold war, Holocaust, Jonathan cahn, Joseph stalin, Karl humann, Pergamon altar, Prophecy, Soviet union, Throne of satan, Wilhelm marr, Faith 

“I complained because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.”

We have all heard that expression. I happen to live with someone who has no feet.

Yet during my decades of marriage to a bilateral amputee, there have been plenty of times when I complained that my feet hurt. I have limped around the house nursing a blister while living with a woman who leans her prosthetic legs next to the nightstand.

You would think that daily reminder supplied all the perspective I needed. It did. Perspective was never the problem. Gratitude was something else.

We live in a culture that has industrialized comparison. Social media serves it to us by the scroll: Someone has more than we do, and someone else has less. The algorithm knows how to make us envious, aggrieved, or smug. It cannot make us grateful.

Seeing someone with greater challenges can put our difficulties into perspective. It may even stop us from complaining out loud for a while. We say, “I don’t have anything to complain about.” But we usually do. We simply tamp it down for decorum’s sake before returning to our regularly scheduled grumbling.

Perspective may embarrass us into silence, but silence is not gratitude. Besides, what kind of gratitude requires another person’s misery? “I was feeling sorry for myself, but then I looked at your life and felt much better” probably will not land the way we intend.

Gratitude is not looking across the room and saying, “At least I’m not you.” It is looking at mercy and saying, “You saw me.”

I learned something about that during one of Gracie’s hospitalizations.

One afternoon, I drove home from the hospital for clothes and supplies before heading back. Some friends called and asked me to stop by their home. They ushered me into their kitchen, where a place had been set for one person.

There sat a bowl of homemade vegetable beef soup, a thick slab of cornbread, and a tall glass of sweet tea. As a Southerner, it was about as fine a meal as I could imagine.

My friends quietly said, “Your boys are safe with their grandparents for spring break. Gracie is safe at the hospital. And you are safe here. Sit down, eat, and rest. We’re watching over you.”

They saw what I had not yet recognized. I had spent so much of my life watching over someone else that I did not know how to admit I needed someone to watch over me.

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I have eaten costlier meals I can barely remember. Decades later, I still remember their kitchen, the table, the chair, and that meal with clarity.

What produced gratitude in that moment? Not perspective. I already had perspective by the truckload from countless hours in hospitals and surgical waiting rooms. What moved me was not that someone else had less. It was that my friends saw the burden in my stooped shoulders.

C. S. Lewis wrote of being “Surprised by Joy.” That afternoon, I was surprised by mercy. My friends prepared a place and came toward me before I asked.

That is a picture of the gospel.

God did not rescue us by pointing to someone whose sins were worse than ours. He saw us stooping beneath a burden we could neither understand nor remove. He did not wait for us to straighten ourselves, find the right words, or properly explain our condition. He saw us, and then He came toward us.

Paul writes, “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Luke tells of 10 lepers whom Jesus healed. All 10 received something beyond their reach, but only one returned to thank Him. Receiving something, even something miraculous, does not automatically produce gratitude. One man connected the mercy he received with the One who gave it.

Jesus asked, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine?” I find that question uncomfortable because I have spent a good bit of my life among the nine.

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I have too often received mercy and hurried on to the next problem. I have prayed for provision and complained about the packaging. I have asked God to open a door and grumbled because it squeaked.

My problem was not a lack of perspective. My problem is gospel amnesia.

“Bless the Lord, O my soul,” David wrote, “and forget not all his benefits” (Psalm 103:2). Gratitude requires remembering.

Self-centeredness says, “I deserve more.” Perspective says, “Someone else has less.” Gratitude says, “I have received mercy.”

My friends did not solve our crisis that afternoon. The hard road still waited outside their home, and it continues to this day. But for a little while, I rested while someone else stood guard.

I never knew grace could smell like vegetable beef soup and warm cornbread.

That afternoon, gratitude tearfully accepted a second bowl.

​C.s. lewis, Caregiving, Christianity, Envy, Faith, God, Gospel, Grace, Gratitude, Love, Mercy, Opinion & analysis, Perspective 

Kathy Griffin hasn’t learned a single lesson since crashing her own career.

The “D-list” diva shared a horrifying image of herself holding a fake, bloodied head of President Donald Trump, ISIS-style, in 2017. The backlash proved swift and furious. She apologized (then took it back) and watched her stand-up gigs evaporate.

Country singer Jelly Roll famously shed a whole lotta weight in recent years. Good for him! Now he’s hoping to shed fans.

It took years to rebuild a semblance of a career, and she eventually leaned into her Trump derangement syndrome.

Now she’s playing the Victim Card™ via the “Talk Your Head Off” podcast with Gen Z host Adam Mockler. Mockler complained of the “chilling effect” created when President Trump goes after his critics in the media and the legal arena.

Griffin’s response? She knows the feeling.

“I actually was a victim of that myself in 2017 when I released a controversial photo that I thought everyone else would agree with me,” Griffin said, referring to BloodyHeadGate. “I was very, very wrong.”

That last sentence might be the first wise thing she’s said in ages …

Hostin-ator

AI just got dumber.

“The View” host Sunny Hostin just sold her likeness to AI startup Fountain O. That means the company can use Hostin’s name and brand for AI-based TV shows and movies based on Hostin’s novels.

Wait … she has enough time to share TV’s most idiotic opinions and write novels? Respect!

The deal means her fans can not only see AI reproductions of her stories but watch Hostin herself in them.

“To be able to bring my novels to life in movie and TV form, and actually have my image inserted in the productions, so that audiences can relate to me through my stories beyond my role as an author, is incredibly exciting to me.”

Maybe those “Terminator” films depicting computers conquering humanity didn’t anticipate the Hostin factor …

Jelly rolled

Is anything more fickle than pop music stardom? The list of one-hit wonders may literally be a mile long, and even today’s red-hot stars could run cold in a New York Minute.

Remember Jewel? Right Said Fred? Young MC? That should keep today’s chart-toppers hungry and humble.

Not Jelly Roll. The country singer famously shed a whole lotta weight in recent years. Good for him! Now he’s hoping to shed fans. How? He hosted “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” this week and read straight from the far-left show’s cue cards.

Trump bad. Trump dumb. Trump [fill in the blank]. “Funny” rarely enters the equation on the show, and Mr. Roll did nothing to change that approach. And, naturally, some of the singer’s fans recoiled at his liberal lurch.

He is a country crooner, after all. His response? To paraphrase he Critical Drinker, “Go away now.”

“For those who threatened to stop listening to my music based on my comments last night, I just want to say with conviction: go right ahead.”

Sounds like a plan. In related news, look for Jelly to join Chumbawamba on their 2027 “That One Song You Kinda Liked” tour.

RELATED: VICTORY NAP: Rosie O’Donnell’s back — with the same tired Trump trash talk

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Ali who?

Sacha Baron Cohen was king of the comedy world following his gonzo 2006 film “Borat.” It’s been downhill ever since.

Even worse, Cohen went woke, tackling predictable targets (Trump!) and demanding that the real estate mogul be kicked off of social media.

Sad.

Still, there’s always hope for a creative rebound. And Cohen’s next project is a film-length “documentary” based on his classic Ali G character. “Ali G: Who Iz I” hits theaters this fall, and while the trailer isn’t a hoot, perhaps the best bits are being saved for the film itself.

We’ll see come the film’s release day — Oct. 23. Right now, some comedy pearl-clutchers are coming after Cohen.

A media “watchdog” group, NewsCord, is trying to coax movie houses to ban the film. His routines, it claims, have “enforced harmful stereotypes across marginalized communities through his characters.”

Will that effort get traction? It’s not 2020 any more, thank goodness. For now, Cohen is leaning into his old bad-boy shtick, ignoring how he abandoned his principles over time. Maybe he thinks being unwoke is cool (it is … but not thanks to him).

“In an age when a single comedian’s career can be ended by a single un-PC joke, I thought I’d play it safe and bring this guy back,” he shared on social media.

​Jelly roll, Jimmy kimmel live, Kathy griffin, President donald trump, Sacha baron cohen, Sunny hostin, Trump derangement syndrome, Ai, Entertainment, Hollywood, Lifestyle, Culture, Toto recall 

With the “Women’s” NBA twisting itself into knots rather than plainly defining woman, gender ideology is back in the news.

The first problem is linguistic. Using “gender” when one means sex invites confusion. Jay Richards has explained gender ideology as the view that the sex binary does not fully describe human identity and that a person may possess an internal “gender identity” incongruent with sex.

‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’

That framework helps explain a related question: Why can stating ordinary biological distinctions provoke such extraordinary hostility — even death threats — when the dispute concerns women’s sports and other sex-separated spaces?

One answer is that the argument is not only about biology. It also draws on an older revolutionary tradition that treats inherited institutions and categories as instruments of domination. Hence the old line: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

Start with Marx and Engels. In “The Communist Manifesto,” they called for “the most radical rupture with traditional relations” and “traditional ideas,” while attacking private property, religion, and the bourgeois family. Paul Kengor has written that later leftist movements continued this attack on traditional marriage and family.

The intellectual path from Marx to contemporary gender theory is not a straight line, however. Antonio Gramsci did not simply replace economics with culture; he broadened Marxist analysis by emphasizing culture, institutions, and “hegemony” as sources of social power. What is commonly called cultural Marxism grew from this shift in emphasis.

Herbert Marcuse likewise looked beyond the industrial working class to marginalized groups as possible agents of radical change. Rudi Dutschke popularized the idea of a “long march through the institutions,” while Mike Gonzalez has noted the Gramscian strategy of a long-term “war of position” aimed at reshaping culture before political victory.

Critical theory pushed the analysis further. Frankfurt School thinkers such as Marcuse and Max Horkheimer examined capitalism, authority, culture, and repression through a Marxist-Freudian lens. Other Frankfurt School theorists treated social structures — including family and sexuality — as possible mechanisms of domination.

Postmodern and deconstructionist thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida came from different traditions, but their work converged with critical theory on one crucial point: suspicion toward claims of neutral, universal truth. In this intellectual climate, truth itself was dismissed by some theorists as inseparable from power.

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As Bishop Robert Barron has written in a related discussion of deconstruction, “There is no final truth, no ultimate settling of a question. There is always something new.” Once inherited categories are treated principally as products of power, even apparently basic questions — “What is a woman?” — become open to endless renegotiation.

Judith Butler’s 1990 book “Gender Trouble” brought these currents directly into gender theory. Butler argued that gender is performative and challenged the stability of the sex/gender distinction and traditional sex roles.

This does not prove that every person who supports transgender rights is a Marxist, or that modern gender theory can be reduced to a single ideological source. It does show why the rhetoric so often sounds revolutionary rather than merely therapeutic.

When transgender discrimination is called the “civil rights issue of our time,” the claim places gender identity within a familiar oppressor-oppressed framework. Christopher Rufo has said that some trans activists explicitly describe their movement as a successor to Marxism, with transgender people cast as a new revolutionary vanguard.

That is the more defensible connection. Gender ideology did not simply fall out of “The Communist Manifesto.” It developed amid intellectual traditions that increasingly interpreted social categories through power, oppression, liberation, and the deconstruction of inherited norms.

Its political alliances reinforce the point. Gender politics routinely appears among the current things the activist left leverage as part of its war on capitalism and Western civilization generally. Jonathan Butcher has noted how intersectionality explicitly links “identity movements based on gender and racial liberation” through a common theory of social domination.

From Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors describing herself as a “trained Marxist” to the pro-Hamas red-green alliance that includes Queers for Palestine, the coalition repeatedly joins causes that appear unrelated on the surface but share a politics of oppression and liberation.

The issue is not always literally the issue. Increasingly, the issue is the revolution.

​Critical theory, Cultural marxism, Gender identity, Gender ideology, Postmodernism, Traditional marriage, Transgender rights, Western civilization, Womens sports, Gender theory, Wnba, Women’s sports, Opinion & analysis 

Bill Gates is a repugnant individual. He puts the ick in sick, the sin in sincere, and the con in concern. But rest assured, he cares deeply about your well-being and the future of the human race.

The bespectacled billionaire recently penned a remarkably revealing essay. The central message is that although AI is probably coming for your job, your social life, your education, your children, and perhaps your sanity, he has a plan.

This two-facedness is infuriating, but it’s an old trick.

Gates argues that AI “can substitute for human cognition” and that “many jobs will disappear forever.” He even says that if someone had a credible plan to slow AI globally, he would “likely support it.” But, conveniently, he immediately concludes that this isn’t “going to happen,” so we’d better learn to live with this rather depressing reality.

And who helped build the world in which this revolution became possible? Gates’ own Microsoft is now one of the biggest players in AI. Gates acknowledges that he still has “financial ties to” the tech industry, then assures us his views aren’t motivated by money. Believing that takes a level of blind faith usually reserved for doomed cults.

The giveaway is his proposed solution.

Meet “Human Reserved,” a tiny tax-bracket sanctuary where some of us get to exist like protected wildlife. Don’t save work because human beings deserve meaningful lives; reserve some jobs because society still needs people employed. Although Gates talks about the “broader value of work,” the argument keeps circling back to stability, government funds, and the social consequences of mass unemployment.

That’s the true nightmare keeping him up at night. Starving people don’t splurge, and desperate people tend to break things. His concern is not that lives will be ruined, but that an economy without paychecks stops consuming. He wants us to revere him as a high-minded public intellectual, yet he operates like a landlord calculating how much mold a tenant will tolerate. He advocates for AI taxes and automation caps with one hand while funding the companies behind the technology with the other. Preserving a few human roles in nursing homes and kindergartens is less an act of mercy than a recognition that a fully automated world could harm his bank balance.

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He notes rather glibly that he likes the phrase “Human Reserved” because it makes him “think of nature reserves.” In his eyes, human labor is no longer an organic expression of dignity, purpose, or community. Instead, it’s more like an endangered species trapped inside a fenced-off sanctuary, permitted to exist solely because the park ranger feels an odd burst of sentimentality. He treats working-class survival like a protected wetland. Essentially, a scenic spot where we could build data centers, but we choose not to because the sight of total extinction gives him a slight headache. It’s the ultimate condescension: an absolute elitist granting us a small, artificial habitat to graze in while he clears the rest of the forest for his server farms.

Shortly after his patronizing essay was published, word emerged that Gates is actively arranging a trip to Beijing to meet personally with Xi Jinping.

The Manchurian candidate

China spends millions of dollars every day running continuous cyber operations against American infrastructure, stealing military IP, and breaching government servers. Yet this supposedly great American philanthropist wants to help the Chinese Communist Party navigate the risks of the very technology it actively weaponizes. He plays the homegrown hero, preaching the need to protect American workers and secure the nation, while simultaneously plotting to help a strategic rival become more powerful. Gates wants to discuss global safety standards with an authoritarian regime, acting as a self-appointed shadow secretary of state.

This two-facedness is infuriating, but it’s an old trick in the slimy septuagenarian’s playbook.

In the 1990s, when the Department of Justice dragged Microsoft into federal court for using its desktop monopoly to strangle Netscape Navigator, the world got a front-row seat to the real Bill Gates. The trial exposed a savvy street fighter who treated entire software sectors like nuisance weeds in his garden. Rather than outcompeting his rivals, he wanted to cut off their oxygen supply. He spent that decade playing the ruthless corporate terminator, extracting tribute from every PC sold on earth, and turning the free market into his personal fiefdom.

When the antitrust hammer finally came down, he didn’t change his nature. But he did change his wardrobe. He swapped the courtroom depositions for knitted sweaters and rebranded overnight as America’s doting uncle. But the killer instinct never vanished. The same instinct that drove him to annihilate competing web browsers now drives him to carve up the future of global technology with Beijing, ensuring that he controls the rules of the game no matter which superpower wins.

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This is not an exaggeration. Xi has described Gates as an “old friend” — indeed, his “first American friend.” A friend of China is no friend of America. And Bill Gates, a man actively liquidating the livelihoods of the domestic workforce while offering to manage their post-economic survival, is certainly no ally of the everyday, decent, hardworking American.

Gates wants software algorithms to process trade decisions, draft legal documents, write code, and manage logistics chains. In exchange, he generously offers to let humans retain a few low-margin positions in elder care and education. How kind of him.

Those specific fields survived his filter for an obvious reason. Software can’t change a physical diaper or offer genuine affection to an aging patient. He frames these designated human roles as an act of moral generosity, when he’s actually just identifying the physical tasks that robots can’t perform.

Only the most foolish would mistake his ruthless risk management for human compassion, and only the most foolish would believe that Bill Gates cares at about our well-being.

​Tech, Bill gates, Artificial intelligence 

Are young Americans expecting too much, or has homeownership genuinely become out of reach? According to BlazeTV host Nick Freitas, the answer is obvious.

While older generations often point to bigger homes and modern amenities to explain rising housing costs, Freitas says the data tells a different story. Even after accounting for those differences, the cost of buying a home has skyrocketed relative to income, leaving many young people feeling frustrated and demoralized.

“When younger people are saying that they have a real problem here, that they’re frustrated, that they’re demoralized, you can’t just dismiss that as, ‘Well, they’re being demoralized by TikTok or online or whatnot,’” Freitas says.

“One of the things in this is every time this gets brought up, people will say, ‘Well, yeah, you can’t compare a home in 2026 that is 2,500 square feet and four bedrooms and has all these amenities and central heating and air with what your grandpa bought on a single income that was an 800-square-foot, two-bedroom house with no AC,’” he explains.

“That’s all fair, but when you account for all of that, when you account … for all of these other factors, what you end up finding out is that the median house price is still significantly higher. Not like a little bit. It’s not like it’s gone up 20%. No, it’s significantly higher,” he continues.

“Now all of a sudden, it’s far more difficult to buy that first house, and what everybody is telling you is, ‘Well, you just need to work harder’ or ‘you expect too much,’” he adds.

But, Freitas says, they’re not expecting too much, pointing out that if you want to buy a home close to where you work, depending on where that is, an 800-square-foot home could run you close to a million dollars.

“You’ve got building codes, and you’ve got taxes. You’ve got multiple factors impacting that price,” he says.

“Your income is never catching up with what you actually need to live. And that is a very real and a very genuine concern,” he continues. “And again, if we have people just easily dismissing this, they are missing the point.”

“Making the Argument with Nick Freitas” is available on BlazeTV+, YouTube, and major podcast platforms.

Start watching Nick Freitas NOW at blazetv.com and use the promo code NICK40 for $40 off your BlazeTV+ subscription.

​Homeownership, Taxes, Nick freitas, Young americans, Boomers, Housing, Cost of living, Inflation, Blazetv show 

For years, Americans have been told that faith belongs in church while public policy should be guided by supposedly neutral, secular principles.

But BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey says that distinction is a fiction, as progressives beliefs are not neutral at all — and somehow make their way into plenty of public policy.

“I also notice this idea that you know, we can leave our Christian faith behind and then when we go into the public sphere, we don this like neutral secular ideology, but this neutral secular ideology says that babies don’t become people until they go through the birth canal,” Stuckey tells Pastor Josh Howerton.

“That’s a superstitious, nonscientific, weird belief,” she continues, noting that it’s not much different than the idea that “kids can be born in the wrong body.”

“So people who believe that they get to insert their definitions, their weird beliefs into school curriculum, into public policy, they define policy,” she adds.

Our bureaucracy, Stuckey says, is “defined by progressive ideology, which is not neutral,” but instead “superstitious.”

“So why does a progressive secularist who has their own dogmas and their own pseudo religion, why is their view seen as neutral?” she asks.

Howerton couldn’t agree more.

“What you’re talking about is loaded into the phrase, ‘You can’t legislate morality.’ The worldview behind the phrase, ‘You can’t legislate morality,’ is the myth of neutrality,” he says.

“It’s a myth of neutrality that there’s some way for us to sort of just order society to where nobody’s beliefs are infringed upon,” he continues, noting that it’s easy to “rip that mask off really fast.”

“A great example of this is with abortion. So somebody may say to a Christian that has a consistent pro-life ethic … ‘Hey, when you advocate for pro-life legislation, you’re trying to force your morality on the mother,’” he explains.

“And honestly, the answer to that question is yes. Yes, that is what is trying to happen. But the question is not whether morality is going to get legislated. The question is whose morality is going to get legislated,” he adds.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Allie beth stuckey, Christianity, Josh howerton, Morality, Leftism, Progressivism, Superstition, Transgender, Abortion, Blazetv show 

Although the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and civil rights laws dating back to 1866 prohibit nearly all racial preferences, most Americans oppose these preferences, and Donald Trump was elected vowing to eliminate DEI — progressives won’t give up.

Their race-obsessed thinking reduces America to intersectional classifications of oppressed and oppressor. This addled concept is a self-defeating dialectic in which no amount of progress on race relations is ever enough — or even acknowledged.

Numerous companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Costco, Delta, and Cisco, openly continue their DEI programs.

Despite enormous advances, with the possible exception of Palestinians and transgender people, no group is seen as more oppressed and deserving of preferences than African-Americans.

In 2025, President Trump issued executive orders that revoked President Biden’s whole-of-government mandates interweaving DEI into all facets of the federal government. Since then, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department under Harmeet Dhillon has filed numerous administrative actions and lawsuits to end racial preferences that disadvantage whites, and some universities, corporations, and charities have limited their DEI programs.

Conversely, many universities have defied the Supreme Court’s 2023 holding in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard by renaming or reformulating their DEI programs. Some are using a loophole in the SFFA decision that acknowledged colleges may consider how an applicant’s race affected his life.

In just the last three months, the Justice Department announced at least 25 investigations, lawsuits, and settlements involving allegedly unlawful racial preferences by the College of William & Mary, Duke University, a Jersey City college prep course, City University of New York, the state of Minnesota, the city of Evanston, Illinois, Arizona State University, University of California Davis Medical School, University of California San Diego Medical School, and 15 other medical schools.

A State Department internal review announced last week found that the Biden administration required foreign service officers to read materials on critical race theory, slavery reparations, anti-racism, and so-called “white fragility.” To be eligible for promotion, they had to discuss DEI with foreign counterparts to demonstrate “allyship.”

They were trained on how to talk about “Black Lives Matter” and “systemic racism” in foreign languages and to use progressive-approved terminology. The State Department claims that it has finally “put an end” to these practices.

Then last month, a federal judge in California ruled that the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and Interior exceeded their authority by imposing conditions ending DEI in grants to California cities. Defending Education, an education watchdog, found that America’s two leading teachers’ unions, the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, are embedding DEI principles into policies for classroom use of AI.

Numerous companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Costco, Delta, and Cisco, openly continue their DEI programs, and the pace of litigation shows that many other companies and institutions covertly do so.

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In 1996, California stunned the nation when 55% of voters approved Proposition 209, which amended the state’s constitution to prohibit public institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity in employment, contracting, and education. In 2020, Democrats unsuccessfully sought to repeal Prop 209.

California next tried to require public companies to include blacks and other “underrepresented” minorities on their boards. The California courts struck that down. Now, California is moving toward authorizing reparations for its black residents.

A decade after ratification of the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court declared that the purpose of the Equal Protection Clause is that “the law in the States shall be the same for the black as for the white; that all persons, whether colored or white, shall stand equal before the laws of the States.”

Progressives don’t care.

On Real America’s “Get Real,” RealClear publisher David DesRosiers seeks common ground across the political spectrum. One progressive panelist recently explained that blacks require preferences because it’s not “what you know” but “who you know.” Whites know all the right people, but blacks do not. What a dated perspective. How patronizing of blacks. How wrong.

More than half of all blacks in major metropolitan areas live in the suburbs, and their children are educated in suburban schools. About 12% of the students in Ivy League colleges are black, even after SFFA. There are 61 black members in the House (14%), five black senators (5%), two Supreme Court justices (22%), and about 184 black federal judges (8%). Blacks comprise about 10% of first-year medical school students, 8% of law school students, 2% of Fortune 500 corporate CEOs, and 13% of all Americans.

I am confident that most of these people know someone who can help them and their families, as do black professional athletes, artists, and actors, as well as more than 1,000 African-American mayors, 1,000 state legislators, 14 billionaires, and about 1.4 million black millionaires.

While listening to the panelist, I thought about the middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn where I grew up. My neighbors were policemen, firemen, teachers, and plumbers. Good people. Not one of them was in a position to help me in my career or introduce me to someone who did.

I made my way with hard work and some luck, but never with help from anyone I knew growing up. Of course, I received support from people I met along the way at Columbia University and during my career, as did my black colleagues. It’s called “networking,” not racism.

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Yes, affluent people know more of the “right people” than poor people and have other advantages as well. Children from poor and low-income families typically face many obstacles due to their socioeconomic status. They often attend inferior K-12 schools and have less time for homework because of jobs or chores. They are less likely to benefit from two actively involved parents and receive, on average, less guidance and assistance.

Students from families in the bottom 25% income bracket comprise only 3% of enrollment in our most competitive colleges, while those from the top 25% comprise 72%. Studies show that high-achieving, low-income children who have lower GPAs and SAT scores than affluent children achieve college grades and graduation rates at the same level as affluent students. Their scores can be “normed” for these differences, even without special programs.

Blacks are more likely to be poor than whites, and consequently, would disproportionately benefit from this approach. That’s fine with me — and more importantly, with the Constitution. Racial preferences are unconstitutional, illegal, and immoral; helping low-income Americans is not.

I defy any children of Michelle Obama, Eric Holder, Jeh Johnson, Beyonce, or Ibram X. Kendi to deny that they have every advantage, including a terrific education and a network of contacts that millions of white Americans lack.

More than once, the U.S. Supreme Court has observed that “distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people.” As Chief Justice John Roberts declared, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

When the Constitution, federal laws, and opinion align, progressives should respect our values. Here, that would mean restoring equality and the dignity of blacks by ending the disgrace of DEI.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

​Black lives matter, Critical race theory, Donald trump, Harmeet dhillon, Justice department, Michelle obama, Progressives, State department, Supreme court, Opinion & analysis, Dei, Race