A Texas pastor who previously served as director of vocations for the Diocese of Dallas and now sees over 9,500 people show up every Sunday at his church in Coppell recently discussed the need for men to assume leadership roles, the challenges they will invariably face, and two challenges fathers should take on today.

Fr. Edwin Leonard noted on the episode of “The Catholic Gentleman” podcast published on Thursday that when he took on the role of pastor of St. Ann Catholic Church during the pandemic, he observed that “everyone had been separated from their church community” long enough for some men to have “gotten used to the loneliness.”

‘He also knew that you would be reading that Gospel.’

Gospel and grill

To combat this pervasive sense of alienation, strengthen the community, and “more purposely target the hearts of men” so that like King David “they could be men after God’s heart,” the parish under Fr. Leonard began holding an annual men’s summit.

“We just got a bunch of guys together, and we had barbecue. We had some bourbon, some beer, and some cigars, and just like hung out in the courtyard of our church,” the priest said. “And it was about, you know, a 20-minute talk that first year from our key presenter.”

Feeling inspired by the Holy Spirit to go beyond consuming content that filled their bodies and minds, the attendees broke into groups and shared what the Lord was doing in their lives and how that had impacted them.

The parish recognized that this summit and similar initiatives focused on fortifying the hearts and minds of men in the community were not only the way to cultivate Christian leaders but to strengthen the faith of multiple generations.

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

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Test your mettle

The priest noted, after all, that the likelihood of successful religious transmission is greatly increased when children receive and grow in their faith in the presence of their father.

“The fact that he is leading in some way, shape, or form — it astronomically increases the opportunity and the chances for your children to have their faith,” Fr. Leonard said. “So we said … if we’re going to pour forth effort, we can do anything, we just can’t do everything. Let’s build up some leaders.”

The aim behind the men’s summit evidently became helping men not just serve their community but point in their service “towards the Lord whom they know.”

Over the course of the podcast, Fr. Leonard raised several issues he has observed negatively affecting young men and undercutting their leadership prospects, not least of which is passivity and “delayed adolescence,” which he clarified is the result of a lack of exposure to adversity.

To rectify these problems, he repeatedly advocated for controlled adversity — for engaging with and surmounting challenges of the kind that test mettle and build muscle.

Action items

After discussing the need to be challenged, Fr. Leonard was asked to provide those men listening with at least one challenge that if met could help them become better over the next week and into the more distant future.

The priest instead issued two challenges, the first of which was for fathers to “pray over your children every night. Make a sign of the cross on their forehead like you did at their baptism. Bless them.”

The second challenge Fr. Leonard issued was for men to “practice listening to the Word of God. So you need to read the Word of God — I would suggest reading the Daily Gospel.”

“Read it once and then, you know, ask yourself two questions: What is the Lord trying to say to me? This isn’t like a historical, critical method Bible study where you’re like, ‘What was the original source material? What was God trying to say 2,000 years ago?'” Fr. Leonard said. “God is omniscient, so as He was inspiring this to be read, He had a literal first-century meaning, but He also knew that you would be reading that Gospel reading in 2026.”

“The second question is the real crux of what I want people to do,” he continued. “Think how you can put that scripture verse or what the Lord said to you into action that day.”

The priest added, “The more that you listen to the Word of God, the more that you’re going to be able to hear the Word of God” and emphasized that “the practice of putting it into action bears fruit.”

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​Faith, Religion, Catholic, Coppell, St. ann catholic church, Texas, Fatherhood 

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.

RELATED: Warning: This college course may be bad for your brain

Andi Purnomo/Getty Images

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.

RELATED: Why do state schools bankroll people who despise the state?

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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.

​State universities, Witchcraft, Occult, Christianity, Arizona state university, College, Opinion & analysis 

When it comes to RAM shortages, no tech company is safe. The gaming industry was one of the first to feel the full effects of AI’s supply chain chokehold, but eventually, it extended outward to impact even the world’s most valuable brands, including Apple.

The Cupertino tech giant has been looking for ways to offset low RAM availability and keep the cost of its products down, but its latest solution has lawmakers worried.

RAM from these blacklisted manufacturers is untested for Apple’s needs.

The rest of us should be concerned too.

Apple’s choice could put at risk not only the company and its products, but our national security.

America’s memory failure

Apple may be a multi-trillion-dollar company, but it’s not immune to the RAM crisis. Especially now that so many Apple products are used alongside AI, ample RAM is crucial to delivering a reliable user experience.

Historically, Apple has relied on several partners to supply the RAM for its first-party Apple silicon chips. You may even know some of these companies — Samsung (yes, the prolific Android phone manufacturer), SK Hynix out of South Korea, and Micron (that recently closed its consumer RAM business after 29 years to service Big Tech AI brands). Unfortunately, the growing need for AI data centers has completely devoured available supplies, forcing Apple to look toward other unlikely partners.

Apple is getting desperate for more RAM

So who’s the memory supplier of last resort?

The very source America is ostensibly gobbling up all that memory to beat.

That’s right. China.

Reports say Apple is in talks with Chinese-owned manufacturers to increase RAM availability for its product ecosystem. This alone is enough to raise some red flags, considering that China has a reputation for spying on Americans and stealing from Big Tech.

To make matters even worse, the two China-based brands that Apple is eyeing for RAM — ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC) — both have sordid pasts. The Pentagon previously declared both brands as companies linked directly to the Chinese military, while YMTC is on the U.S. Entity List, meaning the company is a direct threat to national security.

In other words, Apple is attempting to partner with adversaries of the United States simply to gain access to more RAM, and lawmakers aren’t happy.

Lawmakers don’t want Apple to make a huge mistake

Politicians on both sides of the aisle have taken notice of Apple’s RAM expansion strategy. Sens. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called on Apple to withdraw its attempts to lobby the Trump administration to agree to the purchase of RAM from CXMT and YMTC, citing connections with the Beijing military. They also noted that Apple’s increasing reliance on Chinese manufacturers could harm attempts to bring more manufacturing jobs back to the States. Finally, national security concerns around Chinese RAM could prevent the U.S. government from using Apple products in any official capacity moving forward. Lawmakers have implored Apple to end its pursuit of Chinese RAM by August 21, but no final moves have been made yet.

RELATED: Trump bans Chinese robots — but your robot vacuum may be spying on you already

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It goes without saying that Apple is on the cusp of opening its products to unforeseen vulnerabilities or reliability issues. On a basic level, RAM from these blacklisted manufacturers is untested for Apple’s needs, and they may or may not hold up to the same quality as Apple’s current providers. On a national security level, Chinese RAM could make Apple’s products perfect targets for tampering or unforeseen security flaws. Chinese RAM integration could also make Apple susceptible to a U.S. device ban, similar to what we’ve seen with gadgets from Chinese manufacturers like Huawei and ZTE, though this would only happen in extreme cases, given Apple’s value to the U.S. economy, reputation among consumers, and prowess as one of the most innovative technology companies on the planet.

Apple technically doesn’t need the government’s approval to purchase RAM from blacklisted companies, especially if this RAM is only used in products sold outside of the USA, but moving forward with a deal could have serious consequences for the tech giant, its products, and consumers. That said, while Chinese manufacturers may have the RAM that Apple desperately needs, it may not save the company money in the long run as suppliers are poised to charge top dollar to bail Apple out of a jam.

​Tech, Microchips, Apple, China, Ram 

Caitlin Clark has become one of the biggest names in sports, but BlazeTV host Steve Deace argues she now faces a defining moment that could shape her entire legacy. He explains that she cannot afford to remain silent on the debate over the future of women’s sports, arguing that the issue is not only about personal conviction.

“She has an absolute obligation, not just morally, but financially, athletically, to address the issues that Sophie Cunningham is speaking on,” Deace says.

Clark has remained silent on the issue of men in women’s sports, as she most recently refused to comment on fellow WNBA star Sophie Cunningham’s stance that transgender “women” should not be allowed on the same court.

“This is not a matter of opinion, and I don’t even think it’s a matter of conscience. I think it’s a matter of fact that Caitlin Clark has an obligation to address this,” he continues, asking, “What league does Caitlin Clark play in?”

Deace points out that Clark’s league, the WNBA, is specifically called the “Women’s National Basketball Association.”

He also notes that despite her spot as a top women’s athlete, she still wouldn’t beat a much younger all-American male athlete.

“Freshmen going into college this year. How many of them do you think Caitlin Clark could beat one-on-one?” Deace asks co-host Todd Erzen.

“None. None of them,” Erzen replies.

“She couldn’t beat the average high school star athlete. And she’s the greatest, she’s maybe the greatest female athlete in the world alive today … so then it would seem like protecting the integrity of what that word ‘W’ means, would be vitally important to her,” Deace says.

“What would that do to Caitlin Clark’s stock to just watch these guys come in and pretending to be women and just absolutely physically just roll her, just steamroll her on the way to the basket. She could not even get a shot off,” he continues.

“So it seems as if you are profiting off of being a woman, playing in a league whose first word of its branding is ‘women’s’ … then defining what is and is not a woman would be paramount,” he adds.

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​Caitlin clark, Sophie cunningham, Steve deace, Womens sports, Transgender women, Wnba, Blazetv show 

The majority of practicing Christians believe that tithing 10% of their income is the biblical standard for living out financial faithfulness — but according to Christian finance expert and Ramsey Solutions personality George Kamel, true financial faithfulness requires a lot more than that.

On this episode of “Relatable,” Kamel tells Allie Beth Stuckey what it really means to honor God with our finances.

Financial faithfulness, says Kamel, starts with changing our mindset about money as a whole.

“I think people underestimate the freedom that exists when you go, ‘You know what? I’m a steward of this money. It’s not mine. I’m managing it for someone else,”’ he says, “and when you do that, you look at money through a whole different lens because now it’s not all about me and my selfishness and what could I do with this? It frees me to go, ‘OK, it’s God’s money.”’

This mentality shift, Kamel suggests, creates “three buckets” our money can go into: enjoyment, saving/investing, and giving.

But all of the buckets must be poured into “wisely,” he emphasizes.

“How do we enjoy [money] wisely? Well, obviously, we don’t want to, you know, use it on debauchery, but you can use it to go on vacation. You can use it to upgrade the car. You can use it to have a nice house. That’s OK. Those things aren’t evil in and of themselves,” he tells Allie.

As for investing, Kamel points to the parable of the talents in Matthew 25 to argue that smart investing is biblical.

“Who got all the accolades? The guy who actually planted it and grew the money versus the guy who planted it and nothing came of it and it was just wasted,” he says, “and so you want to make sure that you’re stewarding this well, that it’s growing so that you can give an inheritance to your children’s children as Proverbs says.”

But in the Bible, money is most often discussed in the context of giving charitably.

“With the 2,300 scriptures about wealth and possessions, I think the authors of the Bible knew that we would struggle with the treasures on earth part more than the treasures in heaven part,” says Kamel, urging people to give their money for kingdom purposes.

Allie then wonders if it’s possible to be “too frugal.”

It all comes down to one’s motive, says Kamel.

“Why am I being frugal? To create margin to have kingdom impact? Great! That’s a healthy motive,” he says, “but if it’s just to save because I’m miserly and I have a scarcity mindset, there is no biblical scripture to back that up.”

To hear more, watch the episode above.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

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​Allie beth stuckey, Christianity, Dave ramsey, George kamel, Money, Stewardship, Blazetv show 

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.

RELATED: Two Americas, under Fauci, with liberty and justice for none

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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.

​Fighting words, Opinion & analysis, Disorderly conduct, First amendment, Minnesota, N-word accusation, Law and order, Chaplinsky v. new hampshire, Hate speech 

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.

RELATED: The Biden autopen scandal has one big winner: Anthony Fauci

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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.

RELATED: Two Americas, under Fauci, with liberty and justice for none

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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.

​Anthony fauci, Covid, Epidemiology, Intensive care, Medical authority, Misinformation, Osha, Public health, Supreme court, Opinion & analysis 

In March 2026, after a near-death hospital stay with sepsis, celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton publicly proclaimed that a lucid encounter with God inspired him to reconnect with the Catholic faith of his upbringing. He celebrated his new faith and declared his intention to live a holier life and begin taking his children to church.

Tragically, on Tuesday, August 4 — less than five months after his public conversion — Hilton was hospitalized after a TikTok livestream captured him appearing naked and covered in what looked like blood while holding a knife and engaging in self-harm.

Glenn Beck calls it an “absolute horror show.”

“He’s cutting himself, and it looks demonic. It really does. He’s covered in blood, and thousands of people watched it happen,” he says, confirming that the livestream was “not AI” and that Hilton is currently recovering in the hospital from “all kinds of lacerations.”

Before this horrific incident, Hilton, Glenn points out, appeared to be doing well and continuing down the path of his newfound Christianity based on his public activity, which highlighted his Bible readings, church attendance, prayer life, and sometimes the difficult work of his faith.

“Then Tuesday night comes,” says Glenn bleakly.

Naturally, everyone wants to know how this heartbreaking incident happened.

On this episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn offers a deeper and more sobering take on what happened to Perez Hilton — and where the biggest tragedy lies.

Glenn acknowledges the possibility that Hilton’s chaotic circumstances — near-death experience, a very public and raw Christian conversion, a stressful move to Miami, and 3 young children to care for — could have caused him to experience a psychiatric break.

“We could leave that this is medical, okay? And it very well might be,” he says.

But there’s also the possibility, Glenn argues, that Hilton is experiencing the gruesome realities of spiritual warfare.

He notes how he has warned his own friends about sharing God and the gospel on their large platforms.

“You will come under attack in ways you cannot understand,” he says, highlighting his own experience with spiritual warfare.

Glenn urges his audience not to waste their time trying to figure out the exact cause of Hilton’s tragic breakdown.

“I don’t know if … something [demonic] had taken hold of him or not. Maybe it was just sickness that had taken hold of him. I have no idea. Neither do you,” he says.

The far bigger concern, Glenn argues, is the thousands-strong audience that sat glued to their phones as Hilton self-harmed — some pleading with him to stop, while others recorded or shared the livestream.

“We’re a civilization that is rebuilding the Colosseum, and we put it into every pocket of our children’s clothes. We keep it open for 24 hours, and we call the roar ‘engagement,”’ he warns.

“I think the temptation is to look at a suffering man and see a demon and look at a sick man and see a sinner,” he continues, but the “devil doesn’t need to possess anybody to win Tuesday night; he just needs 15 minutes and a crowd that just can’t look away.”

Glenn pleads with his audience to avoid watching or sharing the video of Hilton and instead pray for him and his family.

“You can’t shut down the amphitheater, but you can decline to be part of the roar — and that’s the only vote that any of us get,” he says.

To hear more, watch the video above.

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​Christianity, Glenn beck, Perez hilton, Tiktok, Spiritual warfare, Mental illness, Blazetv show 

Editor’s note: This article is part of a point-counterpoint on Christian nationalism. Read Garen Christopher Kaloustian’s argument, “Why ‘Christian nationalists’ are liberals — whether they realize it or not,” here.

Garen is right about something that many self-described nationalists might rather not admit. Modern political nationalism emerged alongside liberalism, and the two were often allies.

The nationalists of 19th-century Europe were not generally fighting to restore the old order. They were often fighting against it. They wanted Italians to rule Italians, Germans to rule Germans, Hungarians to rule Hungarians. That put them at odds with the great dynastic empires and, frequently, with the Church. Metternich had good reason to regard nationalism and liberalism as related threats.

Conservatives have to conserve something that actually exists. For an American, that something is not the Habsburg Empire or Bourbon France.

Throne and altar

I should disclose my own bias here. I’m Catholic. I recognize the authority of the pope. I have no particular interest in proving that America is, or must remain, a Protestant nation, and I’m considerably more sympathetic than the average American conservative to the old Catholic critique of liberalism. In fact, I tend to see the Protestant Reformation itself as one of the great ruptures that eventually produced the liberal world. When Garen talks about throne and altar, I understand the appeal.

But I’m also an American, and this is where I think his argument goes wrong.

Garen defines nationalism as a doctrine of political legitimacy: Sovereignty belongs to the nation rather than to a king or emperor. Because this transfers legitimacy from the top down to the bottom up, he calls nationalism a species of liberalism. As he puts it, “To actually be conservative is to reject bottom-up legitimacy.”

Why?

That might describe a particular kind of European reactionary thought. It does not describe American conservatism as it has existed for more than two centuries.

America’s inheritance

An American conservative inherits a republic. He inherits the Constitution, representative government, the common law, federalism, Christianity, local institutions, and a political tradition in which the people are understood to possess rights that precede the state. He can argue about how well those things fit together. He can even acknowledge that some of them have roots in liberalism.

What he cannot plausibly do is declare the entire American political inheritance illegitimate. After all, what’s “conservative” about asking Americans to overthrow a 250-year-old constitutional order in favor of a European political system that they never had?

The same problem arises with Garen’s treatment of Christianity. He’s on firmer ground in describing throne-and-altar politics as part of the historic integralist tradition within Christianity. But Christianity itself is not synonymous with monarchy.

As a Catholic, I don’t need to speculate much about this. The Catechism teaches that political authority ultimately derives from God. But it also explicitly recognizes a diversity of legitimate political regimes. The Church’s Compendium of Social Doctrine goes farther: “The subject of political authority is the people considered in its entirety as those who have sovereignty.” The people may entrust the exercise of that sovereignty to elected representatives and replace them when they fail.

That doesn’t mean Catholicism embraces simple majoritarianism. John Paul II warned against the idea that truth is “determined by the majority,” and the Church teaches that political authority remains bound by the moral order and the common good. The people can’t make something just simply by voting for it.

But that is very different from saying legitimate political authority requires a king. Catholic teaching manages to hold together two ideas Garen treats as opposites: Political authority ultimately comes from God, and the people can nevertheless possess and exercise political sovereignty.

So the choice Garen eventually gives us — Christendom on one side, a liberal empire or balkanized ethnostates on the other — is too neat.

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Cherry bomb

In fact, Garen makes a distinction that helps explain where I think he goes wrong. Nations and nationalism are not the same thing. Nations are ancient. Nationalism as a political doctrine is modern.

I’ve been reading Christopher Hibbert’s history of the French Revolution, and one little scene in the book captures the ambiguity nicely. Hibbert describes crowds wandering through the Tuileries after the royal family’s flight in 1791: “A cherry hawker sat with her basket on the eiderdown quilt of the Queen’s bed. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘Today, it’s the nation’s turn to be comfortable.’”

What exactly did “the nation” mean to her?

By 1791, the word had acquired a radical political meaning. The revolutionaries claimed that sovereignty belonged to the nation rather than the king. Perhaps our cherry seller had absorbed the new doctrine perfectly well.

But she was also using a word that referred to something considerably older: the people of France. The revolutionaries did not invent them.

France already possessed a people, a history, a culture, a territory, institutions, traditions, and a religious inheritance stretching back centuries. The revolutionary innovation was the claim that this pre-existing nation was now sovereign.

Americans and America

That is almost exactly the distinction Garen himself makes. And it’s why I think he asks his historical argument to do too much. He is right that modern nationalism emerged from the liberal and revolutionary upheavals that challenged Europe’s old dynastic order. But he has already conceded that the nation itself is much older. Establishing the liberal genealogy of nationalism therefore doesn’t establish that conserving a nation, preferring one’s fellow citizens, or preserving a national culture is inherently liberal.

The fact that 19th-century Italian nationalists fought against throne and altar does not tell us whether an American in 2026 should believe that America is a real nation, that its government has particular obligations to Americans, or that its inherited culture is worth preserving.

What today’s Christian nationalists generally mean by “nationalism” is not that every ethnic group in America should receive its own sovereign state. They mean something closer to the opposite: They believe Americans themselves constitute a nation, with a particular history and culture rather than merely a common set of administrative boundaries. That nation can include people of different ethnic backgrounds who nevertheless understand themselves to belong to a common people.

They believe citizenship entails obligations that don’t extend equally to every person on earth. They believe a government should prefer the interests of its own people. And Christian nationalists add that Christianity is part of the country’s inheritance and ought to have some meaningful place in its public life.

You can disagree with any or all of that. But pointing out that 19th-century nationalism helped destroy the Habsburg order doesn’t refute it.

Succession concession?

Garen argues that if nationalism is taken seriously as the principle that every distinct people deserves its own sovereign state, then the consistent American nationalist begins to look like a secessionist.

Perhaps. But why must an American nationalist accept that definition? If Americans constitute a nation, there is no nationalist principle requiring the United States to be divided into smaller ethnic republics.

A nation does require common things: a language, institutions, historical memory, loyalties, customs, and some idea of what membership means. It also requires boundaries. A nation that cannot distinguish between its members and everyone else is eventually no nation at all.

Garen’s argument about empires has problems of its own. He observes that the three great powers of the present day — the United States, China, and Russia — are enormous, multi-ethnic states capable of projecting power, while many European nation-states are small, dependent, and demographically declining.

Baby bust

True enough. But size is not the same thing as political health, and empire is hardly a guarantee of permanence. The Austro-Hungarian Empire disappeared. So did the Ottoman Empire. So did the Russian Empire, followed eventually by the Soviet Union. The British Empire once governed roughly a quarter of the world’s population.

Nor is it obvious that Germany’s low birth rate or Italy’s aging population is the consequence of being a nation-state. Russia, one of Garen’s own examples of a successful multi-ethnic empire, faces serious demographic problems of its own.

Garen points to the demographic decline of European nation-states, but he never establishes the causal connection. Why would Italians have more children if Italy were incorporated into a large Christian empire? Whatever is causing the fertility collapse across developed societies, Garen hasn’t shown that the culprit is the nation-state.

But the larger problem with Garen’s argument is his conception of what conservatives are supposed to conserve.

Nostalgia nation

Conservatism cannot simply mean fidelity to the political arrangements of Europe before the French Revolution. Conservatives have to conserve something that actually exists. For an American, that something is not the Habsburg Empire or Bourbon France. It is America.

Our inheritance is messy. It contains Christianity and Enlightenment liberalism, English common law and republicanism, individual rights and civic obligations. There are tensions among those things, and Garen is right to point some of them out.

But we don’t get to choose our inheritance; the conservative question is what we do with it.

And if there is such a thing as an American conservative, he must presumably believe there is an America to conserve.

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Doesn’t it seem like conservatives are always trying to “out-conservative” each other? If you think of yourself as a real-deal, red-blooded conservative, rest assured there’s someone out there ready to tell you you’re not conservative enough.

And more often than not, it’s the self-proclaimed “Christian nationalists” who claim the top spot on the conservative totem pole.

If you care about preserving your people, their country, and their ethnic integrity, then you should not be a nationalist.

It’s a funny phenomenon to me, because If you actually examine it, “Christian nationalism” — and much of the conservative status hierarchy built around it — turns out to be a paradox: a supposedly conservative idea that isn’t conservative at all. And that’s not hyperbole.

Bottom up

Sure, the Christian nationalist’s pitch is that he’s the purest advocate for the normalization and institutionalization of Christianity. He’s staunch on all the “radical” positions (pro-life, anti-gay-marriage, anti-immigration, pro-Jesus), and he’ll tell you the nation needs to be Christian, that the government itself needs to reflect Christian values. He believes he’s a patriot because his beliefs as a Christian reflect the best interests of his nation. It all sounds good on paper.

But let’s forget the “Christian” part for a moment and take a look at “nationalism.”

When we think of a nation, we picture a distinct people who share a history, a culture, and, yes, even a race. Peoples have always belonged to their nations; it’s an ancient biblical concept — and an immutable one.

But nationalism is not the same thing as the “nations” it claims to speak for. Nationalism is a modern political doctrine, and once you trace where it actually came from, you find something the “Christian nationalist” won’t want to hear. It isn’t a conservative idea at all. It’s a liberal one.

Historical nationalism is the doctrine that concerned itself with the feudal peasant’s liberation from his king and church. It’s the idea that a country is governed by the masses of its native people, not the throne and altar. That’s the key distinction here. Political nationalism isn’t necessarily about preserving demographic and cultural integrity, although that is a key component. It’s about the legitimacy and authority of the people of the nation. Under a nationalist framework, the citizen is the sovereign. Authority flows from the bottom up, not the top down.

Vulgar outgrowth

History confirms it. After the French Revolution and the fall of Napoleon, Austrian Chancellor Klemens von Metternich and the Concert of Europe treated nationalism as a vulgar outgrowth of liberalism. The statesmen of the counter-revolution regarded nationalism not as a force for tradition but as one of liberalism’s most dangerous offspring.

That’s because the very concept of “grassroots” legitimacy is, by definition, liberalism. The idea that the underclass of an ethnic enclave can break away from the authority of the king and bishop and carve out their own country has always been (and always will be) a liberal notion. Modern political nationalism is, in many respects, a brand of liberalism draped in a tricolor flag.

Contrast that with how people understand “nationalism” today. When people today hear the word “nationalism,” where their minds usually go to is “race and demographics.” To be a white or Christian nationalist essentially means that you want the majority of the country to be white and Christian.

So then, if we’re to perceive the spirit of the times correctly, what the conservative right really has anxieties about isn’t political nationalism as a legitimacy doctrine, but ethnic integrity. What the majority of people truly want is to preserve their people and their people’s culture, not to necessarily hold the power of kings. These two terms, nationalism and ethnic integrity, definitely overlap and intersect, but they run on separate axes.

It’s important to note this distinction, because I would argue that if you care about preserving your people, their country, and their ethnic integrity, then you should not be a nationalist.

Small and dependent

Why?

Just take a look at what political nationalism has historically accomplished (or hasn’t, for that matter). The European ethnostates of the 19th and 20th centuries were mostly the successor states of the collapsed empires of the ancien regime. Germany, Italy, the Balkan states (you can go down the list) — all these nation-states were the children of liberal nationalist movements that pried their respective populations from the grip of royal authority and carved democratic governments out of them. Freedom and independence for all, or so they say.

But what does this do in reality? It creates security problems. The glaring issue with ethnostates is that they’re no longer large land empires. They’re small and dependent. Whereas these ethnostates would have had their ethnic integrity protected were they part of a larger Christian empire, the modern ethnostate is the fragile vessel that fails to do just that. The old nation that preserved its ethnic integrity inside an empire under throne and altar is swept aside because the people pridefully believe in grassroots self-governance.

Nearly every developed nation-state today faces some combination of demographic decline, economic dependency, or strategic vulnerability. Italy, Ireland, Germany, etc., are struggling to reproduce. Japan and South Korea remain wealthy and technologically advanced, but they too are confronting demographic trajectories that, if left unchecked, will eventually carry profound economic and strategic consequences. Meanwhile, states like Israel remain heavily dependent on the protection and patronage of larger powers.

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Empire state of mind

Meanwhile, who prospers and dictates terms to everybody else? It’s the large, multi-ethnic empires, which primarily consist of the big three: the U.S., Russia, and China. And yes, both Russia and China are multi-ethnic empires. They’re not on the same level of diversity as the U.S., but they sit on the empire side, not the ethnostate side. Although they’re Russo- and Sino-majoritarian in population, they collectively govern Tatars, Chechens, Uyghurs, Turkics, Tibetans, and Mongols, as well as projecting power in their respective spheres.

All three of the major powers are able to project the power that they project and are able to administer the aid that they administer simply because of how big they are and how much they don’t care about being an ethnostate. They care more about being power-projecting empires than being a state with a distinct culture and people.

So if you’re an American, and you’re opining for a more “nationalist” agenda for your country’s future, what you’re really asking for is a balkanization agenda. You want to divvy the country up into smaller countries, each one carved along the lines of a distinct people.

Because when you take it seriously and follow it all the way through, that’s what nationalism is: the principle that every nation, with its own history and blood, deserves its own sovereign state. If nationalism is taken seriously as that principle, then the consistent American nationalist begins to sound like a secessionist. And anyone who is naively tempted by the prospect of secession has no idea how much harder life gets in a much smaller country.

King me

But here’s where the “Christian” half of “Christian nationalism” comes into play. To actually be conservative is to reject bottom-up legitimacy. To the historic integralist tradition within Christianity, legitimacy flows downward from God through throne and altar rather than upward from the people.

Smuggling a liberal legitimacy doctrine under a Christian banner simply does not fly.

Monarchy, deemed legitimate by the Church, is integralism, which is the opposite of vulgar nationalism. I’m not going to argue here for why Christian monarchism is the correct choice over secular republicanism. The point here is to say that liberalism definitionally is the departure from Christian monarchism. If you disagree with that, then you’re unaware of your own nation’s ideological genealogy.

Tugged in two directions

So what’s left?

The Christian nationalist is not a conservative, because his legitimacy runs up from the people rather than down from throne and altar. He’s a liberal who is unaware of his liberalism.

He is not, in any coherent sense, a Christian nationalist, because the faith he invokes is universal monarchism, which would subject multiple ethnic nations to its governance in practice (and thereby securing the integrity of the ethnic enclaves). And he is not an American nationalist either, because political nationalism applied honestly to this country would dismantle it.

So what does the “conservative” American Christian ultimately want?

When you strip it all down, he is tugged in two different directions. The first option is that he wants a large polity united by the Christian faith, reflected in its traditions, customs, and laws from the top down. That option has a name. It’s called Christendom. It is the old Christian monarchical order that 19th-century nationalist revolutions did so much to dismantle. It’s the precise opposite of “We the People” populism.

The other option is that he wants sovereignty and independence for what he considers “his people,” and that would result in a weak, balkanized ethnostate.

Otherwise, you’re stuck with a diverse, secular, and liberal empire.

The irony is that many who call themselves nationalists are, without realizing it, defending a political doctrine born from the same liberal revolution they claim to oppose.

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