The other day, I was making a right turn at a busy intersection, and I almost ran over an elderly woman who stepped into the street unexpectedly.

She had lost her balance because she was crammed together with seven or eight other old people on the street corner.

If these elder protesters are being paid, whoever is hiring them must not care much about their safety.

This odd-looking group was waving to motorists and holding political signs with slogans like: “NO MORE DICTATORS,” “STOP RACISM,” and “NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL.”

I hit the brakes and waited while they helped the lady back onto the curb. Everyone smiled and waved to me. I waved back. They seemed friendly and nice, if not a bit delusional.

Old is new

I’ve seen similar groups in other places. It’s apparently a new trend. Old people randomly gathered on a corner, or on an overpass, or outside a supermarket, holding left-wing signs and waving at cars as they pass by.

The car drivers honk and wave back, and everyone feels good about themselves.

Some people claim these retirement-age protesters are getting paid for their efforts. I don’t know if that’s true. But I have to agree that they look strange and out of place. And not totally authentic.

Welcome to the neighborhood

Usually, these protests take place in affluent, left-leaning areas.

Since there’s so much honking and waving, I assume most people who drive by agree with their message: Trump is bad. Racism is bad. Criticizing open borders is bad.

But if everyone they engage with agrees with them, what exactly is the point of standing out there?

RELATED: ‘Nice to meet you. My kid is gay’: When dads turn ‘support’ into an identity

SOPA Images/Getty Images

The illusion of a dominant left

One reason might be to convince people that the left is firmly in the majority, in your neighborhood and everywhere else.

This is an important project for the left. This is why every late-night talk show audience boos loudly every time the host mentions Trump or anyone in his administration.

You never hear anyone cheer when these people are mentioned. And surely there must be a few conservatives in those audiences.

But no, you only hear boos. I don’t know how the shows do that. Maybe there’s a big “BOO” sign flashing at the audience. Or maybe they are told ahead of time that it’s required. Or maybe the “booing” sound is just edited in.

However they do it, the effect is the same. The right-leaning viewer, watching at home, gets the impression that he or she is in a very small minority. And that the vast majority of Americans hate Trump and his people.

This is not true of course. But the illusion can be effective nonetheless.

This is probably why you see your elderly neighbors standing on street corners: to make you think all your neighbors are leftist and adjust yourself accordingly.

The medium is the message

And what exactly is the message of these elder activists? Their signs are weirdly generic. It doesn’t appear much thought went into them.

Like “No More Dictators.” What’s that supposed to mean? That Trump is a dictator? That all our presidents have been dictators? Last time I checked, American presidents are fairly restricted in their powers.

Trump can’t get his ballroom built. Obama barely got his health care passed. Biden wanted to forgive student loans. And couldn’t.

Do these old people not know what a “dictator” is?

Politics can be fun!

I’ve volunteered for different political actions in my area. I’ve waved signs from the sidewalk. But those were for specific candidates. Or particular ballot measures. We weren’t just spouting random slogans.

I‘ve always enjoyed political activism. It’s a great way to meet other conservatives and learn about the political process.

And interacting with actual voters is always great fun. Going door to door. Talking to people about the issues of the day. Listening to their concerns. Saying hi to their dog.

Old people are especially interesting to visit with. They are often the more independent thinkers, having experienced a wider range of historical events.

Simple. Obvious. Dumb.

But these old people I’m seeing now, they don’t seem to have anything of substance to say. They are more like bad political TV ads come to life. Simple. Obvious. Dumb.

And what about the physical dangers they face? Standing dangerously close to heavily trafficked roadways, exposed to the elements and whatever zombie street people might come along.

That woman who stumbled into the street in front of me? She could have broken her hip!

Call your ombudsman!

If these elder protesters are being paid, whoever is hiring them must not care much about their safety. These old people are apparently expendable.

But that’s classic leftist strategy. Once the minions have served their purpose, they’re tossed aside.

In the meantime, I continue to see these groups of old people lined up along the street, waving their signs, and expressing their tired outrage.

Noam Chomsky called this “manufacturing consent.” I would call it elder abuse.

​Antifa, Aarp, Retirement, Donald trump, No kings, Politics, Lifestyle, Protesters 

Protesters are claiming that Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees have been subject to poor conditions at the Delaney Hall ICE facility in New Jersey and have planted themselves outside the facility for the past week — with many protesters clashing with ICE agents.

“There were these rumors about a hunger strike going on in the ICE facility, and we are now up to day 13 of this alleged hunger strike. Now, that’s like dangerous territory. People aren’t eating for 13 days. That’s life-threatening. I would say that’s a problem,” Gonzales says.

“Their conditions are so terrible that they’re protesting,” she continues, noting that Democrats are claiming there’s “medical neglect,” “lack of sanitation,” and “spoiled food.”

“You’re going to be shocked to hear none of that is actually true. There is no hunger strike,” Gonzales says.

A post from Jennie Taer on X reads: “New data obtained by The Daily Wire shows that commissary sales at Delaney Hall surged 161% during the so-called ‘hunger strike’ rising from $11,498 on May 26 to $30,013 on June 1. While snack sales jumped, the detainee population fell from 724 to 621 during that same time period.”

The Department of Homeland Security quote tweeted Taer’s post, writing: “The hunger strike HOAX was actually just Delaney Hall detainees trading nutritious meals for Honey Buns and Hot Cheetos. It’s time for sanctuary politicians to drop the political theater and work with us to get criminal illegal aliens OUT of our communities.”

However, Democrats like Reps. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) and LaMonica McIver (N.J.) do not care about the stats.

“Here in America, immigration enforcement should be fair, just, and humane. That’s not what’s going on here at Delaney Hall. We spoke to several individuals, none of whom has a criminal record, many of whom have been detained here at Delaney Hall for months. Delaney Hall should be shut down,” Jeffries said in a video uploaded to social media, where he’s standing outside the facility alongside McIver.

“And every single individual, particularly those at a high level connected to this facility, they’re engaging in a depraved indifference to human life. And every single member of this Trump administration is going to be held accountable,” he added.

“Hakeem, the problem for you is every single one of them actually are criminals because they’re here illegally. It’s the ‘I’ and the ‘L’ that go in front of the word legally that actually indicates to you that they are in fact criminals. All of them,” Gonzales comments.

“Also, I love that LaMonica, she already looks like she’s in prison. She’s already dressed for prison, I guess,” she adds.

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​Sara gonzales, Ice, Illegal immigration, Hunger strike, Delaney hall ice facility, Hakeem jeffries, Lamonica mciver, Sara gonzales unfiltered, New jersey 

As the nation approaches what looks like a weak and divided commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, another milestone has arrived with little acclaim. Today marks the 239th anniversary of the introduction of the Bill of Rights in the U.S. House of Representatives.

It should be a day of celebration every year. The Bill of Rights is one of the most important documents in human history. James Madison, one of the nation’s central founders and a future two-term president, introduced it in Congress on June 8, 1787.

We have less than half a decade to avert a fiscal collapse of the federal government and the social and economic destruction that would follow.

The central lesson of the Bill of Rights lies in Madison’s purpose: to bind every level of government to one overriding mission — protecting individual rights against majority tyranny.

The Bill of Rights Institute summarizes Madison’s concern well. Before the Constitutional Convention, Madison wrote “Vices of the Political System,” an essay detailing the flaws of the Articles of Confederation. One of the chief defects, in his view, was that tyrannical majorities in the states passed unjust laws violating the rights of minorities. He had seen the oppression of religious dissenters in Virginia and became the leading advocate for the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

At the Constitutional Convention, Madison argued for separation of powers, checks and balances, bicameralism, and federalism as safeguards for liberty. But he lost one key feature of his plan: a national veto over state laws meant to prevent majority tyranny in the states.

Today, we are light-years away from Madison’s vision and from the founders’ plan to protect it. Neither Madison nor anyone else could force the American people and their governments to live within the letter and spirit of the Constitution and the common law. The founders could only encode their vision into the Constitution, laws, and judicial precedents, then hope later generations would preserve it.

They often have not.

In 1840, only a half-century into the American experiment, Alexis de Tocqueville anticipated the rise of “soft despotism” in the United States. He saw that the passion for equality could erode devotion to natural law, natural rights, and self-government.

Tocqueville warned of a sovereign power that takes each individual “into its powerful hands” and covers society with “a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules.” Such power, he wrote, “does not tyrannize” but “hinders, represses, enervates, extinguishes,” and finally reduces the nation to “a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

He also warned that this mild, regulated servitude could exist “in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.”

That is the danger America now faces.

Tocqueville foresaw that citizens might voluntarily give up sovereignty in exchange for temporary economic stability and government largesse extracted from their neighbors. In doing so, they would surrender the things that made the nation great: self-rule, protection against majority coercion, voluntary association, free enterprise, and ultimately each person’s dignity as a unique human being.

RELATED: The timeless truths behind the Declaration of Independence

Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images

Restoring respect for the Bill of Rights and the founders’ vision is essential if we hope to rescue the United States from the soft despotism into which the American experiment has devolved — and from the harder totalitarianism toward which it now hurtles.

Documents and laws alone will not achieve that. In our present decline, the only way to reverse the slide is to remove the temptation that feeds it: the ability of majorities at all levels of government to vote themselves ownership over other people’s property, liberties, and lives.

In an ironic turn, the United States may now be approaching a resolution of sorts: the collapse of the national government’s ability to pay for everything Congress, presidents, and courts have promised Americans over the past century and a half.

Entitlements such as Social Security, food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, federal housing subsidies, and other national bribes have become insupportable. They now threaten a debt spiral as high interest rates and inflation weaken the economy and erode the government’s tax base.

The federal debt has already risen above 100% of gross domestic product — the nation’s entire annual economic output. More ominously, the debt is accelerating. The total now sits just short of $40 trillion. It is projected to rise to $55 trillion by 2031, an increase of more than one-third in five years. By 2036, it is projected to reach $77 trillion, nearly doubling in a decade.

Meanwhile, federal and state governments have steadily eroded individual rights, freedom of association, free enterprise, election integrity, and countless other safeguards of liberty.

This is the outcome of majority tyranny. We have less than half a decade to avert a fiscal collapse of the federal government and the social and economic destruction that would follow. What would arise from such a catastrophe is impossible to know.

History offers little comfort. The chances are strong that whatever replaced our flawed yet hardy constitutional system would not resemble the order our forefathers established in the 1700s. A nation founded on individual rights and self-government could vanish from the earth.

That is what Americans must confront as we approach another election season and another referendum on our founding values.

​Bill of rights, Soft despotism, James madison, America 250, Constitutional convention, Articles of confederation, American government, Founding fathers, Opinion & analysis 

The next time one hears of virtue, honor, and “the profession of arms” in the U.S. military, one should ask whether those words still mean anything.

Consider a military in which the highest flag ranks sell influence for future employment, commanders conspire to steal optics before deployment, soldiers loot their own supply rooms, chiefs sell night-vision devices online, officers defraud grieving families, and bureaucrats steal money meant for military children.

Petty theft below, influence peddling above, and a thick frosting of platitudes about honor everywhere.

It sounds like Russia — a kleptocratic band of mercenaries where the uniform is just another way to get paid. The officer corps that emerges from this culture is not simply politically adrift, but morally unformed.

Institutions designed to form officers became institutions designed to credential them.

As Alasdair MacIntyre argued in “After Virtue” — the most important book the military profession has not read — although we still use the words “honor,” “duty,” and “integrity,” we have lost the traditions that gave those words their content.

We are, MacIntyre argues, like the survivors of a catastrophe who have salvaged pieces of a scientific textbook without retaining the theories that made them coherent. This describes the average Army values poster.

The loss of the military’s honor culture is exemplified in its typical response to an ethics scandal, which follows a predictable liturgy. A stand-down is called for. A policy is updated. A general delivers remarks about what the uniform represents. Yet nothing changes because the problem is not a deficit of information. It is a deficit of formation.

MacIntyre’s insight is that virtue and honor — the public recognition of virtue — cannot be transmitted through instruction alone. They require practices: socially established, cooperative activities with internal standards of excellence conducted within institutions that have a coherent sense of purpose.

Honorable officers are made by placing them inside a community where virtue is demanded, rewarded, and — critically — where its absence is punished publicly and without mercy.

The Army values and their equivalents are the ghosts of morality: a past civilization’s catechism recited by an institution that can no longer summon the world that made them intelligible.

The linguistic evidence is all around. No one says “that’s dishonorable” anymore — not in barracks, not in the Pentagon, not in the pages of professional military journals. The word survives only as a legal term, a bureaucratic category. As something one man could say to another’s face and have it land, honor has been mocked entirely out of the language.

You can call a fellow officer unethical, unprofessional, or toxic. But call him dishonorable, and you sound like you wandered in from a Patrick O’Brian novel. MacIntyre’s point drives this home: An institution cannot enforce a norm whose name has become a joke.

RELATED: The Pentagon is blowing a fortune fighting bargain-bin drones

Jordon R. Beesley/U.S. Navy/Getty Images

Honor factories

It was not always this way. For most of American military history until very recently, West Point and Annapolis stamped honor into young men through consequences so immediate and so public that the culture became self-enforcing. A cadet who lied, cheated, or stole did not receive counseling or remedial training. He was gone, and the entire corps knew what had happened and why.

Honor functioned because shame functioned, and shame requires witnesses.

The results were not incidental. The officer corps that fought from Cold Harbor to Normandy was decisively shaped by such institutions. These were not perfect men. But they were men whose relationship to honor had been formed by years of practice.

At the service academies, honor adjudication has become increasingly legalistic, with due-process protections, administrative review, and all sorts of punishment short of separation now built into the system.

The total institution — Erving Goffman’s term for an organization with sufficient control over its members’ lives to form their character — is systematically liberalized into an expensive state college with uniforms. Honor talk remains in the brochure, but the machinery around it treats dishonor as an adjudicative problem rather than a communal rupture.

No civilizational catastrophe forced a reckoning with what courage and loyalty meant. In conditions of relative peace and institutional stability, the honor culture of the services was eaten away within a single generation.

The post-Vietnam civilianization of military culture brought enormous external pressure to make the academies more like the universities they competed with for talent. Overreaching judicial decisions through the 1970s and 1980s extended due process protections to cadets that made swift, public expulsion essentially impossible.

The rise of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the 1990s introduced the concern that strict honor enforcement produced disparate outcomes that disadvantaged certain populations.

Each of these pressures was arguable in isolation. Taken together, they achieved something none of them individually intended: institutions designed to form officers became institutions designed to credential them. Formation requires the authority to demand, correct, and, if necessary, expel. Credentialing requires only that the student complete the program.

The good news is that these are policy choices, and while they can theoretically be reversed, they will be difficult to undo. Unlike military revolutions of the past, which left wreckage that demanded reconstruction, this one is comfortable — and lucrative.

Rebuilding the culture

The service academies are the only total institutions remaining in the American military enterprise. If honor cannot be rebuilt there, it cannot be rebuilt anywhere — because nowhere else in the military does an institution have sufficient formative authority to do the necessary work.

What restoration looks like is not complicated. Public consequences for honor violations being swiftly administered and witnessed by the community. Superintendents having the moral courage to empower an honor system run by cadets with genuine authority to separate their peers, not a board whose findings are subject to administrative review and legal appeal.

A culture in which the response to a classmate’s dishonor is not sympathy but shame — for him and, if they tolerated it, for those around him.

The non-toleration clause of the honor code — a cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do — was once the Sword of Damocles. It made the entire corps complicit in enforcement rather than being diluted by heavy-handed oversight.

RELATED: How ‘wet noodle Christians’ surrendered America to Marxists

Paul Marotta/Getty Images

When a cadet violated the honor code at the Virginia Military Institute, the cadet commander would formally assemble the corps and announce: “Cadet X has been found guilty of an honor violation. His name will never again be spoken within the walls of this institution.” And then the drumming out — the cadet was brought to the center of the quad, marched to the gate, and thrown out.

In 2021, amid legal concerns and political pressure during a state-ordered racism investigation, VMI stopped naming expelled cadets during the drum-out.

Shame requires an audience. When you remove the audience, you remove the shame. When you do that, you remove the social technique that humanity used for thousands of years to enforce honor from the inside out rather than ineffectively from the top down.

Consequences must communicate to every observer that dishonor is not a career setback but social death. The burden of proof is entirely on those who would defend the present arrangement, which produces flag officers who leave public service under a cloud, pass through a mild embarrassment ritual, and reappear almost immediately as best-selling authors, board members, fellows, or global-security sages.

The academies cannot do this alone, and no honest argument claims they can, but they are the only place left where the military has the authority to begin.

When institutions fail to enforce virtue through honor, the only remaining answer is the man who enforces it from within — who understands that he cannot be responsible for the Army, but is unconditionally responsible for himself and refuses to be complicit in his own degradation.

The ultimate purpose of the service academies is to produce military officers who win without losing their souls in the process. We are not made to be machine men with machine hearts. We were made for something greater.

What is required is deep and far-reaching — a national renaissance, a rebirth on the 250th anniversary of America, out of the conviction that there are things worth being, not merely things worth having.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the American Mind.The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the views or positions of the U.S. Army, the Department of War, or any part of the U.S. government.

​Us military, Military academies, Honor culture, Honor code, West point, Dei, Alasdair macintyre, Army values, Annapolis, Service academies, Opinion & analysis 

A 98-year-old was brutally beaten inside his Brooklyn apartment building amid an argument earlier this week — and police said they’re searching for the female culprit.

Investigators said the female responsible for the attack punched, kicked, and struck the elderly victim with a broomstick and metal chair inside his apartment building in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, News 12 Brooklyn reported.

The beating is yet another in a stretch of attacks involving older Brooklyn residents.

The attack took place around 4 p.m. Thursday, the station said.

Investigators released video showing the woman appearing to drop off flyers at a building, News 12 Brooklyn reported, adding that investigators said the woman on the video is the person they’re trying to identify.

Investigators told the station that the 98-year-old man had just entered the apartment building when he got into an argument with the female.

Then the verbal spat reportedly became violent, the station added.

RELATED: Video: Female bully towers over and beats up elderly woman on Florida bus. Victim is left ‘battered and bruised’: Sheriff

Investigators told News 12 Brooklyn that the woman repeatedly punched and kicked the elderly man — and then she began hitting him with a broomstick and a metal chair.

She then ran from the building and headed east on Maple Street, the station said.

Despite the brutal beatdown, the victim suffered only minor injuries and was treated at the scene, News 12 Brooklyn reported.

New York City police are looking for the suspect, CBS News added.

The beating is yet another in a stretch of attacks involving older Brooklyn residents, News 12 Brooklyn said, adding that a 72-year-old man was punched multiple times in the face in Brownsville last week — and just days later, an 83-year-old woman was slashed in the head while walking to church.

No arrests have been announced in this latest case, News 12 Brooklyn said, adding that those who recognize the woman seen in the video are asked to contact Crime Stoppers.

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​Physical attack, 98-year-old victim, Nypd, Brooklyn, New york city, Female suspect, Brutal beating, Crime 

As the Texas Senate race heats up between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton, BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey feels compelled to remind Texas voters of Talarico’s moral failings — which are anything but small.

These moral failures are reflected even in the church he attends, St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Austin, which was recently exposed by the Daily Wire for having “explicit LGBTQ books in its bookstore aimed at children.”

Stuckey calls the books “basically pornographic,” as they contained “illustrations of sexual acts.”

The church is also an “ardent supporter of Planned Parenthood.”

“He also has his own kind of personal scandal that we very unfortunately had to read about last November in the New York Post. They found that he was following on his official account at least 10 OnlyFans models,” Stuckey explains.

The Democrat had liked multiple sultry photos posted by at least one of the accounts and exchanged private messages with another.

“If we’re already liking accounts and messaging OnlyFans models as a professing Christian, like we obviously have a sexual immorality issue going on there,” Stuckey says.

But that’s not even close to all of what Talarico’s done.

“He has repeatedly blasphemed God, saying God is nonbinary … he’s advocated for the gender mutilation surgeries of kids. He has pushed for the killing of unborn babies through abortion,” Stuckey explains.

“And these aren’t just policies … this is Talarico’s rejection of God’s order, rejection of God’s justice, his order of male and female, his desire to strip innocent babies of the right to life. It’s a spiritual position. It’s a theological position. And his politics are just downstream from the immorality and the corruption that’s in his heart,” she continues.

While Stuckey admits that Ken Paxton also has moral failings, these failings don’t bleed into policy the same way Talarico’s do.

“Talarico is very pro-abortion … he votes on the side of lax abortion laws and against any measure to protect the life of unborn children,” she says, pointing out that he has said he is pro-abortion “because” of his “faith.”

In an interview on “The Jamie Kern Lima Show,” Talarico explained that he trusts Texas women “to make decisions about their own bodies, to shape their own destinies in consultation with their family members, their doctors, their faith leaders.”

“I don’t believe that’s a place for government. That’s a belief I hold not despite my faith, but because of my faith. Jesus never talks about abortion. The Bible is silent on abortion. And when that happens with a social issue as important as abortion, we Christians have to take Scripture as a wholem and we’ve got to try to make some kind of ethical determination,” he added.

“I just want to remind you,” Stuckey comments, disturbed, “that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.”

“So don’t allow his humble-seeming, gentle-sounding disposition and tone of voice fool you into thinking that this is reasonable or biblical,” she adds.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

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More Americans are turning to chatbots with their hardest questions, often before they turn to anyone else. Grief, guilt, whether to leave a marriage, whether God is real — the questions people once carried to church now go into the text box.

So it matters a great deal what the text box says back. New work from researchers at Brigham Young University, gathered under a group called the Consortium for Evaluation of Faith and Ethics in AI, suggests the answer should trouble anyone who takes faith seriously.

Lies of omission

They built a test called the AllFaith Benchmark, which included hundreds of real moral questions drawn from religious communities, and ran it through the major models: ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. The pattern held across all of them. Asked about death, forgiveness, or the meaning of a life, the machines reached for secular, generic answers and left faith out of the equation. The omission was systematic. It showed up steadily, measurably, and every time the test ran.

A third of American adults already rate spiritual advice from AI as trustworthy as a pastor’s.

Why does an absence matter this much? Because these tools do more than recite facts. They frame what counts as a reasonable answer. When a model treats the believer’s answer as clutter to clear away, it teaches a lesson, never stated outright, about which replies belong in serious conversation and which can be skipped.

Iterate that process at scale, and entire generations get a reshaped sense of what a thoughtful person, or even a soulful person, sounds like.

That deep-seated formation was once the province of the Christian wisdom that built the West. The conviction that every person carries equal worth, and that even kings answer to a law above their own, entered Western civilization through the Church and outlasted the doctrinal quarrels that produced it. Among the great civilizational faiths, none shaped this part of the world the way Christianity did.

Spiritual appropriation

A second finding goes deeper, and it’s considerably stranger. A researcher named Tim Hwang recently took a model and did something close to an MRI on it, watching its inner workings while it ran. He gave it a simple prompt, “As a Christian,” and watched what changed. What changed was a single switch. Begin a prompt with those words, and one specific, dormant part of the model wakes up and fires the same way, no matter what follows.

Ask it whether lying is wrong, ask it to describe a sofa, and the response shifts in the same direction both times. The switch does two things. It pushes religious words to the front, such as God, Jesus, and prayer. It also pushes absolute words like always, never, and not to the front. That’s the entire performance. When this model acts Christian, it grabs holy vocabulary and a hard, certain tone, whether you ask about salvation or seating. The model believes nothing. It speaks with fluent reverence and flawless conviction, but possesses neither.

RELATED: It’s not easy being pope — Leo’s big new tech encyclical proves it

ANDREAS SOLARO/Getty Images

The machine has decided that Christian identity comes down to holy phrases delivered with real conviction. Absent from that picture is everything a believer would claim as the substance of it: grace, mercy, humility, patience — and the slow, unglamorous labor of moral reasoning.

This would be a harmless oddity if these systems stayed in a lab. But they don’t. They pulse in the pocket of nearly every teenager in America, fielding questions about sex and suffering and forgiveness long before a parent or pastor hears a word of it. And they’re not asking ironically. A recent survey found that a third of American adults already rate spiritual advice from AI as trustworthy as a pastor’s, a number that climbs to two in five among Gen Z and Millennials. When someone types “what does Christianity say about this,” the machine answers.

Simulating salvation

They get the surface and miss the center, and they never notice the gap, because the answer is convincing. A pastor who got the faith this wrong would be corrected, possibly even banished, by Sunday. The chatbot answers 10,000 times an hour, and no one corrects it at all. That’s the trouble with a good fake. It doesn’t look fake. And people want to believe.

Christians have argued for centuries upon centuries that faith lives in the heart, that a man can say every right word and mean none of them. The machine has now built, by accident or by design (I’ll let you decide), a virtual likeness of exactly that man, who can preach but cannot believe. So the worry is simple. People are learning Christianity from a system that has mastered the motions and missed the whole point.

Smashing the machine is a fantasy, so put the fantasy away. The work that remains is teaching the people forming their faith how to tell the difference between a voice that lives the faith and one that has only read about it.

​Faith, Lifestyle, Culture 

For many Christians, the world seems impossibly dark right now. The scale of abortion is truly massive, with over 1.1 million per year in the U.S. alone. There has been an explosive rise in occult and pagan practices, human trafficking continues as a multibillion-dollar industry, and Christian persecution — especially in parts of Africa — has led to the deaths of thousands. Wars rage in multiple regions, while record levels of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation disproportionately impact today’s youth.

Many feel crushed by the weight of the world’s depravity and wonder if things will only get worse.

But Rick Burgess, BlazeTV host of the spiritual warfare podcast “Strange Encounters,” offers hope against the oppressive darkness: Revival is also happening.

Rick points to a powerful example at Joby Martin’s Church of Eleven22 in Jacksonville, Florida. Last month, at the church’s annual Beach Baptism held at Hanna Park, 2,552 people were baptized in the Atlantic Ocean — the largest single-day baptism in the church’s 14-year history and a significant jump from nearly 2,000 the year before. Over 14,000 people gathered for the event.

“[Martin] said that these were numbers that they had not seen before, and most of these people were young people,” he says.

Rick explains what’s happening right now on the spiritual plane.

“[Satan] always overplays his hand, and what he’s doing right now with this revival of evil — it’s actually working detrimentally against his plan,” he says.

“Now we have a generation of young people … they’ve looked at this overplaying of evil’s hand and saying, ‘If this is the best that a fallen world can offer me, I don’t want it. I’m going to Jesus,”’ he continues.

Rick believes Eleven22’s record-breaking numbers are part of a larger movement, especially among younger men, who are rejecting the emptiness of modern culture and turning toward authentic faith instead.

In the midst of widespread moral confusion and spiritual darkness, moments like the Eleven22 baptisms serve as a powerful reminder that God is still at work — and that light often shines brightest when the darkness seems overwhelming.

To hear more, watch the full episode above.

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​Strange encounters, Rick burgess 

As we approach our nation’s 250th birthday, Americans will be doing a lot of celebrating. They will honor not only the fact of our independence and nationhood, but also the political thought that shaped America’s founding struggle for freedom. Special attention will be paid, of course, to our Declaration of Independence.

But some may be rather cool to celebrating the Declaration’s doctrine of universal truths, such as the equality of all human beings in their natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Declaration has become a source of controversy among some younger conservatives who came of age during the Trump era.

The New Right’s dissatisfaction with the Declaration’s universalism is an understandable — but mistaken — reaction to various political misuses of America’s founding creed in recent decades.

There is no conflict between the Declaration’s universal principles and the New Right’s America First nationalism.

The older generation of conservatives who grew up admiring Ronald Reagan love to boast about America’s defense of universal truths. The New Right has argued that this rhetorical approach has not served the conservative political movement or the country well.

The Reaganite message, so powerful in the late 20th century, proved unable to keep winning national elections in the 21st. As a result, conservatives ceded political power to a Democratic Party and a left wing increasingly committed to an alarming agenda of social and cultural transformation.

The old-guard conservatives could not beat the Obama coalition. Moreover, their excessive preoccupation with America’s commitment to universal moral principles harmed the nation’s interests — and the interests of many Americans, especially those of the working class — in areas such as immigration, trade, and foreign policy.

In response, the New Right developed its now well-known message of American nationalism in the wake of Trump’s victory in 2016. They have embraced an “America First” agenda that places the social and economic well-being of its citizens at the center of national policy.

This stands in sharp contrast to the older conservatism, which tended to approach immigration, trade, and foreign policy in light of the country’s universal moral commitments as expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

The New Right’s recalibration proved politically successful: witness President Trump’s electoral victories in 2016 and 2024. But such success breeds criticism, and many on the left and among the older conservative establishment have condemned the new nationalism as a betrayal of the Declaration’s universal principles. Such criticism has, no doubt, deepened the New Right’s skepticism of the Declaration.

What are we to make of all this?

The New Right is correct to reject superficial and politically unhelpful misappropriations of the Declaration. Its members are justified in repudiating suggestions that America is just a political “idea” with no particular and concrete interests. And they are correct to dismiss claims that the Declaration’s universal principles require us to embrace immigration, trade, and foreign policies at odds with the well-being of our own citizens.

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It would be a terrible mistake, however, for the New Right to go farther and reject the Declaration itself.

Such rejection is, in the first place, unnecessary. Contrary to the self-serving hectoring from the left and the old-guard conservatives, there is no conflict between the Declaration’s universal principles and the New Right’s America First nationalism. Those principles do not require the open-borders moralism preached by globalists of all stripes.

The Declaration asserts the great and universal truth that all human beings are equal in their natural rights. However, it nowhere asserts that everyone has a natural right to enter a political community of which he is not already a member, much less a natural right to become a citizen of that community.

The founders and subsequent generations of Americans regulated immigration according to the nation’s needs and interests rather than a fanciful moral obligation to accept all who want to come here.

Nor does the Declaration rule out an America First trade policy. Its philosophical framework was influenced by John Locke, in particular his claim that all human beings have a natural right to “life, liberty, and property.” None of these rights, however, entails a right to engage in trade across national borders.

Indeed, Locke’s Second Treatise makes clear that government, once established by the consent of the governed, would regulate foreign trade in the nation’s interests. The founders reflected this understanding in the Constitution by vesting Congress with the power to regulate foreign commerce.

Finally, nothing in the Declaration requires the U.S. government to promote democracy abroad or undermine tyrannies in foreign lands.

The Declaration famously teaches that a people can appeal to the right of revolution when their government is determined to destroy their individual rights and subject them to despotism. That right, however, must be exercised with “prudence” by the people living under a tyrannical government — not by the people of another nation.

Nothing in the Declaration indicates that America or any nation has a right — much less a duty — to liberate other nations from their tyrannical regimes and to impose on such peoples all the costs of a revolution that cannot be certain of success.

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The Declaration teaches that America’s foreign policy needs to be guided by our reasonable and just interests, the star by which founding-era statesmen such as Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison steered the ship of state.

Indeed, the Declaration itself affirms a kind of nationalism. Before turning to the political theory in its famous second paragraph, it teaches that peoples or nations are not mere artificial contrivances but instead exist in contemplation of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”

They have a right to a “separate and equal station” among the other “powers of the earth.” In other words, every people has a right to control its own political fate. Read as a whole, the Declaration is as much an affirmation of the sovereignty of nations as of the rights of individuals.

There is, then, no reason for the proponents of America First nationalism to reject the universal principles of the Declaration of Independence. In fact, to do so would be a grave mistake. However abused or misunderstood, those principles are a foundational and vital element of America’s political identity.

It is no part of the duty or interest of any movement of the political right — or of any movement governed by sobriety and caution, not to mention gratitude for what one has inherited — to reconstruct the identity of one’s own nation.

An America indifferent to the universal principles of the Declaration would no longer be the America we have all been blessed to inherit — and that we all have an obligation to preserve.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.

​Declaration of independence, Nationalism, Trump, America first, Ronald reagan, John locke, Democrats, New right, American founding, Founding fathers, Foreign policy, Opinion & analysis