The first performance car I ever drove was my mother’s daily driver — a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda 383 convertible, yellow with a black top and black interior.

I was 16, and that car left an impression that has never really gone away. So reviewing the all-new 2026 Dodge Charger Sixpack Plus feels especially timely.

It doesn’t pretend to be the cars I grew up with, but it proves there’s still room for performance, personality, and attitude.

This isn’t a throwback, and it isn’t powered by a V-8 — though I’ll admit I wish it were. Instead, Dodge has reinvented its most recognizable nameplate as a modern, gas-powered performance sedan, blending contemporary technology, standard all-wheel drive, and serious straight-line speed. The question isn’t whether this Charger is fast enough. It’s whether a muscle-car icon can evolve without losing its soul.

Room for V8

Power comes from a 3.0-liter twin-turbo inline-six offered in two configurations: a 420-horsepower version producing 469 lb-ft of torque and a more aggressive 550-horsepower delivering 531 lb-ft. Both pair with an eight-speed automatic transmission and standard all-wheel drive — a major departure for the Charger. Dodge has clearly left physical room under the hood for a possible V-8 revival someday, but for now, this turbo six carries the performance torch convincingly.

On the road, the Charger Sixpack Plus delivers numbers that still feel worthy of the name. Zero to 60 mph takes just 3.9 seconds, the quarter-mile passes in 12.2 seconds, and top speed reaches 177 mph.

Fuel economy is rated at a respectable 20 mpg combined. An active transfer case with front axle disconnect allows the car to change personalities, while a 3.45 rear axle ratio, mechanical limited-slip differential, performance suspension, and Brembo brakes keep this nearly 4,850-pound sedan composed.

Launch Control, Line Lock, and an active exhaust make it clear that Dodge still expects owners to visit the drag strip — an idea reinforced by the complimentary one-day session at the Dodge/SRT High Performance Driving School.

Modern muscle

Inside, the Charger blends muscle-era cues with modern tech in a way that feels deliberate. The leather-wrapped pistol-grip shifter, flat-top and flat-bottom steering wheel, paddle shifters, and 180-mph speedometer nod to the brand’s roots. Uconnect 5 with a 12.3-inch touchscreen, a 10.25-inch digital driver display, wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, and available navigation bring it firmly into the present. The standard nine-speaker Alpine audio system sounds good, while the optional 18-speaker upgrade delivers serious volume and clarity.

Optional packages push the Charger noticeably upmarket. Leather performance seats, heated and ventilated fronts, heated rear seats, a head-up display, surround-view camera system, wireless charging, ambient lighting, Alexa built-in, and a power tilt-and-telescoping steering column all add comfort and convenience.

Despite its performance focus, the Charger remains practical, with seating for five and up to 37 cubic feet of cargo space when the rear seats are folded.

From Bludicrous to Black Top

From the outside, the Charger Sixpack Plus still looks like a modern muscle car. Trims range from R/T Sixpack to Scat Pack and Scat Pack Plus models in both two- and four-door configurations, all with standard all-wheel drive, rear-drive mode, Launch Control, Line Lock, and dual-mode active exhaust.

Options like Bludicrous blue paint, the Black Top Package, available 20-inch wheels wrapped in massive 305-section tires, and a full glass roof let buyers dial in the look. Details such as bi-function LED headlights and key-fob-activated window drop add a layer of polish.

Safety tech is well covered, with standard automated emergency braking, lane-keeping assist, blind-spot monitoring, and adaptive cruise control. Optional front and rear parking sensors and side-distance warning make daily driving easier.

RELATED: Why speed limits don’t make our highways safer

John Chapple/Getty Images

Plenty to like

Pricing for the 2026 Dodge Charger Sixpack Plus ranges from $51,990 to $64,480, with my test vehicle climbing to $68,355 when fully equipped. Warranty coverage includes three years or 36,000 miles bumper-to-bumper and five years or 60,000 miles on the powertrain, though complimentary maintenance isn’t included.

There’s plenty to like here. The 550-horsepower turbo six is genuinely quick, the rear-drive mode adds real fun, and straight-line performance remains a core strength. The downside is weight — the Charger doesn’t feel like a true sports car in corners — and traditionalists will miss the sound and character of a V-8.

Still, in a segment increasingly defined by electrification and downsizing, the 2026 Dodge Charger Sixpack Plus stands as a modern interpretation of American muscle. It doesn’t pretend to be the cars I grew up with, but it proves there’s still room for performance, personality, and attitude in a changing automotive landscape.

​Test drive, Muscle cars, 2026 dodge charger six-pack plus, Dodge, Barracuda, Lifestyle, Auto industry, V8, Align cars 

Muslim immigrants don’t shy away from letting Americans know what their intentions are with our country — and BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales has the video evidence to prove it.

In a man-on-the-street-style clip Gonzales shares from the account Muckracker on X, a young man stops to talk to a group of Muslims in Ohio who happen to be Somali.

“America will become a Muslim state,” one man yells.

“Our goal is to make America Islam,” he yells again.

“That’s not a conspiracy theory. … No, they’re actually saying it very loudly and proudly,” Gonzales says on “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered.”

“They’re, like, right there, right in front of your face, saying all of the quiet parts out loud. But there are a lot more seemingly benign ways that they are infiltrating America to just sort of create this society that’s perfect for them, like, something you wouldn’t expect: our food,” she continues.

And host of the “Hearts of Oak” podcast and former campaign manager for the U.K. Independence Party Peter McIlvenna has been sounding the alarm about this seemingly innocent Trojan horse.

“The Halal food market is a huge thing, I think it’s something like $2.2 trillion globally and going to hit $4.5 trillion within about eight years, 2033, growing at nearly 10% a year. And here in Texas, the big hot spots for halal food are Houston and Dallas, growing around 22% a year,” McIlvenna tells Gonzales.

“And it kind of goes unnoticed, and I call it economic jihad, because it is using the levers of power to [insert] Islam in all areas of society,” he says. “And Islam is very smart as an ideology.”

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

To enjoy more of Sara’s no-holds-barred takes on news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Camera phone, Free, Video phone, Video, Upload, Sharing, Youtube.com, Sara gonzales unfiltered, Sara gonzales, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Islam, Islamic, Somalian, Muslims, Muslim immigrants, Halal food, Peter mcilvenna 

According to Salon, nicotine use is apparently the preserve of stupid men, right up there with weight lifting and a fondness for firearms.

This is how you know a substance is having a moment. When something offers even a modest benefit — focus, alertness, a slight edge — it attracts not curiosity but alarm. The kind usually reserved for the stuff that will actually kill you: heroin, fentanyl, toxic masculinity.

Nicotine is not cigarettes. This distinction matters, though it is treated as apostasy in contemporary wellness discourse. Nicotine, isolated and controlled, has been studied for decades. In small doses, it produces a measurable cognitive lift: sharper attention, faster reaction time, improved working memory.

That isn’t influencer folklore. Far from it. It’s why exhausted academics used it to push through marking and deadlines, why surgeons relied on it during long overnight shifts, and why soldiers carried it in environments where fatigue killed faster than bullets — long before Salon’s feeble attempt to dismiss it as a “scam.”

I use Zyn regularly. It helps me concentrate. That’s the entire story. I don’t feel enlightened. I don’t feel transformed. I don’t feel the urge to start a movement. And, crucially, I don’t feel compelled to use the product in any anatomically creative fashion.

Tucker Carlson, a former Zyn user turned rival nicotine entrepreneur, recently aimed a jab at his old brand, joking that its devotees have abandoned the instructions altogether in favor of a more southern route of administration.

I can’t speak for others. I can only report that I place the pouch exactly where the instructions suggest, write my sentences, and get on with my day. If a shadow subculture of rogue pouch experimentation exists, it has somehow escaped my notice.

Backside-bracing humor aside, the Salon piece really zeroes in on Carlson, quoting him at length and treating his remarks with a gravity usually reserved for Senate hearings.

Carlson has described nicotine as “super important,” arguing that the country has grown sadder and less healthy since it was discouraged and that its return coincides with people seeming, on balance, happier — though it is not entirely clear which people he has been interacting with, given that most Americans currently look one minor inconvenience away from spontaneous combustion.

He has also referred to it — again, with comic exaggeration — as a “life-enhancing, God-given chemical” that can make you “feel better than you’ve ever felt.”

The language is clearly playful, designed to provoke rather than persuade. But exaggeration doesn’t automatically mean error. Mild stimulation can brighten mood and restore alertness, particularly in a culture permanently exhausted by poor sleep and low-grade stress.

In a culture serious about public health, nicotine would barely rate a mention. We’d be too busy going after the sugar cartels poisoning the body politic with obesity and diabetes or the doctors throwing drugs at problems better addressed in the confession booth.

Instead, nicotine is singled out not because it is uniquely hazardous, but because it violates the aesthetic rules of modern wellness as defined by smug, affluent, urban commentators who have never missed a meal or a night’s sleep. To them, nicotine belongs to the wrong people — MAGA rubes, rednecks, bumpkins — rather than credentialed strivers in co-working spaces.

Nicotine stimulates rather than soothes. It activates rather than dulls. It may even nudge testosterone upward, however modestly. And for that social transgression alone, it is treated not as imperfect, but as suspect.

Well, it’s time to push back. Think of nicotine as coffee’s scruffier cousin. Coffee is embraced because it has been ritualized, monetized, and moralized into submission — latte art, loyalty cards, sanctioned dependence. Nicotine, by contrast, still carries the faint scent of agency. It has not been fully tamed, branded, or absolved by consensus. You use it because you want to function better, not because it comes with a yoga mat and a manifesto.

The real scandal is not that influencers exaggerate nicotine’s benefits. Influencers exaggerate everything. They once convinced millions that celery juice could heal trauma. The scandal is that nicotine provokes panic precisely because it works, within limits, for some people.

It requires no subscription or expert guidance. It is relatively cheap, widely available, and stubbornly unimpressed by credentialed gatekeepers. That alone makes it dangerous in a wellness economy built on scarcity, jargon, and endless scams. A substance that delivers a small, practical benefit without demanding anything in return beyond a few dollars isn’t easily controlled — and so it must be pathologized rather than tolerated.

None of this requires indulging the more unhinged claims now circulating online. Nicotine doesn’t cure herpes. It doesn’t raise IQ. It can’t turn a fat, lazy slob into a Navy SEAL. Anyone selling it as a miracle deserves mockery.

But pretending nicotine is uniquely dangerous while applauding sugar binges, SSRIs handed out like breath mints, and total screen immersion is selective hysteria. It’s moral panic dressed up as concern, aimed squarely at the wrong target.

Nicotine is not a lifestyle. It is not an identity, but a tool. Used deliberately, occasionally, it can help certain people think more clearly for a short stretch of time. That is all. The insistence on treating it as either a demonic poison or a sacred molecule is the same mistake from opposite ends of the spectrum.

Let the haters hate. I, like Carlson, will continue to use nicotine. I’ll stick with Zyn, use it occasionally, and — this seems important to clarify — continue to administer it exactly as instructed.

​Culture 

The alternate reality Democrats have constructed is falling apart in real time. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said the following when asked to comment on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shooting a woman in Minneapolis who was attempting to run over the agent with her car: “What we saw today was a criminal, a criminal, murder a woman and shoot her in the head while she was trying to escape and flee for her life.”

She then called “disgusting” the “editorializing” of those who argue that the ICE agent was in front of the car as it was accelerating, just before he fired. “Watch it for yourself, watch it for yourself,” she concluded, with supreme confidence that any viewer would see with the same skew of her own lens.

A significant portion of the American media and popular culture has normalized the idea that totalitarians have taken over the government.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (D) went even harder over the rhetorical cliff in responding to the shooting. He classified interpretations of the ICE officer’s action as self-defense as “bull***t” and demanded that ICE “get the f**k out of Minneapolis.” Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) in New York followed suit, calling the event a “murder” and a “horror.”

It is a stark bit of evidence of how American society has been warped by the twisted rhetoric of the radical left regarding political conflict in our country.

The video from the officer who fired at the vehicle indicates clearly, however, that it was accelerating in his direction, with him close enough to touch the hood. How is it possible to watch video footage and see it as the “murder” of someone “flee[ing] for her life”? The vehicle was illegally blocking a law enforcement vehicle. Instead of complying with the demand to exit the vehicle as any sane person would do, the driver hit the gas, making contact with the law enforcement officer before being shot.

Are we to believe that ICE agents came there precisely to kill her?

The New York Times published a video analysis that supposedly debunks the claim that the agent fired in self-defense. How? Well, the wheels of the SUV turned to the right just in time to avoid hitting the agent. Never mind that the agent was standing just in front of the vehicle when it started to move forward quickly, and he moved to avoid it. By the Times’ logic, the agent would apparently have been justified to use force only after the SUV had hit him.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) said he doubts an FBI investigation of the shooting could reach a “fair outcome.” He’s given no reason why he believes this. But of course, if your view is that all sides not directly aligned with you ideologically are Nazis, this is a logical conclusion.

One might first hypothesize that Ocasio-Cortez, Frey, Walz, Mamdani, and others who share their bizarre interpretation of the evidence are cognitively challenged in some way. We do not wholly discount this possibility.

But the more likely answer is that such things become possible when a significant portion of the American media and popular culture has normalized the idea that totalitarians have taken over the government and are actively looking to kill their opponents. In such a scenario, attempting to run over the totalitarians with your car might not only be an acceptable choice — it might be the most moral one.

The Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin connected the event to the language the far left has been using to describe ICE: “This is the direct consequence of constant attacks and demonization of our officers by sanctuary politicians who fuel and encourage rampant assaults on our law enforcement who are facing [a] 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats.”

There is no doubt that political radicals have been foaming at the mouth about ICE and other aspects of the Trump administration’s policies in the most extremist language. They’ve justified using violence against them even since before the first Trump administration took office.

RELATED: Fraud thrived under Democrats’ no-questions-asked rule

Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

The alleged assassin who murdered Charlie Kirk in September, who was involved in a relationship with a transsexual, had come to believe that Kirk and other conservatives who criticized the overreach of trans radical activism were such a deadly threat that only lethal force was appropriate. He wrote anti-fascist messages on the casings of the bullets he used.

None of this is a surprise in a culture in which American nationalism is seen as the equivalent of Nazism and violent attacks against the Trump administration and its supporters are cheered on and encouraged. And it is not just the explicitly political media that embraces this insanity.

Witness the response to “One Battle After Another,” the recent film by Paul Thomas Anderson, loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Vineland.” Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn, the film cheerleads for a radical anti-fascist terrorist organization as they wage war on American police and immigration forces. Penn is cast in a stupendously comical role as a caricature of which the left never tires: He is a military figure and a white supremacist who nonetheless is sexually attracted to nonwhites. All of the admirable figures in the film are revolutionary terrorists. The response by critics in the mainstream media has been a virtually unanimous cheer.

We are in a dangerous place. Leftist radicals are giving no indication of cooling their rhetoric — or their actions.

Buckle up. It is going to get rougher before it gets better.

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

​Opinion & analysis, Minnesota, Minneapolis, Immigration and customs enforcement, Ice raids, Fascism, Antifa, Leftists, Political violence, One battle after another, Paul thomas anderson, Charlie kirk assassination, Department of homeland security, Tricia mclaughlin, Tim walz, Alexandria ocasio-cortez, New york times, Self-defense, Jacob frey 

From Iran to Jordan to Gaza, former Muslims have been having incredible encounters with Jesus — and it’s happening in their dreams.

“We estimate that about one 1 out of every 3 Muslims that comes to faith in Christ has had a dream or a vision of Jesus. We have maybe half now. There was a team that was in Jordan getting trained from Saudi Arabia on how to do secret church,” Tom Doyle of Uncharted Ministries tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey on “Relatable.”

“Thirty-nine people. They didn’t know each other. They were all from different areas. They found out through the internet. They came to this conference, and the leader asked at the end, ‘How many of you had a dream about Jesus or a vision before you came to faith in Christ?’ All 39,” he explains.

“Over 200 times in the Bible, there were dreams. Maybe he’s using that today,” he adds.

“Why do you think that Jesus seems to be using dreams as a way to communicate with these people?” Stuckey asks.

“Jesus always met people where they were. I mean, you look at the woman with the issue of blood, and she was despised, and he said, ‘Daughter, your faith has healed you.’ He just met her there,” Doyle says.

“How would he be meeting Muslims through dreams? That’s how Islam started. Muhammad went into a cave and had a dream. And he says Jibreel, who is supposed to be Gabriel, downloaded the Quran, which, we don’t believe that’s what happened. We believe it was demonic,” he continues.

Doyle points out that dreaming is seen by Muslims as a “viable way that God can communicate truth to them.”

“And also, the last week in Ramadan, they have a night. … It’s called the night of power or the night of destiny, and Muslims will cry out, ‘God, if you’re there, show me yourself. Come to me in a dream, in a vision,’” Doyle says. “That’s the number one day of the year that Muslims have dreams about Jesus.”

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

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

​Sharing, Camera phone, Video, Video phone, Upload, Free, Youtube.com, Relatable, Allie beth stuckey, Relatable with allie beth stuckey, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Tom doyle, Muslim, Christianity, Christian conversion, Jesus christ, Religious visions, Religious gatherings