Iowa voters cast their ballots in the primary election on Tuesday, determining two of the state’s highest-profile November matchups, including the open gubernatorial race and an open U.S. Senate seat.

Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) announced in April 2025 that she would not seek a third term. In Sept., U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst (R) announced that she would also not seek re-election.

‘We now have the most Republicans ever. … There is no excuse for [Democratic] turnout to exceed ours here, but if that happens again … uh-oh.’

Five Republicans faced off in Iowa’s primary election, seeking to succeed Reynolds.

A survey conducted by JMC Analytics and Polling from May 27 to 28 predicted that the Republican gubernatorial primary may head to a convention, with none of the candidates able to secure the required 35% of the vote.

Of those surveyed, 24% stated that they would vote for businessman and former conservative political director Zach Lahn, 22% selected state Rep. Randy Feenstra, 15% selected former director of the state Department of Administrative Services Adam Steen, 8% selected former state Rep. Brad Sherman, and 4% selected state Rep. Eddie Andrews. However, 27% of those surveyed said they remained undecided.

Feenstra was endorsed by President Donald Trump, who called the candidate “MAGA all the way!”

Live ballot tabulations showed Lahn and Feenstra in a tight race on Tuesday evening.

With roughly 90% of the votes counted and Lahn leading by approximately 1,400 votes, BlazeTV’s Steve Deace stated, “I’ve seen enough. @ZachLahn will be the GOP nominee for governor in Iowa.”

Decision Desk HQ projected at 11:30 p.m. Eastern that Lahn would win the election against challenger Feenstra. With 98% of the votes counted, Lahn led Feenstra by less than one percentage point, according to the Associated Press. Lahn secured over 37% of the vote, avoiding a state party convention previously predicted by the polls.

Feenstra reportedly called Lahn Tuesday evening to concede.

Lahn will face uncontested Democratic nominee Rob Sand in the upcoming November 3 general election.

RELATED: A storm is brewing in Iowa — and Republicans should take note: ‘There are danger signs’

Ashley Hinson; KC McGinnis/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Former state Rep. Jim Carlin and Trump-backed U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson went head-to-head on Tuesday seeking to become the Republican nominee to fill Ernst’s open seat in the Senate.

The same poll from JMC Analytics and Polling showed 58% of those surveyed were planning to vote for Hinson and that Carlin trailed behind by 39 percentage points. However, 23% of respondents stated they were still undecided.

On Tuesday, Hinson pulled off a massive victory against Carlin in the election. Roughly 30 minutes after the polls closed, Hinson was projected to be the winner by NBC News and the Associated Press. With 99% of the ballots counted, Hinson won by over 48 percentage points.

State Rep. Josh Turek won the Democratic primary race against state Sen. Zach Wahls to battle it out against Hinson on the November ballot.

RELATED: Pro-life senator announces she will not seek re-election

Zach Wahls; Charlie Neibergall/Getty Images

Heading into Election Day, Deace shared his thoughts on the Iowa races and their national implications.

“We better hope the Democrats follow their heart with Zach Wahls and not their heads with Josh Turek, because the latter has run the best and most inspiring messaging I’ve seen from a Democrat statewide in Iowa in many years,” Deace wrote in a post on X. “Wahls is a construct of every Leftist fetish normies vote against if the economy isn’t totally in the tank. But if Turek is their nominee, the US Senate race in Iowa will be a way tougher pull for our side this fall. He gives normies a reason to vote for him and not just against Trump.”

He noted that Democratic voter turnout nationwide has far surpassed Republicans, which he called an obvious “potential danger sign for November.”

“But here in Iowa, we now have the most Republicans ever and more than a 200,000 voter registration advantage. There is no excuse for their turnout to exceed ours here, but if that happens again … uh-oh,” Deace added.

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​News, Iowa, Kim reynolds, Joni ernst, Zach lahn, Randy feenstra, Adam steen, Brad sherman, Eddie andrews, Jim carlin, Ashley hinson, Donald trump, Josh turek, Zach wahls, Politics, Primary 

Scott Pelley, a 68-year-old liberal who claimed in a commencement speech last year that “you only lose if you quit,” has been a fixture at CBS News since 1989.

Although he was ousted as the anchor of “CBS Evening News” in 2017 — allegedly because he complained “to management about the hostile work environment,” though his ratings also stank — Pelley clung to another position at the network, working for nearly a decade as a correspondent on “60 Minutes.”

CBS News kicked Pelley to the curb for good on Tuesday — a day after the talking head reportedly volunteered a number of criticisms of the network’s choices and personnel.

‘I have been in combat.’

At a Monday staff meeting in Manhattan, Pelley hammered Nick Bilton, a newly hired executive producer on “60 Minutes,” for his “slender” qualifications and characterized Bari Weiss, the blogger turned CBS News editor in chief, of being a hatchet man who is “murdering” the show and lacks a love for “this place,” reported the New York Times.

Bilton, an English-born filmmaker and former tech columnist who apparently has no broadcast news experience, announced on Tuesday, “We have parted ways with Scott Pelley.”

The purportedly slenderly qualified producer said in a missive to Pelley obtained by the Times,

I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the 60 Minutes veterans, with you among them. For that reason, one of the first things I did in my new role was call you to talk and invite you to dinner. It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt.

Bilton claimed that while he supposedly welcomes “a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate,” Pelley’s “performative display of hostility” demonstrated that he has “no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress.”

RELATED: Polarization may be the cure — and the clarity — America needs

Bari Weiss. Noam Galai/Getty Images

After emphasizing that Pelley’s “antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear,” Bilton told the liberal that his employment was “terminated for cause effective immediately.”

Pelley, who complained in a woke speech last year that “journalism is under attack,” wasted no time reminding everyone of his bravery and “devotion” to journalism.

“I have been in combat in Afghanistan,” he told the Times in a phone interview after his termination, referring to his time as a war reporter while other men actually engaged in combat operations. “I have been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast.”

Pelley claimed that Bilton’s letter “betrays a complete misunderstanding of what we work for and what we live for at ’60 Minutes.'”

Earlier in the day, the ex-CBS News correspondent stated that the “incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc” at CBS News, adding that the “collapse of values at the top has become untenable.”

Pelley claimed further in another statement that the new owner of the network — Paramount Skydance — was casting aside the “legend” of “60 Minutes” in an effort to “curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.” He claimed further that new management had instructed him to “inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.”

CBS News did not immediately respond to Blaze News’ request for comment.

Now with Pelley out and Anderson Cooper having bailed out last month, the “60 Minutes” roster of correspondents includes Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim.

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​Scott pelley, Cbs news, 60 minutes, Liberal media, Msm, Bari weiss, Journalism, Media, Fake news, Politics 

Henry Nowak, a white teenager headed for home in the Southampton suburb of Portswood, England, was savagely attacked on Dec. 3 by a knife-wielding Sikh named Vickrum Digwa.

The attacker stabbed Nowak several times, filmed his desperate attempt to flee, and loomed over him as his chest cavity filled with blood. Adding grievous insult to injury, Digwa, joined by members of his family at the scene, falsely told police that his bleeding and crumpled victim was the real aggressor — that Nowak was a racist who attacked him, called him a “Paki,” and knocked off his turban.

‘A deep line needs to be drawn in the sand.’

Digwa was convicted of murder last week and sentenced on Monday to a minimum of 21 years in prison.

While Digwa will be going away, the scandal surrounding Nowak’s death isn’t — certainly not after the release of damning body camera footage showing how poorly police treated the teen in his final minutes.

Hundreds of protesters swarmed Southampton Central Police Station on Tuesday carrying English flags and signs that said, “All lives matter,” and demanding justice for Nowak, whom police arrested for assault, handcuffed, and treated as a criminal, all on the basis of Digwa’s lies.

In addition to reciting the Lord’s Prayer, denouncing the police involved in Nowak’s arrest, and chanting “Christ is king,” some protesters yelled, “I can’t breathe” — a phrase the young man apparently said to police nine times before losing consciousness, footage revealed.

RELATED: ‘White lives matter’: UK erupts over footage of English teen’s demise in handcuffs after stabbing by Sikh thug

JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty Images

Remigration activist Tommy Robinson stressed to his fellow protesters that the public does not want the officers involved to resign “with fully bloody pensions” but to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

A spokesman for the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary, which oversees Southampton, confirmed to Blaze News that three of the officers who responded to the scene of Nowak’s murder in December are still serving but that one officer has resigned.

The spokesman noted further that the Independent Office for Police Conduct, which is investigating the incident, is treating the officers as witnesses, meaning they are “not subject to any restrictions.”

The police department complained on social media Tuesday about “the significant spread of misinformation online” and has asked that “people avoid harmful speculation online” while the IOPC investigation is under way.

While Britons took to the streets to signal their displeasure, lawmakers and other officials — confronted with the bloody results of years of woke policies — have roundly condemned the murder and character assassination of Nowak.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer, for instance, called the body camera footage “harrowing” and noted that “it’s absolutely right that the IOPC is looking at this.”

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch blasted Britain’s “race-based laws” and “two-tiered policing.”

“The fear of being called racist was greater than dealing with Henry Nowak’s murder,” said Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who demanded on Monday that England’s attorney general ensure that Digwa can never walk free again. “We should respond to this with pure cold rage.”

“Enough is enough — a deep line needs to be drawn in the sand. Talk is weak. Britain needs to say no more, and mean it,” wrote Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore Britain.

In her lengthy response to the scandal, British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood made sure to reassure the public that “everyone in this country is equal before the law,” that there can be no justification for vigilante justice, and that the Labour regime “is committed to halving knife crime in this decade.”

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​All lives matter, Body camera footage, Henry nowak, Keir starmer, Nigel farage, Vickrum digwa, Kemi badenoch, Racism, Anti-white, Murder, United kingdom, Britain, Politics 

There is a building in Veldhoven, in the Southern Netherlands, where engineers fire droplets of molten tin through a vacuum chamber 50,000 per second. Each droplet is intercepted by a laser, vaporized into plasma, and impelled to emit light at a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers, less than a thousandth the width of a human hair. The plasma is briefly 40 times hotter than the surface of the sun.

The machine that does this work is called an EUV lithography scanner, made by a Dutch company named ASML, the only such manufacturer. Your smartphone only works because of it.

Welcome to the Veldhoven choke point.

The EUV lithography scanner is, by some measures, the most complex manufactured object on earth. In 2025, ASML recorded revenue of 32.7 billion euros, of which it spent €4.7 billion on R&D. The scanner itself weighs more than 150 metric tons. Shipping one requires roughly 250 crates, 40 freight containers, several cargo planes, and 20 trucks.

The ultimate printing press

Lithography is a printing process: a pattern on a mask is optically projected onto a silicon wafer coated with photoresist, and the exposed regions are chemically altered to form circuits. Smaller features require shorter wavelengths of light according to the Rayleigh criterion. For decades, the industry shortened wavelengths incrementally, moving from visible light through ultraviolet to deep ultraviolet at 193 nanometers, squeezing extra performance through immersion fluids and clever tricks of computational correction.

What looks like ubiquitous computation is, underneath, managed scarcity.

The next step, extreme ultraviolet at 13.5 nanometers, required a fundamentally different machine: vacuum chambers, because EUV is absorbed by air; reflective mirrors rather than glass lenses, because EUV is absorbed by glass; mirrors polished to picometer tolerances, because at that wavelength any surface irregularity is an error. Zeiss, in Germany, makes these mirrors. They are roughly a meter across. Each mirror has more than 100 alternating layers of molybdenum and silicon, each layer a few nanometers thick. The largest ones are the smoothest objects humans have ever made.

ASML did not arrive at this position through genius alone. The company began in 1984 as a joint venture between Philips and ASM International, in a shed behind the Philips campus, with a staff that was given little funding and told to figure things out. Its first commercial product failed. The company survived by licensing technology aggressively and co-developing with suppliers. When EUV became the industry’s necessary next step, ASML had already positioned itself at the center of the effort. It acquired Silicon Valley Group in 2001, inheriting proximity to the U.S. research base that had done foundational EUV work. It acquired Cymer in 2013, bringing the light-source development in-house. It launched a co-investment program in 2012 in which Intel, TSMC, and Samsung paid €1.38 billion for the right to help fund EUV’s development and own a piece of the company that would sell them the tools.

The first commercial electronics enabled by EUV appeared in 2019. The research had begun in the 1980s. Nikon and Canon, both serious competitors in earlier generations of lithography, fell behind because they lacked the network. They did not have the suppliers, the customer co-investment, the acquired capabilities, or the tolerance for 30 years of deferred returns. Dominance in hard technology can look like the patient assembly of dependencies.

Printing money

The scanner imposes a disciplined way of seeing matter at scales that have no analogy in ordinary experience. A human hair is approximately 70,000 nanometers wide. ASML’S next generation of scanner, the High-NA EUV, has a resolution of roughly 8 nanometers. This required a redesigned optical system called anamorphic optics, in which the image is scaled differently in horizontal and vertical directions.

It would be a mistake to think of ASML’s dominance as residing in the scanner. The actual dominance is in the installed base of machines already running in fabs in Taiwan, South Korea, and the United States; in the €8.2 billion in annual service revenue that grew 26% in 2025; in the field engineers who operate on a 24-hour global rotation, resolving roughly 95% of issues locally, constituting a permanent guild of expertise that no competitor can easily replicate.

RELATED: The Trump phone is here — and so is the controversy. Is it any good?

BasSlabbers/Getty Images

The Dutch government has restricted exports of ASML’s advanced tools since 2023, with additional restrictions added in 2024 and 2025. The United States has pressed allies toward wider controls. China, which generated roughly a third of ASML’s 2025 sales, has been cut off from the most advanced systems and is expected to account for only about 20% of revenue in 2026. In May 2026, the Dutch government publicly objected to proposed U.S. legislation that would extend restrictions further. A private firm in Veldhoven has become a standing item in diplomatic correspondence between sovereign states.

ASML employs more than 44,000 people of 143 nationalities across more than 60 locations, and approximately 80% of its components come from a global supplier network. The machine that prints the world’s smallest features is assembled from a wide collaboration: German optics, German lasers, American light-source expertise, Belgian research infrastructure, Taiwanese and Korean and American customers. What looks like a Dutch company is a Dutch-coordinated actor network that has been stabilized, over decades, into something that behaves like a single artifact.

We speak of the digital world as if it were weightless, as if computation were a condition of the atmosphere rather than a product of factories in specific places run by specific people under specific export licenses. EUV lithography makes the concealment harder to maintain. The allegedly frictionless economy runs on tin plasma, picometer-smooth mirrors, and the continued willingness of the Dutch government to issue the right permits. What looks like ubiquitous computation is, underneath, managed scarcity: a single network managed from Veldhoven.

​Tech 

Florida police said a 27-year-old woman left a 3-year-old child in a hot car for several hours while she donated blood at a plasma center on Sunday afternoon.

The woman found the girl unresponsive when she came back to the car and frantically called police for help at about 4:32 p.m., according to a Facebook post from the DeLand Police Department.

‘I started to cry because I didn’t think I was going to be able to get her back.’

While police raced to the business park on New York Avenue, bystanders tried to help the girl, and one was giving her CPR when emergency responders arrived.

The girl was rushed to a hospital in critical condition.

An investigation by the DeLand Police Dept. determined that Latana Williams left the child unattended for about two hours on a day when the outside temperature had reached 84 degrees.

The girl was treated for symptoms consistent with heat exhaustion, according to the arrest report.

Police said Williams told them that the air conditioning was left running in the car and that she was monitoring the child through FaceTime on a tablet. However, police said they believed the car had been left with the ignition off.

One bystander named Marc Tait recorded Williams after she found her daughter and said he thought he was watching a child die.

Rosemary Roile told WESH-TV she was the person who gave the child CPR. She recalled becoming emotional after the child regained consciousness.

“I started to cry because I didn’t think I was going to be able to get her back,” Roile said.

Police arrested Williams on Sunday, and she was charged with child neglect, a first-degree felony. She denied any wrongdoing.

RELATED: Texas cops investigating odor at home believed someone died inside — they found 2 children living in horrific conditions

“Please take this as a reminder to always check your back seats,” said Captain Prurince Dice, one of the officers who responded to the scene.

“Give yourself enough time when you’re traveling so you’re not in a rush when you arrive at your destination,” he added.

Police said Monday that the child would likely recover but did not offer specifics about her condition.

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​Child neglect, Heat exhaustion, Hot car, Florida woman, Crime 

One of the enduring gifts of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” is that 50 years later, people still quote it.

My favorite scene involves the Black Knight.

King Arthur encounters him guarding a bridge, and a duel follows. The fight goes badly for the knight. Arthur lops off one arm, then the other. When the knight keeps fighting, Arthur removes both legs as well. Reduced to a torso lying in the dirt, the knight somehow surveys the situation and announces, “All right, we’ll call it a draw.”

The older I get, the more convinced I become that much of human behavior can be explained by that scene. We possess a remarkable ability to keep arguing with reality long after reality has settled the matter.

And which of us has not, in some absurd situation, said, “It’s just a flesh wound”?

Reality has a way of reminding us that some things we carry are, indeed, more than a flesh wound.

That thought crossed my mind recently while reading statements coming out of Iran. Whatever one thinks about the conflict itself, leaders standing amid rubble and declaring victory have a distinctly Monty Python quality. At a certain point, the rhetoric sounds less like confidence and more like the Black Knight insisting he still has a chance.

But Iran does not have a monopoly on reality rejection.

Recently, Jill Biden said she feared her husband was having a stroke during his one and only 2024 presidential debate. She described watching him struggle on stage and wondering whether he was experiencing a stroke or some other medical emergency.

As a caregiver, I am apparently behind the times. For 40 years, I foolishly assumed that if one suspects a spouse is having a stroke, the next step involves medical attention. Evidently, the new protocol may include chants of “Four more years!” at the after-debate rally, followed by a late-night visit to Waffle House.

Medical science has made huge strides.

Someone’s Waffle House hash browns were clearly scattered and smothered. Whether they were covered as well remains an open question.

As the Black Knight might say, it’s only a flesh wound.

Like Jill Biden, I am not a licensed physician. But watching her reminded me that I know enough to recognize when someone may need urgent care — or at least a cranial specialist.

Yet while I laugh at the Black Knight, sigh at Iran, and look with exasperation at Jill Biden — and at the reporter who let that remark pass without serious follow-up — I have to admit that defiance in the face of reality is not limited to them. Sometimes it appears in my own bathroom mirror.

The absurdity of these public examples points to a common problem in the human condition. Most of us have our own version of the same speech. We insist the exhaustion is not that bad, the debt remains manageable, the resentment is justified, the addiction is under control, or the diagnosis must be wrong.

RELATED: Caregivers should not have to lie to prove compassion

Samuel Corum/Getty Images

Every day, I talk with family caregivers who insist things are fine while staggering under impossible burdens.

We twist ourselves into pretzels defending positions reality abandoned long ago. We can mock Iran’s leaders and Jill Biden. We can laugh at the Black Knight. But are we prepared to admit that we often travel the same road, just not as far down it?

The Serenity Prayer asks for the wisdom to know the difference between what can be changed and what cannot. Most of us would prefer a third option: the ability to negotiate with reality until it agrees to call the whole thing a draw.

Sooner or later, reality delivers its verdict and waits.

The question is whether we will acknowledge it.

The Black Knight never did. Iran’s leaders and Jill Biden seem intent on following him into absurdity. That is why we laugh at the knight and deride the others.

But perhaps we should stop laughing long enough to see ourselves.

Reality has a way of reminding us that some things we carry are, indeed, more than a flesh wound.

​Caregiver, Conflict, Fight, Holy grail, Iran, Jill biden, Joe biden, Monty python, Opinion & analysis, Politics, Reality, Stroke 

Recent primary elections across the country have confirmed the end of bipartisanship in the United States — and the destruction of the uniparty that has ruled Washington since the early 1980s.

Both major parties’ congressional establishments are crumbling. Prominent, once-popular legislators and governors are falling to upstart socialists in Democratic primaries and to Trump-endorsed MAGA candidates in Republican contests.

The old bipartisan order blurred responsibility. Polarization reveals who stands for what.

This is the most important and positive change in American politics in decades. Bipartisanship is no longer possible. Polarization now defines American politics.

Contrary to what the media and establishment figures keep insisting, that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Two genuinely divergent political parties in Washington can serve the American people better than a cartel of polite agreement. Strong, fundamental disagreement keeps politicians from doing too much, too quickly, with too little scrutiny.

That is how the founders designed the system to work. They did not want easy majorities imposing their will on everyone else. They built a constitutional order full of friction, checks, divided powers, and obstacles to sudden national action.

Bipartisanship, by contrast, gets things done. That is often the problem.

When Washington becomes “effective,” it usually means politicians, powerful interests, and armies of professional grifters have found a way to expand spending for their mutual benefit. The public pays. The insiders profit. The press calls it “responsible governing.”

We see this across federal programs, from Medicaid to food stamps to defense spending. Fraud, chicanery, and outright theft flourish when both parties decide the money must keep flowing. The late Department of Government Efficiency began to expose some of the grift. It did not last long.

That is what bipartisanship often produces: waste, theft, and punishment for the people who expose it.

Polarization interferes with the trade of public money for political power. For everyone except thieves and grifters, that is a benefit.

Fortunately, American politics is now undergoing a thorough bifurcation.

The Democratic Party is nominating more open socialists at every level of government. They are winning in places such as New York City and Seattle and taking office. Republicans, for their part, are giving landslide primary victories to candidates endorsed by President Trump.

These events mark the end of the old bipartisan arrangement. The two parties are moving to opposite corners of the ring. The middle has grown thin.

RELATED: Barney Frank’s dying warning should worry conservatives

Paul Morigi/Getty Images

Democrats have made their stand as the party of open socialism. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and her fellow Squad members call for vastly expanded government power and direct attacks on speech, enterprise, and excellence. Their politics increasingly divide Americans by race, sex, and class in pursuit of a utopian vision.

Their party tested many of these ideas during the pandemic and the racial upheavals of the past decade. We know they mean it. Republicans who assisted in those efforts are now being cast out of office as their terms expire — or are leaving before primary voters come for them.

Republicans, meanwhile, have coalesced around Trump’s MAGA movement, a call to restore American greatness through freedom and the rule of law. Trump, Vice President JD Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), and Secretary of State Marco Rubio represent this vision. It seeks to unleash human excellence while dismantling the destructive concentrations of power built over the past century.

The two elements of the MAGA strategy — freedom and government retrenchment — reflect the two poles of the founders’ vision of ordered liberty. That creates some tension inside the movement. MAGA partisans must sometimes use government power to break up the crony system government helped build. More liberty-minded Republicans understandably find that uncomfortable, necessary though it may be.

Democrats struggled with their own internal split. For now, the hard-left democratic socialists have won. That is the real reason for today’s polarization: The party of the left has moved farther to the fringe.

The only thing both parties still agree on is that they cannot stop overspending. Even there, they overspend for different reasons. Democrats emphasize social programs. Republicans emphasize national defense and the border.

The current gridlock in Congress, with major legislation stalled in the Senate because of the filibuster, is not the fault of polarization. The Republican Senate majority could pass much of its agenda by eliminating the filibuster. It has chosen not to do so.

RELATED: Trump’s endorsement power keeps saving the wrong Republicans

Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

The country needs major federal reform, especially a large reduction in spending. Polarization is not the obstacle to that work. It is the beginning of clarity.

The old bipartisan order blurred responsibility. Polarization reveals who stands for what. Eventually, the American people will decide which vision they prefer.

That bifurcation gives voters clearer choices between parties, within parties, and among candidates. It is becoming much more obvious what citizens are voting for when they support either side.

As cities such as Detroit, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Portland deteriorate into hellscapes while their most capable residents move to Dallas, Nashville, Charlotte, Miami, and other places with lower taxes, less crime, and lighter regulation, the consequences of these rival political visions grow harder to ignore.

Political polarization is the source of that clarity. It is the one thing that can restore true self-government to the American people.

​Primary elections, Maga, Trump, Medicaid, Democrats, Socialists, Jd vance, American greatness, Political polarization, Opinion & analysis 

While much of America will be celebrating Pride Month all June, conservative Christians across the country will be holding counter-celebrations in the name of “Noahic Covenant Month.”

This counter-revolution has in many ways changed the overall feeling of the month of June, but has it successfully quelled the hijacked rainbow crusade that turned God’s covenant bow into a banner for rebellion?

On this episode of “Relatable,” Allie Beth Stuckey delivers an honest breakdown of the good, the bad, and the ugly in America’s ongoing LGBTQ+ culture war.

The “bad news,” Allie says, is that some Pride Month celebrations and events are actually getting more radical.

For example, the Boston Public Library will host “19 drag queen storytime events for children during Pride Month.” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s Office of LGBTQ+ Advancement is also publicly backing and helping to amplify a “Trans Period Pride” event centered on “menstrual equity and the experiences of trans menstruators.”

On June 1, Strawbridge Elementary School in Haddon Township, New Jersey, used school grounds to host a K-5 event dubbed “Pride on the Playground,” where kids were invited to participate in LGBTQ-themed crafts, games, read-alouds, face painting, and more activities.

Despite the financially disastrous consequences suffered by companies like Target and Bud Light, some large corporations are continuing to participate in Pride Month. Allie exposes the popular craft store Michaels for selling colorful stickers with sayings such as “Protect trans kids” and “Be gay, do crime.” One sticker even features an AR-15 over the trans rainbow flag with the phrase “Defend equality.”

But there’s good news too.

“Over the last several years, conservatives have pushed back. Christians have pushed back and really have had success in pushing back against LGBTQ activism and the broader culture wars,” Allie says.

She highlights recent Gallup polling that shows declining support for gay marriage, especially among Republicans whose support is currently at its lowest point in 30 years. Pew Research data also indicates that over half the nation — roughly 56% (up from 46% in the June 2022 survey) — now supports laws and policies that ban health care professionals from providing care related to gender transitions for minors.

Even Democrat support for gender-transition procedures for minors has waned notably, with 35% in favor of banning gender-transition medical care for minors compared to 26% in 2022.

Support for requiring transgender-identifying athletes to compete based on biological sex has also increased across party lines.

Further, some Republican politicians are beginning initiatives to counter Pride Month. Allie gives the example of Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signing a resolution in April designating June as “Nuclear Family Month.” As a deliberate counter to Pride Month, he defined the nuclear family as one husband, one wife, and their biological, adopted, or fostered children, describing it as “God’s design for familial structure” and the bedrock of society.

Across the nation, several states have taken action to protect minors from gender-mutilating procedures as well.

“Nearly half the states in the country have now passed laws banning health care providers from giving minors puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or gender-mutilating surgeries. In 2025 alone, several states expanded or strengthened those laws, some even imposing penalties on medical providers who perform the procedures,” Allie recounts.

She then lists several more recent pro-family wins:

In January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” which explicitly bars all federal funding, sponsorship, promotion, or support for gender-transition procedures (including puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries) for minors under age 19.As of June 2026, 27 states have laws or regulations that require school sports participation to be based on biological sex. Last month, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) reached a groundbreaking settlement with Texas Children’s Hospital, requiring the hospital to establish the nation’s first dedicated detransition clinic to provide medical care for minors harmed by prior gender-transition procedures, while also paying $10 million for alleged Medicaid fraud and firing several involved physicians.

Allie is heartened by the progress that’s been made in the LGBTQ+ culture war. The grounds gained are proof, she argues, that Christians must enter the political fray.

“Politics affects policy, policy affects people, and people matter. Why should Christians engage in the culture war? Because it does something,” she stresses.

To hear more of Allie’s in-depth analysis, watch the full episode above.

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.

​Relatable with allie beth stuckey, Allie beth stuckey, Pride month, Relatable