Abdul El-Sayed did Americans a favor when he sat down with Jesse Watters on Fox News this week. The Michigan U.S. Senate candidate gave us a remarkably clear lesson in the philosophy behind America’s growing democratic socialist movement. The real question is simple: Who owns your property — you or the government?

The most revealing moment was not about Sharia law, transgender medicine, or even socialized health care. It came when Watters pressed El-Sayed about his proposal to tax the wealth of Americans with more than $100 million.

Before giving government more power, ask what happens when the people wielding it decide that you, too, have more than you need.

El-Sayed has made the argument before. Billionaires, he says, can surrender a substantial portion of their wealth and still remain billionaires. Their children and grandchildren will still be rich.

Notice the premise. This is not merely an argument that government needs revenue for legitimate functions, nor a dispute over whether the top marginal income-tax rate should be 35% or 39%. The argument is that you possess more than you need — and government gets to decide how much that is.

That is the part Americans need to understand.

Suppose you build a company. You work for decades. You save, invest, and take risks. The company becomes enormously valuable. Under the traditional American understanding, the presumption is that the property is yours. Government may tax under constitutional authority, but it does not acquire an unlimited moral claim on your property because politicians decide you have too much of it.

El-Sayed reverses that presumption. What are you going to do with all that money? Whatever your answer, the socialist argument says it is too much because you have more than you need.

The proper question is not what you intend to do with your property. The proper question is: By what right does the government take it?

That distinction takes us back to 1776. The founders understood that government is necessary to protect life, liberty, property, contracts, and the peaceful exercise of rights.

But precisely because government possesses coercive power, it must be limited. The founders built a constitutional order around the insight that human beings abuse power, so power must be divided, checked, and restrained.

Read the Declaration of Independence. The complaint against George III is repeatedly that political power has exceeded its proper bounds. The king interferes with colonial legislatures, imposes taxes without consent, and seeks to subject Americans to “absolute Despotism.”

The central political problem was not how government could solve every problem. It was how citizens could prevent government from becoming one.

RELATED: The data center mob wants your property rights too

Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Compare that instinct with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s declaration that there is “no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.” That is nearly the photographic negative of the American constitutional tradition.

The founders asked: What powers have we actually given government, and how do we limit them? The new socialists ask: What problem is left for government to solve?

El-Sayed’s wealth-tax argument reveals why. Once we abandon the presumption that your property is genuinely yours, the limiting principle becomes hard to locate. If $100 million is too much, why not $50 million? Why not $10 million? If politicians may determine how much wealth you need, why stop with billionaires?

The issue is not whether anyone should feel sorry for billionaires. The issue is who owns the property.

Redistribution is politically easiest when it begins with somebody almost nobody identifies with. He has plenty. You do not. Why shouldn’t government take some?

Because a government powerful enough to decide how much property another person needs has been given a power that does not become harmless merely because its first target is richer than you.

Then there is the comic assumption beneath the argument: Government will spend the money more wisely.

El-Sayed’s home state offers a useful caution. The state auditor found Michigan’s Unemployment Insurance Agency ineffective during the COVID pandemic. Fraud controls were weakened, billions in improper or fraudulent payments went out, and later audits found serious failures in recovering them.

These are the institutions that will reliably improve on the decisions of people who built billion-dollar companies?

Government has legitimate but limited purposes, and legitimate taxation follows from those purposes. But legitimate taxation does not establish a standing claim to whatever share of your wealth politicians decide you do not need.

This debate is especially important because socialism has found a receptive audience among younger Americans. Harvard’s 2025 Youth Poll found support for capitalism among young Americans at only 39%, while nearly half of young Democrats expressed support for socialism.

That is, in part, a failure of education.

We have spent enormous energy teaching young Americans to critique power and too little teaching them why constitutional government was designed to limit it. Much of contemporary oppression theory condemns authorities who presume to know how others should live, then demands political power to impose its own answers.

The next generation needs a different lesson.

RELATED: The DSA’s history lesson has one big omission

Sarah Rice/Getty Images

Your life is your responsibility. Your neighbor’s property belongs to your neighbor. Wealth does not become public property when it crosses an arbitrary number selected by a politician. Government exists to protect rights, not to decide how much prosperity citizens are permitted to enjoy.

Freedom includes choices politicians consider foolish or wasteful. Save your money, give it away, invest it, build a business, leave it to your children, support your church, fund a charity, or buy something ridiculous. Within the law, those decisions belong to you.

That is what limited government protects.

The socialist temptation is perennial because it begins with an attractive promise: Give us more power, and we will use it to make life fairer.

The American answer is older and wiser: Before giving government more power, ask what happens when the people wielding it decide that you, too, have more than you need.

​Abdul el-sayed, Americans, Billionaires, Capitalism, Declaration of independence, Democratic socialism, Dsa, Government spending, Property rights, Redistribution, Zohran mamdani, Opinion & analysis 

Virtual Private Networks are meant to shield your browsing history from all manner of prying eyes, including your internet service provider, your workplace or school, and even potential hackers. If you use a VPN with your Windows PC, though, I have some bad news: Microsoft has a full record of your browsing habits, and it can even report your activity to the FBI.

According to court documents released on July 1, a 19-year-old young man working with the cyber criminal group known as Scattered Spider was caught hacking into a computer system belonging to a luxury jewelry store. While inside, the hacker stole company data and demanded $8 million in cryptocurrency for ransom. Ultimately, the jewelry store kicked the hacker out of its system without paying the ransom, and the perpetrator was later arrested and charged.

Every user is susceptible to unwarranted surveillance and government overreach.

It’s a simple case of conspiracy, digital intrusion, and fraud … but there’s a catch.

The hacker’s identity should have been hidden from the feds.

Reports indicate that the hacker used a Windows PC to access the jewelry store’s system. Before breaking in, he installed a VPN onto his device that was meant to conceal his IP address, location, and identity. The VPN worked as intended, but it still wasn’t enough to keep his activity from leaking to the FBI. Even with protections in place, Windows itself was the thing that outed him in the end, thanks to a little-known device identifier called Global Device Identifier, or GDID.

What is GDID?

Every installation of Windows is assigned a GDID. Up until recently, there wasn’t a lot of information on exactly what this identifier could do, and even now, details are scant. However, thanks to this case, we can make a few deductions.

GDID can track and keep a record of the web browsing history on the device that it’s assigned, even if a VPN is installed. This information is saved over time, and it can’t be erased or cleared, even if with a system wipe or reinstall of Windows.

GDID can’t see what a user did on the pages they visited. It doesn’t know what that person saw or read on the screen. However, simply visiting a certain URL may be enough to draw conclusions and bring legal charges, as was the case with the Scattered Spider hacker.

What does this mean for regular users?

For the criminally inclined, GDID is just another way for the FBI to serve justice in a world increasingly plagued by cyber criminals, AI-powered security threats, and system breaches. As more of our digital infrastructure comes under attack at the hands of quantum computing and other innovations we haven’t yet imagined, the feds will need all the help they can get to stop criminals in their tracks.

And for the rest of us?

RELATED: New malware is crippling Android phones, but not yours if you do this

Jutharat Pinpan/Getty Images

The revelation that Microsoft created Windows with browser-tracking spyware baked directly into the OS is neither shocking nor acceptable. A feature that can monitor a hacker’s browsing activity is a fatal flaw that makes every user susceptible to unwarranted surveillance and government overreach. This is especially egregious when you take into account what this could mean for something like the age-verification bills that are currently at Capitol Hill.

Imagine what would happen if states begin to pass age-restriction laws. Instead of turning over their IDs, citizens would use a VPN to access the internet by routing their connection to a nonrestrictive state — a clear violation of the new law. A Windows PC would detect this behavior, and it could inform the government of such an infraction, resulting in legal repercussions.

At that point, there’s no going back.

How to disable GDID

This is usually the part of the story where I try to deliver some good news — a solution to keep you, your devices, and your rights safe from Big Tech and/or the government. Unfortunately, there isn’t much that can be done here.

GDID is built directly into Windows. It is assigned to your device whether you use your Microsoft account to log in or you use a local account. It is also persistent, meaning that once assigned, it doesn’t change. That identifier is attached to your computer and you for the rest of its life, and when you get another Windows PC, the next identifier will follow you too.

The only way to avoid it is to choose a different PC platform altogether.

​Tech, Microsoft, Privacy, Vpn, Gdid 

On August 10, a powerful magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck western Colombia near the town of San José del Palmar in Chocó Department, killing at least 287 people, injuring thousands, and knocking down buildings in cities like Pereira and Cali.

While Colombia is the most recent example, it’s certainly not the only country to experience devastating earthquakes in recent months. Since May, Venezuela, Indonesia, Mexico, and Japan, among several others, have all experienced the ground-splitting force of major quakes.

On a recent episode of “Live Free,” host and Lakepointe Church pastor Josh Howerton, along with co-host and fellow pastor Carlos Erazo, dove into the biblical significance behind the uptick in earthquakes and other kinds of chaos.

“When you look at Scripture, there’s only one time that Jesus actually specifically explicitly addresses earthquakes,” says Erazo, “and the one time He does it, it happens in the context of the end-times and the return of Jesus.”

He then reads Matthew 24:7-8, which documents Jesus’ answer to His disciples’ questions regarding the signs that will mark the end of the age: “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.”

The earthquakes that are happening all over the world right now, Erazo says, are “literally what Jesus said 2,000 years ago would happen.”

He acknowledges that skeptics will argue that earthquakes have always happened, but they’re missing a critical distinction.

“There’s always been earthquakes … and that’s true, but we haven’t always had these amount of earthquakes in the context of literally everything else that we’re seeing right now happening and unfolding in our world,” he says.

He points to another of Jesus’ end-time signs in Matthew 24 — “wars and rumors of wars.”

“Studies show today that in the last four to five years, there’s been an increasing number in quote ‘active armed conflicts involving governments.’ 2025 set an all-time record high since World War II,” says Erazo.

“In 2026, the amount of countries that were involved as well in conflicts outside of their own borders nearly doubled in the last 20 years, and according to this same report, it says quote, ‘Global peace is at its lowest level since 2007,”’ he adds, citing the 2026 Global Peace Index from the Institute for Economics & Peace.

These natural disasters and global conflicts aren’t mere occurrences, Erazo argues, but signs that Jesus’ prophesies are coming to pass.

“When you see stuff like that — earthquakes, wars, persecution, the insanity happening out there, chaos — Jesus said this would happen,” he says.

For Christians, these signs herald the good news that Jesus’ final return draws nearer — but not so for the unbeliever, says Erazo.

“If you’re not a Christian … this should scare you,” he warns.

“Jesus spoke about birth pains, and this is just the beginning of something that’s going to get worse.”

To hear more, watch the episode above. “Live Free with Josh Howerton” is on BlazeTV+, YouTube, and major podcast platforms.

Join BlazeTV+ and start watching Josh today at blazetv.com/JOSH. Use promo code JOSH40 to get $40 off your subscription.

​Josh howerton, Earthquake, Colombia, Blazetv show, End-time, Prophecy 

Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) recently made headlines when she claimed during an interview on ABC’s “This Week” with Jonathan Karl that “Woke 1 was crazy.” She was specifically referring to the extreme progressive rhetoric and positions of the 2020 COVID lockdown era, particularly calls to defund or abolish the police.

Some have interpreted the DSA member’s words as evidence that the left is entering a more sane, commonsense phase — but BlazeTV’s Christopher Rufo believes the opposite is actually true.

On this episode of “Rufo & Lomez,” Rufo and co-host Jonathan Keeperman sit down with foreign policy expert Zineb Riboua to dive into what Rufo predicts is the left’s next phase — a movement that will make the pinnacle of wokeism look tame.

“It’s long been my thesis that what’s next on the left is the ideology of Third-Worldism,” says Rufo.

Riboua breaks down what that term entails. “Third-Worldism is really about seeing everything through a very specific lens, where you show who is the colonizer, who is the colonized, who is the oppressor, the oppressed.”

This “very binary” way of thinking, she explains, pits “the global north” against “the global south,” with the explicit goal of seeing the latter “triumph.”

But this isn’t the massive shift some interpret it to be, she says. Third-Worldism, Riboua explains, is just “a different form” of the left’s longtime goal to take money and power from the West and give it to other groups via redistribution, reparations, and shifting power.

“My kind of pet theory is that there’s also just a change in racial focus,” Rufo adds, highlighting 2020’s BLM era, which was hyper-focused around “black America’s historical grievances [and] historical oppressions” — an era whose “leadership class” ultimately “collapsed.”

Rufo wonders if Third-Worldism is simply the shifting of the left’s racial focus off of black America and on to the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.

“Is it just a racial shift in the subject — seeking the same policies, yes, but seeking a kind of stronger leadership class?” he asks Riboua.

“While it’s true that there is a change in … which race we’re going to give priorities for, I think that what is, I think, more fundamental about Third-Worldism is that it positions things in a way that anyone who feels oppressed can join,” says Riboua.

“In a way, Third-Worldism is much more, I would say, inclusive of all these grievances against anything that is Western and de facto imperial, patriarchal even though things are obviously very much complicated in history,” she adds.

To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.

Want more from Rufo & Lomez?

To enjoy more of the news through the anthropological lens of Christopher Rufo and Lomez, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Jonathan keeperman, Third worldism, Alexandria ocasio-cortez, Blazetv show, Christopher rufo 

BlazeTV’s Allie Beth Stuckey recently debated progressive commentator and former evangelical Monte Mader on Jubilee’s “Face Off” series. Their hour-long discussion focused primarily on four claims — two from each participant.

Allie’s were “Christians must oppose abortion” and “Christians cannot affirm same-sex marriage,” while Mader’s were “America is not and will never be a Christian nation” and “Patriarchy, not feminism, is at odds with Christ’s ministry and teaching.”

Allie defended biblical Christian positions on all four claims, and Mader critiqued them from her deconstructed progressive worldview.

On a recent episode of “Relatable,” Allie reflected on the debate and shared with her audience advice and tips for handling high-pressure exchanges as a Christian.

Tip #1: Back to brass tacks

Given the format of this particular “Jubilee” debate — time allotments for speaking, a shared clock, and a strict no interruptions rule — Allie acknowledges the difficulty of formulating responses to her opponent’s “monologue.”

“They make too many claims in a matter of say five minutes that they’re talking. You’ve got to pick and choose what claims you are going to respond to,” she explains.

Her strategy in this scenario was to always get back to the “brass tacks” of the central claim.

While typical back-and-forth conversations aren’t limited by a ticking clock and allow for interjections and clarifying questions, honing in on an opponent’s core points instead of getting sidetracked on tangents remains an excellent debate strategy.

“That’s what I encourage you to do as well because it’s really easy when someone is spouting a lot of information that might seem factual because they’re very confident to kind of follow them down that trail, but that’s called a red herring,” says Allie. “That is making an argument that is actually totally unrelated and irrelevant to the logic and the substance of the main claim. It’s your job to get back to the main claim.”

Tip #2: Watch out for the ‘Gish gallop’

A Gish gallop, Allie explains, is a tactic where someone tries to “overwhelm” their opponent with a high volume of “rapid fire” claims.

The goal is to create a situation where the opponent is literally unable to respond to every claim presented.

“If you tried to go through each claim one by one, you would end up going down the trail of a red herring of something that actually doesn’t have to do with the main point at all,” says Allie, “or you end up having this tangential conversation, and then you go off the reservation and you lose the spirit of what the debate is supposed to be about.”

But once spotted, a Gish gallop is simple to dodge.

“Your job is not to meet them by responding to every argument or talking just as quickly. Your response has to be ‘slow down,’” says Allie.

“You could even say that out loud — ‘Slow down. Hang on a second. I want to go back to the claim. I want to go back to what you originally said, and let me get down to what this actually means,”’ she advises.

3. Kindness and compassion ≠ compromise

The reason Allie says she agrees to do “Jubilee” or other kinds of debates is not to change the minds of her opponents or even their audiences.

“My debate is for you,” she says.

Allie shares that since the debate with Mader, some people from the “exvangelical’s” audience have sent her vile messages wishing for her and her unborn child’s deaths. But their callousness doesn’t discourage her because the debate was never for them in the first place.

“Me going into these situations to go back and forth with these ideas is to hopefully, by the grace of God, exemplify how you can respond with kindness, with respect, with peace, without compromising at all in what is good, right, and true,” she says.

“A lot of people, especially Christians, think that in order to love someone, you have to nuance your positions; you have to compromise a little bit; you have to give in in just a few areas in order to relate to someone. You don’t have to do that,” she declares.

To hear more of Allie’s debate breakdown, check out the 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.

​Abortion, Allie beth stuckey, Feminism, Jubilee, Blazetv show 

California tried to pass a law squelching dissident speech. Again. People are finally noticing.

Governor Gavin Newsom last week signed Assembly Bill 2624, aptly dubbed the “Stop Nick Shirley Act.” The law establishes special privacy protections for qualifying “immigration-service workers” who claim threats or harassment. It also creates a formal process letting those workers demand restrictions on publication of their “personal information” and images — including names, employment, photographs, and video.

The First Amendment was written for precisely this sort of piggish government.

Shirley says this creates an obvious problem for investigative journalism. He’s right.

Suppose he investigates a taxpayer-funded hospice or nonprofit, films the people running it, and asks uncomfortable questions about where the money went. Under his reading of the law, one of those people could hand him a written demand not to publish his name or image. If Shirley publishes anyway and the subject claims fear or receives threats, Shirley says he could face legal consequences simply for reporting what he found.

That would be an outrageous law.

But the final law isn’t as broad as Shirley says it is. Not that it doesn’t deserve to be nuked. We need to be clear.

Somebody cannot simply hand him a piece of paper and prevent him from publishing a video. The enacted version requires “specific intent” to incite imminent great bodily harm or to threaten someone in a manner creating “objectively reasonable fear” for personal safety.

That distinction will matter when the courts take up the inevitable First Amendment challenge.

You know what else matters? What California Democrats originally tried to pass.

The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, the designated “victim” in Shirley’s investigations, was not merely a supporter of A.B. 2624. California’s own legislative analysis identifies the taxpayer-funded immigration organization as one of the bill’s co-sponsors.

So an organization receiving millions of dollars in taxpayer money helped sponsor a law creating a special legal regime under which the organization may demand restrictions on the publication of their names, workplace, photographs, and video.

That should raise an eyebrow.

When the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression looked at A.B. 2624 in April, the bill was substantially worse. The original version allowed a “protected person” to send someone a written demand and bar that person for four years from publishing “personal information” or an image — without the specific-intent requirement now written into law.

RELATED: Democrats love free speech — until conservatives get some

Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg/Getty Images

FIRE warned that the bill could suppress criticism, newsworthy reporting, photographs, and ordinary social media posts. The original even contained a special exemption for journalists covered by California’s shield law.

Why would lawmakers need a press exemption if the bill merely prohibited “threats” and “doxxing”?

Then people complained. FIRE complained. UCLA First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh complained. Republicans like Assemblyman Carl DeMaio of San Diego complained loudly.

And Democrats retreated — a little.

The legislature added the specific-intent language, narrowed the publication restriction, and removed the journalist carve-out. FIRE now says the amendments prevent the law from being unconstitutional on its face, although the group still warns that the written-demand system could chill lawful speech.

Could?

At a raucous Capitol rally Wednesday, Shirley insisted that it absolutely will. Newsom’s office responded that critics were either “lying to create up fake conspiracy theories” or did not “know how to read.”

That is awfully cocky coming from an administration defending a law that had to be substantially rewritten to have a prayer of surviving First Amendment scrutiny.

And A.B. 2624 is hardly an aberration.

In 2024, Christopher Kohls, who posts online as “MrReagan USA,” created an obviously satirical AI-generated Kamala Harris campaign ad. Elon Musk shared it. Newsom saw it and declared that manipulating a voice in an ad “should be illegal.”

When Newsom signed A.B. 2839, he reposted Kohls’ parody and bragged: “I just signed a bill to make this illegal in the state of California.”

A federal judge almost immediately blocked the law on First Amendment grounds and later permanently enjoined its enforcement against Kohls and the other plaintiffs.

Newsom’s appalling candor was refreshing in a way. He saw political speech he disliked, announced it should be outlawed, then used the power of the state to try to make it so.

He would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for that meddling First Amendment.

RELATED: No, the founders did not ‘tell you so’

Wildpixel/Getty Images

Then there is Mirabelli v. Bonta, involving a preposterous law that allowed public schools to hide students’ “gender transitions” from their parents. California defended the law to the hilt. In March, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that the parent plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their constitutional claims.

Different subject. Same censorious reflex.

Who gets to say what? Democrats think they decide.

So never confuse retreat with innocence.

California Democrats did not begin with a carefully limited A.B. 2624 and painstakingly protect innocent victims while respecting the First Amendment. They reached much farther into protected speech and backed off only after people caught them.

If the problem was doxxing and threats, why did the original bill reach names, employment information, photographs, and video? Why did lawmakers think they needed a special exception for journalists? And why does the final law retain a formal four-year “do not publish me” demand if the only publication California may punish is a threat or incitement?

Patrick Henry had the proper American disposition toward government power: “Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel.”

Especially in California.

Kohls was no accident. Neither was Mirabelli. Nor did A.B. 2624 accidentally offend the First Amendment. Scratch a “liberal,” find a censor.

Again and again, California Democrats reach for state power to control what people may say, publish, parody, disclose, or hear — then retreat only when courts, civil libertarians, or public outrage force them to.

The First Amendment was written for precisely this sort of piggish government.

​California, Courts, Gavin newsom, Governor, Elon musk, First amendment, Democrats, Free speech, Doxxing, Nick shirley, Censorship, Opinion & analysis 

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

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

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

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

‘Satan’s throne’

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

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

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

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

What exactly was “Satan’s throne”?

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

I believe that identification is significant.

Sinister discovery

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

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

They soon uncovered the remains of the great altar.

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

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

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

Altar of anti-Semitism

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

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

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

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

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

RELATED: Has Andrew Jones found Noah’s ark? A patient researcher builds his case.

Andrew Jones/Anadolu/Getty Images

Stalin’s prize

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

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

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

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

Pergamon’s return

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is a picture of the gospel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That afternoon, gratitude tearfully accepted a second bowl.

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