After President Donald Trump accused state Rep. James Talarico (D) of insulting Jesus, the Texas lawmaker responded with a speech framing progressive policy positions as expressions of Christian values — and Trump’s positions as the antithesis of them.

But BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey believes the president was right.

“Let me tell you the good news. The good news is, their candidate is whacked out with his six different forms of gender and all the things that I saw. The insult to Jesus,” Trump told Brian Kilmeade on Fox News.

“Trump is obviously absolutely right about that. He’s right about everything that he said,” Stuckey says. “Talarico is very extreme, very kooky. He uses the name of Jesus to justify his extremism.”

And Talarico took the opportunity to respond to Trump’s criticism.

“The President of the United States just said that I insulted Jesus. You want to know what insults Jesus? Kicking the sick off their health care while cutting taxes for billionaires. You know what insults Jesus? Deporting the stranger and separating babies from their mothers,” Talarico began.

“You know what insults Jesus? Bombing innocent schoolchildren in Iran and sending our brave men and women off to die in another forever war. You know what insults Jesus? Covering up the Epstein files and then refusing to prosecute a single person in them,” he continued.

Talarico went on to ask the audience, which appeared to be churchgoers, whether they can imagine war in heaven, bigotry in heaven, or poverty in heaven.

“This would be my advice to Trump,” Stuckey says. “I don’t want Trump to talk about Talarico anymore. I don’t want him to talk about Talarico anymore, even though everything he said is absolutely true.”

“I support Trump, but his realm is not theology, and so comments like he’s ‘an insult to Jesus’ don’t really help this conversation,” she continues, pointing out that Talarico, like Satan, mixes lies with truth.

“And so, I’ll just point out some of the true things that he says before I get into the complete and total lies. Jesus is saddened by sickness and death. Jesus is saddened by the killing of innocents always. Jesus is definitely against Jeffrey Epstein and the delay of justice,” she explains.

However, Talarico was also very wrong about several of his claims.

“It is not true that Jesus is always against war. Romans 13, New Testament, part of the inerrant word of God, says that the government bears the sword to punish the evildoer, both here and abroad. Lots of debate and nuance about when and how that should be used, absolutely,” Stuckey says.

“But it does mean, at least in principle, that not all government-wielded violence is wrong. And actually, that it is at times necessary to protect the innocent and to quell evil,” she continues, pointing out that it is also “not true” that in order to love the sick, “we have to have a government-provided and mandated health care system.”

“Christians have a very long, rich history of caring for the sick, and we should continue to do that. That does not require us to support Medicare for all,” she adds.

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, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Allie beth stuckey, Relatable with allie beth stuckey, Christianity, James talarico, President donald trump, The bible, Christian, Religion 

A Columbia County grand jury indicted a very popular TikTok influencer on Thursday over charges related to the alleged rape of seven women over a decade.

Benjamin Gleason, who has over a million followers, was arrested by New York state police on 17 counts and pleaded not guilty.

It is unclear if Gleason contacted any of the alleged victims through his social media account.

The alleged victims ranged in age from approximately 17 to 27 years old, according to prosecutors.

Gleason identifies himself as an American artist on his social media profile and claims to be “your girlfriends [sic] favorite influencer.” His videos include lip-syncing, music performances, and commentary about dealing with borderline personality disorder.

The charges against Gleason include:

Three counts of predatory sexual assault;Three counts of first-degree rape by forcible compulsion;Three counts of first-degree rape involving physically helpless victims;Four counts of criminal sexual act in the first degree;One count of aggravated sexual abuse in the second degree; andOne count of sexual abuse in the first degree.

He could face up to life in prison over the charges, if convicted.

It is unclear if Gleason contacted any of the alleged victims through his social media account.

RELATED: Activist pretends to be child online to catch alleged pedophiles: ‘You ain’t getting away, homeboy!’

Gleason had also created a GoFundMe donation account to ask his followers to raise $6K to repair his teeth. He said that his former struggles with addiction had damaged his teeth.

“The cost of dental repair is overwhelming, and it’s simply out of reach for me right now,” the suspect wrote.

That campaign has raised only $20.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Tiktok influencer rape, Serial rapist influencer, Benjamin gleason arrested, Influencer arrested for rape, Crime 

A student-run newspaper has apologized this week but not to the peer who was murdered.

Loyola University Chicago student Sheridan Gorman, 18, was shot and killed on March 19 around 1:00 a.m. The Department of Homeland Security said at the time she had been walking in a park with friends.

‘We deeply regret these errors, and we’re committed to continuing the high standards we hold for ourselves as journalists.’

DHS went on to accuse Jose Medina-Medina, “a Venezuelan criminal illegal alien,” of wearing a mask and shooting Gorman as she attempted to run away.

Now Loyola University Chicago’s newspaper is apologizing for characterizing the accused as an “illegal immigrant.”

In an article published on Sunday, the Loyola Phoenix added an editor’s note about language used in an Instagram post on Monday.

The outlet first wrote that its original headline on Instagram, “Immigrant Man Charged in Murder of Sheridan Gorman, DHS Involved,” was inappropriate because it caused “harm” to “community members.”

“That headline didn’t reflect the most important elements in the story, and it was taken down minutes later to prevent any further harm to affected community members,” the Loyola Phoenix began.

Then the student-driven paper apologized for using the term “illegal immigrant” entirely.

RELATED: College student went to Chicago park to see northern lights — and was lethally shot by illegal alien suspect, DHS says

“In the body of the original post, we described the man who was charged as an ‘illegal immigrant,’ using language provided by the Department of Homeland Security. That language does not align with Associated Press style, nor does it align with the values of this newspaper,” the note said.

“No human’s existence is illegal, and we quickly changed our wording to reflect that.”

Associated Press dropped the term “illegal immigrant” in 2013 and currently provides a bevy of alternate terms while declaring one should “use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant.”

The style guide goes on to say that terms like “immigrants lacking permanent legal status” or “irregular migration” are acceptable substitutes. The guide explicitly says not to use the terms “alien, unauthorized immigrant, irregular migrant, an illegal, illegals, or undocumented,” except when quoting people or government documents.

“Many immigrants have some sort of documents, but not the necessary ones,” it adds.

RELATED: Will Pritzker honor ICE detainer against illegal alien accused of murdering 18-year-old college student?

Photo by Jim Steinfeldt/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Loyola’s paper continued, saying it acknowledged the “harm such language can cause and the power and importance of the words we choose to use.”

“We deeply regret these errors, and we’re committed to continuing the high standards we hold for ourselves as journalists and members of the Loyola, Rogers Park, and Chicago communities,” the message concluded.

Blaze News reached out to the article’s author, Lilli Malone, who is also listed as the editor in chief of the paper, but did not receive a response.

In its report, DHS said that Medina-Medina was released into the country in May 2023 after being apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol and released again that June after he was arrested for alleged shoplifting in Chicago.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​News, Murder, Illegal immigrant, Immigration, Chicago, Illinois, Venezuela, College, University, Crime, Politics 

In yet another example of our human experiences being harvested to feed Big Tech, it has come to light that data culled from Pokémon Go, the once-trendy phone-based game, was leveraged to push robotics to the next level — players unaware. Those goofy humans running around their trendy cities, chasing meaningless but well-branded digital phantoms, never had the least idea who they were serving or what they were actually doing in the protracted “just for fun” exercise.

In point of fact, Pokémon Go, which incentivized users to “catch ’em all” in the immersive new “augmented reality” world, did disclose in its terms and conditions that none of the collected data would be owned by the players. Niantic Spatial, the owner of the game and designer of the bait-like fantasy creatures, buried this item deep in the small print, of course. The company knew, and we know now, that the players, much like anyone impatiently clicking those little pop-up checkboxes, never cared and likely never even read the T&Cs.

It’s the theme of the times: harvesting the human until the human can be replaced.

Niantic’s dataset is so valuable because its players ran and walked with their children and friends through the unmapped urban canyons of the world, so difficult for GPS to access. Coco Robotics had a problem getting robots to deliver pizzas without GPS. The result — the intended outcome — is called visual positioning system. Niantic calls it “the future,” and it’s what robots of the present and future will be using to orient and navigate the physical world.

Robots will use VPS for delivering pizzas. Soon, they’ll also use it to deliver kinetic payloads — missiles, as civilians call them — to the doors of living, conscious beings. It would be nice to believe that former Pokémon Go aficionados will find themselves morally torn about such things, and as the explosions refresh their dulled recollections one last time, maybe a few of them will.

For now, as the brute facts of user exploitation come to light, there doesn’t appear to be much, if any, player complaint.

But what of the more sinister underlying pattern — people actively replacing themselves? At what point will people care about that? The new workflow of ramping up our own digital substitutes just keeps repeating itself. Games are developed and used for ulterior purposes, including military ones, as gamers who played Battlefield 3’s detailed Kharg Island map ruefully observe. Amazon plans to let go 14,000 employees in the near future. Jack Dorsey just dropped his staff from 10,000 to 6,000 with an X post. If they’re not safe, who is?

RELATED: California’s next dumb tech idea: Show your papers to scroll

Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Pokémon Go players aren’t to be blamed any more than the rest of us who know the adage, “If the product is free, you’re the product,” but failed to find much else to do with our time over the past 20 years but stare at “our” screens, ever more intently, for ever greater stretches of unremembered time.

One wonders: How far in advance of the development and release of Pokémon Go did the creators understand its collected data would be the big payoff? How long have they waited for the robotics tech to need their human datasets to scale? Can we blame the creators trapped in the substitutionary circuit any more than the users?

Our avoidant response to the flywheel of our self-induced obsolescence is enabled by soothingly rational arguments. After all, look around: Isn’t our national infrastructure wasting away? Isn’t our population aging? Wouldn’t we rather all take an early retirement? On the strength of such ideas, Jeff Bezos has unveiled his latest stratagem for hyperscaled success. The archetypal nerd, whose outsized winnings from the on-demand, on-the-couch economy have fueled his transformation into an ‘80s-style action figure, is pivoting into an AI-driven conquest of industry and manufacturing.

He is gathering a reported $100 million to buy up whatever distressed, fire-sale material operations he can, rejigger the works with robots, let his Prometheus AI djinn do the management, and, along the way, jettison the human “element” entirely. Is this to usher in the age of no work and all play? Back to owning nothing and being happy we go, this time wrapped in a nationalist instead of globalist skin.

And what happens after AI conquers every building, every company, every neighborhood? There’s no more value to be extracted from our world but us. It’s the theme of the times: harvesting the human until the human can be replaced. With what, if anything, “expert” opinion differs.

​Tech 

Philadelphia’s far-left district attorney issued a warning to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who have been deployed to the city’s airport to help ease the burden on Transportation Security Administration agents amid the ongoing Department of Homeland Security shutdown.

During a press conference at the Philadelphia International Airport on Tuesday, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner (D) threatened to arrest and prosecute ICE agents.

‘If you don’t like it, Larry, tell your fellow Democrats to fund’ DHS.

“I have a message for the good people, and there are a lot of good people who work for ICE as agents: Keep your oath; uphold the United States Constitution,” Krasner stated.

He said that he views “mass deportation” as “immoral,” but added that his opinion “does not matter for my job.”

“My job is to enforce the law,” he continued.

“You commit crimes within the jurisdiction that is the city and county of Philadelphia — I prosecute you. That is how it works. No, I don’t take a phone call from the president, saying, ‘Let him go.’ No, the president cannot pardon you.”

RELATED: ‘We will find you’: Soros-backed district attorney vows to ‘hunt down’ ICE agents who violate law

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Krasner, who previously received financial aid from left-wing billionaire George Soros, repeated that President Donald Trump would not be able to pardon prosecuted ICE agents.

“And yes, I will put you in handcuffs, and I will put you in a courtroom. And if necessary, I will put you in a jail cell if you decide to make the terrazzo floor of this airport anything like what you did in the streets of Minneapolis, which involved the criminal homicide of unarmed, innocent people. We are not having that here,” Krasner added.

RELATED: ‘You don’t want this smoke’: Philly DA and sheriff threaten ICE officers — DHS just laughs

Larry Krasner. Gilbert Carrasquillo/GC Images/Getty Images

On Wednesday, Krasner posted a video on social media further condemning ICE’s deployment to airports.

“My message to ICE agents deployed at PHL Airport: Don’t break the law, or you’re going to find out,” he wrote.

The White House responded by calling Krasner “sick and deranged.”

“@ICEgov is there to help because Democrats have forced @TSA officers to work without paychecks. If you don’t like it, Larry, tell your fellow Democrats to fund @DHSgov,” Rapid Response 47 replied.

“To most Americans, our ICE officers are heroes as they put their lives on the line to arrest murderers, rapists, pedophiles, gang members, and terrorists,” DHS acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis told Blaze News. “What Krasner is trying to do is unlawful, and he knows it. Federal officials acting in the course of their duties are immune from liability under state law.”

“Attacks and demonization of ICE law enforcement are wrong. Because of smears like this, our ICE officers are now facing a more than 1,300% increase in assaults against them as they put their lives on the line to arrest murderers, rapists, pedophiles, gang members, and terrorists,” Bis continued. “What’s immoral is illegal aliens killing American citizens like 18-year-old Loyola University student Sheridan Gorman, who was shot and killed last week, allegedly by Jose Medina-Medina, a Venezuelan criminal illegal alien.”

Editor’s note: This article has been edited after publication to incorporate a statement from the DHS.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​News, Larry krasner, Larence krasner, Philadelphia, Immigration and customs enforcement, Ice, Immigration crisis, Illegal immigration crisis, Immigration, Transportation security administration, Tsa, Department of homeland security, Dhs, Dhs shutdown, Airports, Politics 

President Donald Trump is once again weighing in on the ongoing peace talks with Iran, portraying the adversary as “strange” and increasingly desperate.

Trump is hammering Iran to cut a deal with the United States as the conflict with Iran approaches its fourth week. Iranian media has denied that there are ongoing peace talks, but the president insists Iranian officials are “begging” to make a deal to end the hostilities.

‘Only President Trump determines who negotiates.’

“The Iranian negotiators are very different and ‘strange,'” Trump said in a Truth Social post Thursday. “They are ‘begging’ us to make a deal, which they should be doing since they have been militarily obliterated, with zero chance of a comeback, and yet they publicly state that they are only ‘looking at our proposal.'”

“WRONG!!! They better get serious soon, before it is too late, because once that happens, there is NO TURNING BACK, and it won’t be pretty!”

RELATED: ‘Utterly false’: White House sets the record straight over media’s ‘laughable’ Iran narratives

Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images

After Trump initially made the negotiations public on Monday, reports began swirling about which officials are being included, and in some cases excluded, from the talks.

CNN reported earlier in the week that Iranian officials would not re-enter negotiations with Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, instead insisting on meeting with Vice President JD Vance. The anonymous reports that Kushner and Witkoff were cut out of meetings were quickly quashed by the White House and other sources who set the record straight.

“President Trump and only President Trump determines who negotiates on behalf of the United States,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Blaze News.

“As the president stated today, Vice President Vance, Secretary [Marco] Rubio, Special Envoy Witkoff, and Mr. Kushner will all be involved.”

RELATED: ‘TOTAL RESOLUTION’: Trump orders temporary suspension amid Iran peace talks

Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP via Getty Images

Another source familiar with the negotiations told Blaze News that these reports are a form of foreign propaganda relying on accounts of potential adversaries who want to see the peace talks fail.

“CNN and NYPost are using anonymous sources aka sources from other Middle Eastern countries who clearly want to scuttle negotiations to launder foreign propaganda and blatant misinformation,” the source told Blaze News.

“The big tell is it’s not even being sourced to the Iranians but other unnamed regional sources who may or may not have a reason to undermine negotiations by peddling this type of laughable fiction,” the source added. “The whole premise and their sourcing is laughable — they’re relying on other countries who may have an interest in quashing any negotiations here.”

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Donald trump, Karoline leavitt, Marco rubio, Jd vance, Steve witkoff, Jared kushner, Iran, Iran war, Middle east war, Fake news, No new wars, Politics