Republicans took a beating in the midterms, and President Trump can’t afford to ignore the reasons why — which BlazeTV host Liz Wheeler explains have created a lack of faith in the president.

“Number one,” Wheeler says, “the Iran war obviously impacted President Trump’s base. That’s pretty hard to argue. It’s very obvious that that is the case.”

Wheeler believes the Iran war is partially to blame for two reasons.

Those reasons, she says, are that “people in Trump’s base care about the Iran war due to opposition to forever wars. And also because of how the conflict, the military conflict in Iran, raised gas prices.”

“Those are the two fundamental reasons why the Iran war impacted President Trump’s base,” she adds.

However, while Wheeler also “vehemently oppose[s] forever wars” and “detest[s] high gas prices,” she believes the comparison between the Iran war and “forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” is an “unfair” one.

“And also based on what Trump’s stated goal is, that I think most agree with at least theoretically, that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon because that poses a direct threat to America — not just our allies, but to us, to America,” she says.

“And also, of course, based on Trump’s history of opposing forever wars. President Trump is the one who introduced, he taught conservatives and Republicans to be against forever wars,” she continues.

Wheeler says another issue people took with the Iran war is that Trump promised Americans that it would “be over in days or weeks,” and that hasn’t been the case.

“You just don’t make a promise like that in politics if you are not confident that you can fulfill that promise because it causes people to lose trust,” Wheeler says.

“It is also worth noting that President Trump’s base would have given Trump more leeway on the war in Iran and even on the domestic implications, the gas prices, if they felt trust in Trump,” she continues, noting that making good on the promise of “justice” would have sealed that trust.

“For example, if Trump, the day that he took office, would have pounded justice … remember Fauci, Brennan, all of them,” she says.

“But Pam Bondi didn’t do that,” she continues. “Basically zero of the Democrats who weaponized the government under Biden, weaponized government against you, have been held accountable. And people feel that viscerally. They feel disillusioned because that’s why they cast their vote for President Trump.”

“They voted for justice,” she adds.

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​Republicans, Donald trump, Midterms, Iran war, Justice, Blazetv show 

Vivek Ramaswamy found the Ohio gubernatorial election on Tuesday even harder to carry than a 10-year-old.

The biotech entrepreneur lost by nearly eight percentage points to Democrat Amy Acton, the pandemic authoritarian who closed Ohio schools and businesses and forbade virtually all public and private gatherings in early 2020.

‘Heavy D has been waiting two years to drop this hammer on Vivek.’

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) laid into Ramaswamy during an after-action review on Thursday, telling the eponymous host of “The Sage Steele Show” why Ohioans rejected him.

“How bad did they beat Vivek like a drum?” said the governor. “Now part of that was Vivek, quite frankly. I don’t know why they would have pushed him to be the candidate there.”

After noting that his mother, Karen DeSantis, hails from Youngstown, Ohio, DeSantis noted that the Buckeye State “is a working-class state, very blue-collar.”

“You know, Vivek — he’s, like, a tech guy. He did this Alzheimer’s drug, and he wants to bring in people, foreign workers, on visas,” continued DeSantis. “That is not the type of person that’s going to sell — and I know he shot himself in the foot. I know he did a lot of other stuff to make it a real landslide against him, but even with that, it’s like, you gotta meet the voters where they are in some of this stuff.”

RELATED: The Extraordinary American

Peter Zay/Anadolu via Getty Images

Ramaswamy, the son of Indian immigrants, certainly did himself no favors by:

attributing tech companies’ decision to “hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans” to the supposed veneration of “mediocrity over excellence” in American culture;asserting that “‘normalcy’ doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent”;running a business that liberally used the very H-1B program that he subsequently vowed to “gut”;calling for the H-1B program to be replaced with another domestic-labor-displacing program “that focuses on selecting the very best of the best”; emphasizing that immigrants “can be the lifeblood of the American dream”;stating that as a Hindu, he believes Jesus Christ “is a son of God,” not the Son of God.

DeSantis suggested that the Republicans might have kept the governor’s mansion in Ohio had they run “a candidate that was more representative or more in tune with the interests of kind of these blue-collar people that make the backbone of Ohio.”

The Ramaswamy campaign did not immediately respond to Blaze News’ request for comment.

“Dayum. Ron has determined to settle some family business,” tweeted BlazeTV host Steve Deace.

BlazeTV host Jesse Kelly said of DeSantis’ analysis, “You just know Heavy D has been waiting two years to drop this hammer on Vivek. Has to feel good.”

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​Vivek ramaswamy, Ohio, Midterm election, Ron desantis, Immigration, H1b, Steve deace, Jesse kelly, Politics 

Some of the first age verification laws are starting to roll out across the United States. One of them requires iPhone owners to take a selfie so that Apple’s AI can verify their age. Here’s which states are affected so far, plus the more intrusive measures you can expect in the future.

Although hotly contested for the privacy implications they could bring, age verification laws are looking like an inevitability across the United States. Some target specific sectors of tech, like access to AI, while others would prevent you from using your devices entirely without an ID. And chances are, you’ll be surprised to see which state is leading the charge.

If the scan fails, you are required to provide more information to complete the process.

Senate Bill 2420, signed into law by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), requires platform holders that operate online app stores to verify the ages of their users before they download apps to their smartphones. Federal District Judge Robert Pitman tried to block the bill before it went into effect in January 2026, but his efforts ultimately fell flat at the hands of Attorney General Ken Paxton, who reversed the block in June. As of today, Senate Bill 2420 is the law of the land.

It’s important to note that both Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton lost their races for Texas governor and senator during the midterms this fall, ceding control of the red state to Democrats for the first time in decades.

Like all the other age verification bills on the table right now, Senate Bill 2420 is meant to protect children and minors from harmful content accessible in apps on app stores. While it’s a noble cause, the unfortunate truth is that adult users are the ones who will have to forfeit their privacy – or the semblance of it – to prove that they’re old enough to use their devices unabated.

Now that Senate Bill 2420 is in place, Apple may require users in Texas to take a photo of themselves to verify their age. According to Apple, “your selfie is analyzed using age-estimation models that run both on-device and on Private Cloud Compute, which extends the security and privacy of your Apple device into the cloud.”

This process is meant to be completely private to ensure user data isn’t leaked, compromised, or shared outside of the verification system. “[Your photo] isn’t accessible to anyone, not even Apple,” the company claims. Once verification is complete, the image is deleted entirely with no data retention.

RELATED: How to enable the ultimate parental controls on iPhone

Organic Media/Getty Images/Getty Images

On the bright side, the selfie-based age check won’t require users to submit a valid state ID or passport in most cases. Instead, the system runs the selfie image through Apple’s Private Cloud Compute AI system to scan for adult visual traits. If the image passes the age check, you’re all set with no further action needed.

However, if the scan fails — either because your age is inconclusive from the photo or for another reason — you are required to provide more information to complete the process. Apple notes that you must either submit a photo of your credit card that includes your name or a copy of your state-issued ID with all information markers clearly visible.

Apple’s selfie-based age verification system is available on iOS 27.2 and up. Prior versions of iOS do not contain this age check provision to satisfy state laws, so you may be forced to update to the latest software in order to comply.

While selfie-based age checks are intrusive enough to cause a stir among the privacy-conscious, Apple released another document detailing even more invasive age verification measures. The document notes that some states in the future may actually require a state ID or credit card as a first measure instead of selfie verification.

In these cases, Apple says that users who refuse to verify their age will be blocked from disabling certain unnamed safety features on their devices, and they won’t be allowed to download apps rated for users 18 years old or older. The only users who will be spared are those who have had an Apple account long enough to confirm their adult status.

If you’re upset about the new age verification laws in Texas, you can thank Gov. Abbott and AG Paxton for diminishing your privacy rights on behalf of the minors they aim to defend. Then again, the people have already passed their judgment on the ruling class by shoving them out the door this past election cycle, albeit a little too late to stop Senate Bill 2420 from going into effect.

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​Age verification, Apple, Artificial intelligence, Parental controls, Privacy concerns, Privacy rights, Protect children, Texas, User data, Tech 

Philadelphia residents who helped search for a missing 10-year-old are stunned and angry after the girl’s foster mother was arrested more than a week later.

The Philadelphia Police Dept. issued the missing notice Monday for Jalayshia “Malayshia” Alford, who was last seen alive on Oct. 22 according to investigators.

Prosecutors said objects may have been used to cause the injuries and that there were signs of abuse.

On Thursday, the police announced that the girl’s remains had been found.

Assistant District Attorney Ashley Toczylowski said that a video from Oct. 26 led police to find Alford’s remains. The video showed a person removing a body from a home in West Philadelphia at about 1:53 in the morning.

“It was that video that then led law enforcement officials to a suspect vehicle, which then led law enforcement officials to find that vehicle and find a person that they wanted to speak to related to that vehicle,” Toczylowski said.

Investigators found the vehicle and discovered the girl’s remains in the trunk of the car at about 11:30 p.m. on Wednesday. It was parked at the Stonington Court Apartments in Lindenwold of Camden County, New Jersey.

A medical examiner said she died of blunt force trauma and ruled the death a homicide.

Prosecutors said objects may have been used to cause the injuries and that there were signs of abuse.

Alford’s foster mother, Carprice Williams, was charged with murder, abuse of a corpse, and other offenses, according to Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner.

RELATED: ‘Horrific, monstrous, unfathomable’: Prosecutor unveils shocking details in ‘co-parent’ torture and death of 7-year-old boy

A memorial with balloons and stuffed animals was set up for the girl Thursday evening.

“It’s heartbreaking that this is the end result,” said Malcolm Jordan, who had joined a search party for the girl. “I just wish it was a different result, man, and we just gotta do what we can to prevent this stuff from happening.”

“These balloons are just a symbol of love, the outpouring of love that we have for this baby,” another resident said.

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​Philadelphia, Missing children, Foster care, Murder, Crime 

Muslim communities are organizing politically in America, and they are not apologizing for it. Mosques in North Texas have become voter-registration hubs. In Michigan, Muslim candidates and activists have demonstrated the power of an organized constituency. The state has just elected the nation’s first Muslim U.S. senator.

What American Christians should learn from these examples is not theology. It is confidence in bringing religious commitments into public life. American Christians should pay attention. They have spent decades hearing that faith belongs in church and that explicitly Christian political action is somehow improper. That convenient rule does not seem to apply to everyone.

Christendom shaped the West, including America’s laws, customs, and understanding of human dignity. If Christians believe that inheritance is worth defending, they must speak up.

Christians must learn to fight for their faith in public. The future belongs to communities that intend to preserve their way of life, not those that apologize for having one.

America was founded by a population overwhelmingly shaped by Anglo-Protestant Christianity. That tradition formed its customs, moral assumptions, and public institutions. Several founding-era states required officeholders to profess Protestant or Christian beliefs. Georgia and New Hampshire explicitly favored Protestants. Other states adopted broader religious tests.

The U.S. Constitution was different. Article VI prohibited religious tests for federal office from the beginning. The First Amendment barred Congress from establishing a religion and protected its free exercise. Those protections did not change the basic reality: American life remained saturated with Protestant Christianity.

Yet the central cultural fact remains: Protestant Christianity shaped the country’s public life so thoroughly that its adherents rarely needed to think of themselves as a political majority. A fish does not know it is wet. When a nation’s schools, holidays, and moral vocabulary largely reflect one religious inheritance, political organization around that inheritance can seem unnecessary.

Immigration changed the balance. Catholics had been present since colonial times, as had Jews, but immigration from Ireland, Italy, Germany, and Eastern Europe expanded the numbers and influence of religious minorities. The question was unavoidable: Could a culture built around Protestant assumptions absorb growing religious diversity without surrendering its own character?

In 1958, presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy published “A Nation of Immigrants” with the Anti-Defamation League. Its vision placed immigration at the center of the American story rather than treating Anglo-Protestant culture as the country’s defining feature. Kennedy’s election as the first Catholic president in 1960 marked another transformation in the nation’s religious imagination.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, signed by Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy’s assassination, abolished the old national-origins quota system, radically changing who would be allowed to enter the country. Suddenly the floodgates to America were open.

Something else changed alongside the laws: the meaning Americans attached to religious liberty. Freedom of conscience, once defended in a society largely governed by Protestant assumptions, increasingly meant public institutions treating rival faiths on equal terms.

Courts extended constitutional limits on religious establishment to the states. The prohibition against establishing an official state church was now interpreted as a prohibition against favoring Christianity at all.

RELATED: Brazil’s election is a chilling warning for America

Blaze News Illustration

Liberal mainline Protestant leaders embraced this transformation. Their participation in the civil rights movement brought a conviction that public Christianity, if too closely identified with the old social order, could become an obstacle to inclusion. Others accepted the proposition that politics should be conducted in a supposedly neutral language, with Christian commitments translated into secular terms before they could be heard.

The pitch to the churches was simple — and seductive. Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar. Christ rejected an earthly kingdom. Shouldn’t Christians be content to preach the gospel and leave the business of government to professionals? Fear of being labeled backward or intolerant made retreat even easier.

But Christ did not tell His followers to pretend their convictions had no bearing on law, education, or the common good. The idea that Christians must be politically passive because the Constitution protects religious liberty turns that liberty into a gag order.

Conservatives helped sell this bargain. Reduce the power of government, they said, and stop trying to shape the culture through politics. Conveniently, their opponents had no intention of surrendering political power. The result was a right that treated withdrawal as principle while every competing movement treated political organization as common sense. In schools, public ceremonies, and debates over the family, that retreat handed the initiative to others.

For decades, the Christian political class has mistaken the rules of a plural society for an instruction to disappear. No secular activist interprets pluralism that way. No Muslim organizer needs to. They enter the political arena as people with convictions, constituencies, and interests. Christians should quit treating those facts of political life as a privilege reserved for everyone else.

The Moral Majority showed that Christians could act collectively. So have the religious conservative organizations that followed it. Yet too often their leaders have been content to defend yesterday’s defeats rather than articulate a Christian vision of public life. They speak of “Western values” and “Western civilization” as though Christianity was an embarrassing family secret.

RELATED: The American dream now comes with upgrade fees

Blaze News Illustration

Meanwhile, a spiritual vacuum does not stay empty. Secular humanism promised to supply moral purpose without religion. Wokeness took on the character of a rival creed, complete with its own saints, heresies, and rituals of public repentance. And now Muslim communities, confident in their religious identity, are also competing for influence in the public square.

Christians should stop acting surprised. Political power will not remain unclaimed simply because they refuse to reach for it. Nor will churches recover their cultural authority by pretending that doctrine has no public consequences.

Christendom shaped the West, including America’s laws, customs, and understanding of human dignity. If Christians believe that inheritance is worth defending, they must speak up. They must organize, argue, vote, and fight politically for the institutions and moral commitments they want their children to inherit.

The lie is that doing so violates the country’s principles. The truth is that religious liberty gives Christians the same right to organize that everyone else already exercises. A faith that refuses to defend its place in public life should not be astonished when others occupy the ground it abandoned.

​Abdul el-sayed, Christianity, First amendment, Islam, Moral majority, Opinion & analysis, Protestantism, Religious liberty, Religious rights, Western civilization, John f kennedy, Christendom, American founding, Elections 

Libertarians have long called for a smaller American footprint overseas, and Austin Padgett is making the argument that Trump’s foreign policy is doing exactly that.

“The way I would generally describe libertarian foreign policy is … it’s not isolationist, but it’s non-interventionist. It’s the idea that, you know, look, we’re happy to trade with people, but if it’s not directly affecting us or really signifying a significant threat to our security, we just don’t need to be involved,” BlazeTV host Nick Freitas says.

“A lot of times libertarians have a debate as if we’re questioning whether we should create a Federal Reserve, rather than having a debate in the context of the fact that we do have a Federal Reserve,” Padgett says.

“We’re not debating in 1913,” he says.

“It’s the same thing for the empire. The empire represents a dependency,” he continues. “It’s a security dependency. Security works like a market like anything else. If the government takes over that service or your government takes over in another government’s region to provide security services, then that creates a legitimate dependency.”

This is why in order to “accomplish actual libertarian goals,” a libertarian would “have to do something along the lines of what Trump is doing.”

And what Trump is doing is “getting our allies to invest in their own militaries.”

“Japan’s building their own military for the first time in forever. We’re getting Europe to fund their defense. We’re neutering Iran so that Israel and Saudi Arabia can manage the region effectively on their own,” Padgett explains.

“And we don’t have to get tied in there because could you imagine if Iran developed missile deterrence, had the clear to finish their nuclear program, and then could you imagine in that context trying to get the U.S. military out of the Middle East? They would have a reason for a permanent balance of power,” he says.

“The real question is, how do you create the conditions that actually allows you to pull back while still maintaining a stability in the region that does facilitate the positive interactions that libertarians want, which is generally trade,” Freitas comments.

“And even if Trump isn’t as libertarian as some people might want him to be, the fact that he’s engaging in reality makes him a better person to have in office to achieve libertarian goals than even the most libertarian person you could ever imagine,” he adds.

“Making the Argument with Nick Freitas” is available on BlazeTV+, YouTube, and major podcast platforms.

Start watching Nick Freitas NOW at blazetv.com, and use the promo code NICK for $20 off your BlazeTV+ subscription.

​Libertarian, Donald trump, Austin padgett, Foreign policy, Blazetv show