Democrats have an extremism problem, and it’s not clear how they can solve it.

After yet another gunman allegedly tried to assassinate President Donald Trump at last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, liberals nobly renewed their commitment to moderation. “We need LESS violence in America, not MORE violence in America,” wrote CNN’s Van Jones.

Quite right. But the American left has not exactly put itself in a good position to calm down its radicals.

You can court bloodthirsty Marxists, or you can build a wide-ranging coalition of the sensible, but it’s hard to do both at once.

Consider: In April, the New York Times hosted superstar streamer Hasan Piker for a podcast with writer Jia Tolentino. Piker has fantasized on camera about murdering landlords and once told his viewers, “If you cared about Medicare fraud or Medicaid fraud, you would kill [Florida Republican Sen.] Rick Scott.”

He joked with Tolentino about “micro-looting” — that is, shoplifting — and equivocated about whether UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson deserved to die at the hands of his alleged murderer, Luigi Mangione.

Thompson “was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder,” said Piker, citing Friedrich Engels to suggest that the killing was retribution for “systematized forms of violence” in the health care system.

Piker is just one online celebrity, but the problem is that he represents a significant portion of the base that Democrats must now cater to. One survey found that 41% of young voters, and 22% of Democrats, considered Mangione’s actions “acceptable.”

This will make it hard for mainstream politicians to tack toward the center without alienating their most youthful, energetic supporters — especially since many Democrats have been enthusiastically courting those supporters since 2020.

That June, following the death of George Floyd, then-California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris solicited donations to cover bail for rioters and looters in Minnesota. Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), and other congressional Democrats donned Ghanaian Kente-cloth stoles and knelt in a display of solidarity with protesters as they proposed unworkable and dangerous police reform.

For a good long while, it was not only encouraged but almost compulsory on the left to side with criminals in the name of social justice. None of this was a secret; all of it was put proudly on record.

Not only that, but to dissent from the maximalist position in these matters, even slightly, was portrayed as a ghastly betrayal that could only be motivated by rank prejudice. “All this anti-woke stuff is just anti-black. Period. Full stop,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) just last year.

If that’s the case, then it’s hard to see how 2028 presidential hopefuls like Newsom can moderate in any meaningful way without falling into the jaws of their own logic: Either you’re woke, or you’re a cretin. That is not the sort of stance one can gracefully adjust or walk back without considerable awkwardness.

RELATED: Trump’s enemies keep reaching for the gun

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And so, as William Voegeli observed in the Claremont Review of Books, “Even when moderates do emerge from the Democrats’ process of selecting nominees, a correlation of forces within the party combines with shrewd politicians’ flexibility of conviction to accelerate the leftward shift.”

The Hasan-ization of the party, in other words, may be hard to resist. Try as they might to avoid it, Democrats might be forced to swallow the Piker Pill.

For instance, last November, Ezra Klein of the New York Times was lamenting that “the Democratic Party has made room on its left and closed down on its right,” suggesting a more balanced approach would be effective against the polarizing force of Trumpism.

But by April of this year, Klein was making qualified excuses for Piker in a column initially headlined “Hasan Piker is not the enemy.” The Tolentino podcast followed shortly thereafter.

You can court bloodthirsty Marxists, or you can build a wide-ranging coalition of the sensible, but it’s hard to do both at once.

Democrats might like to recast themselves as the cool-headed alternatives to Trump’s reckless villainy. But all the momentum and media clout are with Piker — and with young celebrity politicians who feel comfortable making high-profile public appearances alongside him, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D).

Regrettably, this could be what peak Democrat performance looks like from now on: callow, clickable, and aggressively extreme on social and economic issues.

That’s not obviously a winning brand. But it could be the only viable one going. If so, then Democrats don’t actually get to choose whether to court the far left or recast themselves as sensible centrists. They already chose back in 2020, and they chose peak woke.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the American Mind.

​Brian thompson, Democrats, Ezra klein, Luigi mangione, Rick scott, Shoplifting, Trumpism, Unitedhealthcare ceo, White house correspondents dinner, Zohran mamdani, Young voters, Hasan piker, Radical left, Opinion & analysis 

For years, Americans have been told the future of driving is settled. Electric vehicles would take over, gas engines would fade away, and anyone questioning the timeline was “anti-progress.” That narrative just took a direct hit, and it came from General Motors.

GM isn’t tweaking its EV strategy. It’s hitting pause, hard.

Charging times still don’t compete with a five-minute fill-up at a gas station.

The company has indefinitely delayed the next-generation refresh of its electric trucks and SUVs. No new deadline. No confident road map. Just a quiet admission that the plan isn’t working the way Washington, or the automakers themselves, promised.

Translation: The market isn’t cooperating.

Truck stop

After pouring billions into electrification, GM is now sitting on $7.6 billion in EV-related losses from 2025 alone, including a massive write-down tied to scrapped production plans and battery commitments. At the same time, EV sales dropped 43% in the fourth quarter after government incentives dried up. Turns out, when the subsidies disappear, so does a big chunk of the demand.

And while EV inventory piles up, GM is doing something far less glamorous but far more telling: It’s going all in on gas-powered trucks. Silverado. Sierra. The vehicles politicians love to demonize are the same ones keeping the lights on.

Because that’s what Americans are actually buying.

This is the part policymakers don’t want to admit. You can regulate, subsidize, and mandate all you want, but you cannot force consumers to embrace a product that doesn’t meet their needs.

Electric trucks still come with trade-offs that matter in the real world, not in a press release. They’re expensive. Range drops when you tow. Charging infrastructure is inconsistent at best, nonexistent at worst, especially outside major metro areas. And charging times still don’t compete with a five-minute fill-up at a gas station.

And now the bill for ignoring that reality is coming due.

RELATED: Stellantis just blew $26 billion on bad EV bet

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Hero to Zero

GM’s flagship EV facility, Factory Zero, has already seen shutdowns and workforce cuts. Production volumes for high-profile electric models remain underwhelming. And instead of ramping up, GM is scaling back, delaying programs that were once central to its “all-electric future.”

Let’s call this what it is, a strategic retreat.

Not because EV technology is useless. Not because innovation has stalled. But because the timeline was never grounded in how people actually live, drive, and spend their money.

For years, the auto industry was pushed into a corner to build EVs at scale or face regulatory consequences. So they did. They spent. They bet big.

But consumers didn’t get the memo.

Now, the same companies that were racing to meet political deadlines are pivoting back to profitability, back to demand, and back to common sense.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth for the architects of this agenda: Affordability matters more than ideology.

Money talks

When EVs cost more, when infrastructure lags behind, and when performance doesn’t match expectations, consumers don’t “adapt.” They wait. They keep their current vehicles longer. Or they buy what works, which right now is still overwhelmingly internal combustion.

GM’s move isn’t an isolated event. It’s part of a broader industry correction that’s been building for months. Automakers are quietly scaling back, delaying investments, and reassessing timelines that were never realistic to begin with.

The electric future isn’t canceled. But it’s no longer on a government-imposed fast track. It’s being dragged back to reality, where consumers, not regulators, decide what succeeds.

And right now, the verdict is clear. If EVs want to succeed, they better start putting buyers in the driver’s seat.

​Auto industry, Electric vehicles, General motors, Suvs, Gas engines, Gm, Lifestyle, Align cars 

What began as a Supreme Court ruling on workplace discrimination quickly became a sweeping federal campaign to enforce gender ideology across American life — and Camille Varone, senior counsel at the DOJ, has proof.

According to the DOJ’s 2026 report by the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, the Biden administration expanded the 2020 Bostock decision far beyond its original scope and used it to rewrite Title IX guidance, pressure public schools, and challenge religious exemptions.

Varone tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey that the Biden administration “created all sorts of new memorandums, guidance materials, and threatened across the board doctors, schools, school lunch programs, and girls’ sports with compliance, with their views of gender ideology, at risk of losing federal funding.”

“It sounds like you’re saying the Biden administration really weaponized against Christian institutions, individuals, and schools,” Stuckey comments.

The Biden administration also used the Department of Agriculture to tell public schools that if they did not abide by the rewrite of Title IX and allow boys into girls’ bathrooms, they would not receive SNAP funds, and it considered requests for religious exemptions as “harmful conduct to be regulated.”

“So, they really wanted to use this rewrite of Title IX, this transgender issue specifically, to push back on Christians and Christian institutions exercising our beliefs about biology and gender,” she continues. “Is that right?”

“That’s exactly right,” Varone responds.

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.

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Mother’s Day is more than flowers, lunch at a nice restaurant, Hallmark cards, and sentimental social media posts. It is a reminder of the profound and formative responsibility mothers carry in shaping the next generation.

In a culture increasingly built on outsourcing, mothers are constantly told someone else can do the job better. Let the schools educate them. Let youth pastors disciple them. Let sports teams shape their character. Let others teach them practical skills. Let screens entertain them while we parents catch up on life.

Our ‘do more’ culture demands peak performance in every area of life, but it is leaving both children and mothers exhausted.

But motherhood was never meant to be outsourced. As a mother of two, these are a few lessons I’ve been learning.

Motherhood is discipleship

Mothers remain one of the single greatest influences on a child’s spiritual formation.

Barna research found that among practicing Christian teens, 79% say their mother encourages them to go to church, 66% say their mother teaches them about the Bible, and 72% say their mother teaches them traditions.

Social media and its culture of comparison can make us think discipleship requires planning elaborate Bible lessons, printing worksheets, and creating Instagram-worthy devotional moments. But with just a little intention, some of the most meaningful spiritual lessons can happen naturally through ordinary life.

You light a candle at dinner and explain, “Jesus is the light of the world.” You pull weeds together and talk about how bitterness and sin grow quickly when we neglect to root them out. Or, as my toddler and I did last week, you read “The Little Red Hen,” then knead bread dough or grind flour together while talking about diligence, generosity, and helping one another.

The advantage of this informal approach is that faith becomes woven into everyday rhythms instead of compartmentalized into a separate lesson plan. These are the moments when faith becomes tangible and competence is built.

Children need margin

Modern parenting culture often leaves children overscheduled, overstimulated, and emotionally exhausted. Childhood itself is disappearing beneath endless activities, sports schedules, programs, lessons, and pressure to achieve earlier and earlier milestones. These poor kids are hardly allowed to be kids anymore.

Parents now worry whether their preschooler can pass entrance assessments while many children barely have time left to roam outdoors, build forts, help cook dinner, or sit quietly long enough to become curious. We need fewer sensory bins in the living room and more mud puddles in the backyard.

More than anything, children need margin — the kind of unhurried space modern family life often eliminates — and our presence. They need more kitchen table talk and less time away from home.

They need to be bored because boredom is the birthplace of creativity, resilience, and imagination. In fact, a growing body of research shows that unstructured play is tied to healthier development, stronger executive functioning, and greater long-term independence. My parents’ generation understood this, but my generation often fills every gap in our children’s schedules, leaving little room for kids to simply be kids.

Our “do more” culture demands peak performance in every area of life, but it is leaving both children and mothers exhausted.

Mothers need margin

Another Barna survey found that 32% of mothers say they feel tired most of the time, while 38% say they constantly find themselves worrying about something. Many mothers feel isolated, unsupported, and crushed by unrealistic cultural pressure to “do it all.”

Many women strive to be fully present mothers, maintain spotless homes, manage packed calendars, curate magical childhood memories, and somehow do it all effortlessly. The result is that many families are running at a pace no one was designed to sustain — and more dangerously, it’s spiritually bankrupting us.

As Christian mothers, our family life should look drastically different from the world’s. Our priorities should reflect eternal values instead of mirroring the frantic priorities of the world.

Maybe for your family that means dropping a sport or cutting out an activity to make room for those family dinners and deep conversations — creating space for what matters.

My mother-in-law wisely sat down with my husband as a young boy and showed him on a calendar how many weekends the next “level” of baseball would consume. She told him, “We can do this if you’d like, but if you are saying yes to this, you are saying no to fishing, dirt biking, or camping on those weekends.”

She gave him the choice, and he chose the latter.

That kind of intentionality matters because what fills our children’s time will shape who they become.

RELATED: How to choose godly friends

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Life skills matter

A Yugo survey found that 74% of parents believe teens are not fully prepared for adult life. Only 37% of teens know how to cook a basic meal, and just 32% understand basic food safety.

I saw this firsthand during my senior year of college when several freshman girls came over for dinner and Bible study. I asked one to chop an onion and another to brown hamburger meat. Neither had ever chopped a vegetable or touched raw meat before. Not because they were lazy, but because no one had ever taught them.

I came from a very different upbringing. Before the age of 10, I was already baking bread, grinding flour, doing laundry, and helping manage our house — whether I liked it or not.

These practical skills matter because they shape what kind of roommate, spouse, parent, and adult our children will become. We should be setting our kids up for success, not failure.

Some mothers feel intimidated because they themselves were never taught these skills. But the beautiful reality is this: We live in the age of YouTube, tutorials, online learning, and accessible information. If you do not know how to garden, sew, cook from scratch, can vegetables, or bake bread, you can learn.

Ask other women, watch videos, do little by little, and more importantly, don’t be afraid of failing, and failing a lot (like I do!).

I constantly ask people to show me how to do things because I desperately need a community of women walking alongside me in this motherhood journey.

Greatest responsibility, deepest joy

Motherhood has forced me to slow down, eat a lot of humble pie, and imperfectly navigate all kinds of new terrain.

And that is fine. This vocation is ultimately not about curating an image of perfection. It is about faithfully stewarding the souls, habits, character, and formation of the children God has given us.

As mothers, we have the greatest responsibility and the deepest joy to raise our children up to love the Lord and become competent, mature adults who serve God and others well. What we build in our homes today will shape the world tomorrow.

And that responsibility is far too important to outsource.

​Lifestyle, Faith, Family, Motherhood, Christian living, Mother’s day 

A video has gone viral on TikTok for revealing a literacy crisis in America — showing high school students failing to read a very simple sentence: “She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat gauche.”

And BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey believes that one of the reasons for this crisis is not only the method for teaching literacy in schools, but that the amount of parents reading to their children daily has dropped. And according to a study conducted by HarperCollins Publishers, the drop is significant.

“I saw this statistic that says only 41% of children aged 0 to 4 are read to daily as of 2025. That is a nine-point drop only since 2019. Only 55%, a little over half of children aged 0 to 5, are read to at least five days a week,” she continues.

“There are a lot of parents who are overstimulated. They’re tired. They’re distracted. It’s really not about these kids having their own lack of discipline. It starts with a lack of discipline and bad priorities for parents honestly,” she adds.

Stuckey believes that the difficulty parents face finding the time or energy to read to their kids is manifesting in “difficulty for them for the rest of their lives.”

And the reason this is creating so much difficulty for children is because “the comprehension of words is necessary for understanding the world.”

“It is very difficult to be a diligent student, an informed voter, a productive citizen, a helpful neighbor if you do not understand words,” Stuckey says.

But it’s not just the ability to participate in modern society that’s being threatened by the literacy crisis.

“Unlike Buddhism, Christianity does not place a premium on silence or the emptying of the mind. Christianity is a word-based faith. You go all the way back to the beginning. God spoke the universe into existence,” Stuckey explains.

“He dictated all of creation, including the creation of man and woman who were made in his image. He spoke to Noah. He spoke to and through Moses,” she continues.

This is why, Stuckey explains, Christians have historically been “the best communicators in the world.”

“Christians dominated academia in this country before giving it over to the liberals and the secularists over time. And now, I think we have the opportunity to take the lead again. We have to. I mean, look at where we are,” she says.

“We have schools that are not teaching kids to read. We have people going to college and becoming lawyers and doctors with barely a high school-reading level. We’re scared of objective standards here in the U.S., standards of excellence because of whom they might exclude,” she continues, adding, “And all of us are going to suffer for that.”

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.

​Allie beth stuckey, Allie beth stuckey podcast, America, Blaze media, Blaze news, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Blaze podcast network, Blaze podcasts, Blazetv, Harpercollins publishers, Host, Literacy crisis, Reading, Relatable, Relatable with allie beth stuckey, Schools, Students, Teaching, The blaze, Tiktok, Video, Viral 

Few remember what economic plan Jimmy Carter tried to sell in 1980. They remember the misery index, inflation and unemployment climbing together, and the hostages in Iran. What they don’t remember are the policy details, because one question cut through all of it.

Ronald Reagan asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

That was it. Everything Carter wanted to argue for a second term had to pass through that question. Once it didn’t, the rest of the argument no longer mattered.

People escape accountability because we lack the will — or the courage — to let the question stand in the spotlight.

People remember questions like that, not because they were clever, but because they left nowhere to hide.

“What did the president know, and when did he know it?” —Howard Baker

“Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?” —Senator Marsha Blackburn

“What’s your favorite type of abortion?” —Rep. Brandon Gill

And then there is the question God put to Job, not for information, but for perspective: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”

Some questions demand accountability from men, while one reminds man who he is. We used to understand this. Now we try to avoid it.

I have spent four decades in exam rooms, where polite conversation is useless when something goes wrong. You don’t ask questions to sound informed; you ask because something is at stake.

What happened? What changed? What are we doing now?

You don’t let the answer drift into language that sounds right but explains nothing. You bring it back, again and again, until something real emerges. No amount of expertise, credentials, or authority allows someone to evade accountability with a filibuster. You don’t have to know how to perform surgery to do that. You just have to care enough not to be brushed aside.

That discipline is rare in our public life.

A congresswoman recently echoed a talking point her party and much of the media have been pushing. She pressed Pete Hegseth about the 25th Amendment and Donald Trump. It sounded serious, but it wasn’t.

The world watched Joe Biden struggle in plain view. Where was this concern then?

The same thing shows up with Elizabeth Warren. She raised concerns about airline prices while opposing the JetBlue-Spirit Airlines merger that might have reshaped that market.

She is welcome to make the argument, but the question remains: “You opposed the merger, so how is this outcome not on you?”

That question doesn’t ask for a speech; it requires an answer.

The same pattern shows up on a much larger stage. For decades, leaders in both parties have said the same thing about Iran: It cannot be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon, and it remains a leading state sponsor of terrorism.

That has been the consistent position, even as the policies have differed. Two Clintons, two Bushes, Obama, Schumer, Pelosi, Biden, and scores of others all said the same thing: Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon.

Now, when Donald Trump takes steps he argues are aimed at achieving that outcome, many of the same voices object.

RELATED: The media can’t hide behind ‘we’ forever

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We have also lost the discipline to define the words we use. People throw around “fascist” as if saying it settles the argument, when all it does is raise another question: “What do you mean?”

Not the label, but the definition. If the word means something, it should withstand that question. If it can’t, then it is being used as a weapon or a prop, not a description. Ultimately, the question becomes the teaching moment.

God set that standard in the third chapter of Genesis: “Where are you?” “Who told you that you were naked?”

He didn’t ask because they needed information, but because they needed to see. That’s what a real question does. It brings clarity. It forces things into the open that people would rather leave covered.

Clarity doesn’t come from longer answers. It comes from better questions. And when the question is right, it leaves no room to hide behind time or language.

People escape accountability because we lack the will — or the courage — to let the question stand in the spotlight. The clock runs out. The filibuster works. And the question either goes unanswered or never gets asked at all.

And everyone retreats to their corner, waiting for the next performance.

​Accountability, Definition, Donald trump, Fascist, Jimmy carter, President, Real questions, Genesis, Adam and eve, Opinion & analysis