Latest posts

  • A Single Round, A Million Excuses: A Cultural Critique of the Assassination of Charlie Kirk

    A Single Round, A Million Excuses: A Cultural Critique of the Assassination of Charlie Kirk

    Let us convene, grim-eyed, on the manicured quads of Utah Valley University, where normalcy shattered into shards of ideological glass in a single, solitary moment: the death of a political firebrand, felled supposedly by a single bullet from a nearby building. That bullet—cold, precise, unembellished by flourish or bombast—reduces weeks, perhaps years, of incendiary rhetoric

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  • Twenty-Four Years Later: What We Should Have Learned from 9/11 (But Absolutely Didn’t)

    Twenty-Four Years Later: What We Should Have Learned from 9/11 (But Absolutely Didn’t)

    The anniversary of September 11 rolls around every year like a fire alarm that no one bothers to silence anymore. We stop, we remember, we replay the grainy footage in our minds, and then—like a nation addicted to selective amnesia—we forget the one lesson we were supposed to have learned: unity. Not unity as in

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  • When the Shepherd Won’t Call the Hotline: The Gospel According to Mandatory Reporting

    When the Shepherd Won’t Call the Hotline: The Gospel According to Mandatory Reporting

    There is a special place in America’s theater of hypocrisy reserved for pastors who forget that “suffer the little children” was not meant as operational policy. This week, Gainesville’s Assemblies of God star, Pastor Mark Vega of Ignite Life Center, found himself in police custody, charged with the third-degree felony of knowingly and willfully failing

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  • The Birthday Book Blues: How Epstein’s Guest List Became Trump’s Latest Hallmark Special

    The Birthday Book Blues: How Epstein’s Guest List Became Trump’s Latest Hallmark Special

    America has always had a gift for taking the grotesque and wrapping it in party favors. We can turn a banking collapse into a Netflix documentary, a constitutional crisis into a coffee-table book, and now, Jeffrey Epstein’s rolodex into a “birthday book.” Imagine the scrapbooking aisle of Michael’s, but curated by Ghislaine Maxwell. This week,

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  • The Gospel of Countdown and Shrug: Mel Robbins’s DIY Serenity Prayer

    The Gospel of Countdown and Shrug: Mel Robbins’s DIY Serenity Prayer

    Self-help is America’s unofficial national pastime. Baseball, apple pie, and the endless hunt for a three-word mantra to finally make us tolerable to ourselves. Into this crowded bazaar of affirmations and hacks waltzed Mel Robbins, who has done the impossible: sold millions of copies of not one but two rules for living that could fit

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  • America’s New Job Fair: Now Hiring Deportation Apprenticeships

    America’s New Job Fair: Now Hiring Deportation Apprenticeships

    The Trump administration has always treated immigration enforcement less like policy and more like a casting call. But now the casting call has become a crash program: 10,000 new ICE officers and 3,000 CBP agents by year’s end. Funded by a $170.7 billion “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the program is less about public safety and

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  • Tom Hanks, the Wokest Man Alive: How America Lost Its War Against Niceness

    Tom Hanks, the Wokest Man Alive: How America Lost Its War Against Niceness

    Once upon a time, the biggest threat Tom Hanks posed to national security was making every American cry in unison. Whether storming Omaha Beach or talking to a volleyball, Hanks specialized in weaponized empathy. He was our cinematic dad, our comfort-food patriot, the guy who could make a two-and-a-half-hour movie about the postal service (The

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  • E. Jean Carroll vs. Donald Trump: The $83.3 Million Reminder That Defamation Still Has a Price Tag

    E. Jean Carroll vs. Donald Trump: The $83.3 Million Reminder That Defamation Still Has a Price Tag

    The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a unanimous per curiam decision that might as well have been subtitled “Actions Have Consequences, Even for Presidents Who Think They’re Immune to Consequences.” The ruling upheld the $83.3 million defamation judgment against Donald J. Trump in Carroll v. Trump (No. 24-644), rejecting his immunity claim with

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  • Fox Succession: Billion-Dollar Blood Feud, Season Finale

    Fox Succession: Billion-Dollar Blood Feud, Season Finale

    Rupert Murdoch—still kicking at ninety-four, though now more embalmed than alive—closed the latest family cage fight over who gets to steer the Fox propaganda mothership into the next few decades. The result: a $3.3 billion settlement that removed Prudence, Elisabeth, and James Murdoch from the family trust like contestants voted off an island. Each walked

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