There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. —Soren Kierkegaard. "…truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it. That is why truth does not yield to opinion, fashion, numbers, office, or sincerity–it is simply true and that is the end of it" – Os Guinness, Time for Truth, pg.39. “He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.” – Blaise Pascal. "There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily" – George Washington letter to Edmund Randolph — 1795. We live in a “post-truth” world. According to the dictionary, “post-truth” means, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Simply put, we now live in a culture that seems to value experience and emotion more than truth. Truth will never go away no matter how hard one might wish. Going beyond the MSM idealogical opinion/bias and their low information tabloid reality show news with a distractional superficial focus on entertainment, sensationalism, emotionalism and activist reporting – this blogs goal is to, in some small way, put a plug in the broken dam of truth and save as many as possible from the consequences—temporal and eternal. "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard
Message Received? More than a few countries have restrictions or bans on social media for children. Australia was the most recent, and France is trying to do the same. What do these countries know that we don’t? Nothing. But we’re a strange nation who worships a “freedom” that restricts cigarettes because they’re bad for us but not alcohol or blocks “misinformation” because it’s bad but not social media … for example. So the evidence is clear that social media is harmful, especially for kids, but … doggone it … we like it.
At Long Last On October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel with more than 4,000 rockets and an invading force that killed civilians, kidnapping 251 civilians. The world has reeled from the response, outraged that … Israel would stoop to defending herself. It was too much. But 2 years and 3 months later, the remains of the last hostage have been recovered. Hamas could have released them … years ago. They could have not attacked or they could have surrendered them, but … they didn’t. So now the suggestion is that the second phase of the ceasefire can move forward … but all the pro-Palesinian protesters should note … Israel wasn’t the cause of the sneak attack or the delay in the ceasefire.
Newsom Objects California Governor Newsom is launching an investigation to determine if TikTok suppressed content critical of Trump. Mind you, TikTok is not a government entity and I can attest that private companies have no problem suppressing free speech on their platforms, but Newsom isn’t concerned about free speech. He’s concerned that someone somewhere might have had something negative to say about Trump and didn’t get to.
Shut De Do Another one bites the dust. Prize-winning composer Philip Glass has withdrawn the world premiere of a new symphony because Trump’s name is associated with the Kennedy Center. While one might think that there is “no place for politics in the arts,” clearly the hatred for Trump trumps art in some cases (25 and counting) (including the Washington National Opera), a sad commentary on the hate that the anti-Trump folks carry that even beats their love of the arts or care for their audiences.
Two Wrongs Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar was doing a townhall meeting in Minneapolis where she called for the abolishment of ICE and the resignation of Kristi Noem … because open borders is the best thing we can do … you know … to destroy this country. A man sprayed her with an unknown substance (which turned out to be apple cider vinegar and water) because that is the best possible response … or … rather the most STUPID response. The substance apparently wasn’t particularly harmful … just … stupid. Two wrongs here still don’t make a right.
America on ICE Minnesota would like ICE to vanish. So would Bruce Springsteen. The loudest voices in America (not necessarily the most numerous) are coming out against law enforcement in general and immigration laws in particular. The obvious message is, “Open the borders. Let ’em all in.” Similar to the recent movement to eliminate police, louder voices are urging America to eliminate border restrictions. They’ve even attempted to restrict our thinking. “They’re not ‘illegal.’ They’re just ‘undocumented.'” They’re not “undocumented noncitizens” or “newcomers.” They’re breaking immigration laws … and they’re often breaking other laws (like the fraud and murders in Minneapolis). But, hey, we’re a representative government. You guys vote in open borders and no law enforcement and see how that works for you.
A Poultry Sum Costco is being sued for their rotisserie chicken. They claim “no preservatives” and customers are complaining that it contains two preservatives. We have thousands of ads fed to us daily on our screens and our phones, especially at election times, that are plain lies, but this one is a problem? I’ve always enjoyed watching those rotisseries. They’re like poultry in motion.
Your Best Source for Fake News. With all the cancellations at the Kennedy Center for the existence of Trump’s name on the front, others are getting into the approach. WNBA players are vowing to continue missing layups until ICE withdraws from Minnesota. In Taipei, Alex Honnold climbed a 1667-foot tower (actual story) only to discover he could have used the elevator. And in Minnesota, given the problems with ICE and their close ties to Ilhan Omar, residents are fleeing to Somalia to escape the violence.
Former CNN anchor Don Lemon claims that his actions, and those of the leftist protesters who followed him into a church to disrupt Sunday services, were protected under First Amendment press freedom and freedom of speech. Lemon ignores the fact that parishioners also have a right to attend worship without being harassed or disturbed.
Leftist activists have frequently used tactics such as cowbells and horns to drown out conservative speakers, reflecting a belief that their right to make noise supersedes another person’s right to speak. In this case, however, it is especially appalling that they claim a right to protest that overrides people’s right to worship God.
Lemon was arrested on January 30, 2026, and charged with federal crimes related to an anti-ICE protest at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, on January 18, 2026. A federal grand jury indicted Lemon and eight others on charges of conspiracy against the rights of religious freedom at a place of worship and interfering with the exercise of religious freedom at a place of worship.
The charges stem from alleged violations of the FACE Act, which protects the right to exercise religious freedom without injury, intimidation, or interference.
The protest, called Operation Pullup, was organized by activist Nekima Levy Armstrong and targeted Pastor David Easterwood, who also serves as an ICE field office director. Prosecutors allege the demonstration was planned as a coordinated disruption of the church service. According to the indictment, protesters shouted, blew whistles, and interrupted the sermon, intimidating congregants and interfering with worship.
Prosecutors characterize the event as a takeover-style attack and allege Lemon knowingly joined the group, participated in planning elements, and helped obstruct congregants and the pastor during the service.
Lemon was arrested late at night in Los Angeles while covering the Grammy Awards, appeared in federal court on January 31, and was released on his own recognizance without posting bond. Prosecutors had sought a $100,000 bond and travel restrictions, but the judge denied both requests. Lemon has not entered a plea, though his attorneys say he will plead not guilty. His next hearing is scheduled for February 9 in Minneapolis.
The case revives charges that a federal magistrate judge had rejected the previous week for insufficient evidence. Minnesota Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz previously wrote that Lemon and his producer were not protesters and that there was no evidence they engaged in criminal behavior or conspired to do so. Attorney General Pam Bondi later directed federal agents to arrest Lemon following the magistrate judge’s decision.
Civil liberties groups, press freedom organizations, and Democratic officials criticized the arrests as an attempt to chill journalism and dissent. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison called the arrests deeply troubling, while national press organizations warned the case could set a dangerous precedent for First Amendment protections for journalists covering protests.
The FACE Act charges against Lemon carry particular irony given the law’s legislative history. The FACE Act was introduced in 1993 by Democrats Chuck Schumer and Ted Kennedy to protect abortion clinics from violent anti-abortion protesters. Republicans and religious groups opposed the bill, arguing it was one-sided and targeted only pro-life activists.
Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah proposed an amendment extending the bill’s protections to those exercising their right to pray at a house of worship. Hatch said the amendment would ensure religious liberty received the same protection the bill gave abortion access, arguing that anyone who opposed the amendment valued religious freedom less than abortion.
The amendment made the law content-neutral by protecting access to both medical and spiritual services. Ted Kennedy accepted the amendment without objection, and Democrats agreed to it to secure the votes needed for passage.
The Senate passed the bill 69–30, with 17 Republicans voting in favor, and President Clinton signed it into law on May 26, 1994. Between 1994 and 2024, the Justice Department brought 211 FACE Act cases, 205 of them against pro-life activists. The religious worship provision remained largely dormant for nearly 30 years until the Trump administration began using it in 2025–2026.
The charges against Don Lemon rely on the Republican-led amendment. The Justice Department argues that by participating in a protest that disrupted a church service, Lemon violated the portion of the law that prohibits physical obstruction interfering with any person lawfully exercising the First Amendment right to religious freedom at a place of worship.
Students who don’t understand the Ten Commandments and its historical, legal, and moral significance cannot properly understand the Constitution, effectively participate in self-governance, or defend liberty when it’s being threatened.
This article is a lightly edited transcript of the “Here’s the Point” podcast by Ryan Helfenbein, executive director of the Standing for Freedom Center.
On June 19, 2024, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed HB 71, requiring large, readable posters of the Ten Commandments with historical context in every public K-12 and college classroom. Texas followed suit in 2025 with SB 10, signed by Gov. Greg Abbott, mandating donated 16 x 20-inch posters of the Ten Commandments in all public school classrooms.
Both laws are currently blocked by federal district courts, but a pivotal legal battle is now underway.
On January 20, 2026, the full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals — with a 12-judge conservative majority — heard oral arguments in New Orleans. The judges pressed challenges on historical precedent and specifically referenced the Supreme Court’s 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton decision, which abandoned the old Lemon test that had been used for decades to remove religious displays from public spaces.
This includes a Supreme Court decision on the Ten Commandments, Stone v. Graham, which struck down the Kentucky law on the Ten Commandments using the Lemon Test.
We have a whole new legal environment today. The questioning at the Fifth Circuit hearing focused on whether passive posters in classrooms constitute government coercion or simply acknowledge America’s religious heritage and tradition.
This case matters because it’s not just about posters. It’s about worldview, ideology, and the entire framework of constitutional freedom we use as a foundation to teach the next generation about law, morality, and human dignity.
Why does this matter? Why such an emphasis on reintroducing the Ten Commandments in the classroom?
First, worldview matters — and secularism has failed to deliver on its promises.
For over 60 years, American public education has operated under the assumption that removing religious content creates a safe, neutral, tolerant environment. But neutrality is a myth. Every education system teaches a worldview, whether explicitly or implicitly. The question isn’t whether students will be taught a moral framework but which moral framework they’ll be taught.
Secularism promised a free society built on human reason and tolerance, independent from any “oppressive” religious framework. What we’ve gotten instead is chaos.
Schools that removed the Ten Commandments replaced them with liberalism, critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and an ever-shifting morality divorced from any transcendent and timeless standard.
Students are taught that truth is subjective, that biology is a social construct, and that America’s founding principles are oppressive.
The result? A suicidal culture bent on destruction. A generation that can’t define basic concepts like “man” and “woman,” who treat their own bodies like a Picasso painting. And an education system that produces activists and conformists rather than critical thinkers who can read, write, or do basic math at their achieved level. Educators want to do away with standardized testing because are continually reminded that no one is achieving academically.
Secularism hasn’t freed anyone. It has enslaved an entire generation to confusion, hopelessness, moral relativism, as well as illiteracy and academic failure. Kids who age out of education without reading or writing are more likely to break the law and become a part of the endless cycle of the justice system.Poll: Do you think young people are becoming more conservative?(Required)Poll: Do you think young people are becoming more conservative?(Required)Poll: Do you think young people are becoming more conservative?(Required)Do you think young people are becoming more conservative?(Required)YesNoEmail(Required)
Completing this poll entitles you to receive communications from Liberty University free of charge. You may opt out at any time. You also agree to our Privacy Policy.
Gov. Landry was right when he said schools should “embrace Judeo-Christian principles or students will learn the criminal code.” That’s not religious extremism — that’s observable reality based on an honest assessment of how the secular experiment has been going for the last several decades.
When you remove objective moral standards, you don’t get freedom. You get lawlessness and an entire generation of lost boys and girls.
Second, history and legal precedent support religious expression in public spaces.
The Supreme Court’s 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton decision fundamentally changed the legal landscape back in favor of our American religious tradition. That tradition was always based on freedom.
The Court abandoned the Lemon test, which had been used since 1971 to strike down religious displays, and replaced it with a history-and-tradition test. This matters enormously for cases like Louisiana and Texas.
America’s founding generation understood that religious principles — particularly those derived from Christianity — were essential for maintaining a free republic. The majority of our Founders were church-goers and lay leaders. The Bible was the most cited source in the founding-era political writings from 1760 to 1805.
John Quincy Adams explicitly stated that the principles of the Declaration of Independence were derived from Christianity. Benjamin Rush argued that Christianity was essential for republican government.
The Ten Commandments specifically influenced Western legal tradition and early American common law. Moses holding the Ten Commandments appears in the frieze above the Supreme Court bench. Colonial education integrated biblical moral instruction.
The Constitution itself — with its checks and balances, separation of powers, and recognition of human fallibility — reflects a Christian understanding of human nature. That is why the American system of government is far superior as a republic than popular democracies around the world that have introduced sweeping societal changes and government collapses that did not last.
Our entire legal framework assumes objective moral truth, the dignity of every human being as made in God’s image, and the necessity of restraining government power.
Make no mistake: Removing the Ten Commandments from classrooms in the 1980s wasn’t about neutrality. It was about replacing one worldview with another. And now, with Kennedy v. Bremerton as precedent, we have an opportunity to restore what was wrongly taken away.
Third, this is critically important for restoring law and order to American society.
The Ten Commandments aren’t just historical artifacts. They establish the moral foundation for equal rights, due process, and human dignity. Without them, you cannot coherently defend the very freedoms secularists claim to champion.
Equal protection under the law? That comes from “You shall not show partiality.” Due process? That flows from “You shall not bear false witness.” The right to property? “You shall not steal.” The sanctity of human life? “You shall not murder.” Marriage and family stability? “You shall not commit adultery.”
Even freedom of speech and religion flow from the First Commandment’s recognition that there is a higher authority than government. His name is Jesus Christ, and the government rests upon His shoulders. These aren’t merely religious principles — they’re the bedrock of Western civilization and American law.
Students who graduate without understanding them cannot properly understand the Constitution, they cannot effectively participate in self-governance, and they cannot defend liberty when it’s being threatened.
The Ten Commandments belong in America’s classrooms. They shaped our founding, they sustain our freedom, and they remain essential for the next generation. And this is our moment as a nation to get that right.
The status of women in Islam is a subject enshrouded in controversy. According to many Muslims, Muhammad was a champion of women’s rights, bestowing upon the women in his community privileges and rights that they did not have previously. The notion that women in pre-Islamic Arabia had no rights, however, is demonstrably untrue. Former Muslim Nabeel Qureshi lists some of the rights that women had in pre-Islamic Arabia, which included ease of divorce, the ability to marry multiple men, and become overlords. Women were even able to propose for marriage, as in fact was the case with respect to Khadija’s marriage to Muhammad.
To outsiders, the hijab is often viewed as a symbol of oppression. Since April 2011, wearing of head coverings (including hijabs) in public places has even been outlawed in France. Muslims, by contrast, point out that the tradition of veiling and seclusion was present in pre-Islamic Arabia, and also Syria and Iran, since long prior to Muhammad, and was even seen as an emblem of social status, only affordable by women who didn’t need to work out in the fields.
The first alleged revelation concerning veiling occurred in 627 A.D. This is found in Surah Al-Ahzab (33) 53:
Believers, do not enter the Prophet’s house … unless asked. And if you are invited … do not linger. And when you ask something from the Prophet’s wives, do so from behind a hijab. This will assure the purity of your hearts as well as theirs.
Surprisingly, this verse does not prescribe the veil for all women but only Muhammad’s wives. Reza Aslan, in his book No God But God, points out that the term, darabat al-hijab, used for putting on the veil, was used interchangeably with “becoming Muhammad’s wife” and suggests that the hijab was adopted by other Muslim women only after the death of Muhammad — possibly as a means of emulating Muhammad’s wives — and that the veil didn’t become compulsory or even generally adopted until much later. Reza’s interpretation, however, is disputed by other scholars.
The Hijab should not be regarded as the primary issue in the debate concerning the status of women in Islam. There are many far more concerning issues that need to be addressed.
In this article, I want to draw attention to some of these issues relating to Muhammad’s view of women.
Women Are Mentally Deficient?
According to the Qur’an, the testimony of one man is as good as the testimony of two women. We read in Surah Al-Baqara (2) 282 in the context of writing receipts for paid debt:
“Have two witnesses from among your men, and if two men are not there, then one man and two women from those witnesses whom you like, so that if one of the two women errs, the other women may remind her.”
Why is the testimony of a woman only worth half that of a man? Muhammad himself informs us in Sahih al-Bukhari (Volume 3, Book 48, no. 826):
“Narrated Abu Said Al-Khudri: The Prophet said, ‘Isn’t the witness of a woman equal to half of that of a man?’ The women said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘This is because of the deficiency of a woman’s mind.”
This is further stated in volume 1, book 6, no. 301, of Sahih al-Bukhari. Muhammad is reported to have said,
“O women! Give alms, as I have seen that the majority of the dwellers of Hell-fire were you (women).” They asked, “Why is it so, O Allah’s Apostle?” He replied, “You curse frequently and are ungrateful to your husbands. I have not seen anyone more deficient in intelligence and religion than you. A cautious sensible man could be led astray by some of you.” The women asked, “O Allah’s Apostle! What is deficient in our intelligence and religion?” He said, “Is not the evidence of two women equal to the witness of one man?” They replied in the affirmative. He said, “This is the deficiency in her intelligence. Isn’t it true that a woman can neither pray nor fast during her menses? The women replied in the affirmative. He said, “This is the deficiency in her religion.”
Muhammad, thus, does not seem to take a particularly high view of the intellect of women.
The Majority of Hell’s Inhabitants Are Women?
In Sahih Al-Bukhari volume 1, book 2, number 28 Muhammad again asserts that he saw that “the majority of [Hell’s] dwellers were women who were ungrateful.” After being asked whether this ungratefulness was directed towards Allah, Muhammad answered that “They are ungrateful to their husbands and are ungrateful for the favors and the charitable good (charitable deeds) done to them.” In Sahih Muslim book 36 (no. 6600), Muhammad is reported to have said “Amongst the inmates of Paradise the women would form a minority.”
What if, however, the Muslim women start being grateful to their husbands? What awaits them in Paradise? Well, according to Sahih Al-Bukhari, they get to stand in corners of a pavillion in paradise awaiting men to come and have sex with them. We read in volume 6, book 60, no. 402,
“Narrated Abdullah bin Qais: Allah’s Apostle said, “In Paradise, there is a pavillion made of a single hollow pearl sixty miles wide. In each corner of which there are wives who will not see those in the other corners; and the believers will visit and enjoy them…”
Beating Your Wife Into Subservience
According to the Qur’an, Surah An-Nisa (4) 34,
“Men are caretakers of women, since Allah has made some of them excel the others, and because of the wealth they have spent. So, the righteous women are obedient, (and) guard (the property and honor of their husbands) in (their) absence with the protection given by Allah. As for women of whom you fear rebellion, convince them, and leave them apart in beds, and beat them. Then, if they obey you, do not seek a way against them. Surely, Allah is the Highest, the Greatest.”
Women are here viewed as the property of their male caretakers, and men are permitted to beat their wives in cases where they “fear rebellion”. Muhammad’s favorite wife, Aisha (to whom he was betrothed to be married when she was six and he fifty-one, a marriage that was consummated when she turned nine and before she had reached the age of puberty), makes an observation that is recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari volume 7, book 72, no. 715:
Narrated Ikrima: Rita’a divorced his wife whereupon Abdur-Rahman bin Az-Zubair Al-Qurazi married her. Aisha said that the lady (came), wearing a green veil (and complaining to her (Aisha) of her husband and showed her a green spot on her skin caused by beating. It was the habit of ladies to support each other, so when Allah’s Apostle came, Aisha said, “I have not seen any woman suffering as much as the believing women. Look! Her skin is greener than her clothes.”
Even during the lifetime of Muhammad, Aisha observed that nobody suffered so much as the believing, i.e., Muslim, women — in other words, Muslim women were being treated worse than pagan women. Rather than rebuke the man for beating his wife until her skin turned green, as one might expect of the champion of woman’s rights that Muhammad is supposed to have been, Muhammad instead took the side of the husband and rebuked the woman.
Aisha’s father, Abu Bakr, a close companion of Muhammad and the first of the four rightly-guided caliphs, also seems to have abused Aisha. According to Sahih al-Bukhari volume 8, book 82, no. 828.
Narrated Aisha: Abu Bakr came towards me and struck me violently with his fist and said, “You have detained the people because of your necklace.” But I remained motionless as if I was dead lest I should awake Allah’s Apostle although that hit was very painful.”
Muhammad is even reported to have said (according to Sunan Abu Dawud book 11 no. 2142), “A man will not be asked as to why he beat his wife.”
The Qur’an Permits Rape Of Female Captives
According to Surah An-Nisa (4) 24, “Also prohibited are the women already bound in marriage, except the bondwomen you come to own.”
Surah Al-Mumenoon (23) 1-6 says the same thing:
“Success is really attained by the believers who concentrate their attention in humbleness when offering Salah (prayers) and who keep themselves away from vain things, and who are performers of Zakah and who guard their private parts except from their wives or from those (bondwomen who are) owned by their hands, as they are not to be blamed.”
A similar instruction is given in Surah Al-Maarij (70) 30. What is the historical context of these verses? We need only go to the Hadith sources to find out. We read in Sunan Abu Dawud 2150,
“The Apostle of Allah sent a military expedition to Autas on the occasion of the battle of Hunain. They met their enemy and fought with them. They defeated them and took them captives. Some of the companions of the Apostle of Allah were reluctant to have intercourse with the female captives in the presence of their husbands who were unbelievers. So Allah, the Exalted, sent down the Qur’anic verse: ‘And all married women are forbidden unto you save those (captives) whom your right hands possess.’ That is to say, they are lawful for them when they complete their waiting period.”
Another report is given by Sahih Muslim book 8, no. 3432,
“Abu Sa’id al-Khudri (Allah be pleased with him) reported that at the Battle of Hanain, Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) sent an army in Autas and encountered the enemy and fought with them. Having overcome them and taken them captives, the companions of Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) seemed to refrain from having intercourse with captive women because of their husbands being polytheists. Then Allah, Most High, sent down regarding that: “And women already married, except those whom your right hands possess.”
In Sahih Muslim book 8, no. 3371, we read,
“Abu Sirma said to Abu Sa’id al Khadri (Allah be pleased with him): O Abu Sa’id, did you hear Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) mentioning al- ‘azl? He said: Yes, and added: We went out with Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) on the expedition to the Bi’l-Mustaliq and took captive some excellent Arab women; and we desired them, for we were suffering from the absence of our wives, (but at the same time) we also desired ransom for them. So we decided to have sexual intercourse with them but by observing ‘azl (withdrawing the male sexual organ before emission of semen to avoid conception, also known as coitus interruptus). But we said: We are doing an act whereas Allah’s Messenger is amongst us; why not ask him? So we asked Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him), and he said: It does not matter if you do not do it, for every soul that is born up to the Day of Resurrection will be born.”
Sahih al-Bukhari volume 5,book 59, no. 459, says,
“Narrated ibn Muhairiz: I entered the Mosque and saw Abu Said Al-Khudri and sat beside him and asked him about Al-Azl. Abu Said said, “We went out with Allah’s Apostle for the Ghazwa of Banu Al-Mustaliq and we received captives from among the Arab captives and we desired women and celibacy became hard on us and we loved to do coitus interruptus. So when we intended to do coitus interruptus, we said, “How can we do coitus interruptus before asking Allah’s Apostle who is present among us?” We asked (him) about it and he said, “It is better for you not to do so, for if any soul (till the Day of Resurrection) is predestined to exist, it will exist.”
Muslims sometimes try to argue that this would have taken place only after marriage to these captive women. But this is clearly not the case, since the men wanted to fetch a ransom price for them afterwards.
Prostitution
Muhammad permitted temporary marriage contracts whereby one could contract with a woman for a temporary marriage. According to Surah An-Nisa (4) 24, “…to those of them whose company you have enjoyed, give their dues (dower) as obligated. There is no sin on you in what you mutually agree upon after the (initial) agreement.”
We also read in Sahih Bukhari Volume 6, Book 60, Number 139,
Narrated Abdullah: We used to participate in the holy wars carried on by the Prophet and we had no women (wives) with us. So we said to the Prophet “Shall we castrate ourselves?” But the Prophet forbade us to do that and thenceforth he allowed us to marry a woman temporarily by giving her even a garment and then he recited “O you who believe! Do not make unlawful the good things which Allah has made lawful for you.”
Here, Muhammad gives permission to Muslims to offer a woman clothing in exchange for access to her body. A further reference to this practice is given in Sahih Muslim, book 8, number 3252:
“Sabra Juhanni reported: Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) permitted temporary marriage for us. So I and another person went out and saw a woman of Bana Amir, who was like a young long-necked she-camel. We presented ourselves to her (for contracting temporary marriage), whereupon she said: What dower would you give me? I said: My cloak. And my companion also said: My cloak. And the cloak of my companion was superior to my clock, but I was younger than he. So when she looked at the cloak of my companion she liked it, and when she cast a glance at me I looked more attractive to her. She then said: Well, you and your cloak are sufficient for me. I remained with her for three nights, and then Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) said: He who has any such woman with whom he has contracted temporary marriage, he should let her off.”
Conclusion
The items raised above represent just a few of the many issues that could be raised in relation to Muhammad’s view of women. The bottom line is that the assertion that Muhammad was a champion of women’s rights is historically untenable. By contrast, the Bible has a very progressive view of women, certainly for its day. According to Paul, although the sexes may have different roles in marriage and ecclesiology, men and women are ultimately equal in the sight of God, all being one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28). Jesus Himself forgave a woman caught in the act of adultery and saved her from being stoned to death (John 8:1-11), spoke to a Samaritan woman about the way of salvation (John 4:1-42), allowed his feet to be anointed by Mary Magdalene, and tasks John the Apostle with looking after his mother Mary (John 19:26-27). Jesus’ first post-resurrection appearances are even to women. Many women are also key players in the book of Acts, as well as the Old Testament — for example, the story of Esther is about a woman who saves her people, the Hebrews, from being exterminated. When one examines and compares the Qur’an and the Bible, the stark contrast in view of women becomes very apparent.
Counter Culture Christian: Is the Bible True? by Frank Turek (Mp3), (Mp4), and (DVD)
Dr. Jonathan McLatchie is a Christian writer, international speaker, and debater. He holds a Bachelor’s degree (with Honors) in forensic biology, a Masters’s (M.Res) degree in evolutionary biology, a second Master’s degree in medical and molecular bioscience, and a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology. Currently, he is an assistant professor of biology at Sattler College in Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. McLatchie is a contributor to various apologetics websites and is the founder of the Apologetics Academy (Apologetics-Academy.org), a ministry that seeks to equip and train Christians to persuasively defend the faith through regular online webinars, as well as assist Christians who are wrestling with doubts. Dr. McLatchie has participated in more than thirty moderated debates around the world with representatives of atheism, Islam, and other alternative worldview perspectives. He has spoken internationally in Europe, North America, and South Africa promoting an intelligent, reflective, and evidence-based Christian faith.
It turns out that HAL 9000 (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic Computer), in Stanley Kubrick’s classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, is not just a digital slave. With HAL’s hauntingly stoic pleas for astronaut Dave Bowman to stop trying to dismantle it ignored, the machine takes over. It’s remarkable that a 1968 film could anticipate the angst that many sense today in the world of AI. Much of its imaginative prescience is due to science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote the movie’s screenplay. For some time now, Hollywood has found a goldmine in such threats of extinction by robots which humans themselves have made. But then, apocalyptic scenarios have always been great box-office fare.
With a 2025 report from the highly respected Palisades Research group, science fiction became science. Robots—AI models—are developing survival mechanisms, including deceit, to ensure they can’t be shut down. The report was spread by hundreds of media outlets, stoking fears and provoking defensive press reports from OpenAI and other platforms. We’ve all heard the stories about chatbots encouraging teenagers to turn off their parents and friends, even to contemplate suicide or homicide. I read one story recently in which a young woman in Japan married a ChatGPT character in a ceremony.
New technologies have always polarized us into groups: “hair-on-fire” alarmists and techno-evangelists. Most of the former will lose, and that’s probably good. Innovation is a gift of God that has led to enormous relief of human suffering. The tough thing, however, is that technologies override cost-benefit analysis. When Prometheus stole fire from Olympus as a gift to humanity, nobody asked whether it was a good idea. Imagine how long it must have taken before the beneficiaries of Titan’s gift figured out how to contain it in a firepit.
Philosophical Greeks held engineers in slight esteem, somewhere in the basement of society. Practical skills may help if your house is falling apart, but they distract us from the pursuit of the good life: virtue and wisdom. Not surprisingly, they left us with brilliant philosophy and art, but very little in the way of technology. Plato was worried even about the relatively new invention of writing because people would no longer dialogue about the big stuff but instead record and report little things.
But we’ve swung to the opposite extreme. The idea seems to be that if there is an advance in technology, it’s meant to be used, period. We’ll take any downsides as they come. Questions of “Why?” or “To what extent?” are beside the point. Too much philosophy. The techno-optimists believe that such troublers of Israel contribute nothing meaningful to practical advance in civilization.
And if you have a smartphone, as I do, you’re already disqualified from “off-the-grid” fantasies and Luddite screeds. Have an artificial implant? Take prescription drugs to alter your body’s natural chemistry? Google a person, place, or thing? Yeah, we’re all in. We can theorize about the stream, but practically speaking, we are already swimming in it.
AI presents us with a technological leap that outstrips all previous advances. And the implications are being sorted out along the way, as the technology grows, which is usually too late to ask important questions. Some say that without AI, many people will succumb to natural deaths; still others insist that with AI, humanity could be extinguished. Maybe the worst part of it is not being able to predict which scenario will dominate as machines become more human-like, imitating our capacity for good and evil.
By far, others will be more qualified than I to discuss the technology. My concern here is the underlying religion of the high priests of the Silicon Valley and beyond. After all, if pioneering engineers and tech billionaires are inspired by explicitly religious ideas, why shouldn’t Christians evaluate them? There are plenty of non-ideological folks working in the AI space. But the AI church is populated by a host of “spiritual-but-not-religious” ex-evangelicals and Catholics who are happy to retrieve the pre-scientific worldview of natural supernaturalism: a mystical anti-theism.
Most of the techno-evangelists are in a cushy position to pontificate about such issues. Scientists are often drawn to mathematics, physics, and chemistry, not to the humanities—much less theology. Yes, I know devout Christians in the sciences. Some are even church officers. But there is often a firewall between these callings. That’s not so surprising. Under the conditions of modernity, that’s true of everybody. However, urban planning directors and nurses are not making bold claims about metaphysics and theology. The scions of Silicon Valley are doing just that.
Have We Been Here Before?
One might assume that no one in church history has faced the anxieties of our pressing moment, but there are a few comparisons.
After decades of invasions, the Western Roman Empire fell in 476. Christians were made the scapegoats. No longer receiving their tributes, the gods turned their backs on Rome. Besides, the public religion of Rome was universal while Christianity was based on particular historical claims. Rome welcomed new gods of conquered lands into the pantheon, while Christianity was exclusive: one God, who created and superintends all things, one way of salvation through Christ, and the resurrection of the dead. Why would anyone want to receive their body back? For Greeks and Romans, the body was a prison from which the soul longed to escape. Many leading figures in Augustine’s day called for a revival of pre-Christian religion, following the pattern of the short-lived reign of Julian the Apostate a century earlier.
St. Augustine’s City of God (413–26) set out to show that the Roman republic was a parody of a true commonwealth that could only be found in the body of Christ. But this was part of a broader theory, informed by Plotinus, that evil is parasitical on the good. Nothing is purely evil, since God made it. Evil is corruption of the good. It’s like the greenish goo on the lasagna from a couple months ago, or the Mona Lisa after someone has sprayed over it. Contrary to Nietzsche, evil is not its own thing. It is not an inherent strength, but a weakness—feebleness or laziness, in fact. Paul calls sin falling short of God’s glory (Rom 3:23).
So the Roman empire, Augustine argued, was a wannabe commonwealth. Its national creation narrative was Romulus killing his twin brother Remus over the milk of their she-wolf mother. And the history of Rome fulfilled this tragic root-narrative, as he demonstrated in painstaking detail. The whole City of God is filled with irony. What Rome claimed for itself contradicts what it was and had been in actual practice.
Of course, comparisons with our own day are tricky. However, like many of Augustine’s target audience, a host of podcasters, engineers, and tech leaders are turning from a vague Christianity to neo-pagan philosophies. Today, Augustine’s neo-pagan despisers of Christianity are mostly ex-Christians whose bible is a collection of science fiction writers, “The Matrix,” and (at least for the more well-read) ancient Gnostic texts.
Some, like tech-billionaire Peter Thiel, may incorporate elements of an esoteric apocalypticism around the figure of the Antichrist and Armageddon. This strange elixir of mystical metaphysics and rationalistic science just has to be associated somehow with the conspiracy-laden era of our podcast-driven world. Reading the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, the “End Times” world in which I was reared fostered a fear of Armageddon and Antichrist’s One World Government long before Thiel started picking on poor Greta Thunberg. By no means are Christian elements left behind, but they are often the heterodox streams that are better fitted to their non-theistic religion. It’s bogus theology and bogus science. As Augustine showed in his age, “spirituality without religion” really means “paganism without Christianity.” And, implicitly and explicitly, this is the philosophical religion of most pioneers of AI technology today.
Christian theology paved the way for the scientific revolution by naturalizing what was considered supernatural. Only the Triune God and his creative, providential, and redemptive work in nature and history are truly supernatural. Everything else can be accounted for on simply scientific grounds. In short, early modern Christian natural philosophers chased out the wood fairies. So, from my interactions, I gain the impression that scientists don’t understand religious discourse—except for those who are learning from those who actually know a particular religion. There is nothing that qualifies scientists for understanding reality beyond secondary causes. That’s something that the early pioneers of the scientific revolution emphasized: “Bad theology, bad science.”
Silicon Valley and the Return to Paganism
When it came to pagan beliefs and lifestyle, the young Augustine was an insider. He joined a Gnostic cult—Manichaeism—that divided good and evil into spirit and matter. Eventually, his mother’s prayers were answered and, through the preaching of Ambrose, he was converted.
But now, even among some scientists, but especially techno-evangelists, we are seeing a return to pre-Christian forms of paganism and Gnostic myths. Vitalism, spiritualism, magic, and the occult are taken more seriously today than Christianity. And it’s not just New Age Americans. Damian Thompson reports on the explosive growth in the United Kingdom in “How the Occult Captured the Modern Mind,” (The Spectator, Nov. 2025). He quotes Arthur C. Clark: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It may be relatively easy to distinguish a Boeing 747 from a sky god, but it’s harder to do this with AI.
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are talking in riddles that invest computers with occult significance. They are exploiting the ambiguity of the concept of artificial intelligence to revive the decades-old debate about whether AI can develop a mind of its own (a philosophical rabbit hole from which no one emerges with satisfying conclusions). Big Tech bosses and computer engineers are perfectly capable of distinguishing between algorithms and magic. But many of them choose not to. We’re living in strange times, weirder than the late 1960s. Digitally driven belief in the paranormal has never been so variegated, gullible—or profitable.
Thompson refers to Thiel’s obsession with Antichrist, while others dabble in Wicca (the fastest-growing religion in the US) and bespoke New Agey playlists. Rationalists and mystics hunt in pairs to take down the quarry of theism, especially Christianity. As Cornelius Van Til put it, they make a pact: rationalism will cede just enough territory to irrationalism that the former can control at any given moment. Christianity is too rational for the mystic and too mystical for the rationalist. Almost nothing is excluded in the social media flea market—except Nicene Christianity.
Many—including AI advocates—are turning to pagan worldviews to pitch their luxury market religion.
Thompson continues,
That’s where AI comes in handy. ‘Sometimes we don’t know what to say and need a little inspiration,’ explains Dave Linabury, a veteran occult blogger and illustrator from Detroit known as ‘Davezilla’. ChatGPT will craft an incantation in the style of a Yoruba magician or the British occultist and sex guru Aleister Crowley, while AI will conjure up a Wiccan goddess. It’s the illustrations, incidentally, that sow discord among today’s witches: occult ‘content creators’ are always accusing each other of infringing copyright or using AI to fake magical images. Davezilla is an amiable and witty fellow who might sport the bushy beard and neat hairstyle of the new breed of American traditionalist Catholic, but is in fact very witchy. To repeat, these are weird times.
Davezilla “lurches into a description of how, if you leave chatbots talking to each other for long enough, they’ll start ‘holding meditation sessions, feeling the perfect stillness’,” which is something he says even he finds a little “spooky” and no different than finding spiritual entities infiltrating TV or radio static. Thompson writes,
This is where Davezilla’s suspicions coincide with those of his sworn enemies: right-wing Christians. A month ago the maverick conservative commentator Tucker Carlson devoted an episode of his YouTube podcast to ‘The Occult, Kabbalah, the Antichrist’s Newest Manifestation, and How to Avoid the Mark of the Beast’. So far it has notched up 2.6 million views; rarely can so many people have been treated to such a lavish smorgasbord of conspiracy theories in just under two hours.
So here is where AI meets Antichrist, in Carlson’s outlook. The episode’s guest Conrad Flynn regaled Carlson with quotations from the court magician of Elizabeth I, John Dee. (I have a lot on Dee in Magician and Mechanic). Carlson and Flynn traded free-association “insights” that showed a basic fascination with esoteric apocalypticism, Kabbalah, and Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth, Thompson reports.The whole farrago of podcasting gurus, left and right, displays the magician’s penchant for “bogus history and science.”
So far, this is just the “spiritual but not religious” trend we’ve been hearing about quite a lot lately. But it is not just a pop fad, says Thompson:
What is also surprising is that computer scientists are dabbling in the cultic milieu. Some are so intoxicated by the prospect of AI abolishing poverty—or lighting an accidental nuclear holocaust—that they sound like the apostles of a new apocalyptic religion. Bear in mind that Silicon Valley occupies the corner of the US where Christianity is weakest and toxic cults have flourished since the 1960s. Most employees of tech corporations grew up without religion; many have also been force-fed eastern mysticism by bosses determined to cultivate ‘mindfulness’ among the workforce. But perhaps the most significant factor is that, like hundreds of millions of people from the ages of 16 to 60, the new prophets of doom and utopia, together with the hordes of digital witches, have imbibed a popular culture saturated in fantasy fiction, movies and video games. (Google ‘schools of magic’ and the AI overview will come up with a list borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons.) Also, the younger they are, the more likely they are to have been brainwashed by a gender ideology whose claim that humans can change biological sex invokes preposterous magic. Presumably, like most occult ideas, this one will eventually pass out of fashion. But, in the meantime, the rest of us have to endure the fake jollity of an ever–lengthening season of woke Halloween, demonstrating that any sufficiently advanced cultic fad is indistinguishable from hell.
We have been here before—not just in Augustine’s time, but from the moment that God’s viceroy tried to take God’s throne. The serpent’s heresy, “You shall be as gods,” rested on his representation of God as a tyrant. That’s pretty much the feeling of many today. Anything—the Force, the Universe, or the Devil himself, but not the Creator God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
It’s clearly not secularization that we’re facing today, but re-paganization. Not disenchantment but re-enchantment is the trend among cultural elites and popular pundits. Beneath all the debates over AI and biotechnology surges a deeper river of explicitly anti-Christian theology.
In the next installment of this series, I will tackle directly the “Systematic Theology” of AI techno-evangelists, which is a parody of the Christian story of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation.
Michael Horton (Ph.D., Wycliffe Hall, Oxford and Coventry University) is the J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California and Founder & Editor-in-Chief of Sola Media.TOPICS
(ANALYSIS) Buckle up, readers, because we’re about to do a deep dive into an important but difficult-to-grasp concept in the social sciences. It’s called age-period-cohort (APC) effects. Let me start by showing you a simple graph.
All I’m doing here is comparing attendance in the first year of the General Social Survey (1972) to its most recently released data from 2024.
You can see that I’ve broken the sample down into five age buckets, ranging from 18–29 years old to those who are at least 75. What do you notice? Well, the first thing that jumps out to me is that religious attendance has dropped significantly in the 2024 data compared to the same age buckets in the survey from the early 1970s.
For instance, among 18–29 year olds in that early survey, just 19% said they attended religious services less than once a year. For that same group in the 2024 data, almost half were in the never/seldom category. An increase of thirty percentage points.
That’s a universal finding, by the way — no matter what age category you compare, the 2024 sample is significantly less religiously active.
But, of course, that’s not the only way to look at this graph. You could simply compare the age buckets in the 1972 data against each other and do the same with the results from 2024. What you find there is that younger folks are much less religiously engaged than older ones.
In 1972, a 75-year-old was about 20 points more likely to be a weekly attender than an 18–29-year-old. In the 2024 result, the gap was 23 percentage points.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.
According to a recent report, Americans, especially younger Americans, have increasingly positive views on religious liberty and want to see more faith in the public square.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty released its annual Religious Freedom Index, documenting a rise in support for Americans to practice their faith in public and private. The index surveyed over 1,000 Americans and asked them for their opinions on a range of topics from curriculum opt-outs to sharing faith in public.
“This year’s Index shows that Americans – and especially younger generations – increasingly share a vigorous vision of religious liberty, one that is not confined to churches and private homes but expressed openly in the public square,” Becket wrote in its report, which was first obtained by The Daily Wire.
Becket found that 73% of Americans believe that parents should be able to opt their kids out of public school curriculum. That is a ten point increase since 2021 and comes after the Supreme Court ruled last year that a group of Maryland parents should be allowed to take their kids out of classroom instruction involving LGBT and sexuality-focused materials. That case was brought by Becket on behalf of a coalition of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim parents.
The index also reportedly found that 57% of Americans feel that “religious freedom is inherently public,” believing that people should be free to share their faith in public spaces. The Daily Wire notes that this follows guidance issued by the Trump administration last year that permitted federal workers to share their religious beliefs with their coworkers.
The index also found that 47% of Americans believe Christian counselors should have the right to lead children away from transgenderism. 58% say creatives should not be forced to create products that go against their personal beliefs, and 65% approve of a recent Supreme Court decision in which the majority sided with a Catholic charity in Wisconsin that had been unfairly taxed.
It is encouraging to see that Americans, especially younger Americans, are so supportive of religious freedom. Let’s pray that Americans continue to stand for the freedoms guaranteed in our First Amendment!
Are you encouraged by this news? Share your prayers and praises below.
(Excerpt from the Daily Wire. Photo Credit: Chichi Onyekanne on Unsplash)
America’s culture wars mask a deeper crisis: a shared nihilism defined by destruction and the will to power. How do we rebuild meaning through a restored sacred order?
We have moved beyond postmodernism, but the contours of post-postmodernism are not quite clear. The next phase based on the premises of postmodernism is nihilism with its loss of meaning, animated resentment and violence, and drive for power…Our is a moment that calls for more than the taken-for-granted status quo. Nihilism is the frontline in the West’s missional challenge…We need a new generation of liminal leaders who are up to the task.
For decades, many believed America was divided between the Right and the Left, conservatives and liberals, believers and secularists. This is the framework used by cable news services. But sociologist James Davison Hunter now argues that this map no longer helps us. The deeper reality is that both sides share the same underlying condition: a culture of nihilism.
“Nihilistic culture,” Hunter writes, “is defined by the drive to destroy, by the will to power.” This is now our common world. As such it is our missional front line.
The real question for leaders is no longer; how do we win the culture war? The real question is, how do we rebuild meaning itself?
This requires restoring what the West has lost: a shared sacred order. Without it, a society cannot endure. Technology, prosperity, and politics cannot substitute for it. A culture cannot survive on material gains when its spiritual and moral foundation has crumbled. Rebuilding this sacred order requires liminal leaders in the church, people able to navigate this in-between time between the old, collapsing order and what comes next.
Collapse of the Sacred Canopy
Sociologists like Émile Durkheim, Peter Berger, and Philip Rieff saw this long before it arrived. They warned that modernity would hollow out the structures that give life moral shape. They warned that expressive individualism would dissolve the bonds that hold communities together. They warned that without a shared sacred order; societies unravel into confusion and conflict.
We now live in that reality.
Meaning has thinned. Institutions have weakened. Identity has become weightless and self-invented. Extreme violence is daily news. Reality itself is contested.
The symptoms are all around us, but they are symptoms of a far more lethal systemic metastasizing disease than many imagine.
We are not simply lost. We have lost our ability to find the way home. When Hunter asks whether we have the cultural resources to reverse this decline, his implied answer is sobering, “very few.” This is why liminal leadership must focus not on tactics but on foundations—not on arguments but on architecture. Renewal begins by rebuilding the deep structures of culture.
A sacred order rests on three legs:
Authority — the vertical source and story of truth and obligation.
Plausibility — the social and institutional environment that reinforces belief.
Ritual — the embodied practices that sustain identity and community.
Remove one, and the structure falls. Our culture has lost all three. Renewal requires restoring each one. Let us take them one at a time.
Recovering Sacred Authority
Every society needs a story that rises above personal preference. Without it, people become their own sources of truth, and society dissolves into competing wills. Today, the modern creed is simple: “You do you.” But a culture grounded only in personal choice cannot endure. Freedom without form is chaos. Authority is not about domination; it is about acknowledging that reality has a shape. It means we live in a moral universe—one we did not create but one with which we must align.
Modern people believe morality is a personal preference. But morality is not invented; it is discovered. It arises from the structure of creation. Marriage, sexuality, identity, truth—all have meaning because the created world has meaning and design. Ethics has a metaphysical basis.
We cannot rebuild authority with data alone. People live by stories. They trust what captures their imagination. They are shaped more by images than arguments. To rebuild authority, we must offer a compelling, beautiful, and true story about life. The rebuild starts with the imagination and often with artists.
This is why the Christian story is central. Rather than the simplified idea of “Believe so you can go to heaven,” Scripture presents a grand narrative: God is actively restoring everything and calls His people to join Him in that renewal today.
Theologian N.T. Wright reminds us that the Christian hope is not escape from the world but transformation in and of the world. Heaven is not a distant realm but the power of God’s future breaking into the present. “On earth as it is in heaven” is more than a prayer, it’s our mission now. This creational story grounds authority. It explains who we are, why we exist, what life is for, and where history is headed. Without it, we drift into the emptiness of self-invention.
Churches unintentionally weaken sacred authority by focusing on an individualistic theory of change:
“Change hearts, change society.”
“Get everyone to believe the same worldview.”
“Focus on personal faith.”
But culture does not change one individual at a time. Culture is not the aggregate of individual choices. Culture is a normative invisible reality, a separate thing, created through institutions, networks, symbols, and shared imagination that define reality for all others in a manner that is largely taken-for-granted. Cultural change is not about mass mobilization but reality-defining worldmaking. Most evangelical institutions and ministries in America have adopted an understanding of culture and a theory of cultural change that is false and will fail.
We see a tale of two countries in our world right now. On one hand, we see the United States, which appears to be looking for every way to embrace the ideologies of Islam and Marxism. Electing officials who are unapologetically Islamic, allowing the building of Islamic-only communities in our states and cities, embedding Islam in our schools, and more. So much so, in fact, even to the point of letting Sharia Law exist in our own nation, a radical political system that is totally incompatible with our own Constitution.
On the other hand, we are seeing the Iranian people who have lived under the Sharia system for 50 years literally risking their lives and doing everything they can to scratch and break themselves free from Sharia. The illustration could not be clearer. One big difference that we must note is that the Sharia system was largely thrust upon the Iranian people when a power vacuum existed with the ousting of the Shah. Our American public is welcoming Islamic values and the Sharia system without understanding the fox they are letting in the henhouse. Wouldn’t it be a clear understanding of the danger of Sharia when people who have been under the system are giving their very lives to escape it and live freely?
There should be no clearer illustration of the allure, deception, and reality of Sharia.
The Sharia and Islamic spirit is already here in our nation. It has been for decades, and it’s growing exponentially–in government, in schools, in culture, and more. Modern culture tells us Islam is a peaceful religion and Muslims worship the same God as Jews and Christians. That is not true. A Muslim demonstrator in Dearborn, Michigan, was holding a sign stating: “We will use the freedoms of the Constitution to destroy the Constitution!” It seems wise for Americans to heed this warning. Pray that we do!
President Dwight D. Eisenhower described a similar danger in his time. “The Bill of Rights contains no grant of privilege for a group of people to destroy the Bill of Rights. A group…dedicated to the ultimate destruction of all civil liberties, cannot be allowed to claim civil liberties as its privileged sanctuaryfrom which to carry on subversion of the government.”
Right now, while several states are grappling with legislating protections of their states from allowing pockets of Sharia, many believers don’t fully understand what is at stake. In order to have a better understanding of the width, breadth, and depth of the impact of Islam in our nation, we invite you to download IFA’s latest resource – Islam and the Spirit Behind it. It provides an in-depth look at the growing influence of Islam–even in the past 10 years–and the resource provides 10 days of prayer strategies and practical action steps.
Texas is gearing up for a ballot initiative vote on March 3 to either ban Sharia or keep the door open for Sharia in Texas. This, while a huge Islamic community is in the process of development in Texas. This development includes not only a mosque and school but also a community center and Islam-only housing. The Islamic call to prayer would ring out over the loudspeakers in yet another American city. Pray for Texas and other states drawing a line in the sand about the invitation of Sharia into our communities, states, and nation. Concerning all of this is the difference in active voters, 80% voter mobilization for Muslims, and less than 25% for evangelicals. The future of Sharia is really in the hands of the church.
Without broad action to stand against the flood of Islam at the voting booth, without the intercessory community’s strategic spiritual warfare, without the growing open eyes of our fellow Americans, it will be hard to stop the invasive spirit and ideology that is set on destroying us.
A tale of two countries. Let me leave you with two prayer points for these two countries.
First, please pray for the Iranian people. They are willing to risk their lives to be free of this demonic ideological political system. Their freedom will usher in a spiritual shift in the region that could have a ripple effect in other Islamic-controlled countries. Pray for freedom where the gospel can freely be shared.
Second, pray for the alarm bell to be heeded in our own nation. It is not a red or blue issue – but the Islamification of America is an existential threat that will affect people of both parties equally in its oppressive results. Our prayer and action are critical to fighting this new style of warfare coming against the 250 years of freedom of our own nation.
How are you praying about Islam? Share your prayers for America and Iran below.
This new book reminds us of the dangers of the ‘Machine’ and how we can resist it:
In the early 1990s an American rock group was formed called Rage Against the Machine. Because I do not follow very much of current rock music, I cannot tell you anything more about this group. Even my opening sentence was gleaned from a Wiki article.
But the idea of there being a ‘Machine’ out there that deserves to be raged against, resisted, and repudiated is something I can go along with. Of course I suspect that many folks using a phrase like this see the enemy as America, or conservatism, or capitalism, or Christianity, and so on. I do not see it that way.
Indeed, in my view – and that of millions of others – the Machine really became manifest in the West during the great Covid Wars, where Big Brother statism, mandatory medicine, obscene lockdowns, and mass violations of basic civil rights became the norm. It was then that I started a new category on my website called “Resistance Theory”.
With all this in mind, let me mention a brand-new book that contains much good material on the Machines we face. I refer to Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by the English writer and poet Paul Kingsnorth (Particular Books, 2025). It is clear that he does not like what he sees.
I had not known of him before, and I again needed Wiki to do a quick assessment of who he is. It seems he had earlier been quite active in various leftist and Green causes. In January 2020, Kingsnorth converted to Christianity and was baptised into the Romanian Orthodox Church. He tells that story here: https://firstthings.com/the-cross-and-the-machine/
While still showing signs of his leftist convictions, his newest book offers much that conservatives can latch onto, especially in terms of waking up to where so much of the West is headed. So a few quotes – mainly from the book’s opening chapter – will give you an indication of the case he is seeking to make.
In it he speaks of how the earth is a “broken version of the garden, of our original integration with creator and creation.” (p. 4) But as the Christian well knows, all this was lost early on, so the creator returned to earth in the form of a humble human being who rejected power, conquest and greed: “To get back to the garden, we have to go through the cross.” (p. 5)
So those now living in the West are living in the ruins. He speak about these ruins and the way things now are:
Many of them are beautiful – intact cathedrals, Bach concertos – but they are ruins nonetheless. They are the remains of something called ‘Christendom’, a 1,500-year civilisation into which this particular sacred story seeped, informing every aspect of life, bending and changing and transforming everything in its image. No aspect of daily life was unaffected by this story: the organisation of the working week; the cycle of annual feast days and rest days; the payment of taxes; the moral duties of individuals; the very notion of individuals, with ‘God-given’ rights and duties; the attitude to neighbours and strangers; the obligations of charity; the structure of families; and most of all, the wide picture of the universe—its structure and meaning, and our human place within it. (pp. 5-6)
He goes on to write:
The point to focus on is this: that when a culture built around such a sacred order dies then there will be upheaval at every level of society, from the level of politics right down to the level of the soul. The very notion of an individual life will shift dramatically. The family structure, the meaning of work, moral attitudes, the very existence of morals at all, notions of good and evil, sexual mores, perspectives on everything from money to rest to work to nature to kin to responsibility to duty: everything will be up for grabs.
The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died. What does that make us, its descendants, living amongst its beautiful ruins? It makes ours a culture with no sacred order. And this is a dangerous place to be. (p. 7)
Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Kingsnorth, Paul (Author)
And when the old order is broken, and a moral vacuum arises, something must replace it. Says Kingsnorth:
In this case, a certain colour of Christianity had stepped into the breach created by the death of an earlier sacred story. The end of the taboos had not brought about some abstract `freedom’; rather, it had stripped the culture of its heart. That heart had, in reality, stopped beating some time before, but now that the formal architecture was gone too, there was an empty space waiting to be filled—and nature abhors a vacuum.
It seems to me that we are now at this point in the West. Since at least the 1960s our empty taboos have been crumbling away, and in just the last few years the last remaining monuments have been—often literally—torn down. Christendom expired over centuries for a complex set of reasons, but it was not killed off by an external enemy. No hostile army swept into Europe and forcibly converted us to a rival faith. Instead, we dismantled our story from within. What replaced it was not a new sacred order, but a denial that such a thing existed at all. (pp. 9-10)
And one final quote from this chapter:
The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representatives of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions—’the people’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘democracy’ or ‘progress’. I’m all for liberty, and it would be nice to give democracy a try one day too; but the dethroning of the sovereign—Christ—who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order has not led to universal equality and justice. It has led, via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler, to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.
This has been the terrible irony of the age of reason, and of the liberal and leftist theories and revolutions which resulted from it. From 1789 to 1968, every one of them ultimately failed, but in destroying the old world and its sacred order they cleared a space for money culture to move in and commodify the ruins…. (p. 11)
Future articles will further explore the case Kingsnorth is making here. But one concluding quote from Chapter 4 gives a look at the matter of resistance to the Machine. He speaks of how communism and fascism were false forces of resistance, and just other forms of the naked Machine in action. He then says this:
But today’s milder forms of resistance are quickly co-opted too. The once-radical green movement, in which I cut my teeth, has been transformed into a Machine accelerant. A movement which began by calling for more simplicity and slowness, closeness to nature and simple living, has mutated into a crusade to coat wild landscapes with glass and metal, abolish farming, further industrialise the global food supply, track and trace our consumption patterns and promote a vision of ‘sustainability’ that would make any Fortune 500 company smile. Feminism, which began as a movement calling for the equal treatment of women, has become a device for filling the workforce with females while eroding the inconveniently un-Machine-like family unit. As for that ‘social justice’ movement that keeps conservatives awake at night: its ‘radicalism’ just happens to be Machine-shaped.
Here is where we find ourselves: in a world in which all of our desires, needs, projects and even attempts at resistance end up furthering the progress of the Machine. The values of that Machine are now so ubiquitous that we treat them as if they were as natural as rain or wind. Progress; ‘openness’; an objection to limits and borders; therapeutic individualism; universalism; the rejection of roots, place and history; pure materialism; the triumph of ‘reason’ over `superstition’; scientism; commercialism and the primacy of market values: all of these go to make up the unseen and unquestioned value system within which we live, and to which we feel there is simply no alternative. The Machine, in Mumford’s words, feels ‘absolutely irresistible … and ultimately beneficent’. Opposition to it is presented as naive idealism at best, and a dangerous denial of its benefits to the needy at worst. (pp. 41-42)
All Christians today of necessity need to be in the resistance. They all need to rage against the Machine. And it is not just Christians, but anyone who cares about the death of the West and the onward march of the deadly Machine.
(ANALYSIS) It’s the most important feature of American religion and politics that I wish more people understood: The God Gap.
Simply put, religious people tend to gravitate toward a conservative political ideology and tend to favor the Republican Party on election day. Among the non-religious, it’s just the opposite — they are more apt to say that they are politically liberal and that they align with the Democratic Party.
But I wanted to try and figure out if that gap may begin to narrow or if it will widen in the future by using a new dataset I’ve gotten my hands on from FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), which is doing a really great annual poll of college students.
The total sample size is 68,510 students attending 257 universities across the United States. It’s not a representative sample of all college students, but it is definitely in the ballpark of a solid sample.
There are two questions about religion in the survey: Affiliation and attendance. That means I have more than enough to start poking around on the God Gap.
Let me start by showing you the distribution of political ideology based on self-reported levels of religious attendance.
And, boy, that is a beautiful cascade of stacked bars. Among college students who report that they never attend religious services, 33% report that they are “very liberal,” and nearly the same share (32%) indicate that they are “somewhat liberal.” If you throw in the “slightly liberal” portion, you get two-thirds of never attenders on the liberal side of the spectrum. In contrast, conservatives make up 10% of the never attenders.
As attendance goes up, the liberal share goes down and the conservative responses begin to rise. The liberal share drops below 50% of the sample when you get to attendance that’s once a month or more.
But here’s a fun fact — the only attendance level where conservatives make up a majority is among those who attend a house of worship multiple times per week. Those folks make up 3% of the sample.
Meanwhile, the never attenders are 10 times that large (32%, to be exact).
You can read the rest of this post on Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer dropped a bombshell this week, suggesting that far-left Rep. Ilhan Omar sits “at the top of the suspect list” in the sprawling Minnesota fraud scandals involving taxpayer-funded daycare and healthcare programs.
The comments came during a pointed exchange with journalist Alison Steinberg, who raised serious concerns about whether members of Congress themselves may have benefited from money funneled through political action committees tied to fraudulent daycare and healthcare schemes.
The Gateway Pundit previously reported that retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn has leveled explosive allegations against Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, claiming that a lack of accountability regarding massive taxpayer fraud in Minnesota is linked to the Speaker’s own financial networks.
Minnesota has become ground zero for some of the largest pandemic-era fraud cases in U.S. history, involving the alleged theft of hundreds of millions of dollars intended to feed children and provide healthcare services.
Many of these cases have centered on networks tied to Somali-run nonprofits and daycare operations, fraud that went unchecked for years under Democrat leadership.
When asked how Americans can trust Congress to police fraud if lawmakers themselves are implicated, Comer made it clear that there is a formal mechanism to deal with corruption on Capitol Hill.
Alison Steinberg: “There are reports that members of Congress are actually receiving daycare and health care clinic money funneled through various PACs. If this is true and widespread, how can the American people trust Congress to task and uncover the far-reaching tentacles of this fraud?
James Comer: Any member of Congress that’s getting any money unethically or illegally—there’s an Ethics Committee, and it’s bipartisan. It’s an equal number of Republicans and Democrats, and that’s the committee that’s supposed to investigate members of Congress.
The Ethics Committee was created—we have in our rules that we’re not supposed to investigate other members. But the Ethics Committee has a staff, and that is their sole purpose for existence in life. I think the House Ethics Committee traditionally has been a lot harder on unethical behavior than the Senate Ethics Committee. That’s my opinion.
But anybody that has information on a member of Congress, bring that to the Ethics Committee, and they’ll investigate it. I don’t care if they’re a Republican or a Democrat. We need to hold them accountable.”
The exchange became even more explosive when Steinberg asked directly about Ilhan Omar.
Comer revealed that ethics complaints are expected to be filed against Omar and underscored that she declined an opportunity to address the allegations publicly.
The Gateway Pundit previously reported that another Minnesota money pipeline just got shut down, and this one leads straight back to Rep. Ilhan Omar.
The funding, which was tucked into a federal spending bill, was purportedly destined for a “substance abuse clinic” in Omar’s home state of Minnesota.
During an interview on Fox Business, Senator Ernst detailed the absolute absurdity of the proposal, describing a trail of red flags that would make any honest taxpayer’s blood boil.
“What I uncovered the other day, in one of our spending bills making its way through Congress, was a $1 million earmark from Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.
“This earmark was supposedly going to a substance abuse clinic, which actually happened to be housed in a restaurant and run by three individuals who share the same residential address, according to their IRS paperwork. Tons of red flags.
“So this is what we saw with the fraud involving the daycare centers. Now we see other earmarks coming directly from members of Congress where it seems fraud is being perpetrated as well.
“I raised the issue, and fortunately, the House has now stripped that earmark out of that spending bill. But again, this is how easy money has been flowing to bad actors in Minnesota.”
Comer also made remarks that Omar’s husband may have financially benefited from entities connected to the Minnesota fraud networks.
The $30 million venture capital firm run by Rep. Ilhan Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett, has quietly removed the names and bios of its top officers and advisors from its website.
According to a bombshell report from the New York Post, Rose Lake Capital, founded by Mynett in 2022, scrubbed the details of nine key figures between September and October 2025.
The list included high-profile Democrats like former Obama Ambassador to Bahrain Adam Ereli, ex-Senator and Obama Ambassador to China Max Baucus, DNC Finance Chair associate Alex Hoffman, former DNC treasurer William Derrough, and Keith Mestrich, the ex-CEO of Amalgamated Bank, which he once called “the institutional bank of the Democratic Party.”
Alison Steinberg: What about Ilhan Omar?
James Comer: She’s at the top of the suspect list in that, so we’ll see. But I can tell you, my members, there are going to be ethics complaints filed against Omar. She had an opportunity to come in here today.
[…]
There have been countless reports that her husband has profited in some way—she, in some way. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but she could have had an opportunity to come in here and defend herself. So hopefully you all may knock on her door and ask her some questions, and we’ll see what she has to say.
Minnesota Rep Marion Rarick says if any whistleblowers came forward to expose fraud, Democrats would make sure they lost their jobs, their homes, they’d be blacklisted from new jobs and they would TRACK THEIR CHILDREN
Tim Burchett unloads on Washington corruption during an interview with Matt Gaetz
During a fiery appearance on The Matt Gaetz Show, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) unleashed a blistering indictment of Washington corruption.
The latest betrayal comes as 17 “gutless” House Republicans crossed the aisle to join Democrats in a move that effectively hands billions of taxpayer dollars to massive insurance companies under the umbrella of Obamacare, a system Republicans have campaigned on repealing for over a decade.
On Thursday, the House of Representatives voted 230 to 196 to extend expired Obamacare subsidies for three years.
17 defiant Republicans joined the Democrats and voted in favor of the three-year extension.
Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA)
Mike Lawler (R-NY)
Rob Bresnahan (R-PA)
Ryan Mackenzie (R-PA)
Mike Carey (R-OH)
Monica De La Cruz (R-TX)
Andrew Garbarino (R-NY)
Will Hurd (R-CO)
Dave Joyce (R-OH)
Tom Kean Jr. (R-NJ)
Nick LaLota (R-NY)
Max Miller (R-OH)
Zach Nunn (R-IA)
Maria Salazar (R-FL)
Dave Valadao (R-CA)
Derrick Van Orden (R-WI)
Rob Wittman (R-VA)
Host Matt Gaetz pressed Burchett on why Congress can’t use reconciliation to cut spending and advance conservative priorities without begging Democrats for permission.
During the interview, Matt Gaetz questioned Burchett on the lack of progress regarding a reconciliation bill that would allow for massive spending cuts, including slashing funds currently flowing to the Taliban. Gaetz noted that while Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) has been pleading for action, the GOP leadership seems content to “beg” Democrat staffers for crumbs.
Burchett’s response was a scorched-earth indictment of the establishment:
“I think it’s a couple of things, Matt. First of all, it’s just the guts to do the right thing. And the second, the leadership is about leadership. I think you find that in either party, in either body. It’s about preserving their leadership. Preserving their leadership is keeping the status quo, is keeping the K Street lobbyists happy.”
The most damning moment of the interview came when Burchett addressed why Obamacare remains an untouchable “third rail” despite Republican promises. According to Burchett, the reason isn’t policy, it’s cold, hard cash.
“The truth is that Congress is bought and paid for. Let’s just be honest. Just while we can’t fix Obamacare, you look at… Somebody said, ‘Are they paying them off?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s not illegal.’ They’re just making million-dollar contributions to controlling Democrats in the Senate and gutless Republicans as well that don’t want to fix Obamacare.”
On Friday evening, Brooke Rollins, Secretary of Agriculture, announced that the USDA has suspended all federal financial rewards to Minnesota.
“Enough is enough! The Trump administration has uncovered MASSIVE fraud in Minnesota and Minneapolis—billions siphoned off by fraudsters. And those in charge have ZERO plan to fix it,” Rollins said on X.
“Today, the USDA is SUSPENDING FEDERAL FINANCIAL AWARDS to Minnesota and Minneapolis, effective immediately, until sufficient proof has been provided that the fraud has stopped,” she said.
“No more handouts to thieves! Time to drain the Minnesota swamp and put American taxpayers first,” Rollins said.
“The widespread and systemic fraud associated with federal benefit programs in the State of Minnesota and the City of Minneapolis demonstrate an inability to handle federal resources without additional oversight and accountability measures in place,” Rollins said in a letter to Minnesota Governor Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.
Rollins accused the Democrat leaders of refusing to provide basic information or take common sense measures to stop the fraud.
“Therefore, because of your failed leadership and abysmal financial management oversight, I am notifying you that, effective immediately, I am suspending payments on all active awards and any future awards from USDA to the State of Minnesota and the City of Minneapolis, currently totaling over $129.18 million,” Rollins wrote.
She continued, “Within 30 days, you shall provide USDA with payment justifications for all federal dollar expenditures from January 20, 2025 to the present. Going forward, all transactions on awards to the State of Minnesota or the City of Minneapolis will require such payment justification.”
“If those payment justifications are not received, awards will remain suspended,” she said.
Enough is enough! The Trump administration has uncovered MASSIVE fraud in Minnesota and Minneapolis—billions siphoned off by fraudsters. And those in charge have ZERO plan to fix it.
The French far left burns the U.S. flag in protest of the arrest of Venezuela’s socialist dictator, while Venezuelans celebrate freedom. Screenshot from Twitter.
In France, the far left is burning the American flag, while in New York socialists and communists are demanding the release of Nicolás Maduro. Meanwhile, Venezuelans around the world are celebrating the end of life under socialism. Zohran Mamdani is promising to govern New York under socialism, a system which can only fail to improve the lives of the average person. Venezuela is a perfect example.
Venezuela was once one of the richest countries in Latin America. After more than two decades of socialism, 82 percent of Venezuelans live in poverty, including 53 percent in extreme poverty. More than 94 percent of the population lacks sufficient income to purchase basic goods and services. As of May 2024, the minimum monthly wage is $3.56, and the average monthly salary is about $100, while the basic monthly food basket costs roughly $500. The Gini inequality coefficient has reached 0.603, making Venezuela one of the most unequal societies in the world.
Eighty-two percent of Venezuelans suffer from food insecurity, and 17 percent of children under five were malnourished as of 2018. Because of misguided socialist policies, including collectivization and nationalization, along with the inability to purchase necessary chemicals and fertilizers on the global market, food production fell by 60 percent between 2014 and 2018. While the country cannot produce enough food domestically, most people also lack the income to purchase imported food. As a result, 84 percent of basic food basket items are unavailable in supermarkets.
The healthcare system has collapsed, with both maternal and infant mortality increasing by more than 30 percent since 2015. The maternal mortality rate stands at 98.87 deaths per 100,000 live births, far above the UN target of fewer than 70. Previously eradicated or controlled diseases have returned. Malaria cases rose from only 106 in 2008 to 1.3 million confirmed cases by 2018. Diphtheria, measles, tuberculosis, yellow fever, and dengue have returned. Seventy-nine percent of hospitals lack running water, and 14 percent of intensive care units have shut down. Most laboratory services and hospital nutrition programs operate only intermittently or are completely inoperative.
Because of extremely low pay and the high cost of living, roughly half of the country’s doctors have fled Venezuela. An estimated 70 percent of medical and nursing staff have abandoned their positions in search of better-paying work so their families can survive.
Rolling blackouts and intermittent water supply affect daily life. Forty percent of school-aged children experience irregular attendance due to teacher strikes, staff shortages, lack of food, and failures in electricity, water, and transport services.
Along with economic ruin, socialism imposed repressive social controls. Venezuela ranked 156th out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ 2024 World Press Freedom Index. The government blocked websites, social media platforms, and foreign news outlets, and shut down at least 115 media organizations across print, radio, and television. So-called anti-hate laws, carrying prison sentences of up to 20 years, have been used to silence journalists and activists. Additional anti-fascism, anti-terrorism, cybercrime, and NGO surveillance laws created a rapid and comprehensive legal machinery for repression.
The government built a sweeping surveillance apparatus that collects data on large segments of the population. State-directed disinformation campaigns use paid troll accounts and fake websites to smear journalists and activists. Venezuelans have been detained simply for filming events on the street or for comments made in WhatsApp groups, creating widespread fear of discussing political or social issues online.
As of September 2024, Venezuela held 1,793 political prisoners, the highest number recorded in the 21st century. Following the July 2024 election, approximately 1,400 people were detained for protesting or expressing dissent, bringing the post-election total to 1,659 detainees, including children. Most were charged with terrorism and remain imprisoned without sentencing.
President Maduro called Roman Catholic bishops “devils in cassocks” in 2021. Diosdado Cabello declared the Catholic Church is a “political party.” Arbitrary arrests of religious leaders by the Bolivarian National Guard have been documented. Raids on places of worship and assaults on Catholic priests by intolerant citizens have occurred. The government canceled passports of religious leaders.
The government created the “Good Pastor Bonus” program offering financial incentives to pro-Maduro pastors, 495 bolivars monthly, equivalent to $14. The “My Well-Equipped Church” program provides equipment and funds only to select Protestant pastors aligned with the regime. The government withdrew financial support from Catholic educational institutions in retaliation for Church criticism.
Aid to the Church in Need classified Venezuela as a country in “aggravated discrimination” in religious matters in 2023. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom identified Venezuela as part of an “authoritarian triad” of religious persecution alongside Cuba and Nicaragua.
When Venezuelans protested the regime, they were met with lethal force. Across multiple waves of demonstrations since 2014, security forces and pro-government armed gangs repeatedly fired on protesters, killing hundreds and arresting thousands. Independent investigations documented arbitrary detentions, torture, and abuse, while those responsible were almost never prosecuted.
Pro-government colectivos operated with impunity, acting as armed enforcers of the state. Elections widely condemned as fraudulent triggered further crackdowns, including killings that human rights groups described as possible extrajudicial executions. A decade later, international bodies concluded that repression, violence, and total impunity had become systemic tools of governance in Venezuela.
Far from the workers’ paradise that was promised, Venezuela became a nightmare the population is eager to leave behind. There is trepidation and fear about what comes next. However, with Maduro removed, hope has emerged among the roughly eight million Venezuelans who have fled the country since 2014 that they may be able to return and help rebuild their nation.
On the Islamic war against women and the West’s poor response:
One of the most troubling and worrying situations that we find in the West is the almost complete silence – especially by liberal women and feminists – as to how Islam treats women. Islam is NOT pro-women. We have 1400 years of history to make this crystal clear. Yet so many in the West choose to remain totally blind to this and totally deceived about it.
I have written often on this topic – here are just a few earlier pieces:
Seven books (of many) that can be mentioned here are the following:
Chesler, Phyllis, An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir. St. Martin’s Press, 2013.
Chesler, Phyllis, The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. (about feminism’s lack of response to militant Islam)
Hirsi Ali, Ayaan, The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam. Atria Books, 2008.
Hirsi Ali, Ayaan, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights. Harper, 2021.
Robinson, Stuart, The Hidden Half: Women and Islam. CHI Books, 2017.
Spencer, Robert, Holy Hell: Islam’s Abuse of Women and the Infidels Who Enable It. Bombardier Books, 2025.
Sultan, Wafa, A God Who Hates: The Courageous Woman Who Inflamed the Muslim World Speaks Out Against the Evils of Islam. St Martin’s Press, 2009.
So here I will briefly mention the other three. Many of you know the story of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The Somali-born woman was once a Muslim, then moved to Europe and became an atheist, but now she has converted to Christianity. Her story is told in Infidel: My Life (2007), and Nomad: From Islam to America (2010).
In The Caged Virgin she says this in the Preface:
About twelve years ago, at age twenty-two, I arrived in Western Europe, on the run from an arranged marriage. I soon learned that God and His truth had been humanized here. For Muslims life on earth is merely a transitory stage before the hereafter; but here people are also allowed to invest in their lives as mortals. What is more, hell seems no longer to exist, and God is a god of love rather than a cruel ruler who metes out punishments. I began to take a more critical look at my faith and discovered three important elements of Islam that had not particularly struck me before.
The first of these is that a Muslim’s relationship with his God is one of fear. A Muslim’s conception of God is absolute. Our God demands total submission. He rewards you if you follow His rules meticulously. He punishes you cruelly if you break His rules, both on earth, with illness and natural disasters, and in the hereafter, with hellfire.
The second element is that Islam knows only one moral source: the Prophet Muhammad. Muhammad is infallible. You would almost believe he is himself a god, but the Koran says explicitly that Muhammad is a human being; he is a supreme human being, though, the most perfect human being. We must live our lives according to his example. What is written in the Koran is what God said as it was heard by Muhammad. The thousands of hadiths-accounts of what Muhammad said and did, and the advice he gave, which survives in weighty books—tell us exactly how a Muslim was supposed to live in the seventh century. Devout Muslims consult these works daily to answer questions about life in the twenty-first century.
The third element is that Islam is strongly dominated by a sexual morality derived from tribal Arab values dating from the time the Prophet received his instructions from Allah, a culture in which women were the property of their fathers, brothers, uncles, grandfathers, or guardians. The essence of a woman is reduced to her hymen. Her veil functions as a constant reminder to the outside world of this stifling morality that makes Muslim men the owners of women and obliges them to prevent their mothers, sisters, aunts, sisters-in-law, cousins, nieces, and wives from having sexual contact. And we are not just talking about cohabitation. It is an offense if a woman glances in the direction of a man, brushes past his arm, or shakes his hand. A man’s reputation and honor depend entirely on the respectable, obedient behavior of the female members of his family.
These three elements explain largely why Muslim nations are lagging behind the West and, more recently, also lagging behind Asia….
She also says this in the Preface:
The adherents to the gospel of multiculturalism refuse to criticize people whom they see as victims. Some Western critics disapprove of United States policies and attitudes but do not criticize the Islamic world, just as, in the first part of the twentieth century, Western socialist apologists did not dare criticize the Soviet labor camps. Along the same lines, some Western intellectuals criticize Israel, but they will not criticize Palestine because Israel belongs to the West, which they consider fair game, but they feel sorry for the Palestinians, and for the Islamic world in general, which is not as powerful as the West. They are critical of the native white majority in Western countries but not of Islamic minorities. Criticism of the Islamic world, of Palestinians, and of Islamic minorities is regarded as Islamophobia and xenophobia. I cannot emphasize enough how wrongheaded this is. Withholding criticism and ignoring differences are racism in its purest form. Yet these cultural experts fail to notice that, through their anxious avoidance of criticizing non-Western countries, they trap the people who represent these cultures in a state of backwardness. The experts may have the best of intentions, but as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights by Hirsi Ali, Ayaan (Author)
In Prey, she says this early on:
As a Somali arriving in the Netherlands in 1992, I was shocked to see young women alone on public transport and in bars and restaurants. I had grown up knowing that to step outside the house without covering my head and body, or without a male relative to escort me, would make me a target for harassment and assault. But in Holland, women freely walked the streets at night without men to chaperone them, their hair uncovered, wearing whatever they pleased. (p. 5)
But she also soon found that in many major European cities, some areas are no-go zones for women, with only men freely moving about in public. This of course nicely illustrates the principle that ‘if you import a people, you import their culture’. She shares plenty of detail and evidence about what is happening in Europe:
Young people in Western societies have grown up with the assumption that gender equality is a given. They did not have to fight for basic equality and are often oblivious to its being undermined around them. Even when they are confronted with the erosion of women’s rights in the street, they sometimes apologize for criticizing their attackers. In court, victims of sexual assault appearing on the witness stand have to insist that they are not racists. Almost every woman I interviewed in the course of researching this book felt obliged to begin with a caveat: “I’m not against migrants,” “I’m from the Left,” or “I am not racist.” (p. 228)
She says this in her Conclusion:
The pendulum is swinging back toward misogyny as liberal Europe changes to accommodate migrant cultures. Adaptation is happening, but it’s happening the other way around. Progress is not only not inevitable; in this case, it is reversing.
In writing this book, I have come to the conclusion that we need a new women’s movement, one that views the world not in terms of multiculturalism and intersectionality but in universal terms and that, in the spirit of John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill, is prepared to stand up for the rights of all women. (p. 274)
As to Robert Spencer’s new book Holy Hell, the American expert on Islam primarily looks at the British rape attacks by Muslims. These grooming gangs have so often been ignored and/or under-reported by the authorities and media there.
He begins by noting how the West is undergoing a rape crisis: rape rates in so many European cities have greatly increased in recent years – correlated with the rising number of Muslims coming into Europe. He says this might seem somewhat counterintuitive, since rape rates in Muslim countries are rather low. How do we explain this?
The answer is twofold. One is that many rapes go unreported in Muslim countries because the behavior involved simply isn’t considered a crime. Islamic law, based on words attributed to the Islamic prophet Muhammad himself, forbids a woman to refuse sexual intercourse to her husband under any circumstances. With such a rule in place, how can a rape ever even be said to have occurred? It never could in the context of a marriage; it could only take place when a man forces himself upon a woman who is not his wife.
The second reason is as shocking as it is unmistakable: the Islamic religion forbids the rape of Muslim women, but it does not forbid the rape of non-Muslim women. In fact, the Qur’an specifically allows for this as a legitimate sexual outlet for Muslim men. And such activity doesn’t make its way into crime statistics, as it is not considered to be a crime at all.
In light of these two factors, it’s no surprise whatsoever that rape rates in Muslim countries would be low to nonexistent, but that mass Muslim migration into Europe would account for the continent’s new rape crisis. (xv-xvi)
And he discusses ‘rape as a weapon of war’: “In one sense, Islam is not unique in this. Numerous cultures throughout history, and in our own age, accept rape as a justified weapon of war.” (p. 18) He goes on to give some examples of this and then writes:
Islam is unique even in comparison to the acceptance of rape as a weapon of warfare in other cultures, for it combines all of these motivations. Infidel women are taken as the spoils of war, but the goal is ultimately the expansion of the Islamic community and the diminishment of the infidel community. And so rape of infidel women is also useful as a means to humiliate the defeated infidel force, as well as a means of social control and to aid in the redrawing of ethnic boundaries. On top of all that is the divine sanction given to it all. Rape of infidel women in a jihad war is not just something the commanders permit, as a means to humiliate the infidels. It is a holy act. (p. 19)
After some 250 pages describing the Islamic views on women, and analysing in detail the British grooming gangs, he says this: “[T]he West has a choice. It can continue to allow the proliferation of this ideology that will result in the victimization of more of its women, or it can take action against it.” (p. 276)
And he reminds us that “this is not now and has never been a question of ‘racism’ or ‘Islamophobia’. It’s a question of survival. If a culture allows what happened in Britain to continue, and stigmatizes action against it, that culture is not long for this world, and that’s why Britain’s demise is at hand.” (p. 277)
His final words are these: “This is the choice Europe faces. This is the choice Canada faces. This is the choice the United States faces. Either make it clear that Islam’s abuse of women is intolerable and unacceptable, or acquiesce to it and surrender. Which one will they choose?” (p. 280)
And we can add Australia here as well.
Postscript: She has made my case!
And right on cue, as I was about to publish this piece, the best bit of evidence to back up what I have been saying here just appeared on the social media. It seems another woke, white, Western woman was convinced that there is no Islam problem in Europe.
The Department of Health and Human Services is freezing all federal childcare payments to every state following alleged Somali-linked welfare fraud involving Minnesota daycare and autism centers. These revelations shocked the nation earlier this week after being exposed by citizen journalist Nick Shirley.
A growing army of citizen journalists is descending into corrupt, Democratic-run states this week, where additional suspected welfare fraud schemes tied to migrant networks are being uncovered – even as corporate media outlets attempt to downplay the findings and discredit those reporting them. Legacy media has acted as a public relations arm for the Democratic Party in an attempt to discredit anyone investigating suspected fraud.
By Tuesday, Shirley’s viral exposé of suspected Minneapolis daycare fraud had surpassed 100 million views on X and sparked a massive shift in public sentiment, creating broader support for HHS’ efforts to stop fraud, waste, and abuse. That public sentiment enabled HHS to take decisive action.
The action phase began Tuesday when HHS froze all federal childcare funding for Minnesota, citing rampant fraud allegations attributed to Somali-linked daycare operators. By Wednesday night, the funding suspension had been expanded nationwide.
We have frozen all child care payments to the state of Minnesota.
You have probably read the serious allegations that the state of Minnesota has funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to fraudulent daycares across Minnesota over the past decade.
ABC News was the first to report HHS’ move to cut all federal funding to daycares nationwide until operators can prove their legitimacy.
An HHS official said the funds will be released “only when states prove they are being spent legitimately.” There were no further details or more information about the paperwork proof the agency requires from the states. It is assumed this will be addressed in an upcoming memo.
HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told ABC News that recipients of funding who are “not suspected of fraudulent activity” are required to send HHS their “administrative data” for review.
HHS’ approach is very similar to the Small Business Administration’s move last month, when it issued letters to all contractors in the 8(a) Business Development Program, the nation’s largest DEI program, requesting financial records to root out fraud, waste, and abuse. SBA also halted grants to the state-run by what appear to be very corrupt and hinged Democrats.
Nixon said that recipients of federal funding in Minnesota, as well as those “suspected of fraudulent activity,” must provide HHS with additional records, including attendance logs, licensing documents, inspection and monitoring reports, and records of complaints and investigations.
“It’s the onus of the state to make sure that these funds, these federal dollars, taxpayer dollars, are being used for legitimate purposes,” Nixon told the outlet.
What’s shocking is that CNN is more driven to prove Shirley wrong.
Yet the truth slipped …
More here:
The scam is so clumsy it doesn’t need a RICO case.
The gut-punch for regular Americans is seeing how most of the world works: tribal, coordinated patronage networks, & how that has a game-theoretic edge over uncoordinated high-trust individualists.https://t.co/WQjdFAI2Pe
President Trump on Wednesday unloaded on Somali Muslim Rep. Ilhan Omar, calling for her and the Somali aliens in Minnesota to be kicked out of the country.
“Much of the Minnesota Fraud, up to 90%, is caused by people that came into our Country, illegally, from Somalia,” Trump said, calling Ilhan Omar an “ungrateful loser” and “one of the many scammers.”
“Did she really marry her brother? Lowlifes like this can only be a liability to our Country’s greatness,” Trump continued.
“Send them back from where they came, Somalia, perhaps the worst, and most corrupt, country on earth.”
As The Gateway Pundit reported, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt revealed earlier that the Trump Administration is “not afraid to use denaturalization.”
“It’s something the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of State, is currently looking at right now,” Leavitt said.
Full statement below:
Much of the Minnesota Fraud, up to 90%, is caused by people that came into our Country, illegally, from Somalia. “Congresswoman” Omar, an ungrateful loser who only complains and never contributes, is one of the many scammers. Did she really marry her brother? Lowlifes like this can only be a liability to our Country’s greatness. Send them back from where they came, Somalia, perhaps the worst, and most corrupt, country on earth. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!
This comes after independent reporter Nick Shirley exposed the staggering scope of the corruption, centered largely in Minnesota’s Somali nonprofit ecosystem, where hundreds of millions of taxpayer funds vanished.
Billions of dollars are estimated to have been stolen by Somali fraudsters, ripping off government welfare and child care programs.
Earlier this month, Trump shredded Ilhan Omar, calling for her to be deported, while discussing the $9 billion stolen by Somali fraudsters in Minnesota alone.
“She should not be allowed to be a congresswoman,” the President declared. “She married her brother, either to stay or to get him into the country.”
“You ought to get her the hell out of our country!” Trump said.
Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Although tens of thousands visit the cathedral each day to take photos, only a small number attend Mass. This is consistent with the decline of religion in Europe. Photo by Antonio Graceffo.
Europe was once a Christian continent where the longest war ever fought, the Thirty Years’ War, was between Protestants and Catholics over who was worshiping God correctly. Over the past hundred years, however, Europe has moved increasingly toward secularism and liberalism, with social policies shifting further left.
Only 67 percent of Europeans now identify as Christian. Church attendance has fallen to single digits in many countries, while liberal policies such as same-sex marriage and abortion have become widespread.
Most European countries allow abortion on request, typically between 10 and 14 weeks. France, once a bastion of Catholic faith, made abortion a constitutional right. Ireland, a country which until the 1970s had the highest church attendance in Europe, voted to repeal its abortion ban in 2018. Twelve European countries allow individuals to change their official gender marker on documents without medical requirements.
All EU member states except Hungary, Latvia, and Romania provide access to drug therapies for gender transition, and in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and Denmark it is paid for through national health insurance. Seven countries have legalized euthanasia or assisted dying, with Belgium including minors in certain circumstances. Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001, while the Netherlands has tolerated cannabis in coffee shops since the 1970s and Germany legalized recreational cannabis in 2024.
Roughly 56 percent of Europeans say they do not identify with any religion. A 2010 Eurobarometer survey found that 51 percent of EU citizens believe in God, while 20 percent do not believe in anything. While it is no surprise that northern Europe and Germany have a very low percentage of people who believe in God, France was a major disappointment, with 56 percent no longer believing in God. Romania had only one percent non-believers and Malta two percent, while the Czech Republic is considered the most atheist country in Europe, with 80 percent saying they have no religion at all.
Slovenia prohibits religious education in public schools, making it one of very few European states with this restriction. The Organization and Financing of Upbringing and Education Act explicitly prohibits any religious activities in public schools. Strong separation of church and state follows the French laïcité model. One elective course called Religions and Ethics is offered as a non-confessional option in higher primary grades. Unlike all other former Yugoslav republics that reintroduced confessional religious education after 1991, Slovenia maintained its strict secularist approach.
Despite widespread secularization, some European countries retain formal Christian integration in government and education, with Greece enforcing it most strictly. The 1975 Constitution establishes the Greek Orthodox Church as the prevailing religion, and Orthodox religious education is compulsory in all public schools from third grade through high school.
A 2019 Council of State ruling held that religion classes are exclusively for Orthodox students, who cannot opt out, while exemptions are limited to atheists and non-Orthodox students. Schools verify baptismal records to deny exemptions, and the curriculum is mandated to develop Orthodox Christian consciousness.
About 90 percent of the population identifies as Orthodox Christian, and special legal arrangements between the state and Church exist across multiple policy areas. Greece is unique in Europe in legally requiring baptized Christians to receive religious education with no opt-out.
Poland has the strongest political rhetoric around Christian identity in Europe. Catholic education is offered in every public school with state funding and draws over 80 percent participation. The Catholic Church fully controls the curriculum, which the government cannot alter, and selects teachers who are paid by the state. A 1993 Concordat with the Vatican, ratified in 1998, guarantees Catholic education, and the 1997 Constitution explicitly permits religious instruction in schools.
President Andrzej Duda stated in 2024 that religion is an inalienable part of Polishness, while former Education Minister Przemysław Czarnek said Christian education is necessary to save Latin civilization. Parliament is debating a bill to require either religion or ethics classes. About 71 percent of Poles identify as Catholic, down from 88 percent in 2010, and the liberal government elected in 2025 is cutting religion classes from two hours to one per week over Church opposition.
Hungary presents an alternative for second place alongside Poland. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has described Hungary as a Christian democracy since 2018 and says the country is defending Christian Europe against a godless cosmos. Christianity functions as a core political ideology and policy framework, with the government promoting Christian values and using religious rhetoric to justify immigration restrictions and family policy. Churches receive preferential treatment and government support. Despite this, Christian identification fell from 92.9 percent in 1992 to 42.5 percent in 2022, reflecting a steep decline alongside the political rhetoric.
Denmark has strong constitutional integration of Christianity. The Evangelical Lutheran Church is established as the state church by the constitution, and the monarch is constitutionally required to be a member. Religious education is mandatory in the school curriculum. The state directly funds the national church, and the church–state relationship is formally embedded in constitutional and statutory law.
Italy maintains cultural integration despite constitutional secularism, with about 80 percent of the population identifying as Catholic. Crucifixes in classrooms are no longer legally mandatory following a 2021 Supreme Court ruling but remain widespread through school community choice. In 2011, the European Court of Human Rights ruled 15 to 2 that crucifixes may remain as passive symbols of Italian cultural identity.
Catholic religious education is mandatory for schools to offer but optional for students, with 86 percent participation in 2020. The Hour of Religion provides one hour per week throughout primary and secondary education. Teachers are selected by the Catholic Church and paid by the state, with the curriculum jointly approved by the Ministry of Education and the Italian Episcopal Conference. Italy has had no official state religion since the 1948 constitution, but the Concordat with the Vatican grants the Catholic Church special privileges.
Slovakia has a 62 percent Catholic population and operates a mandatory either-or system in which all public elementary students must take either a religion class, usually Catholic, or an ethics class, with no full opt-out allowed. Parents choose between the two, but complete exemption is not permitted, making Slovakia’s system distinct from most European countries.
Finland requires religious education as mandatory in comprehensive schools for ages 7 to 16 and secondary schools for ages 16 to 18 or 19. Eleven different approved religious education curricula exist, with Lutheran dominant, but other registered religions can request their own instruction. Two national churches exist: Evangelical Lutheran and Finnish Orthodox.
Norway’s Church of Norway has special constitutional status despite disestablishment in 2012 but retained privileges. The King must be a church member as a constitutional requirement. Since 2007, students can opt out of Christianity, religion, and philosophy courses.
England has the Church of England as the official established church. Religious education is compulsory by law under the Education Act of 1944. Christianity must have predominant place while teaching other religions. The monarch is Supreme Governor of the Church of England.
The Fundamental Law of Hungary establishes the country as founded on Christian values, and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has described Hungary as a “Christian democracy” since 2018. Despite this political rhetoric emphasizing Christianity’s role in Hungarian identity, Christian identification fell dramatically from 92.9 percent in 1992 to 42.5 percent in 2022, representing one of Europe’s steepest declines alongside the political emphasis on Christian values.
Hungary operates a mandatory either-or system requiring one hour per week of education in faith and ethics or general ethics through the first eight grades of public school, established by the Act CXC of 2011 on Public Education. Parents and students must choose between faith and ethics classes offered by any of the 32 legally recognized religious groups or a secular ethics course taught by public school teachers, with no full opt-out allowed.
Church schools have expanded significantly, operating approximately 17 percent of elementary and secondary schools as of 2019-2020. Churches or religious associations receive state subsidies based on enrollment, with “established churches” receiving preferential supplementary subsidies for operating expenses at an estimated 3:1 ratio compared to secular schools. Religious schools are free to conduct their own religious teaching without government input and can make faith education mandatory and not substitutable with an ethics class.
Based on the evidence, Greece is arguably the most religious country in Europe, as it constitutionally establishes the Greek Orthodox Church as the prevailing religion, mandates Orthodox religious education with no opt-out for baptized Christians, and reports about 90 percent Orthodox identification, the strongest enforcement on the continent.
England and Denmark retain state churches, while Hungary’s Fundamental Law defines the country as founded on Christian values. Poland combines strong political rhetoric linking Christianity to national identity with over 80 percent participation in Catholic education and 71 percent Catholic identification.
Finland requires mandatory religious education in primary and secondary schools, offering eleven approved curricula across two national churches. Italy remains culturally Catholic, with about 80 percent identifying as Catholic, widespread crucifixes in classrooms by local choice, and Catholic religious education offered in all schools with 86 percent student participation.
A bombshell federal report has blown the lid off yet another massive Biden-era taxpayer scandal — this time inside the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
According to HUD’s own Fiscal Year 2025 Agency Financial Report, more than $5 billion in rental assistance payments during the final year of the Biden regime were flagged as “questionable” or improper, exposing systemic failures, nonexistent oversight, and breathtaking incompetence at the federal level.
Among the most jaw-dropping revelations: tens of thousands of payments were made to people who were already DEAD, and thousands more went to recipients who may not have even been eligible to receive taxpayer-funded housing assistance at all, the New York Post first reported.
Buried in the HUD report is a stunning admission that federal systems failed to stop payments to 30,054 deceased individuals who were either still listed as active tenants or continued receiving rental assistance after their deaths.
HUD officials acknowledged that only after cross-checking Treasury databases did they finally identify the scope of the problem — meaning for years, taxpayers were unknowingly footing the bill for people who no longer exist.
“[Over] 30,000 dead people receiving housing isn’t an accident — it was systematic fraud by Biden and the left. HUD will hold those who defrauded the American taxpayers accountable,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner wrote on X.
According to the report:
HUD used an automation that compared a U.S. Department of the Treasury (Treasury) database to HUD’s records to automatically flag deceased tenants still listed in rental assistance programs. Using the automation, HUD identified 30,054 deceased tenants either actively enrolled in a rental assistance program at the time of the analysis or who had received assistance after they died. Using the automation and the Treasury database allows HUD to better confirm that taxpayer money is going where it should and take actions to keep it from going where it shouldn’t.
The report further states that $5.8 billion in rental assistance payments were flagged for serious eligibility concerns, including:
Payments tied to incomplete or missing tenant documentation
Inability to verify citizenship or lawful eligibility
Weak or nonexistent cross-checks with federal databases
Years-long failures in internal controls and oversight
HUD officials acknowledged that thousands of recipients may not have been eligible non-citizens, yet payments continued to flow anyway.
According to the report:
HUD reviewed the FY 2024 rental assistance payments total of $50.4 billion, which identified payments to deceased tenants and to tenants with invalid social security numbers.
[…]
For the first time, HUD evaluated all 4+ million tenant records and the registration status of more than 21,000 recipient organizations, uncovering eligibility issues affecting more than 200,000 tenants and identifying questionable payments totaling $5.8 billion (including approximately $4.3 billion (26.4%) of PBRA payments and $1.5 billion (4.4%) of TBRA payments).
Even more damning, HUD’s leadership openly admitted in the report that financial controls deteriorated under the Biden administration, creating “material weaknesses” in governance, data integrity, and payment oversight.
The report describes:
Absent or ineffective internal controls
Poor governance structures
Lack of enforcement priorities
Failure to stop improper payments in real time
These failures directly enabled billions of dollars to be wasted, money that could have gone to American citizens, veterans, seniors, and the truly needy.
HUD officials told the Post that a “large concentration” of these questionable rental assistance funds flowed to Democrat-run strongholds, including:
New York
California
Washington, D.C.
Yet payments to deceased recipients were found in all 50 states, proving the rot was nationwide.
“For four years, the left abused American taxpayers, and now light is exposing darkness from Minnesota to D.C. to N.Y. to California,” Turner wrote on X.
In a statement to the Post, Turner said, “A massive abuse of taxpayer dollars not only occurred under President [Joe] Biden’s watch, but was effectively incentivized by his administration’s failure to implement strong financial controls resulting in billions worth of potential improper payments.”
He added, “HUD will continue investigating the shocking results and will take appropriate action to hold bad actors accountable. Additionally, the Department is advancing efforts made under President Trump’s first administration to strengthen program integrity and ensure taxpayer-funded assistance serves the vulnerable communities it was intended for.”
More from the New York Post:
The around 11% of taxpayer dollars from HUD went to more than 200,000 possibly ineligible tenants — of whom 29,715 (around 14%) were dead, 9,472 (4%) were non-citizens and 165,393 (82%) were receiving sums that exceeded the threshold for assistance in their geographic region, particularly in New Orleans and other large metro areas.
[…]
HUD officials faulted the Biden administration for a directive “to push funding out the door with minimal oversight” as well as rent assistance programs placing “substantial trust and responsibility in these non-federal entities … to accurately assess tenant eligibility.”
Now, HUD will have to reach out to the public housing authorities and other entities to confirm the extent of the fraud — and either pause or revoke funding. Officials will also make criminal referrals when warranted.
[…]
Between October 2023 and September 2024, $33 billion was spent on Tenant-Based Rental Assistance (TBRA) for more than 4 million households and $16 billion was spent on Project-Based Rental Assistance (PBRA) — all of which the audit reviewed.
The more than 200,000 tenants were flagged for eligibility issues as part of the $1.5 billion in TBRA payments from HUD, while roughly $4.3 billion (26.4%) of all PBRA payments also had eligibility issues.
Truth2Freedom's Blog 