Category: Blaze Media
Was the Minnesota AG’s entire career a long con to funnel money to Somalia?
BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales is sounding the alarm on Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D), claiming his political career has been a decades-long scheme to facilitate financial transfers to Somalia.
“It feels a whole lot like Keith Ellison may have been pulling off a long con. I mean, decades long, just to facilitate Somalian fraud. Like it seems like this has been his goal for a very long time,” Gonzales says, pointing out that before he was AG, he served in Congress from 2007 to 2019.
“You would expect that in 12 years serving in Congress, there would be a lot to show for it, right? Like he will have had a bunch of bills that he sponsored that passed … I mean he did turn into the Minnesota AG so like obviously he was successful,” she continues.
“Except, it turns out, there’s only one single solitary bill that he sponsored that ended up becoming law. Just this one,” she says.
The bill is titled Money Remittances Improvement Act of 2014.
“It made it easier for nonbank financial institutions like money-service businesses to provide remittance payments internationally, which of course, you know, is sending American money to foreigners across the world,” Gonzales explains.
And in an interview with the Mogadishu Times, Ellison explained that the primary goal is to keep “the discussion focused on how we can keep money flowing to Somalia.”
“Quite simply, one of the banks that helps to facilitate remittances from the United States to Somalia has now become worried about the degree of risk … they’re worried that they could end up being prosecuted on a criminal basis,” Ellison continued.
“It’s actually so incredible that all of this was out there. All the breadcrumbs were there this entire time. This has actually been in operation for a very long time for Keith Ellison,” Gonzales comments, shocked.
Ellison has also publicly claimed that sending money to Somalia is mutually beneficial for U.S. taxpayers.
“Please give me receipts on how it’s mutually beneficial. This is a third-world country with people who are inbred … so I don’t understand,” Gonzales says.
“On a serious note, lock him up. We need accountability for all of this corruption that has been happening for decades completely unchecked,” she adds.
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Democrats threaten to shut down government over ICE funding: ‘We are not powerless’
Democrats have worked energetically in recent months to demonize and delegitimize the men and women of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — those whom Democrat Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz branded as “Trump’s modern-day Gestapo.”
This messaging campaign helped set the stage for deadly confrontations such as those that led to Renee Good’s death on Jan. 7 and Alex Pretti’s death on Saturday.
‘I won’t vote to fund murder.’
Now Democratic lawmakers — who wouldn’t dream of letting a crisis go to waste — are threatening to shut down the government in order to starve the Department of Homeland Security of funds.
“What’s happening in Minnesota is appalling — and unacceptable in any American city,” said Democrat U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York. “Democrats sought common-sense reforms in the Department of Homeland Security spending bill, but because of Republicans’ refusal to stand up to President Trump, the DHS bill is woefully inadequate to rein in the abuses of ICE. I will vote no.”
Schumer noted further that Senate Democrats “will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included.”
Minnesota U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar echoed Schumer and signaled opposition to the so-called “ICE funding bill” as well — and numerous other anti-ICE Democrats followed suit.
Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Democrat U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, for example, vowed to “do everything” he can to prevent the deployment of federal law enforcement in American cities, noting “that starts with voting no on DHS’s budget this week.”
Ruben Gallego, another Democratic U.S. senator from Arizona, put it bluntly: “I won’t vote to fund murder in the name of law enforcement.”
Democrat U.S. Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey said, “I’m not voting to fund this lawless violence. Trump’s abuse of power is tearing us apart.”
“The Senate should not vote to keep funding this rampage,” wrote U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Ct.). “We are not powerless.”
The House of Representatives passed a three-bill minibus appropriations package in a 341-88 vote Thursday, which would fund the Departments of War, Labor, Transportation, Health and Human services, Education, and related agencies. In a separate vote of 220-207, the House reportedly also passed a funding bill for the DHS, which would allocate $64.4 billion to the department, including $10 billion for ICE.
‘The shutdown cost us a lot, and I think they’ll probably do it again.’
The four spending bills were combined with a pair of measures previously passed in the House then sent to the Senate for approval ahead of the Jan. 30 deadline.
A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader John Thune indicated that the DHS funding measure would not be decoupled from the others, reported NBC News.
While the Senate was expected to vote on the funding package Monday evening, Thune spokesperson Ryan Wrasse indicated the vote would be postponed until Tuesday “due to the impending weather event that is expected to impact a significant portion of the country.”
In order to avoid a filibuster and pass the spending package, Republicans need 60 votes in the Senate where they have only 53 members — including U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has a habit of voting against spending bills.
As of Sunday, the likelihood of another U.S. government shutdown by Jan. 31 was 76%, according to Polymarket.
Just days before Pretti’s fatal shooting by a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer, President Donald Trump told Fox Business, “I think we have a problem because I think we’re going to probably end up in another Democrat shutdown.”
“The shutdown cost us a lot, and I think they’ll probably do it again. That’s my feeling,” continued the president. “We’ll see what happens.”
The most recent government shutdown was the longest in the nation’s history, lasting from Oct. 1 to Nov. 12, 2025 — a total of 43 days.
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What’s Greenland to us?
The late, great Angelo Codevilla had a way of cutting through the fog of foreign policy.
In the Claremont Review of Books in 2019, he asked, “What’s Russia to us?” He didn’t ask because he had any special admiration for Russia. He asked because Washington had turned Russia into a utility: a convenient villain that justified budgets, scolded dissent, and kept the governing class in charge. Codevilla’s point was simple but brutal. Strategy begins with interests. Interests require discrimination. Most of what passes for “grand strategy” amounts to habit and vanity.
Greenland touches national defense. Greenland touches Arctic geography. Greenland touches the supply chain for advanced systems. Those facts don’t bend around Davos etiquette.
That question — his question — fits the Greenland uproar better than any of the Davos hand-wringing last week.
European leaders want this story to be about Trump’s manners and apparent recklessness. They want it to be about “norms,” about “tone,” about the precious feelings of the alliance. They want Americans to believe the true scandal lies in a U.S. president speaking too plainly or belligerently.
Trump did speak plainly. In Davos on Wednesday, he pushed for “immediate negotiations” to acquire Greenland and ruled out the use of military force. He also floated a “framework” tied to Arctic security after meeting NATO’s secretary general, while walking back tariff threats that had rattled allies and markets.
Fine. Trump being Trump shouldn’t surprise anyone.
But Europe’s reaction should surprise people, because it revealed how unserious the continent has become — even about something as serious as Greenland.
Instead of handling business like adults — hard bargaining among allies over a piece of real estate that actually matters — European capitals staged indignation, offered lectures, and then produced the usual substitute for seriousness: a symbolic “show of force” meant for domestic consumption.
The numbers tell the laughable story. Sweden sent three officers. Norway sent two. Finland sent two liaison officers. The Netherlands sent one naval officer. The U.K. sent one officer. France sent around 15 mountain specialists. Germany sent a reconnaissance team of 13. Denmark led with about 100 troops. Reuters called it “modest.” That word was kind.
But that’s the European governing class in a nutshell for you: Perform alarm, then perform resolve, then declare victory over a crisis they helped manufacture.
All of this theater tried to sell one idea: Greenland needs protection from the United States.
Preposterous.
Greenland matters because it helps defend the United States. Pituffik Space Base — some Americans may still know it as Thule — sits where U.S. forces can track threats coming over the pole. The Arctic doesn’t care about European speeches. Missiles don’t fly around Greenland out of respect for allied etiquette. Geography dictates capability, and Greenland sits where the map says it sits.
RELATED: Pressed on Greenland, Trump tells Davos the US has weapons he ‘can’t even talk about’
Photo by Fabrice COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images
Europe’s commissioners understand that. They just hate saying it out loud because it reminds them of the arrangement they prefer to obscure: America provides the real security; Europe provides the indignant boo-hoo commentary.
The Greenland tantrum exposed another reality that should make America’s sensible policy planners sweat, assuming they still exist: The industrial foundations of power have become strategic again, and the West has behaved like an empire that forgot how to build.
Rare-earths sound like an investor pitch until you remember where they go. Modern weapons systems and advanced electronics depend on them. We need minerals you have likely never heard of — neodymium, dysprosium, samarium, and yttrium — to keep our F-35s flying and our missiles precision-guided.
But the supply chain runs through the part nobody wants to talk about: processing and refining. China dominates that bottleneck — especially the heavy rare-earth elements that sit in the highest-end systems. One major estimate put China’s share of global heavy rare-earth processing at more than 90%. That’s a massive national security hole.
Greenland matters because it offers a way out — not a magic wand, but an exit. Greenland holds serious mineral potential. That potential shifts the long-term strategic balance only if development happens.
Greenland’s own politics have made development tricky. In 2021, Greenland reinstated a uranium ban that effectively froze the Kvanefjeld project, one of the world’s most significant rare-earth deposits, because uranium appears alongside rare-earth ore and triggers the political and regulatory trip wires that make major mining projects difficult to sustain.
Greenland’s voters have every right to weigh environmental costs. Strategy still counts consequences. But the practical result of the ban didn’t restrain Beijing. It protected Beijing’s advantage.
The Europeans, of course, love a green virtue-signal that imposes no serious cost on Europe. Through it all, however, the continent remains dependent on America’s military might, dependent on Chinese processing, and increasingly dependent on slogans to conceal both.
So yes — Trump’s aggressive posture creates complications. Acquisition talk puts Denmark in a public box and turns what should be an alliance negotiation into a freak show. It hands European leaders a stage they don’t deserve and an excuse to treat American interests as a moral problem.
RELATED: Trump announces ‘framework’ of ‘great’ deal with NATO on Greenland
Photo illustration by Cheng Xin/Getty Images
But Europe’s leaders made fools of themselves by trying to address a strategic reality through choreography. A reconnaissance team, a few liaison officers, and a weekend of headlines don’t secure Greenland against anyone. Their “show of force” invited contempt, not respect.
Codevilla’s 2019 essay mocked the way our establishment inflates foreign threats to discipline the home front. The Greenland episode shows a mirror image: European elites inflating a U.S. negotiating push into a crisis because they can’t handle an America that talks like a serious country.
Greenland touches our national defense. Greenland touches Arctic geography. Greenland touches the supply chain for advanced systems. Those facts don’t bend around Davos etiquette.
So use Codevilla’s test. Strip away the moral fog. Rank interests and act like the answers matter.
What’s Greenland to us?
A hell of a lot.
The reform every society needs: Stop mistaking shock for success
Years ago, I worked in a large office building with a woman who walked with a terrible limp. Not a slight hitch, but a pronounced, jarring gait caused by a car accident that left her with significant bone loss in one leg. She was a delightful person, but no one could ignore the limp. It shaped how she moved through the world and, at times, how the world responded to her.
She lived that way for more than 25 years.
Liberation may begin with a D-Day assault or a precision, middle-of-the-night special-forces strike, but rehabilitation always moves slower.
Then one morning, everything changed.
She walked into the office upright and steady. No limp. No sway. Her posture looked different. Her face looked different. The transformation was so striking, people stopped what they were doing just to stare.
An orthotist had fitted her with a lift for her shoe. For the first time in decades, her body was aligned.
It felt dramatic. It felt hopeful.
Three weeks later, she showed up at work limping again.
When I asked what happened, she looked down and said quietly, “It was too painful.”
For years, that story stayed with me. I assumed she should have pushed through the discomfort. If she really wanted to walk straight, I thought, she would have endured the pain. I put the burden on her.
Decades later, while talking with the man who makes my wife’s prosthetic legs — who is also a certified orthotist — I mentioned the story. He didn’t hesitate.
“That was the orthotist’s fault.”
With that degree of limb difference, he explained, correction must happen in small increments over time. You do not force a body that has adapted to damage for decades into alignment overnight. The shock alone can undo the good you intend. Pain, in that case, isn’t weakness. It’s warning.
The problem was never the goal of walking straight. It was the pace. The change looked impressive, but it couldn’t last.
Had she been guided wisely, she might still be walking straight today.
That realization reshaped how I think about far more than posture and gait.
RELATED: Do not pass the plow: The danger of declaring a golden age without repentance
Photo by Philippe LOPEZ / AFP via Getty Images
We talk a lot about sustainability, but the word often gets treated as corporate jargon. In real life, it means something simpler: Can you keep going without being damaged by the very solution meant to help you?
The question isn’t whether disruption can be endured for a season. The question is what happens when it lasts long enough to reshape the body, the household, or even a culture itself.
The longer misalignment persists, the more people adjust to it. Not because it’s right, but because it becomes familiar.
I think of family caregivers who, like that woman, adapt to dysfunction. They normalize exhaustion. They compensate for imbalance. What once felt untenable becomes routine. The standard slowly drops, and despair and resentment find room to grow.
This pattern doesn’t stop with individuals.
It shows up in institutions and nations, especially those emerging from long seasons of corruption, fear, or misrule. The fraud being uncovered in Minnesota will not be corrected quickly. Venezuela didn’t unravel overnight, and it won’t be restored all at once. Iran won’t shed decades of tyranny through slogans or spectacle. Systems deformed over time don’t heal on announcement alone.
Liberation may begin with a D-Day assault or a precision, middle-of-the-night special-forces strike, but rehabilitation always moves slower. Hard ground is taken a little at a time. Institutions get rebuilt inch by inch. The work costs money. It lacks glamour. No one escapes it.
Trying to fix everything at once is like forcing a damaged body into alignment without preparation. The result may look decisive, but it often collapses under its own weight.
This is where leadership gets tested.
Not by how loudly change is declared, but by whether it can be endured.
RELATED: When human worth becomes conditional, caregiving becomes impossible
Photo by: Edwin Remsburg/VW Pics via Getty Images
Real leadership doesn’t just name what’s wrong. It requires patience and competence. It understands limits. It moves deliberately. It produces progress people can live with — and live inside — over time.
People can endure difficult change when it leads somewhere stable. What they can’t endure is repeated pain with no lasting gain.
A deliberate pace doesn’t mean abandoning the goal. Real leadership — whether for a caregiver or a nation — recognizes the trauma that brought us here. It refuses to confuse speed with progress. It commits instead to patient steps that straighten what has been bent without breaking what remains.
That kind of leadership doesn’t rush healing. It makes healing possible.
For caregivers, for communities, and for nations, alignment imposed too quickly can injure the very people it claims to help. Alignment applied with patience, competence, and resolve can change a life permanently.
That woman wanted to walk straight. She simply needed someone wise enough to guide her there.
Why Canada’s Chinese EV bet is a big mistake
Canada’s decision to slash tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles is being sold as a pragmatic trade adjustment. In reality, it looks more like a self-inflicted wound to the country’s auto industry, workforce, and long-term economic sovereignty.
Lower prices today may come at the cost of lost manufacturing tomorrow — along with vehicles that struggle with quality and cold-weather reliability in a country where winter is not a minor inconvenience but a defining reality.
A vehicle that looks competitive on paper may tell a very different story after several Canadian winters.
Under an agreement announced earlier this month, Canada will allow up to 49,000 Chinese EVs into the country each year at a tariff of just 6.1%, down from the 100% rate imposed in 2024.
Officials emphasize that this represents less than 3% of the domestic market. But auto markets are shaped at the margins. Even a relatively small influx of aggressively priced vehicles can disrupt pricing, undercut domestic producers, and discourage future investment.
Under pressure
Canada’s auto sector is deeply integrated with the United States, with parts, vehicles, and labor flowing across the border daily. That system has supported hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs for decades. Introducing low-cost Chinese imports into that ecosystem does not simply add consumer choice; it destabilizes a supply chain already under pressure from regulatory mandates, rising costs, and declining market share.
That pressure is already visible. The combined market share of General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis in Canada has fallen from nearly 50% to roughly 36%. These companies are not just brands on a dealership lot. They are employers, investors, and anchors for entire communities. When their market position erodes, the consequences ripple outward through plant closures, canceled expansion plans, and lost supplier contracts.
Cold comfort
Supporters argue that Chinese EVs will make electric vehicles more affordable, accelerating adoption and helping Canada meet emissions targets. But affordability without durability is a hollow promise. Many Chinese EVs entering global markets have yet to prove themselves in extreme climates. Cold weather is notoriously hard on batteries, reducing range, slowing charging times, and increasing mechanical stress — conditions Canadian winters deliver in abundance.
Reports from colder regions already using Chinese EVs raise concerns about performance degradation, software issues, and inconsistent build quality. Battery thermal management systems that perform adequately in mild climates can struggle in deep cold. Door handles freeze, sensors fail, and range estimates become unreliable. These are not minor inconveniences when temperatures plunge and drivers depend on their vehicles for safety as much as transportation.
Quality concerns extend beyond climate performance. Chinese automakers have made rapid progress, but speed has often come at the expense of long-term durability testing. Western manufacturers spend years validating vehicles under extreme conditions precisely because failure carries real consequences. A vehicle that looks competitive on paper may tell a very different story after several Canadian winters.
Cheap creep
There is also the question of what happens to Canada’s manufacturing base as these imports gain a foothold. History offers a clear lesson. When markets are flooded with low-cost vehicles produced under different labor standards and supported by state-backed industrial policy, domestic production suffers. Plants close, jobs disappear, and skills erode — losses that are extraordinarily difficult to reverse.
Europe offers a cautionary example. In the rush to meet climate targets, policymakers opened the door to inexpensive Chinese vehicles, only to see domestic automakers squeezed between regulatory costs and subsidized foreign competition. The result has been declining investment, layoffs, and growing concern about long-term competitiveness. Canada risks repeating that mistake but without Europe’s scale or leverage.
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Image
Spy game
The geopolitical implications cannot be ignored. Modern EVs are data-collecting machines, equipped with cameras, sensors, GPS tracking, and constant connectivity. U.S. officials have repeatedly warned that Chinese-built vehicles pose national security risks. Whether or not those fears are fully realized, perception matters. The United States has already signaled that Chinese EVs will not be allowed across its border, even temporarily.
That leaves Canadian consumers in a difficult position. A vehicle purchased legally in Canada could become a barrier to travel, commerce, or even family visits. The idea that a car could determine whether a driver can cross the world’s longest undefended border should give policymakers pause. Instead the Carney government appears willing to accept that risk as collateral damage.
Realism over resentment
Some Canadians, frustrated by U.S. tariffs and rhetoric, may view this pivot toward China as an act of defiance. But trade policy driven by resentment rather than realism rarely ends well. Replacing dependence on the United States with dependence on China does not restore sovereignty; it simply shifts leverage from one superpower to another, often with fewer shared values and less transparency.
President Donald Trump has made his position clear. He is open to Chinese companies building vehicles in North America if they invest in domestic factories and employ domestic workers. What he opposes are imports that bypass production, undermine jobs, and introduce security risks. Canada’s deal does nothing to address those concerns. Instead it places Canadian workers and consumers squarely in the crossfire.
The promise of cheaper EVs may sound appealing in the short term, but the long-term costs are becoming harder to ignore. Lost manufacturing jobs, weakened supply chains, unresolved quality and cold-weather issues, and strained relations with Canada’s largest trading partner are not abstract risks. They are predictable outcomes.
Canada built its auto industry through integration, investment, and a commitment to quality. Undermining that foundation for a limited influx of low-cost imports is not a strategy. It is a gamble — and one Canadian workers, manufacturers, and drivers are likely to lose.
To Accept the Things I Cannot Change
Menstrual cycles are not an illness, and medicating them as if they are—suppressing the body’s natural hormonal rhythms—clashes with what was once left-wing skepticism of corporate influence in medicine, while conveniently profiting Big Pharma. This should not be a controversial or political claim. And yet, as the New York Times recently noted, it has become one—and a conservative one at that.
The post To Accept the Things I Cannot Change appeared first on .
Malcolm Muggeridge: Fashionable idealist turned sage against the machine
“The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality and the most intellectually resisted fact.”
The name of the man who made this pronouncement may not mean much to many readers now. Yet the world he warned about has arrived all the same, whether his name is remembered or not.
When Malcolm Muggeridge — a British journalist and broadcaster who became a public figure in his own right — died in 1990, many of his fears still felt abstract. The moral strain was visible, but the structure was holding. Progress was spoken of with confidence, and freedom still sounded uncomplicated.
‘I never knew what joy was until I gave up pursuing happiness.’
Today, those assumptions lie in pieces. What he distrusted has hardened into dogma. What he questioned has become unquestionable. We are living amid the consequences of ideas he spent a lifetime probing.
Theory meets reality
Muggeridge was never dazzled by modern promises. He distrusted grand schemes that claimed to perfect humanity while refusing to reckon with human nature. That suspicion wasn’t a pose; it was learned. As a young man, he flirted with communism, drawn in by its certainty and its language of justice. Then he went to Moscow. There, theory met reality.
What he encountered was not liberation but deprivation. Hunger was rationalized as hope. Cruelty came wrapped in benevolent language. Compassion was loudly proclaimed and quietly absent. The experience cured him of fashionable idealism for life. It also taught him something harder to accept: Evil often enters history announcing itself as virtue, and the most dangerous lies are told with complete sincerity.
That lesson stayed with him. In an age once again thick with certainty, that insight feels uncomfortably current.
Pills and permissiveness
Yet Muggeridge’s critique extended beyond politics. At heart, he believed the modern crisis was spiritual. God had become an embarrassment, sin a diagnosis, and responsibility something to be displaced by grievance. Pleasure, once understood as a byproduct of order, was recast as life’s purpose. The result, he argued, wasn’t freedom but loss.
This realism shaped his opposition to the sexual revolution. Long before its consequences were obvious, he warned that freedom severed from restraint wouldn’t liberate people so much as hollow them out. He mocked the belief that pills and permissiveness would deliver happiness. What he anticipated instead was loneliness, instability, and a culture increasingly medicated against its own dissatisfaction.
Muggeridge also understood the media with unsettling clarity. As a journalist and broadcaster, he watched newsrooms trade substance for spectacle and truth for approval. When entertainment becomes the highest aim, he warned, reality soon becomes optional.
By the end of his career, Muggeridge had dismantled nearly every modern promise. Fame proved thin. Desire disappointed. Professional success brought no lasting peace. Skepticism could clear the ground, but it could not explain why nothing worked.
A skeptic stands down
When after more than a decade of exploring Christianity, Muggeridge finally entered the Catholic Church in 1982, the reaction among his peers was disbelief bordering on embarrassment. This was not the impulse of a sentimental seeker but of one of Britain’s most famous skeptics — a man who had mocked piety, distrusted enthusiasm, and made a career of puncturing illusions.
Friends assumed it was a late-life affectation, a theatrical flourish from an aging contrarian. Muggeridge himself knew better. He had not converted because Christianity felt safe or consoling, but because, after a lifetime of alternatives, it was the only account of reality that still made sense.
As he had written years before in “Jesus Rediscovered,” “I never knew what joy was until I gave up pursuing happiness.”
That sentence captures the logic of his conversion. Muggeridge did not arrive at faith through nostalgia or temperament. Christianity did not flatter him. It named pride, lust, and cruelty plainly, then offered grace without euphemism. It explained the world he had already seen — and himself within it.
RELATED: Chuck Colson: Nixon loyalist who found hope in true obedience
Washington Post/Getty Images
Truth endures
His Catholicism was not an escape from seriousness but its culmination. He believed human beings flourish within limits, not without them; that desire requires direction; that pleasure without purpose corrodes. Christianity endured, he argued, not because it was comforting but because it was true.
After his conversion, Muggeridge did not soften. He sharpened. The satire retained its bite. The warnings grew more direct. But they were no longer merely critical. Skepticism had given way to clarity — not because he had abandoned reason, but because he had finally stopped pretending it was enough.
More than three decades after his death, Muggeridge’s voice sounds less like commentary than like counsel. The world he warned about has arrived. What remains is the stubborn relevance of faith grounded in reality — and the freedom that comes only when truth is faced, rather than fled.
AI Christian songs are topping charts — but is ‘soulless’ music a demonic trap for believers?
In late 2025, two songs by “Christian artist” Solomon Ray — “Find Your Rest” and “Goodbye Temptation” — topped Billboard’s gospel digital song sales chart and iTunes’ Christian music songs chart, reaching the No. 1 and No. 2 spots.
Christians across the globe deeply resonate with Ray’s Southern revival style and emotive, biblically solid lyrics. In just a matter of weeks, Ray’s music has amassed hundreds of thousands of monthly Spotify listeners, millions of streams, and significant YouTube views.
There’s only one problem: Solomon Ray isn’t a real person. It’s an AI generation.
Despite their popularity, Ray’s songs have sparked intense ethical and theological debate in the Christian music community — drawing criticism from artists like Forrest Frank over issues of authenticity, the absence of the Holy Spirit, and whether AI can truly convey genuine faith or soul in worship music.
On this episode of “Strange Encounters,” Rick Burgess addresses the controversy.
Rick acknowledges that while there’s certainly room to disagree on this issue, “something about it in my spirit … doesn’t seem right.”
“The first thing that we have to consider,” he says, “is that Solomon Ray has no soul; he has no spirit; he isn’t real. The pictures we see of him are not real. They’re like watching an animation of someone.”
Even though Rick gives credit where it’s due — “they’re good songs,” he admits — he nonetheless feels that Christians who engage with this music are flirting with something sinister.
Many proponents of Ray’s music, however, argue that because the songs were allegedly written by Christopher “Topher” Townsend, the conservative Christian hip-hop artist who created Solomon Ray, it shouldn’t matter who — or what — sings the lyrics. AI, they contend, is simply the next “evolutionary step in music.”
But Rick disagrees.
“It may be true [that AI is the next evolutionary step in music], but there’s something that’s also kind of dishonest about it,” he says, “because when you read [the] Spotify profile, Solomon Ray is a ‘Mississippi-made soul singer carrying a Southern soul revival into the present.’”
“No, he’s not,” he says bluntly.
“We’re starting to blur the lines of reality and truth.”
Rick quotes popular Christian music artist Forrest Frank, who echoed these concerns when he said, “At minimum, AI does not have the Holy Spirit inside of it. So I think that it’s really weird to be opening up your spirit to something that has no spirit.”
If artificial intelligence and Christendom continue to intersect — and they almost certainly will — Rick is concerned about what else our spirits will be subjected to.
“How many sermons are we going to start hearing that no longer feature[] a man of God sitting down with the word of God, praying for the Holy Spirit to inspire him for his next message, as opposed to getting down to the computer, saying, ‘Here’s what I need to speak on Sunday. Crank me out a sermon’?” he wonders.
He cites a recent book by Pastor Todd Korpi titled “AI Goes to Church: Pastoral Wisdom for Artificial Intelligence”: “The biggest threat to creation at the hands of AI is in how it continues to feed our appetite for consumption and progress. AI-generated music is faster, easier to produce than a studio album that requires real musicians, songwriters, audio engineers, the relational part of making music. … AI might continue this trend of disconnection and preference for the convenience of a disembodied interaction that has shaped the last decade.”
Rick agrees with Korpi’s warning. When it comes to AI music, “we’re dealing with something that’s disembodied. That feels demonic to me,” he says.
“The adversary and his demons love to manipulate scripture,” he reminds us, referring to the fall of Adam and Eve in the garden and Satan’s temptation of Jesus in the wilderness.
“The apostle Paul warned Timothy that these days were coming — that people would begin to look for pastors — and I would say musicians and singers — that tickle their ears and satisfy their desires, as opposed to being rebuked by scripture, to being convicted, to being drawn into the holiness of God for praise and worship,” says Rick.
“I’m just concerned that disembodied AI-generated messages and music may not bring me into the awe-ness of God and how awesome He is because it’s those spirit-inspired things about God that always bring me into worship … and it just seems like if I want to manipulate scripture and manipulate theology, AI sure does give me an easy path in.”
To hear more of Rick’s analysis, watch the full episode above.
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Rioter bit off part of federal agent’s finger amid Minneapolis ‘rampant assault,’ DHS says
President Donald Trump and Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin shared graphic images to social media Saturday evening apparently showing part of a Homeland Security Investigations officer’s finger — in a jar.
McLaughlin said Minneapolis “rioters attacked our law enforcement officer and one of them bit off our HSI officer’s finger.”
‘This avoidable tragedy is a result of the total failure of Minnesota’s city and state officials.’
“He will lose his finger,” added McLaughlin.
One of the photographs appears to show a medic tending to an HSI officer who is missing the end of the fourth digit on his right hand. Another photo apparently shows the missing piece of the finger with its nail intact inside a plastic container.
The alleged incident — which U.S. Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) cited as the latest sign that Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act — came just hours after an armed 37-year-old Illinois native identified as Alex Pretti was fatally shot amid a struggle with federal agents.
Pretti’s ex-wife told the Associated Press that he was a Democratic voter with a permit to carry a concealed firearm who previously took to the streets in 2020 to protest the death of George Floyd. Pretti’s father, Michael Pretti, said he warned his son about protesting, telling him “do not engage, do not do anything stupid, basically.”
The AP added that family members said Pretti was an intensive care nurse at a VA hospital who “cared deeply about people” and was upset by Trump’s “immigration crackdown in his city.”
Photographer: Jaida Grey Eagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The Department of Homeland security said its “law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis against an illegal alien wanted for violent assault, an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun. The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted.”
More from the DHS post on X:
Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots. Medics on scene immediately delivered medical aid to the subject but was pronounced dead at the scene.
The suspect also had 2 magazines and no ID—this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.
In addition to asking about Pretti’s firearm, Trump wondered, “Where are the local police? Why weren’t they allowed to protect ICE officers? The mayor and the governor called them off? It is stated that many of these police were not allowed to do their job, that ICE had to protect themselves — not an easy thing to do!”
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche indicated that an investigation into the shooting is underway but stressed that “this avoidable tragedy is a result of the total failure of Minnesota’s city and state officials who have resisted federal law enforcement and created this escalation.”
Multitudes of radicals converged on the location of Pretti’s shooting and immediately began clashing with federal agents.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem noted that the protesters who rushed to the scene “began to obstruct and to assault law enforcement officers. We saw objects being thrown at them, including ice and other objects.”
“A rampant assault began and even an HSI officer agent’s finger was bitten off,” added Noem, who faulted Democrat Gov. Tim Walz for branding ICE as the “gestapo” and other Democrats for effectively painting targets on federal immigration officers’ backs.
Walz activated the Minnesota National Guard on Saturday at the request of Democrat Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Hennepin County Sheriff Dawanna Witt also asked for support from the National Guard at the B.H. Whipple Federal Building.
The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that role of the Minnesota National Guard “is to work in support of local law enforcement and emergency responders, providing additional resources. Their presence is meant to help create a secure environment where all Minnesotans can exercise their rights safely, including the right to peacefully protest.”
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