Category: Blaze Media
WATCH: Florida man says he ‘teleported’ into stolen BMW, blames ‘X-Men,’ thanks cop for rescuing him from ‘aliens’
A Florida man was arrested after getting into a car crash with a vehicle that was reported stolen earlier this month. However, the case took a strange twist when the suspect said he was “teleported” into the stolen BMW by the “X-Men” — but he was now safe from the “aliens,” according to police bodycam video.
The Volusia County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that a car owner informed police that his BMW convertible had been stolen while he was walking his dog at Bicentennial Park in Ormond Beach.
‘You saved me from the aliens!’
The man admitted to law enforcement that he had left his BMW unlocked and that the car keys were in a “closed cup holder.”
Police bodycam video — recorded Dec. 8 — shows a witness telling a deputy that a man in his 30s with blond shoulder-length hair was in a BMW at the park.
“He kept asking for a light,” the witness told the deputy. “I thought, ‘How does he have a BMW if he doesn’t even have a lighter for a cigarette?'”
A few minutes later, the BMW crashed at Old Dixie Highway and Plantation Oaks Boulevard, the sheriff’s office stated.
Bodycam footage shows the car crash site, with one witness claiming that the BMW was traveling at 130 miles per hour. The wrecked BMW is seen half off the road with the front of the vehicle severely mangled after it seemingly crashed into the trees near the highway in a one-car accident.
A deputy confronted the alleged driver of the stolen BMW — 36-year-old Calvin Curtis Johnson.
Johnson — who is seen with blood on his face — is heard telling the deputy, “I don’t know how I got in the car. I teleported or something.”
When the deputy asks where he got the car from, Johnson shrugs and responds, “I don’t know,” and once again suggests that he “teleported” into the vehicle.
The suspect then appears to blame the situation on the “X-Men.”
According to the bodycam video, the deputy asks the suspect if he had just been to Bicentennial Park, to which Johnson replies, “They told me — the X-Men — to do it.”
A distraught Johnson is heard on video stammering, “I don’t do that stuff. Someone told me to get in there. Someone’s in my head. Thank you for saving me. I don’t know how I got in there.”
Then an excited Johnson exuberantly proclaimed to the deputy, “You saved me from the aliens!”
The police bodycam footage also shows the officer dousing flames from a small fire from the car crash.
Johnson was arrested, taken to the Halifax Health Medical Center for treatment, and booked into the Volusia County Jail. Johnson was hit with charges of grand theft of a motor vehicle and driving with a canceled, suspended, or revoked license, according to jail records.
According to Volusia County jail records, Johnson has a lengthy rap sheet with arrests for assault with a deadly weapon, resisting an officer without violence, loitering or prowling, uttering a forged check, trespassing, several charges for failing to appear in court, and operating a vehicle while a driver’s license was suspended, canceled, or revoked.
The Daytona Beach News-Journal reported that Johnson is homeless.
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Democrats melt down as Kennedy Center board votes unanimously to rename building to honor Trump
Democrats are up in arms after Trump’s White House announced that the Kennedy Center will be renamed in honor of President Donald Trump for his restoration efforts.
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will be renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center, according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
‘The building will no doubt attain new levels of success and grandeur.’
“I have just been informed that the highly respected Board of the Kennedy Center, some of the most successful people from all parts of the world, have just voted unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center, because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building,” Leavitt said. “Not only from the standpoint of its reconstruction, but also financially, and its reputation. Congratulations to President Donald J. Trump, and likewise, congratulations to President Kennedy, because this will be a truly great team long into the future!”
Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images
“The building will no doubt attain new levels of success and grandeur,” Leavitt added.
“The Trump Kennedy Center shows a bipartisan commitment to the Arts,” Richard Grenell said on X.
Maria Shriver, John F. Kennedy’s niece, posted a lengthy statement complaining about the move.
“It is beyond comprehension that this sitting president has sought to rename this great memorial dedicated to President Kennedy. It is beyond wild that he would think adding his name in front of President Kennedy’s name is acceptable. It is not. Next thing perhaps he will want to rename JFK Airport, rename the Lincoln Memorial, the Trump Lincoln Memorial. The Trump Jefferson Memorial. The Trump Smithsonian. The list goes on,” Shriver wrote in part on Thursday.
President Trump praised the “very distinguished” Kennedy Center board for the “unanimous” vote to change the name of the center.
However, several Democratic congressmen who are also ex officio members of the Kennedy Center board issued a statement complaining that they were silenced during the vote for this change.
In part, their statement read, “This whole process displays the corruption that permeates the entire Trump administration, and as ex-officio members of the Kennedy Center Board, we will be unwavering in our commitment to holding this administration accountable.”
The Democrats, however, failed to mention that as ex officio members of the board, they do not have a vote, meaning their input was never needed and does not affect the unanimity of the vote.
On Friday afternoon, videos were posted of the addition of Donald Trump’s name on the facade of the building. It now reads: “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”
The Trump-Kennedy Center did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Buckle up: We are headed for an AI collision with China
President Trump spoke by phone to his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, on November 24 and later posted on Truth Social, “Our relationship with China is extremely strong!” The warm feelings from Washington came on the heels of the two leaders holding a productive meeting in Korea recently and scheduling several more confabs for the year ahead.
But bubbling beneath the surface is a rivalry between the two countries over the most vital technology of the 21st century: artificial intelligence.
China is not abiding by the rules that are supposed to govern the global economy.
To understand the rivalry, consider a recent announcement by the U.S. Justice Department: On November 20, it charged two Americans and two Chinese nationals with a conspiracy to illegally export about 400 high-performance graphics processing units to China. Federal law requires a license for export of these technologies, which can be used to develop and strengthen AI.
The co-conspirators didn’t have a license — and never even applied for one. In fact, they lied about the destination of the GPUs when shipping them. And for their services, they received a cool $3.89 million in wire transfers from China.
The backdrop to this smuggling scheme is Beijing having set a goal for China to be the world’s leader in AI by 2030. And it’s made considerable headway. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, “China is the global leader in AI research publications and is neck and neck with the United States on generative AI.” Additionally China is “advancing rapidly in AI research and application, challenging the United States’ dominance in this critical field.”
This progress stems from massive investments by the Chinese government. From 2000 to 2023, venture capital funds connected to the Chinese government made $184 billion in investments in China-based companies in the AI sector, according to a study published last year and conducted by professors at Harvard, MIT, and Oxford.
In an amusing coincidence, one day after the smuggling indictment, Huawei — a leading Chinese technology company — announced a tool called Flex:ai that it said “improves the utilization of artificial intelligence-based chipsets.” The announcement also made the obligatory nod to corporate citizenship, saying that the technology will “speed up the democratization of AI.” But the company buried the lede, saving the most important detail — which is curiously attributed to “sources” — for the final sentence: “The new software tool will help China create an analogue AI chip 1,000 times faster than Nvidia’s chips.”
Huawei is not just any company. It is the world’s largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment. And it’s also been engaged in the kind of skullduggery that resulted in the recent indictment. In 2020, the U.S. Justice Department indicted the company and four of its subsidiaries. The charges mostly revolved around attempts to steal trade secrets from U.S. companies.
The company used an array of tactics, but perhaps most brazen of all, it paid its employees bonuses if they procured confidential information from rival companies. And when U.S. law enforcement was investigating Huawei, the company told its employees not to comply.
RELATED: China’s AI strategy could turn Americans into data mines
iStock / Getty Images Plus
Suffice to say, there’s good reason not to trust the Chinese government and its proxy companies like Huawei.
The Trump administration recognizes the threat. In late June, it approved a merger among two American companies that compete with Huawei: Hewlett Packard Enterprises and Juniper Networks. A senior U.S. national security official told Axios: “In light of significant national security concerns, a settlement … serves the interests of the United States by strengthening domestic capabilities and is critical to countering Huawei and China.” The official said blocking the deal would have “hindered American companies and empowered” Chinese competitors.
Given the economic importance of AI to countries throughout the world, the competition between the United States and China is regrettable. But it’s probably also inevitable. China is not abiding by the rules that are supposed to govern the global economy. And it’s using AI, says the Justice Department, to bolster its military, to test weapons of mass destruction, and to heighten surveillance.
Sometime next year, President Trump is scheduled to make a state visit to Beijing and Xi is scheduled to come to Washington. They’re destined to focus on the cooperative parts of the relationship, but you don’t need to ask ChatGPT to see that the two countries are on a collision course over AI. Buckle up.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
Trump’s autopen reversal could mean more choice, lower prices for car buyers
A quiet, technical ruling about presidential signatures has suddenly become one of the most consequential automotive turning points in decades.
What looked like an obscure constitutional question has reshaped the nation’s energy strategy, reversed federal transportation policy, and put the electric-vehicle transition on a very different path.
Whether seen as restoring constitutional accountability or disrupting environmental planning, the result is unmistakable: America’s automotive trajectory has been rewritten.
The issue is straightforward: If a president did not personally sign an executive action, can it legally stand? President Donald Trump has answered no — and the effects will be felt in dealerships, factories, and garages nationwide.
Sign-off
In late November 2025, President Trump declared that any executive order, regulation, or directive signed with an autopen after mid-2022 is invalid. Oversight reviews suggest this affects up to 92% of actions taken in the final two and a half years of the Biden administration. Trump argues that executive authority cannot be delegated to a machine; the Constitution vests power in the president himself, not staff operating an autopen while the president is traveling or unavailable.
This interpretation has upended large portions of recent federal policymaking.
Nowhere is the impact more dramatic than in automotive and energy policy. The Biden administration’s EV strategy relied heavily on Executive Order 14037, issued in 2021, which set aggressive emissions and fuel-economy goals. While signed early in Biden’s term, nearly all enforcement actions after 2022 — including the rules that gave the order teeth — bear autopen signatures. Those signatures now sit at the center of a sweeping rollback.
Executive Order 14037 formed the backbone of Biden’s push toward zero-emission vehicles. It directed agencies to impose strict emissions rules, raise fuel-efficiency standards, steer manufacturers toward electric powertrains, and work toward a goal of 50% zero-emission vehicle sales by 2030. Automakers spent tens of billions preparing — building battery plants, restructuring supply chains, and cutting production of profitable internal-combustion models.
According to forensic reviews cited by the Trump administration, many of the directives enforcing those standards after mid-2022 were never personally signed by President Biden. Trump maintains this breaks the constitutional chain of authority.
High energy
On the first day of his second term, Trump issued Executive Order 14154, Unleashing American Energy. It revoked Biden’s EV mandates, halted remaining EV-related funds under the Inflation Reduction Act and infrastructure law, and ordered agencies to withdraw aggressive tailpipe regulations. Fuel-economy targets revert to earlier levels. Federal fleet electrification requirements are gone. The 2030 zero-emission sales target no longer exists. The $7,500 EV tax credit will be phased out by the end of 2026.
The industry impact is immediate. Automakers that bet heavily on federal EV mandates are reassessing long-term strategies. Companies focused on trucks, SUVs, and hybrids are now better positioned. EV-only startups face mounting financial strain. Market uncertainty has hit stock prices, delayed launches, and raised doubts about the future of several pure-electric brands.
RELATED: ‘Won’t be the last’: Felon freed by Biden autopen arrested after Omaha shooting
Image composite: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images, Omaha Police Department
Sweeping consequences
Consumers will notice the shift on showroom floors. Vehicles slated for retirement will remain in production. EVs — still pricier than gas or hybrid counterparts — will face new price pressure as incentives disappear. Charging access and range remain barriers, especially outside urban centers. Without mandates driving adoption, consumer preference — not regulation — will dictate the pace of change.
Legal fights are already underway. Agencies must follow formal rule-making procedures, and environmental groups and states like California are challenging the reversals. California plans to retain its own strict standards, setting up years of litigation over federal pre-emption and Clean Air Act waivers.
Even so, the federal direction is clear. The United States is no longer pursuing a national strategy centered on rapid vehicle electrification. The emphasis has shifted to diversification, consumer choice, and competition among internal-combustion, hybrid, and electric technologies.
The autopen dispute may sound bureaucratic, but its consequences are sweeping. A major climate and transportation agenda is being reconsidered because of how it was signed. Whether seen as restoring constitutional accountability or disrupting environmental planning, the result is unmistakable: America’s automotive trajectory has been rewritten.
The internal-combustion engine, long declared on borrowed time, has a renewed future. Hybrids are likely to gain ground. Electric vehicles will remain — but their growth will depend on price, practicality, and performance, not mandates. The timeline for full electrification has shifted, and the debate over how America powers mobility has entered a new phase.
There’s more to come, and I’ll keep you posted.
The socialist spell: Why modern minds keep falling for an old lie
What draws people to socialism?
Even after nearly two centuries of ruin brought to those societies that have adopted this governing system, the appeal still remains. Most Western countries have a thriving socialist party occupying portions of the government, including the United States with the Democratic Socialists of America.
The promises of socialists made in today’s media landscape are closely analogous to the serpent’s promises in the Garden of Eden.
Worse still, the DSA experienced a huge win in New York City with the election of outspoken socialist Zohran Mamdani and came close to beating the Republican candidate with another socialist in a special election in Tennessee in December.
Then, of course, there are the legions of leftist online content creators indoctrinating millions of users with socialist messaging.
Is it historical ignorance with the Cold War increasingly far behind us? Is it the leftist teachers simply passing over the horrific genocides of communist leaders like Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, or Pol Pot and ignoring the ongoing calamities of Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and other socialist backwaters? Is it simply the promise of free stuff? Is it the envy of billionaire elites who seem to wield omnipotent power?
The socialist paradox
No doubt, ignorance, greed, envy, and boredom all play a significant role in the elevation of socialists.
This is why most opponents of socialism generally push back by attempting to teach people about the endless failures of socialism, the basic laws of economics, and the immorality and destructiveness of confiscating property and denying citizens their constitutional freedoms.
Clearly, this approach has not been successful with this latest crop of socialists who now make up a large portion of the Millennial and Gen Z cohorts.
It could just be that human nature is such that it is always vulnerable to toxic ideas like socialism, and digital technology has made this problem even more challenging. After all, the promises of socialists made in today’s media landscape are closely analogous to the serpent’s promises in the Garden of Eden: Do this one thing — i.e., eat this fruit, vote and campaign for this socialist — and you will have everything you want.
Or, more likely, it could be that conservatives are misunderstanding the issue altogether.
Rather than view socialism as an ideology, a movement, or a moral failing inherent in human nature, it would be better to see socialism as a reaction to all these things.
At its core, socialism is what happens when a person consciously rejects political reasoning, morality, and complex abstractions, all in favor of a strictly materialist and existentialist approach to life.
Orwell and the socialist mind
An illustration of this phenomenon comes from the great 20th century writer George Orwell, who unintentionally captures the socialist mind in his personal account of the Spanish Civil War, “Homage to Catalonia.”
Despite being known as a fierce critic of totalitarian surveillance states like the Soviet Union, Orwell himself was an ardent socialist throughout his life. In fact, he was so committed to socialism that he went to Catalonia to fight a war on behalf of the Trotskyist Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification.
His stated goal was not necessarily to write a full account of the Spanish Civil War (though he did), but first and foremost to kill fascists.
RELATED: A socialist New York isn’t just a local problem. It’s a national emergency.
natasaadzic/iStock/Getty Images Plus
What is most surprising about “Homage to Catalonia” is just how little Orwell actually writes about socialism itself. He spends many pages describing the size of rats, the scarcity of tobacco, and the convoluted squabbling between various anarchist, communist, and socialist factions, yet almost nothing about why he is actually fighting in a foreign civil war.
In one of the middle chapters, almost in passing, he devotes a precious few paragraphs on the matter, citing his sympathy with the laborers in their hope of realizing true equality: “The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the ‘mystique’ of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all.”
Sadly, Orwell quickly follows this reflection with the immediate reality of his situation, “I was hardly conscious of the changes that were occurring in my own mind. Like everyone about me I was chiefly conscious of boredom, heat, cold, dirt, lice, privation, and occasional danger.”
Naturally, these concerns are what make up the bulk of his book.
At no point in Orwell’s narrative does his joy rise above the creature comforts of cigarettes, wine, food, sleep, and personal cleanliness, nor does his sorrow go much beyond beyond the deprivation thereof. Any hope he might have that transcends this narrow worldview — i.e., virtue, ethics, greater truth, life after death (Orwell survives a shot through the neck), or even winning the war — is completely absent.
Orwell is just there, living his life and fighting an enemy. Even though he is aware of the atrocities of the socialist militias — like destroying churches and killing innocent priests and nuns — he hardly thinks about it. Even though he throws a bomb into enemy lines and inflicts a slow and painful death on a fascist soldier, he is more annoyed at the man’s screaming than he is perturbed at the fact that he just killed a man in cold blood for a dubious cause.
Obviously, Orwell was not too dim-witted to think of these matters, nor is it because he was some kind of true believer blinded by misleading propaganda, nor was he a sociopath.
Instead, he has committed to a mode of behavior and thought that negates all moral rationality. His socialism simply does not touch on anything beyond the next meal, the next bus to work, the next cup of coffee, the next nice-sounding idea.
Acting as a socialist only means doing what the other socialists seem to be doing, whether that means joining a protest, fighting in a civil war, or voting for a DSA candidate.
Although some of this mode of behavior betrays a deep streak of nihilism, the socialists themselves never reflect on anything long enough to realize it. For all the observations Orwell makes, with his characteristic wryness, none of it ever leads to a deeper conclusion about his situation.
Much of his general attitude could be summed up with the empty platitude, “It is what it is.” Readers can also find this kind of hopeless shrug in the endings of Orwell’s novels “Animal Farm” and “1984,” where the antagonists triumph and all the efforts of the protagonists prove to be futile as well as pointless.
RELATED: The complete failure of ‘1984’
Mininyx Doodle/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Based on the account given in “Homage to Catalonia,” the biggest precondition that leads to this mindlessness is modernity’s systemic atomization and subsequent loneliness.
Throughout his narrative, Orwell has no real friends about which to speak — yet he does somehow drag his wife to Barcelona while he fights with the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification. True, he notes with fondness how everyone addresses each other as “comrade,” as well as substituting the formal “usted” (Spanish for “you”) for the informal “tu.”
Yet, this belies the indifference he ultimately has for these men suffering and dying senselessly. This community of soldiers in the trenches — the one example that Orwell can point to as true socialism in practice — is almost entirely superficial. Years later, he still cannot see this and even feels glad for the experience of stinking and starving in trenches with his socialist “comrades” for so many months.
Humanize before you catechize
In light of all this, it should be clear that mere apologetics for free-market capitalism, liberal democratic republicanism, and Christian communitarianism will fall on deaf ears, for the socialists both then and now.
A catchy slogan, a photogenic demagogue, an attractive vibe will win over otherwise intelligent people and lead them down a dark path that allows no light to come in.
In order to bring them back from this path, conservatives and other anti-socialists need to appreciate the content of their worldview (or lack thereof) along with the modern context of today’s postmodern consumerist culture that have made friendship, depth, and moments of quiet reflection next to impossible.
Once they recognize this, they will finally understand that more education and fewer affordability crises will not fix the problem of socialism’s growing popularity. Instead, they will have to meaningfully connect with these people, pull them away from the sources of malaise, and patiently fill up what has been hollowed out.
People must be humanized before they are catechized.
Even though this is a much bigger project, it is a more effective and fulfilling one. One can speculate what would have happened if Orwell found religion and joined a church instead of finding socialism and joining the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification. Perhaps his eventual novels criticizing Russian communism would have lacked the same insights.
Or, perhaps his cynicism and recklessness would have turned to hope and wisdom, and he could have offered a better way forward to those who fall under the spell of socialism instead of dreaming up horrific depictions of socialism’s excesses.
Unhinged female absolutely pummels male employee at Planet Fitness in Florida
An unhinged female was caught on video absolutely pummeling a male employee at a Planet Fitness in Florida last week.
The attack took place Dec. 12 at the gym on SW 8th Avenue, the City of Miami Police Department told WFOR-TV.
‘She took things too far, brutally battered our client, and ultimately left him in the hospital with a broken nose and severe emotional distress.’
The female is seen on cellphone video climbing over the front counter of the Planet Fitness in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, getting in a male worker’s face, and then socking him so hard in the face that the punch is audible on the clip.
You can view WFOR’s video report — which includes video of the attack — here.
She ends up throwing what appear to be eight more punches; no one intervenes, and the male employee doesn’t fight back.
It apparently all started when the male employee told the female gym member to lower her voice or he’d call the police, according to a police report seen on WPLG-TV’s video breakdown of the incident. She was reportedly making a scene in a locker room.
With that, the female “became irate,” balled her fists, and got in the male employee’s face — but the male pushed her away with both hands twice “in self-defense,” the arrest report says.
That’s when the cellphone clip of the physical attack begins.
Photo by Paul Weaver/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
“She took things too far, brutally battered our client, and ultimately left him in the hospital with a broken nose and severe emotional distress,” Alecsander Kohn, the victim’s attorney, told WFOR.
The female — identified as 35-year-old Kiara Bryant — also was seen on video in the gym’s parking lot trying to leave after the incident, WFOR noted. But she was soon arrested and charged with battery and disorderly conduct, the station said, adding that the victim’s attorney said he’s hoping the district attorney’s office will consider additional charges.
“This would be a case of felony battery,” Kohn added to WFOR. “Hopefully, through some strong advocacy, there will be a modification of the charges to reflect the severity of the injuries he sustained.”
Planet Fitness issued the following statement to the station: “The safety of our employees and members is our top priority, and we have zero tolerance for violence of any kind in our clubs. We are committed to providing a safe environment. The franchise group worked closely with local police and have canceled the member in question.”
The Miami-Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation Department told Blaze News that Bryant was booked into jail on the afternoon of Dec. 12 and bonded out early in the morning of Dec. 13.
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VIRAL VIDEO: Sara Gonzales SLAMS Target shopper who films her own anti-Charlie Kirk meltdown
One California Target shopper has clearly been lacking in Christmas spirit this season — as the disgruntled woman pulled out her phone to record herself harassing an elderly Target worker over the shirt she was wearing.
The shopper, whom online sleuths discovered to be employed by Enloe Health, asked the worker why she was wearing a red shirt that read “Freedom” with Charlie Kirk’s name underneath. In the video that she recorded and posted on her TikTok herself, she accuses the woman of supporting a “racist.”
“Are you f**king stupid?” the customer asked, while the employee, acting nonchalant, calmly responded, “That’s your opinion, ma’am.”
“Imagine harassing this woman and posting it on your TikTok account like you’re the good guy in this situation. I mean, imagine that,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales reacts, shocked.
Gonzales dug up a little more dirt on the Target shopper, and what she found was disturbing.
The shopper, whose name is Michelea Ponce, is no stranger to political posts. In one Facebook post, she proudly shared her husband and daughter making fun of Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
“But there is good news out of this situation,” Gonzales explains.
The Target employee has been identified as “Jeanie” in a GiveSendGo crowdfund, which has surpassed its $200,000 goal.
“It’s like God works in mysterious ways because Cassandra McDonald, who was kind of on top of this fundraiser, she spoke with Jeanie and she said Monday, the day the fundraiser was launched for her, was the 12th anniversary of her husband’s death by suicide after a long battle with illness and oncoming dementia,” Gonzales explains.
“And she now works to raise awareness of suicide prevention options. And by the way, she said she might not even … use the money to go on vacation, because she loves everyone she works with. The Target is standing behind her,” she continues.
“She just sounds like just the sweetest lady who didn’t deserve that,” she adds.
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Viral theory claims ‘Home Alone’ is secretly a Christian film — and the symbolism is shocking
The film “Home Alone” has been a beloved Christmas movie for decades.
However, “Live Free” podcast host Josh Howerton recently went mega-viral for pointing out something that few people have noticed: “Home Alone” is also a Christian movie.
“And so I’m going to read this. He says, ‘Watch this scene very carefully where Kevin is drawn into the beauty and warmth of the church,’” Howerton begins in a TikTok clip.
“As he walks inside to ‘Oh Holy Night,’ he hears the words, ‘Fall on your knees, oh, hear the angel voices’ … a sanctuary candle passes across the foreground, indicating that Christ is present inside the church,” he continues.
“When you first meet Old Man Marley, in the movie, what’s he doing? He’s salting the earth. Now so check this out. So Old Man Marley, Christ figure, Kevin makes a confession to him, then shakes his hand, and we see a bandage on Marley’s hand … his hand is pierced all the way through like the nails driven through Christ’s hands on the cross,” Howerton explains.
“At the end of the movie, Kevin cannot save himself from the burglars, and so Marley appears again to rescue him,” he says, adding, “’Home Alone’ is a Christian movie.”
“I got goosebumps,” BlazeTV co-host Jeff Fisher says on “Pat Gray Unleashed.”
“That’s interesting,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray chimes in.
“I mean, that’s some subtle symbolism there,” he adds.
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This Christmas season, Middle East Christians are under threat
Last December, my country finally threw off the chains of a hated, despotic regime. For many Syrians, it was a moment filled with hope — the belief that decades of repression had given way to a chance for renewal. Yet by March 2025, that hope had begun to fade. Parts of the country slipped into chaos. Videos circulated on social media and WhatsApp showing armed Islamist militias attacking civilian Christians, Druze, and anyone they branded as “infidels.”
Homes were burned. Entire families were killed. The first wave of violence was expanding and closing in on Christian communities of Suwayda in southern Syria, where many of my family members live.
While Israel has faced a campaign of withering international criticism, American Catholics and evangelicals are hearing very little about the plight of Christians from Egypt to Iran.
Then the killing stopped. It wasn’t widely publicized, but Israel — Syria’s southern neighbor — stepped in to prevent a massacre. Decisive military action stopped the slaughter of men, women, and children — our own relatives — in Suwayda.
For Arab Christians who have lived through so much war and persecution, it was a moment of relief but also a reminder of how little the world seems to care. When Christians are murdered in the Middle East, it rarely makes headlines.
As we come into the Christmas season and a new year, Christians are vanishing under Islamist violence and official repression.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s control and Iranian power have sent the Christian population into a tailspin. In Iraq, the number of Christians has dwindled to just over 100,000 faithful from over one million barely a decade ago. Even in small pockets of Christian life, supposed “safe havens” like Ain Kawa in Erbil, Iraq, Christians survive only because local authorities offer protection. From Sudan to Syria, ancient Christian communities have collapsed in just a generation.
The cradle of Christianity, with few exceptions, has become a region where believers cannot worship or gather without threats to our lives. Intervention from Israel helped prevent a massacre of Christian communities in Suwayda. But the world needs to pay attention to protect the Christians of the Arab world.
Western interest in the Middle East has mostly focused on Hamas’ brutal attacks on Israel in 2023 and Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza. While Israel has faced a campaign of withering international criticism, American Catholics and evangelicals are hearing very little about the plight of Christians from Egypt to Iran. Legacy media ignores them. TikTok algorithms suppress them.
It is perverse that right now — with Christian communities across the Middle East facing extinction — prominent voices like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes are ostracizing Christian Zionism as “a heresy.” In fact, Israel is the best friend Christians in the Middle East can hope to have. Alone in the region, Israel hosts a growing Christian population; alone in the region, Israel has intervened time and again to save Christian communities from eradication.
RELATED: The real question isn’t war or peace — it’s which century we choose
Photo by AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP via Getty Images
Our brethren in Syria and across the Middle East need our help this year more than ever before. Where churches are destroyed and believers persecuted, American Christians must pay attention, pray, and speak out.
More than that — contra Carlson — let us reach beyond our community. We can and must bring together a coalition of conscience in defense of persecuted minorities abroad, including human rights NGOs, brave anti-Islamist Muslims, and friendly governments in the region.
As Christmas approaches, the Christians of the Arab world are desperately calling for our help. This season, let us answer them.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
The pernicious myth that America doesn’t win wars
False narratives have a way of being taken as fact in popular understanding. After years of repetition, these statements calcify into articles of faith, not only going unchallenged, but having any counterarguments met with incredulity, as though the person making the alternative case must be uninformed or unaware of the established consensus. Many people simply accept these narratives and form worldviews based on them, denying the reality that, if the underlying assumption is wrong, then so are the decisions that flow from it.
One narrative that has taken hold among many since the humiliating end to the war in Afghanistan is that the U.S. military doesn’t win wars, or that it hasn’t since the end of World War II. This critique of the armed forces, foreign policy, or use of force has become an ironclad truth among many who use it as a starting point to advocate their own preferred change.
The United States military has had plenty of successes since World War II and, in fact, has suffered only a small handful of definitive losses in that time.
Advocates of War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s vision for the military have echoed it: “The military had grown weak and woke, so we need to change the culture, ignore or at least diminish adherence to legal restraints, and remake the composition of the military.” Restrainers, isolationists, and America Firsters have joined the chorus: “America has given up blood and treasure on stupid wars in which we were failures.”
There is only one problem with this understanding, and more importantly, its use as a baseline from which to derive policy prescriptions — it isn’t true at all.
Ignorance of war
It reflects a misunderstanding of how America has used force and what we have and haven’t achieved. And unlike many misunderstandings about American defense, this one isn’t solely by those with little familiarity with what the military does; the view has taken hold among many who should know better. There are several reasons for belief in the fallacy.
First, there is ignorance of what a war is, or at least not having a common definition of it.
For the pedants, one could point out that the United States has not been at war, by strict definition, since 1945. However, this isn’t relevant to the topic at hand because if the United States has not fought a war since 1945, then by this definition, we also haven’t lost one. In fact, the United States has declared war many times: the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, and the World Wars, yet we have engaged in armed conflict significantly more often than that.
So for the purposes of this debate, we can reflect upon the United States using force to achieve foreign policy objectives. With this more expansive definition, then Grenada is just as much of a war as World War II (although the latter certainly is a source of more pride than the former).
Second, there is ignorance of the number of conflicts in which the United States has been involved. Americans tend to have short memories and often pay less attention to events beyond the water’s edge. Many are largely ignorant of ongoing, smaller operations being conducted in their name. (Remember the shocked response to the Niger incident when many people, including congressional leaders, announced their ignorance of U.S. presence there?)
This phenomenon is exacerbated by the passage of time. How many Americans are aware of our involvement in the Dominican Civil War in 1965? Or the various conflicts that made up the Banana Wars?
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Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP via Getty Images
Third, there is ignorance or misunderstanding of the outcome of those wars. Our perspective has been skewed, likely due to the recent history of the embarrassing and self-inflicted defeat in Afghanistan, the messy and confusing nature of the war in Iraq, and the historic examples of very clearly defined wars with obviously complete victories.
There was no ambiguity in the World Wars. The United States went to war with an adversary nation state (or coalition of them), fought their uniformed militaries, and ended these with a formal surrender ceremony abroad and victory parades at home. But this is not the norm, neither for American military intervention nor for conflict in general.
Most of American military history does not look like these examples — conflicts that are large in scale, discrete in time, and definitive in outcome. Some of our previous interventions have been short in duration and were clear victories but smaller in scale (e.g., Grenada and Panama). Some have been clear victories but incremental, fought sporadically with fits and starts and over the course of years, if not decades (e.g., the several smaller conflicts that are often lumped together under the umbrella of the Indian Wars).
Win, lose, draw
But then there is another category — one in which the conflict results in a seemingly less satisfying but mostly successful result, sometimes after a series of stupid and costly errors and sometimes after years of grinding conflict that ends gradually rather than with a dramatic ceremony.
The Korean War, often described as a “draw” because the border between North and South Korea remains today where it was before the beginning of the war, had moments of highs and lows, periods where it seemed nothing could prevent a U.S.-led total victory — only to see the multinational force squander its advantage (e.g., reaching the Yalu River) and moments where all seemed lost, only to escape from the jaws of defeat through audacity and courage (e.g., Chosin Reservoir, Pusan, Inchon).
When President Truman committed U.S. forces as part of the U.N. mission to respond to communist aggression, the stated intent was to assist the Republic of Korea in repelling the invasion and to maintain its independence. South Korea still exists to this day. The combined communist forces of the PRK and CCP were prevented from achieving their aims by American military power.
We have a much more recent (and undoubtedly more controversial) example of a misunderstood success. Many of those who ballyhoo about America not winning wars point not only to the failure in Afghanistan but also to the recent war in Iraq. The Iraq War was many things — initially fought with great tactical and operational brilliance, then sinking into lethargic and incompetent counterinsurgency, then adapting to local power structures, and of course, initiated under pretenses we now know to be incorrect. But it was not, despite the ironclad popular perception, a military failure.
The military set out, with the invasion of 2003, to defeat the combined forces of the Iraqi Army and Republican Guard and remove the Ba’athist government from power. We achieved that goal. Once in control of Baghdad, the U.S. faced a new threat — one of a growing and complex insurgency that we had failed to anticipate. American forces under Ricardo Sanchez, and continuing under George Casey, seemed perplexed and frustrated by a conflict they had not come prepared to fight, nor that they adapted to. For years, despite the insistence of many military and political leaders, the war was not going our way as American casualties increased month after month.
But by 2008, the Sahwa — the movement of Sunni tribal militias aligning with the U.S.-led coalition and the government in Baghdad — and the American efforts to adapt to a more effective counterinsurgency strategy were turning the tide, to the point that by 2010, the violence in Iraq had largely subsided.
The government the United States helped bring about in Baghdad to replace Saddam Hussein endures to this day but not without difficulties. In his 2005 “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq,” George W. Bush defined victory in the long term as an Iraq that is “peaceful, united, stable, and secure, well-integrated into the international community, and a full partner in the global war on terrorism.” By continuing to maintain a relationship with Iraq, we are helping shape this long-term result, just as we did as we helped postwar Germany and Korea maintain security and political stability.
Due to the oppressive steps of a flawed prime minister, American desire to recede from presence and oversight in Iraq, and a compounding effect of spillover from the Syrian Civil War, there was the need for further American assistance in defeating the threat from ISIS, but defeat them we did — another success for the American military.
The Iraqi government also has close relationships with our Iranian regional rivals, as many of the local Arab countries do based on proximity. But just as the need for the 2nd and 3rd Punic Wars does not change the fact the 1st Punic War was a Roman victory, the war against ISIS does not change the fact that the United States accomplished the goal of deposing and replacing Saddam Hussein. Likewise the fact that the Soviet Union gained influence over Eastern Europe does not change the fact that World War II ended in a definitive defeat of the Nazis.
What does victory look like?
None of that changes a separate question, however — whether the war was worth it. But that was a political decision and one that does not negate the truth that the U.S. military first defeated the Iraqi military in a decisive win and then quelled a grinding insurgency in a less decisive way.
Just because a victory isn’t total doesn’t mean that the military fighting it lost. The War of 1812 was a victory, despite the fact the U.S. failed to achieve its maximalist goals of incorporating Canada but did achieve the goal for which the war was fought — rejecting British attempts to deny American sovereignty. World War II was a victory, despite the fact it set conditions for the Cold War and communist oppression. Korea was a victory, despite the fact we did not unify the Koreas under the democratic South. And Iraq was a victory — a poorly decided, stupidly managed, and possibly counterproductive long-term victory.
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Photo by Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Images
When viewed in this way, the United States military has had plenty of successes since World War II and, in fact, has suffered only a small handful of definitive losses in that time — Vietnam, Iran (Operation Eagle Claw), Somalia (1993), and Afghanistan — with the temporal proximity of the latter and the fact that two of these were also America’s longest conflicts, helping to warp the public’s understanding of our military effectiveness.
None of this is to say that America should not take a harsh look at our recent military efforts and seek continuous improvement. Grenada, as I have mentioned, was a victory but an incredibly embarrassing one that was likely only successful because we fought a backwater Caribbean country with a population of less than 100,000. The hard lessons learned by examining the disasters, mistakes, and close calls from Operation Urgent Fury helped reform the military into the globally dominant force that defeated the world’s fourth largest army in 100 hours less than a decade later.
Americans should not look at our military through rose-colored glasses, chest thumping as we chant “USA” and insisting that no other force can land a glove on us. But neither should we allow the false narrative of failure to take hold. We should be clear-eyed about what our military has accomplished, can accomplish, and the costs, risks, and potential gains in using force. Armed conflict will remain a necessary tool for the United States. We need to adapt our military to meet and defeat the challenges of the future, and we need to balance and incorporate military power into our global strategies appropriately — but that will not happen if we do it based on an incorrect understanding of the past.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.
