When The Silly Outweighs The Serious
I am beginning to think that the Democratic Party, and the legacy media it has swallowed, are an organized form of personality disorder. They cannot tell what is important from what is not and everything is viewed through a very personal lens. In the past 36 hours (an amazing period of time when you consider 17% of it was consumed by a single World Series game) I have encountered two very serious stories about exploitation of people, while encountering dozens about things that just don’t matter that much save in the minds of that cohort. It is actually kind of frightening.
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Stephen King’s biggest fear? Christianity
Stephen King got rich by tapping into something universal: the primal, human fears that haunt us all, regardless of race, class, or creed. Books like “The Shining” and “Salem’s Lot” are effective whether you read them in Borneo or Bangor, in Czech or Chinese.
Never mind the master of modern horror’s recent fixation on America’s president — a figure who (at least for King’s senescent Woodstock-generation cohort) represents an evil worse than Pennywise and Randall Flagg combined. The author’s late-career Trump derangement syndrome can’t undo the undeniable impact his more than 60 novels, countless short stories, and a flood of TV and movie adaptations continue to have on pop culture.
King once described organized religion as ‘a dangerous tool.’ His online tirades often single out Christians, casting them as theocrats, hypocrites, or villains.
That is an impact well-worth examining, especially for Christians. Beneath the lurid gore, King’s books can seem oddly comforting and even wholesome. King has a knack for creating heroes out of “regular” Americans, flawed but well-meaning small-town folk who watch “The Price Is Right,” drive Chryslers, and buy Cheerios at the supermarket.
What’s more, these heroes do battle in a world where good and evil are clearly delimitated, with the former always triumphing over the latter. King seems to adhere to the sort of “culturally” Christian worldview that still held sway in the America of his youth (he was born in 1947).
Folly of faith
But a closer look at King’s more than 50-year career reveals a consistent tendency to subvert Christianity. Indeed, it seems that King has applied his considerable storytelling gifts to denigrating faith as much as inducing fear.
King doesn’t simply tell tales of terror. He builds worlds where Christianity is a sickness, believers are lunatics, and God is either cruel or indifferent to our suffering. His work isn’t just critical of religion, but a deliberate inversion of it. The sacred becomes sinister, and devotion becomes disease.
In “Carrie,” King’s first novel, the villain is not the telekinetic girl but her mother — a wild-eyed Christian who punishes her daughter for being human. Blood becomes sin, the Bible becomes a weapon, and faith is presented as the root of madness. Millions of readers met Christianity through that book and learned to detest the believer more than the devil.
The monster in the pews
In his novella “The Mist,” he repeats the theme. Trapped townsfolk turn to a hysterical woman who quotes scripture on her way to presiding over human sacrifices. She becomes a prophet of panic, a parody of piety. The monsters outside may be frightening, but the believer inside is worse. Once again, King’s message is clear: The sacred is the scariest thing of all.
Then comes 2014’s “Revival,” perhaps King’s clearest expression of his contempt for Christianity. It begins in a small New England town, where young Jamie Morton meets Reverend Charles Jacobs, a gifted preacher who wins hearts and fills pews. But when tragedy strikes his family, the reverend’s faith vanishes. From his own pulpit, he mocks belief, denounces God, and is driven out in shame.
Years later, Jamie — now a weary musician addicted and adrift — meets Jacobs again, no longer a man of God but a man of wires and obsession. The reverend has replaced prayer with experiments, chasing power instead of purpose. When he finally forces open the door between life and death, what he finds isn’t heaven or hell, but a monstrous parody of creation — an insect god ruling over the void. It’s less revelation than ridicule, King’s way of saying that only a fool would still look to God for guidance.
Pulling punches
It’s worth noting what King never touches. He spares Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism the same disdain he reserves for Christianity. To mock those faiths would be called “punching down” by the cultural gatekeepers he aligns himself with.
But his compass is as broken as his conscience — spinning wildly, always pointing away from truth. He pretends he’s striking upward at power when, in truth, he’s sneering downward at the poor and ordinary believers who build churches, not empires. It’s all fair game in art, so long as the victims are mostly white and Christian. Mocking Islam would be “insensitive.” Ridiculing Hinduism would be “problematic.” But tearing into Christianity? That’s considered brave. In King’s moral universe, faith is fair game, as long as it’s practiced in small communities, not gated ones.
Photo by BENJAMIN HANSON/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
‘Spiritual vandalism’
Another important point worth emphasizing is that King’s world isn’t godless. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s god-haunted, but the divine is turned on its head. His priests prey instead of pray. His crosses offer no comfort, only despair.
This is not accidental. King once described organized religion as “a dangerous tool.” His online tirades often single out Christians, casting them as theocrats, hypocrites, or villains. He preaches clarity while painting conviction as madness. The man who once wrote about demons now sees them in ordinary Americans.
What King practices is a kind of spiritual vandalism. He keeps the architecture of Christianity — the rituals, the icons, the language — but fills it with sacrilege. The chalice still shines, but the wine is poison. Grace becomes guilt, creation becomes cruelty, and salvation becomes surrender. It is not atheism but corruption — the gospel rewritten in reverse.
King vs. the King
Yet even in his rebellion, King can’t escape the faith he so clearly despises. His stories are soaked in scripture, each one haunted by the very God he denies. Every curse echoes a prayer. Every desecration betrays a longing for what was lost. Behind his hatred lies hunger. A need for meaning, even if that meaning must be mutilated to be felt.
The irony is almost biblical. King writes of hell because he still dreams of heaven. He rejects the transcendent but cannot stop reaching for it. That is why his work feels so spiritual even in its cynicism — because rebellion is, in its way, a strange kind of worship.
This Boomer icon may never kneel before Christ, but his stories do — in rage, not reverence. They curse the altar, yet can’t look away. Stephen King may write about death, but his real subject is the divine he can’t quite kill.
Trump can’t call it ‘mission accomplished’ yet
With a divided Congress and the clock likely running out on GOP control, President Trump’s decision to forgo a second budget reconciliation bill is puzzling. Reconciliation is the only tool available to pass major priorities without a filibuster. So why refuse another chance to make the America First agenda permanent?
At a recent meeting with Senate Republicans, Trump told lawmakers, “We don’t need to pass any more bills. We got everything” in the big, beautiful bill earlier this year. “We got the largest tax cuts in history. We got the extension of the Trump tax cuts. We got all of these things.”
The first Trump presidency showed what executive courage can do. The second must prove what lasting law can achieve.
Really? That answer ignores reality. Tax cuts were never the full measure of the Trump revolution. The movement promised structural reform — from securing the border to dismantling bureaucracies. Limiting the victory to tax relief leaves unfinished the hard work of codifying executive policies into law before the next Democrat in the White House wipes them out with the stroke of a pen.
Biden’s first weeks in office in 2021 proved how fragile executive action can be. Nearly every Trump-era reform — on immigration, energy, education, and national security — vanished within days. The same will happen again if core policies remain tied to presidential discretion instead of actual statutes.
Immigration is the clearest example. Trump moved the country in the right direction, but many key policies remain blocked by courts or enjoined indefinitely. These include:
• Ending birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants,
• Defunding sanctuary cities,
• Cutting federal assistance for noncitizens,
• Requiring states to verify lawful status for benefits under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act,
• Expanding expedited removal of gang members under the Alien Enemies Act,
• Authorizing ICE arrests at state courthouses,
• Deporting pro-Hamas foreign students,
• Returning unaccompanied minors to Central America,
• Suspending refugee resettlement, and
• Ending “temporary” protected status for long-term illegal residents.
Each of these reforms can and should be codified through legislation. Courts can’t enjoin what Congress writes into law.
The same applies beyond immigration. Critical Trump policies remain trapped or reversible, including:
• Abolishing the Department of Education,
• Keeping male inmates out of female prisons,
• Blocking federal funding for hospitals that perform gender “transitions” on minors,
• Removing Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, and
• Requiring proof of citizenship to vote and restricting mail-in ballots in federal elections.
All of these measures would fulfill campaign promises. All of them will vanish the instant Democrats reclaim the White House — unless Republicans act now to make them permanent.
RELATED: While the lights are off, let’s rewire the government
Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images
Meanwhile, the economic front remains unsettled. Inflation continues to crush families, and Washington’s spending addiction keeps prices high. Health care remains broken, with no Republican alternative to stop Democrats from reinstating Biden’s Obamacare subsidies. The challenges are mounting, not receding.
The reconciliation process exists precisely for moments like this. It allows a governing majority to bypass the filibuster and pass budget-related priorities with a simple majority — the same procedure Democrats used twice under Biden to jam through massive spending and climate legislation. Refusing to use it again would be an act of political negligence.
Trump has accomplished much, but claiming “mission accomplished” now risks repeating the failures of his first term — executive orders that were erased within weeks and policies undone overnight.
The task ahead is to legislate the revolution. Codify the border. Dismantle bureaucratic strongholds. Rein in judicial activism. Secure election integrity. Cement economic reform.
The first Trump presidency showed what executive courage can do. The second must prove what lasting law can achieve. If Trump wants his achievements to outlive his term, he must act now — not by declaring victory, but by legislating it.
19-year-old fatally attacked 52-year-old worker at Chick-fil-A with knife and hammer, police say
A 19-year-old man was arrested for attacking and killing a 52-year-old delivery worker at Chick-fil-A in the middle of the night, Illinois police say.
Darryl Lee Jr. of Kankakee allegedly broke into the restaurant at about 3 a.m. and attacked Tracey Land of Bridgeview with a knife and hammer.
‘The guy got my son on the floor, so I got out of the car, and I was trying to get him away from my son so he couldn’t hit my son anymore.’
Land died from the alleged attack.
Lee then reportedly attacked a 20-year-old maintenance worker at the same location. The man was stabbed but fought with Lee and was able to subdue him until police arrived.
He was helped by his mother, who was also a maintenance worker and happened to be in a car nearby and rushed in to help her son.
“There were hitting each other,” she said anonymously to WLS-TV. “The guy got my son on the floor, so I got out of the car, and I was trying to get him away from my son so he couldn’t hit my son anymore.”
Lee was charged with nearly a dozen counts related to the incident, including the following:
- First-degree murder, a class M felony
- Attempted first-degree murder, a class X felony
- Concealment of homicidal death, a class 3 felony
- Aggravated battery, a class 3 felony
- Armed robbery, a class X felony
- Armed violence, a class X felony
- Burglary, a class 2 felony
Oswego Police transported Lee to the Kendall County Jail.
“This was an unprovoked attack and resulted in a tragic loss of life. Our hearts go out to the victims, their families, and everyone affected by this tragic incident,” reads a statement from Oswego Police Chief Jason Bastin.
“We are grateful for the bravery of those who intervened and for the coordinated response from our officers, fire personnel, and assisting agencies,” he added.
WGN-TV reported that Lee’s defense attorney expressed concern that he was not fit to stand trial.
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Vhong Navarro, Jhong Hilario, more celebrities pay tribute to veteran choreographer Anna Feliciano
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