The U.S. aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and its
strike group have arrived in the Caribbean this week as tensions with
Cuba escalate and President Trump has raised the prospect of potential
military action against the island, according to initial reporting by
The Hill.
The Nimitz-class carrier is operating alongside its air wing —
including F/A-18E Super Hornets, EA-18G Growlers and C-2A Greyhounds —
as well as the USS Gridley, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer,
and the
USNS Patuxent, a Henry J. Kaiser-class replenishment oiler,
according to
U.S. Southern Command, which oversees military operations in the
region.
“USS Nimitz has proven its combat prowess across the globe, ensuring
stability and defending democracy from the Taiwan Strait to the Arabian
Gulf,” Southcom said on X.
The Nimitz, commissioned in 1975,
had been conducting joint exercises
with the Brazilian Navy off Rio de Janeiro last week, the U.S. Embassy
in Brazil said.
Trump told reporters Wednesday that Cuba is “on our mind,” following a
Justice Department indictment of former Cuban President Raúl Castro on
murder-related charges tied to the 1996 shootdown of two civilian
aircraft over international waters that killed four people.
“It’s very important,” Trump said. “It was a very big moment for
people, not only Cuban Americans, but people who came from Cuba, that
want to go back to Cuba, see their family in Cuba.”
The indictment was announced on Cuba’s Independence Day. Secretary of
State Marco Rubio, in a rare Spanish-language message to Cubans, marked
the occasion by defending U.S. sanctions and blaming the island’s
ongoing power outages on the communist government.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe also met with Cuban officials on the
island last week, signaling that Washington’s timeline for talks would
not remain open-ended, according to officials familiar with the meeting.
The defeat of Rep. Thomas Massie
(KY-04) on Tuesday night by Trump-backed candidate Ed Gallrein in the
GOP primary was welcome news for conservatives who had grown tired of
Massie's attention-seeking antics and theatrics, and his frequent breaks
with President Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans on America
First policies.
Those antics, as we reported, continued right on into Primary Day,
with Massie and his campaign texting an "endorsement" from Trump to
voters in the 4th Congressional District, making it look like it
happened this election cycle when it was actually from 2022.
When
a furious Trump called him out on it, Massie just doubled down and
continued to make it look like it was a recent endorsement, most likely
out of desperation from knowing he was about to lose.
In
the aftermath, the hot takes were fast and flowing among the Usual
Suspects who were speculating as to why Massie went down in defeat.
The
consensus among Democrats and Marjorie Taylor Greene types on the
right, of course, was that it was because of Massie's push for the
release of the full Epstein files, and how the MAGA faithful in his
district didn't appreciate it.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) was among the many who pushed this theory:
The
problem with this hot take is that it ignores the timeline of Massie's
sudden rush of concern about whether the full files would be released.
It all started after the Trump administration made clear they hoped this
would be Massie's last term in Congress:
In other words, it wasn't sincere, and everyone knew it.
Further,
there was the incovenient-to-the-left's-narratives issue of how often
Massie voted against his party (and Trump) in 2025 alone - including on
issues like border security and tax cuts, as RedState previously reported:
Then
there is Massie’s habit of casting crucial anti-Republican Party-line
House votes. In that chamber, the GOP has a razor-thin margin, and an analysis of voting patterns in the 119th Congress
by Fox News found Massie sided against his party "on 73 occasions, or
22.3 percent of the time." This includes votes against the One Big
Beautiful Bill and for Democrat war resolutions against the Iran
conflict.
Let us also not forget what some have characterized as an antisemitic tone to some of Massie's Israel criticisms:
Massie
has been doubling down on the antisemitic trope about Israel dragging
Trump and America into conflicts and doing their dirty work. He
deliberately mischaracterizes aid to Israel—almost all of which is spent
in the United States, bolstering vital domestic arms manufacturers—as
having no benefit to Americans. He ignores or lies about the fact that
America derives enormous benefits from the alliance with the Jewish
state in terms of intelligence and weapons development. And, like
Carlson, he pretends Iran has not been at war with the United States
since the Islamist regime seized power there in 1979. Just as bad, he’s
been one of the prominent voices bolstering the smear that the crimes of
the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were somehow linked to Israeli
intelligence…He also seems to think there is something illegitimate
about millions of Americans, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who understand
that a close relationship with Israel is not only an expression of
common democratic values.
As if to prove the point, here's the disgusting way Massie chose to begin his concession speech Tuesday night:
Gee, buddy, thanks for saying the quiet part out loud - and for proving the point in the process.
It
was time for Massie to go, not because of the Epstein files but because
a majority of GOP voters who voted in the Tuesday primary wanted
someone who actually was a conservative Republican instead of someone
who cosplayed one only when it was convenient to his ambitions. This X
user summed it up well:
Massie’s
last-ditch effort of using a four year old Trump endorsement
(deliberately blocking out the date by the way) perfectly summarizes
just how vile and deceitful of a person he is.
It also demonstrates Trump’s continued dominance of the Republican Party.
Massie
has been calling Trump a pedophile for over a year. Epstein
Administration, Epstein Class, pedo protector, all of these slanderous
titles he used to attack Trump. Regardless, when it came time to save
his seat, he lies right to his voters’ faces and claims to be a loyal
Trump supporter.
He did this every time he was in his district
speaking to voters face to face. He put pictures of himself with Trump
in campaign ads. Despite being an anti-Trump lunatic to his online,
third world fanbase, he’s smart enough to know that actual voters,
actual AMERICANS, love Trump.
Perhaps no one in history has been
more deserving of a crushing, humiliating defeat than Thomas Massie.
Good riddance to this piece of garbage.
If you come at the king, you best not miss.
He missed. Big time.
Relatedly, Chris Murphy knows we'll take lectures from Democrats on the Epstein files on like the 4th of Never, right?
For
heaven’s sake Bill Clinton spoke in prime time at the last Dem
convention less than two years ago and he was far cozier with Epstein.
Two foreign-owned firms have been
quietly running American boardrooms. Now a coalition of state attorneys
general is moving to stop them. Nebraska Attorney General Michael
Hilgers
filed
a lawsuit Tuesday against Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS),
accusing the firm of pushing climate and DEI agendas on corporate
America while telling its clients it was giving them straight, neutral
advice. Attorneys general from at least 17 states are backing the
effort.
ISS and its competitor Glass Lewis are proxy advisory
firms, businesses that tell large investors, pension funds, and mutual
funds how to vote their shares in corporate elections. Think of them as
the firms that quietly decide how Wall Street votes.
If you have a 401(k), an IRA, or a pension, there's a good chance ISS has been voting your money. Most Americans have no idea.
Together,
the two firms control roughly 97 percent of that market. Both are
foreign-owned. ISS is majority-owned by Deutsche Börse, a German
company.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who announced a separate action
this week, called them "unaccountable foreign-owned private
corporations" manipulating shareholder votes "behind closed doors."
According to the complaint,
ISS told investors to vote against corporate board members at companies
it believed weren't doing enough on emissions reductions or racial
diversity, while never checking whether any of that was actually good
for the people whose money was on the line. ISS also allegedly
coordinated its recommendations behind the scenes with climate and DEI
activist groups, including Climate Action 100+, Ceres, and The
Children's Investment Fund.
"ISS sold Nebraska
investors on the promise of objective, independent research," Hilgers
said in a statement to RedState. "What they were actually getting was
advocacy — coordinated with ESG activist organizations, untested against
any financial standard, and driven by an ideological agenda that ISS
never disclosed. You cannot promise one thing and deliver another in
Nebraska."
ISS's own employees apparently had doubts. Internal emails quoted in the complaint show staff questioning whether the firm's climate and diversity analysis was worth anything.
"I
wish we had a better process (and one that didn't rely so heavily on
the opinions of non-experts, frankly)," one employee wrote.
Another internal message stated bluntly:
"ISS ESG data probably isn't accurate."
One example highlighted in the lawsuit involved Warren Buffett.
In
2021, ISS told investors to think twice about reelecting Buffett to his
own board, citing climate concerns, despite Berkshire Hathaway's stock
rising more than 50 percent over the preceding five years. Nobody at ISS
ran any analysis of what a Buffett-led buyout might do to the stock,
the complaint alleges.
A senior ISS official acknowledged as much in an internal email:
We'll
probably touch the stove for a moment with our cautionary FOR on
Buffett, but it is in line with the other climate risk-driven recs that
we've made this year.
Nebraska also alleges
ISS was running a side business selling consulting services to the very
companies it was supposed to be rating, without telling clients.
The complaint calls it "a health inspector selling cleaning services on the side."
ISS did not respond to a request for comment.
Nebraska
isn't acting alone. Iowa, Texas, and West Virginia filed their own
suits the same day, according to an email to RedState. More than a dozen
states have banded together under a Multistate Proxy Advisor
Coalition.
Uthmeier's Florida action seeks to fine ISS and Glass Lewis, bar them from continuing their practices, and require them to pay back affected investors.
They also have the White House behind them. President Trump signed
an executive order in December 2025 directing federal regulators to go
after the proxy advisory industry, calling out ISS and Glass Lewis for
using their influence to "advance and prioritize radical
politically-motivated agendas."
West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey didn't mince words in a statement to RedState.
"ISS
has, itself and through its proxies, exerted massive, secretive
influence over major portions of our economy, leading to a restructuring
of board rooms into political machines designed to destroy coal, gas
and many of the values that West Virginians hold dear," McCuskey said.
"That stops today."
I hate to be the guy who throws on the spandex and a mask to play
Captain Bringdown, but Spencer Pratt is not going to get elected mayor.
That’s not dooming. That’s objectively assessing the situation. Spencer
Pratt is a political superstar—there’s no doubt about that. He’s
injected something that’s totally missing from the LA mayoral race,
which is common sense. His innovative AI-aided ads and his ability to inflict something the Democrat overlords don’t ever get—public pushback—is highly entertaining. But Los Angeles is not coming out of its death spiral anytime soon. I wish it weren’t true. But it’s true.
And the spiral is spiraling. I just came back from my Houston house
to spend some time here, and what struck me was the malaise. It’s dingy.
It’s old. It’s dirty. This isn’t the California of my youth with
swinging palm trees, sunshine, and endless opportunity. The sun still
comes out, but there’s a vibe here I’ve never felt before in my 50+
years in Cali. It’s depressing. I grew up in a northern California San
Francisco suburb (the same one and at the same time as Greg Gutfeld,
though we didn’t know each other), and that had its unique problems, but
it was a cool place to be. Then I went to college in San Diego in the
80s, and that was really cool. But after going off to the Army and the
Gulf War, I knew I wanted to come back to Los Angeles because I knew Los
Angeles was the place I could do whatever I wanted to do. And I did. I
became a bunch of things: a senior Army officer, a partner in a law firm
trying and winning multimillion-dollar cases, a best-selling author, a
columnist, and even a stand-up comic. That was the California dream. If
you wanted to do it and were willing to work for it, you could do it.
This is where the great Andrew Breitbart chose to make his splash at the
end of LA’s prime. Then, Los Angeles was a place of opportunity.
But
that LA is gone, replaced by Palm Tree ‘n Fire Detroit. And it’s
reasonable for you to ask why I’m not gone, at least not yet. Here’s
what you need to know about California, and Los Angeles as well. It’s a
feudal system. People asked me why I live here. I live here because it’s
really good to live here, except for the taxes and the irritation I
experience knowing they’ve managed to take the Golden State and turn it
into the Gelded State. See, it’s semi-tolerable because I’m not a serf. I
was a lawyer. I’m a nobleman. I don’t live in the City of Los Angeles.
That’s not for people like me. The people like me—affluent
professionals—live in the surrounding cities. I live in the Beach Cities
south of LAX. It’s very nice here – good restaurants and very few bums.
There are a few who wander in, but the cops are all over them. We don’t
defund the police. We fund the police. All those ladies with the “Hate
has no home here” signs? They see somebody who doesn’t fit in, and
they’re on the phone to the local 5-0 before you can say “No Kings.” Oh,
and when there are No Kings rallies, and there occasionally are, it
looks like Sunny Acres has been issuing its residents day passes.
Of course, if you go five miles to the east across the 405, you get
into where the poor people are. It’s Serfin’ USA. It’s a dystopian scene
full of misery and decline. The high schools in my area send kids off
to the Ivy Leagues and the UC system, provided they’re not white. The
high schools in the hood might have five or 10 students who are
grade-level proficient in reading and math. That’s not a percentage.
That’s absolute numbers. But you know, their mom and dad voted for it or
didn’t vote at all. Maybe the local Democrats just filled out their
ballots for them—LA is as fully corrupt as Capone Era Chicago was. But
it doesn’t matter. Not my problem.
Nope, Los Angeles is not my
problem, and I’m not going to give it another moment of thought. If it
wants to drown in a cesspool of hobo dung, it can dive in. Spencer Pratt
is absolutely right about everything he says, from the fires to the
junkies to the gross incompetence. Moreover, everybody knows it’s true.
But nobody cares. You need to understand something. This isn’t about
competence. When Karen Bass,
a black communist mental defective, looks
baffled at Spencer Pratt explaining how she’s helped run Los Angeles
into the ground, that look of confusion is not because she’s stupid. She
is, but it’s because he’s speaking a different language. She’s a
literal communist. She’s gone to Cuba and taken notes. Her purpose isn’t
to create prosperity and security for the people of Los Angeles. Her
purpose, like that of all communists, is to secure power. The same is
true of her bizarre, real competitor, some South Asian communist named
Nithya Raman. As is endemic to the Third World, they fetishize power;
these Marxists want control. That’s it. It’s not about filling in
potholes. It’s not about safe streets. It’s not even about keeping half
the city from going up in flames. It’s about control. There is no bottom
to Los Angeles. It’s not going to get so bad that people are going to
generate some sort of backlash, no matter how clever Spencer Pratt’s ads
are, and they are clever. Those ads are only scoring with those of us
on the outside. They give us false hope that something can be done. But
nothing can be done. The decline is not the point. It’s literally
irrelevant to them. Take Detroit, once also a rich and powerful city. Do
you think that at some point, the leftists who control it looked at it
and said, “Wow, we have become Detroit. Yikes! Should we try something
else”? No. The dysfunction is the function; the squalor doesn’t matter
to them. Not at all.
And it doesn’t matter to the vast majority of the inhabitants of LA.
Almost all of those people who got burned out along the Pacific Coast
Highway and in the Pacific Palisades are leftists who voted these people
into office. And here’s the thing. They’re going to vote for them
again. Raman ran an ad calling Spencer Pratt a “fascist.” It’s
hysterically funny to the rest of us, equating the idea that safe
streets and your house not burning down is pretty much the same thing as
being Mussolini. But you know what? Those people whose houses burned
down are going to listen to her, and they’re not going to vote for
Spencer Pratt. They’re going to vote for her.
You can’t help somebody who won’t help himself. And let’s not fool ourselves into thinking we can.
What’s
it going to take to fix Los Angeles, California, and the rest of the
blue hellholes? Gosh, you don’t want to ask that. You’re not going to
like the answer. They will never fix themselves. Never. All the normal
people are gone. You’ve got a few rich leftists and a bunch of welfare
cheats, and that’s it. It’s going to take something from the outside to
fix them. It would have to be imposed upon them and not gently. It would
take an American Franco, but then you would need to have an American
Spanish Civil War to get there, and I’m not up for that—nor should you
be. There are plenty of things I’m willing to fight and even die for,
like my own personal freedom. After all, at my age, I’m too old to live
on my knees, and I prefer to expire on a pile of expended brass. But I’m
not willing to risk death to save people intent on destroying
themselves.
Sorry to be depressing, but I’ve got to be honest. I’m not going to
tell you the sun’s out like on an old-school California summer day. It
isn’t. But that doesn’t mean Spencer Pratt isn’t performing an important
service. The guy is a patriot. The guy isn’t giving up. He’s staying in
the fight. And even if he doesn’t win this battle, and he’s not going
to win this battle, he’s doing something for the rest of us. He’s
shining the spotlight on the complete failure that the Democrat Party
has embraced as it has invited the socialists and communists into the
highest echelons of its ranks. Los Angeles won’t save itself, but the
cautionary example that Los Angeles provides may help other places save
themselves.
Thank you, Spencer, for sounding the alarm, and good luck to you even though you don’t have a chance in hell.
Last week, we learned
that Milwaukee County Judge Ana Berrios, or Ana Berrios-Schroeder,
refused to revoke the communication privileges of an inmate, Amier H.
Jones,
who was abusing those privileges to harass and threaten a woman
and children, who were victims of domestic abuse at the hands of Jones.
Judge Berrios-Schroder refused to revoke Jones' communication privileges
despite the fact that law enforcement reported his abuse and the
District Attorney's office pushed for revocation and an increased bail.
Jones is being held on multiple felony charges, including stalking,
intimidation of a victim, possession of a firearm by a felon, fleeing
and eluding, and recklessly endangering safety. Many of the charges
carry habitual criminality enhancers. According to The Heartland Post, Jones stalked his victim for months, attacked her in her home, and pointed a gun at her.
It's
another example of an activist judge putting the safety of the
community and crime victims behind the supposed rights of criminals.
Now, Judge Berrios-Schroeder has been named the head of the Milwaukee
County Court's domestic abuse branch.
EXCLUSIVE:
Last week, Milwaukee County Judge Ana Berrios-Schroeder refused to
punish a domestic abuser who called his victim from jail more than 1,500
times. Today she was named the head of the Milwaukee County Court's
domestic abuse branch. https://t.co/fXCu0PzGCLpic.twitter.com/TagLoikMQX
Judge
Ana Berrios-Schroeder was named Presiding Judge of the Domestic
Violence Subdivision and the Misdemeanor Division by Milwaukee County
Circuit Court Chief Judge Carl Ashley.
The appointments take effect
August 3.
Last week, Judge Berrios-Schroeder was widely criticized for her handling of the case against Amier H. Jones, Jr.,
who is in the Milwaukee County Jail on multiple charges, including
felony stalking. While behind bars, he continued to contact his victim
and made threats against her as well as a member of the Milwaukee County
High Risk Domestic Violence Team who had been working on his case.
According to a motion filed by prosecutors,
Jones sent a message to that member from a tablet approved by the jail
that read, “If this is the detective from preliminary reading this &
on the case, u already on my hit list.” Jail staff immediately moved
Jones to a restricted housing unit and took away his access to phones
and tablets and allowed him to contact only his attorney.
In a
hearing May 7, though, Berrios-Schroeder reversed that move and
reinstated Jones’ access to communication devices. The Milwaukee County
District Attorney’s Office had also requested that Jones’ bail be
increased from $30,000 to $75,000 in light of the danger he posed to his
victim and the officer he threatened, but Berrios-Schroeder denied this
and kept bail at $30,000.
“I decided the onus is on him, that I would give him one opportunity,” Berrios-Schroeder said of her ruling.
This is eerily similar to the remarks made by Massachusetts Judge Janet Sanders, who knew that career criminal Tyler Brown was dangerous after he tried to murder two Boston police officers. Sanders instead 'took a risk' on Brown and sentenced Brown to just five years behind bars, and Brown recently went on a random shooting spree on a Cambridge roadway.
It's also not the first time a Milwaukee County judge has been lenient with domestic abusers. Former Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan
was found guilty of obstruction in December after she helped an illegal
alien evade ICE agents last April. That illegal alien, Eduardo
Flores-Ruiz, was in Dugan's courtroom on serious domestic abuse charges.
Dugan faces up to five years in prison, and her sentencing is scheduled for June 3.
Domestic
abuse survivors in Milwaukee County, as well as groups who advocate for
them, should be made aware that the new head of the court's domestic
abuse division is fine with inmates using their communication privileges
to further abuse and terrorize their victims.
South Carolina GOP Representative Nancy Mace introduced a joint
resolution on Wednesday proposing a constitutional amendment that would
explicitly bar naturalized citizens from serving in Congress, the
federal judiciary, or holding any Senate-confirmed positions.
The proposed legislation seeks to extend the “natural-born citizen”
constraint — which currently applies only to the presidency and vice
presidency under Article II of the U.S. Constitution — to all members of
the House of Representatives, the Senate, federal judges at all levels,
and prominent appointed officers such as Cabinet members and
ambassadors.
If passed and ratified, the amendment would establish a strict
dual-track citizenship restriction, requiring federal lawmakers and
officials to have held U.S. citizenship from birth.
In a statement announcing the joint resolution, Mace described the
legislative push as a necessary measure to guarantee unwavering loyalty
among top federal decision-makers, arguing that those responsible for
writing laws, confirming judges, and representing the nation on the
global stage must have a single allegiance to the United States.
Mace argued that the amendment simply extends the rigorous
constitutional standard already required of the president to other
critical positions of national trust. She justified the urgency of the
restriction by citing specific instances of conflicting loyalties among
certain foreign-born officials, pointing directly to the public
statements and actions of representatives like Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)
as
evidence of why systemic safeguards are needed.
Ilhan
Omar. Shri Thanedar. Pramila Jayapal. All born in foreign countries,
none were citizens by birth. All sitting in the United States Congress.
All making clear every single day their loyalty is not to America.
Mace argued further that the amendment is a long-overdue mechanism to
close a security gap in the foundational text of the Constitution,
emphasizing that anyone wielding federal authority should be a
natural-born American.
The proposal, however, immediately drew criticism from naturalized
lawmakers who viewed the amendment as a “betrayal of American values.”
Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), who immigrated to the
United States from India as an infant, released a statement denouncing
the resolution, arguing that patriotism in America is measured by
service and character rather than birthplace.
Meanwhile, the measure faces a high bar to clear before it can
reshape the composition of the federal government. To successfully amend
the U.S. Constitution, the joint resolution must first secure a
two-thirds supermajority vote in both the House of Representatives and
the Senate, followed by ratification from three-fourths of all state
legislatures.
If it accomplishes that threshold, the timeline outlined within the
text specifies that the restrictions would apply to federal judges,
ambassadors, and other Senate-confirmed officials exactly six months
following final ratification, ending a centuries-old precedent that has
allowed naturalized citizens to serve at nearly every tier of the
federal framework.
California taxpayers just learned their hard-earned dollars were
funneled into a prison modernization scheme that reads more like a
luxury tech rollout than sober corrections policy. The Newsom
administration sanctioned a multiyear contract worth roughly $189
million to outfit tens of thousands of inmates with state-issued digital
tablets — a program billed as “digital equity” but paid for by working
families.
An explosive
investigation found that many inside the system are using those
taxpayer-funded devices in ways nobody promised to voters — watching
pornography, exchanging sexual messages, and in some cases allegedly
grooming victims on the outside. Dozens of current and former inmates
interviewed for the report say restrictions are routinely circumvented,
which should alarm every parent and neighbor who expects prisons to be
places of punishment and accountability.
This is not just theory
or rumor; federal prosecutors have tied specific criminal conduct to
state-issued tablets. A federal indictment revealed that Nathaniel Ray
Diaz, already jailed for lewd acts against a 12-year-old, allegedly used
a CDCR-issued tablet and prison phone system to place thousands of
calls and pressure the child into sending explicit images — behavior
that continued despite a court-ordered no-contact restriction. Americans
deserve to know their state isn’t enabling further victimization behind
locked doors.
The state’s own purchasing roll shows the program
was no small experiment: a new vendor won a multiyear, nearly $189
million deal to replace the prior system, a cost that critics rightly
say should demand ironclad oversight and strict limits on access for
violent and sexual predators. Officials defend the tablets as tools for
education and reentry, yet taxpayers have a right to ask why dangerous
offenders received the same privileges as nonviolent inmates and why
safeguards failed.
Governor Newsom and his spokespeople have
pushed back, deflecting responsibility to the corrections bureaucracy
even as the scandal grows and parents reel from the details; that
response is nowhere near good enough. If California wants to talk about
rehabilitation, do it with accountability, not freebies that become
instruments of abuse — and any official who greenlit this rollout must
answer to the people who pay the bills.
Pastor Josh Howerton’s now-viral sermon — titled “How to Vote Like
Jesus” — smashed through the usual chatter about religion and politics
and dared to tell Christians what too many pastors have been unwilling
to say: your faith demands civic engagement. The sermon and his
subsequent conversation with Allie Beth Stuckey pushed back against the
idea that Christians should retreat from the public square, arguing
instead that Christian stewardship includes choosing leaders who reflect
biblical truth.
Howerton was blunt: in a constitutional republic
the voters sit at the top of the org chart, and God has placed believers
where their choices matter for the common good. He tied centuries of
biblical witness — from Moses to Esther — to the modern obligation to
protect the institutions of family, church, and state, insisting that
abdication is not neutrality but surrender.
Let’s be clear:
silence from the pews is not humility; it is the vacuum into which
godless agendas rush. Howerton warned that when Christians refuse to
lead through voting, the only voices shaping law and culture are those
hostile to Scripture, and that is a moral catastrophe for future
generations.
Allie Beth Stuckey joined the conversation to
demolish the progressive talking point that every act of faith-informed
voting is “Christian nationalism,” showing how that charge is often used
to shame believers into political cowardice. Both Stuckey and Howerton
pointed to Romans 13 and the biblical recognition of government
authority to argue that law and order are God-ordained tools to restrain
evil, not pagan inventions to be feared by the faithful.
The
left’s obsession with labeling any public expression of biblical
convictions as sinister is a rhetorical trick, not theology. Stuckey
rightly observed that conflating concern for national stability and
border enforcement with theocracy is a bait-and-switch meant to silence
parents, pastors, and patriots who refuse to let radical progressives
rewrite moral categories.
Practical theology matters in a messy
world: Howerton reminded listeners that a vote is a strategic decision,
not a sacrament, and Christians must choose the best available path
forward rather than hold out for impossible purity. That honesty about
the imperfect nature of politics should free believers to act with both
conviction and prudence, defending life, family, and liberty in every
election.
Americans of faith cannot cede the future to activists
who despise the moral order that birthed our freedoms; the cost of
silence is ruin. If pastors and pews refuse to disciple civic life, then
the nation will be governed by those who have no fear of God — and
hardworking families will pay the price. Stand, vote, and lead like your
children’s lives depend on it, because they do.
Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky., won the Republican primary for Kentucky's U.S.
Senate seat, which opened when Sen. Mitch McConnell decided not to seek
an eighth term.
Newsmax and Decision Desk HQ called the race for Barr, who was endorsed by President Donald Trump, about an hour after polls closed.
With 34% of votes counted, Barr had 59.8%, followed by former state
Attorney General Daniel Cameron at 31.9%
and nine other candidates.
Barr will be the heavy favorite to succeed McConnell in a state Trump
won by nearly 31 percentage points in the 2024 election. McConnell, 84,
was the GOP Senate leader from 2007 to 2025, the longest tenure for any
party leader in the upper chamber's history.
Barr would have faced entrepreneur Nate Morris, who was endorsed by
Donald Trump Jr. and received financial support from Elon Musk. In a
Truth Social post
shortly before endorsing Barr, the president said he had asked Morris
to "step aside" from the race to join his administration as an
ambassador.
"Nate is a terrific businessman and strong MAGA Warrior," Trump wrote, adding that he will announce Morris' specific role soon.
Shortly afterward, Morris posted on X that he was proud to join the Trump administration and, in another post, endorsed Barr.
Barr's opponent in the November general election will be former state Rep. Charles Booker.
Newsmax and DecisionDesk HQ called
the race for Booker, who had 46.7% of the vote with about 95% counted.
Next was former Marine pilot Amy McGrath at 35.9%, followed by five
other candiates.
Booker narrowly defeated McGrath in the 2020 Democrat primary before losing to McConnell in the general election.
Democrats have not won a U.S. Senate race in Kentucky since 1992.
