by Glenn Greenwald, Glenn Greenwald: As the Israel Lobby gets more desperate watching the collapse of American support for their country, they also become more nakedly authoritarian to control U.S. discourse. On Friday morning, I taped an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s program to discuss the ongoing Iran War, growing Israeli influence in the U.S., and proliferating […]

March 18, 2026 — Today's Conservative Cartoon

"They did everything they could to destroy us. That's why we're like this secret, cult band."

James Talarico is having a moment. The Texas state representative and Democratic Senate candidate has gone viral more times than most politicians manage to in a full career, partly because he’s young and articulate, and partly because he does something unusual for a Democrat: he talks about Jesus. A lot. He quotes Scripture on the House floor. Joe Rogan told him to run for president. The political media has decided Talarico represents something new: a Democrat who can finally speak Christian and counter their secular reputation. I want to take that claim seriously because I think it deserves a serious answer. And the serious answer is: no, he doesn’t. James Talarico simply stands for an old form of religious progressivism that is more interested in achieving progressive outcomes than holding sincerely to the Christian faith. The question isn’t whether Talarico is personally sincere. I have no reason to doubt that he is. The question is whether his Christianity is doing any actual work in his politics and whether it functions as a theological foundation or is merely a rhetorical costume. When you look closely, the answer is pretty clearly the latter — Talarico’s Christianity is a Trojan horse with a progressive interior and a Christian exterior. There is no progressive policy that Talarico’s Christianity hasn’t made peace with. Talarico supports abortion access, transgender ideology, expansive redistribution, and a vision of government robust enough to accomplish the full progressive policy agenda. He opposes the Ten Commandments in public schools and has described God as “nonbinary.” He attends a PCUSA church whose congregants celebrate being free from “dusty old creeds and dogma.” Now, here’s what’s interesting: you could arrive at every single one of those positions through standard secular progressive reasoning: appeals to autonomy, identity, equity, and the expansion of the administrative state. You don’t need the Bible to get there. You don’t need the atoning work of Jesus. Christianity is merely decorative. It’s a rhetorical add-on bolted onto a political program that was already fully assembled before Scripture even entered the room. Here is what I mean when I say progressive Christianity wears Christianity as a skin suit. The framework is secular progressivism: identity politics, abortion, sexual revolutionary politics, and redistributionist economics. Christian language gets stitched over the top of it to make the whole thing look familiar to voters who grew up in church. It is smarmy and syrupy in its appeals to the “brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God.” But the theological content has been hollowed out and replaced. What remains is a set of emotional associations strangely redolent with progressivism (funny how that happens, isn’t it?), and it goes something like this: Jesus loved people, therefore expand Medicaid; the prophets cared for the poor, therefore raise the marginal tax rate; love your neighbor, therefore no borders. The assertions don’t hold up when the Bible is used responsibly, but they feel right to people who want the warmth and consolation of faith without the theological demands that counter progressive orthodoxy. But oddly, none of this actually works in the long run for the people who employ it. Liberals don’t need Christianity to reach the conclusions Talarico is reaching. They already have a fully operational secular moral vocabulary — rights, autonomy, justice, and equity — that gets them to the same place. So why bother with the theological window dressing? The answer is purely electoral. Democrats have been hemorrhaging religious voters for a generation, and they’re looking for a way to stop the bleeding. Talarico is the proposed solution. But the solution has a structural problem, and sociology is rather clear about it. Liberal theological commitments corrode religious belief across generations. This isn’t a conservative talking point; it’s one of the better-documented findings in the sociology of religion. Churches that accommodate the surrounding culture’s moral assumptions tend to empty out within two or three generations. The children of progressive Christians disproportionately become religiously unaffiliated. Why? Because if Christianity is just a more emotional version of what MSNBC already told you, you don’t need to get up on Sunday morning to hear it. You do not have to tithe; you do not have to bear social scorn for holding to supposedly outmoded dogmas “on the wrong side of history.” Theological substance — creation, fall, redemption, resurrection, judgment, human dignity, sexual ethics, and the exclusive claims of Jesus Christ — is precisely what makes Christianity worth believing. Strip that away in the name of openness, and you’ve kept the brand while destroying the product. That Talarico is having a moment should surprise no one. Previous generations of religious progressives had their moment, too, and in time, it all ends the same way: churches mutating into art museums and social justice clubs. What Talarico and the progressive Christian project are doing is trying to make the Democratic Party look religion-friendly while simultaneously denying religion its actual substance. This betrays what Christianity really is by transforming it into progressive sentiment. Orthodox Christians won’t be persuaded, because they can see the theology has been replaced. Secular progressives don’t need Christianity anyway, so the whole performance ends up as a media-fueled vanity project to bolster progressive politics. Talarico may mean well. But Christianity isn’t a political tool. It’s a truth claim about reality at odds with the progressivism of his “Christianity.” * * * Andrew T. Walker serves as Associate Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and is a Fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center. You can follow him on X: @AndrewTWalker. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey is sounding off on what she sees as a deeply unsettling turn in high fashion, criticizing Paris Fashion Week for embracing what she describes as “demonic” and grotesque aesthetics over beauty.“The theme is clearly to be demonic. And I don’t know what kind of statement they’re trying to make, if it’s some kind of critique of society or if they are just the demonic people themselves, but pretty scary. Obviously, not about beauty,” Stuckey says.And those who attend the shows and praise the designers aren’t much better.“I think that they’re all thinking about being seen, and how the world is interpreting them, and what kind of statement they’re making, and what kind of opportunity or attention this is going to get them,” Stuckey says, mocking, “‘Do people think I’m edgy finally? Oh, I bet I’m going to be the strangest, most bizarre, most, you know, edgiest person there.’”“I think they’re all thinking about themselves. I don’t think that they are there to enjoy the art or to enjoy the spectacle. I think they are there to be the art and to be the spectacle,” she adds.Designer Kei Ninomiya’s collection was described as “gloom” made “tangible” by Vogue Runway. The collection featured gothic horror elements of bondage and morbid animal sculptures.“Because all of us are like, ‘How can I get my hands on some gloom?’” Stuckey comments.“The soundtrack for the collection was labeled ‘the aural equivalent of a nervous breakdown,’” she says. “Again, I have always wanted my nervous breakdowns to become an aura that I could just kind of swim through.”The brand Enfants Riches Déprimés, whose French name translates to ‘Depressed Rich Kids,’ also made an appearance.“His show featured a model chained to a statue of a man’s head. ... The brand’s inspiration comes from fellow child elites the designer met in rehab as a young man,” Stuckey explains.The designer, Henri Alexander Levy, is quoted as once saying, “If you were going to kill yourself, wouldn’t you want to do it with a $7,000 cashmere noose?”“I think people underestimate how many people in Hollywood, the fashion world, movie industry, are truly just disturbed people who are working out their trauma and demonic possession through entertainment and fashion,” Stuckey says.Another brand, Matières Fécales — which is French for “Fecal Matter” — claims that its collection is a critique of “wealth, power, corruption, and inequality.”“Somehow, I just don’t feel like that’s what it’s accomplishing,” Stuckey says.“There is something just very dark about the glorification of the demonic that we see among a lot of people in Hollywood and in the music industry,” she adds.Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

A small bronze bull head figurine discovered by a hiker in the Serra de Tramuntana mountain range in Mallorca, Spain, is now being studied by archaeologists. The head is just three centimeters (1.2 inches) long and is only miniature bull head found in Mallorca known to survive. Thanks to the diligence of the hiker who immediately notified the Consell de Mallorca of the find and handed it over to the authorities, this unique artifact will be preserved in a Mallorca museum. Dating to between 600 and 200 B.C., the bull head was crafted by the sophistic metal craftsmen of the post-Talaiotic culture, descendants of the first settlers of Mallorca and other Balearic Islands. They are named after megalithic towers known as talaiots that pepper the landscape of the islands, about 300 of them on Mallorca alone. The features of the bull — ears, horns, eyes, nose — are meticulously shaped and incised in the stylized form typical of the Talaiotic Culture. Archaeologists believe it was once part of a larger sculpture or a decorative fitting. The wee bull head shares common design elements with and is a contemporary of the far larger bull heads of Costitx, icons of the bull’s ancient totemic significance in Spain’s cultural history. The three life-sized heads were discovered at the archaeological site of Son Corró outside Costitx, Mallorca, in the late 19th century, and are believed to be related to a Talaiotic bull-worship cult. They are now exhibited at the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid, much to the consternation of Costitx, which has repeatedly petitioned Spain’s government to return the heads to their home only to be denied over and over again. That loss adds a great deal of weight to the miniature version staying put. The bull head is now undergoing archaeological and metallurgic analysis by Consell de Mallorca researchers. They hope to narrow down when it was manufactured, the metallurgic techniques employed, the metal composition and answer the question of whether it was originally mounted to a larger piece.