In 1988, after escaping socialism in Romania, I celebrated my first Christmas in America. It was a profound experience marked by joy, gratitude, and reflection. It was the first time I was able to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ without fear of being arrested by a totalitarian socialist regime. I enjoyed the freedom to attend church and the joy of discovering new cultural traditions. It marked a significant milestone in my journey toward freedom and renewal. But before that journey was even an idea, I attended my first Socialist Party Christmas as a child. As we arrived, my father said very sternly, “We are at the Socialism Party headquarters, where Santa’s party will take place. Remember, only say yes or no, nothing more.” The large reception room was decorated in red, and on each wall there was a large portrait of our “Beloved Leader” Nicolae Ceaușescu, flanked by Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. On the left side of the room, a small Christmas tree stood, decorated with pictures of soldiers who had died, a picture of Ceaușescu, and topped with a big, red socialist star with a yellow hammer and sickle. There were no angels, no silver Bethlehem stars, no nativity scenes. Santa was a Socialist Party leader, and all the gifts had a Communist theme. The boys received Communist soldier toys or books about Ceaușescu. The girls received red-scarfed socialist dolls. The following year, Santa was replaced with Dictator Ceaușescu’s name, and no gifts were given. circa 1985: Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu (1918 – 1989) and his wife Elena with a large group of children in national costume. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images) Now, years later, I’ve watched as the influence of socialist ideologies and policies has infiltrated and changed how Christmas is celebrated in America. Since 1971, court cases, like Lemon v. Kurtzman and Allegheny County v. ACLU, have scrutinized the use of religious elements in public Christmas displays, often resulting in the restriction of nativity scenes on government property to avoid the perception that the government favors one religion over another. The fear of appearing “too religious” or “exclusive” has transformed Christmas celebrations, shifting them toward a more secular, inclusive holiday focused on community and festive cheer rather than its core religious meaning. This secularization has diluted the profound significance of Christ’s birth. As governments and institutions increasingly strip Christ from Christmas, our religious freedoms are slowly eroding – and could soon vanish entirely if we don’t stand against it. Make no mistake. This is exactly what happened in Romania. Ceaușescu’s rise to power in Romania was due to his charm, enthusiasm, anti-capitalist rhetoric, and how he portrayed himself as a man of the people. These qualities all resonated emotionally with citizens and framed socialism as a path to equality and justice. As soon as Ceaușescu took power in Romania, his regime systematically attacked religious freedom by promoting atheism, controlling religious institutions, and demolishing churches. This created an environment of repression that stifled religious expression and contributed to the decline of organized religion in Romania during his rule. Ceaușescu used Decree 177/1948 for further repression that significantly curtailed religious freedom in Romania. He established a framework for state control over religious organizations and practices. New religious groups faced significant difficulties in obtaining official recognition. Religious literature, including Bibles and other texts, faced heavy censorship. Many publications were banned in socialist Romania or required state approval before distribution. Nativity scenes, crosses, and other religious imagery were often removed from public spaces, and churches faced restrictions on displaying decorations that highlighted the religious significance of Christmas. Some families in socialist Romania, risking cruel punishment, jail time, or death, created small altars or displays in their homes featuring religious icons, candles, and nativity scenes, allowing them to express their faith privately. While initially Ceaușescu’s anti-capitalist rhetoric resonated, the reality of his regime’s failures ultimately led to widespread disillusionment. George Barna’s research recently found that support for socialism is growing in America. Socialism is now deeply rooted in New York City after the election of self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani. And Mamdani is following Ceaușescu’s playbook. He strongly criticizes capitalism as corrupt and exploitative, while socialism is a path to equality and justice. He plays on the emotions of New Yorkers who struggle to survive in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Mamdani hopes people will see the true reality of his policies years from now. He advocates for religious freedom by emphasizing the importance of maintaining a secular government approach to it. He frames religious freedom within the broader context of social justice, racial equality, economic justice, and immigrant rights. He believes in promoting government policies grounded in ethical and secular principles rather than religious doctrines. Liao Pan/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images The election of progressive candidates who openly identify with socialist principles in America has changed the political landscape, challenging traditional party norms and policies. Socialism stands in direct opposition to God, replacing Him with an all-powerful government that demands total allegiance. It erodes our God-given religious freedoms and brands faithful Christians as obstacles to its agenda. My own life bears witness to this truth. I fled a socialist regime in 1988, escaping the brutal oppression that crushed religious rights and silenced believers. Those same poisonous lies of socialism, now spreading rapidly in America, are gaining ground, especially among those who despise our nation’s founding principles and Judeo-Christian heritage. We cannot remain silent. Those of us who have endured the horrors of socialism will never stop sounding the alarm. It is time to rise up and fiercely defend our freedoms before they are lost forever. * * * Virginia Prodan is an international human rights attorney, best-selling author of the memoir “Saving My Assassin,” and host of the “Courageous Leadership with Virginia Prodan” podcast. She serves as an ambassador on the President’s Council for National Religious Broadcasters, a member of the Advisory Board of the American Christian Leaders for Israel, and an Allied Attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire. Christmas Sale – Get 40% off New DailyWire+ Annual Memberships

It’s been a cold winter so far in the Midwest and much of the Northeast, early-in-the-season snow even in Washington, D.C., and temperatures falling to freezing and below in much of the South. Come to think of it, North America’s 2024-25 winter was pretty cold, too. It’s gotten to the point that “polar vortex” is a phrase on just about everyone’s lips. Of course, you are surely aware—as those of us with doubts about inevitably disastrous global warming were often told—that there’s a difference between weather and climate. Weather is anecdote, climate is longstanding trend. And the longstanding trend in climate, we have been told this entire past quarter-century, is toward a hotter climate all over the world, with multiple catastrophic consequences. Now, we seem to have reached an Emily Litella moment—the moment when, on the now half-century-old “Saturday Night Live” program, the befuddled character realized that she had misheard and misinterpreted some anodyne comment and had been propounding an absurd theory, and dismissed it with a hurried, “Never mind.” Playing the Litella role this October was Bill Gates, who, as a mega-philanthropist, makes serious efforts to gauge whether the causes to which he has contributed have been worth the money. Although “climate change will have serious consequences,” he said, using the two-word phrase that replaced global warming as it was becoming apparent that Earth wasn’t uniformly warming in line with predictions, “it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.” Numbered also among the converts—the use of religious metaphor is not accidental; more below—is Breakthrough Institute research director Ted Nordhaus. “I used to argue that if the world kept burning fossil fuels at current rates, catastrophe was virtually assured,” he wrote this fall in The Free Press. “I no longer believe this hyperbole.” He pointed out that the demographic and physical factors on which he based his predictions two decades ago have not come to pass, and that despite measurable warming, some of which is attributable to human activity, people have adapted, and any damage has been well short of catastrophic. As British science writer Matt Ridley notes, claims such as Al Gore’s 2006 prediction of a 20-foot sea-level rise in 20 years have fallen short—by 19 feet and 9 inches. Meanwhile, the undermining of hyperbolic scenarios has, as Wall Street Journal economics reporter Greg Ip wrote this week, led the likes of Canadian Prime Minister (and former British central banker) Mark Carney and BlackRock DEO Larry Fink to downplay the risks of climate change, as most American voters have done some time ago. In all this, I see elements of religious conversion. Advocates of drastic action to address global warming climate change tend to be secular in religion but religious in their devotion to their cause. We have sinned, with our SUVs and corporate jets frying the Earth; we must atone by reducing our (or others’) standards of living; we must faithfully perform daily rituals, adjusting our thermostats and sorting our trash for recycling. The science writer John Tierney reports that The New York Times received a record number of letters in response to his 1996 article that it was economically and environmentally wasteful. It was like telling traditional Catholics their rosaries were a waste of time. For many Americans of a certain age, any change in the climate they remember from the summer when they were 16 is a change for the worse, just like any change from the playlist of songs they remember from that glorious summer. Satellite radio programmers and canned music providers in shopping malls provide the music from that golden moment, and politicians promising to halt climate change promise to provide the golden weather. But my impression is that those musical offerings are, like the baby boomer generation, getting scarcer, and certainly the demand in the political marketplace for restoration of that golden summer’s weather climate seems to have grown weaker too. This is operating within a larger cultural trend, an increasing skepticism of science and scientists. Earlier this month, as a Wall Street Journal editorial was among the few to emblazon, the journal Nature retracted a study that projected climate change could lead to a 62% economic decline by 2100. Among the factors that skewed the results threefold was the 1995-99 data from Uzbekistan. You can almost hear Litella saying, “Never mind.” Such shoddiness seems amusing, at least until you consider the “replication crisis” in which scientists have been unable to replicate the results of dozens of peer-reviewed and journal-published experiments, some of them famous like the Stanford prison experiment. And then there was the effort, successful during the COVID-19 crisis, by National Institutes of Health official Dr. Anthony Fauci, to suppress the now generally accepted theory that the virus spread because of a leak from the lab in Wuhan, China, whose gain-of-function research, deliberately strengthening viruses, was subsidized despite a ban by former President Barack Obama in 2014. So, the public’s skepticism of science and scientists is not surprising, though it’s surely having some unfortunate effects. People can see that expert recommendations, pushed by teachers unions, to close schools despite children’s negligible COVID-19 risk have resulted in long-lasting learning loss. And they are seeing one prominent preacher after another of environmental doom from climate change suddenly saying, like Litella, “Never mind.” COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post We Have Reached the Emily Litella Moment on Climate Change appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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President Trump addressed the nation this week about his administration’s many accomplishments over its first year — and shockingly, in a move very unlike the president, the speech was only 20 minutes.“Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it. When I took office, inflation was the worst in 48 years, and some would say in the history of our country, which caused prices to be higher than ever before, making life unaffordable for millions and millions of Americans,” Trump began.“Over the past 11 months, we have brought more positive change to Washington than any administration in American history. There has never been anything like it. And I think most would agree,” he continued.Some successes Trump pointed out were that “drugs brought in by ocean and by sea” are down 94% and the “grip of sinister woke radicals in our schools” has been broken.He also touted that he has “settled eight wars in 10 months, destroyed the Iran nuclear threat, and ended the war in Gaza, bringing for the first time in 3,000 years peace to the Middle East, and secured the release of the hostages, both living and dead.”Trump recalled the rising inflation under Biden, which he happily reported has declined since he took office.But one thing the president didn’t say is that we’re going to war with Venezuela — and BlazeTV host Glenn Beck believes he might have tricked the media into covering all his successes.“Everybody was speculating, ‘He’s going to say we’re going to war.’ ... I don’t think we’re going to war with Venezuela. I think he’s making it look like we’re going to war to freak Venezuela out and to get Maduro out, but I don’t think we’re going into war,” Glenn says.“I saw this as the kickoff of the campaign. I saw this as, okay, this is the message for 2026 for the Republicans. And it was so disciplined and so tight,” he continues, pointing out that sometimes the media won’t cover a speech like that.“I wonder if the war thing wasn’t a way to get them to cover this,” he adds.Want more from Glenn Beck?To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Students of a high school in Texas are protesting against the district's actions after a student was killed by another with scissors right outside their science class.Aundre Matthews, 18, was arrested for allegedly stabbing 16-year-old Andrew Meismer to death at Ross S. Sterling High School in Baytown on Wednesday.'We are not safe. We are not safe here.'Prosecutors said the two were excused to go to the bathroom and got into a fight over a vape pen. The stabbing happened during a fight between the two at about 10:40 a.m. The victim was airlifted to Texas Medical Center in Houston but was later pronounced dead.The school said that it went into lockdown briefly after the incident."I need to see that surveillance video. I need to see what happened in terms of all the claims that were read in that probable cause affidavit," said Matthews' attorney, Gianpaolo Macerola. The horrendous incident shocked the community and spurred many students to protest against the district for not taking action to protect Meismer. They alleged that signs of the threat from the suspect were ignored."This could have been prevented," said Maria Blanco, a 10th grade student, to the Baytown Sun. "Now somebody's life is lost, and when they had the time to do something about it, they did not do anything.""We are not safe. We are not safe here," said sophomore Lilly Williams, who described the victim as "very kind."RELATED: Police release photos of student who allegedly plotted mass shooting at Christian high school One of the protest signs read, "How many warnings are enough?" and another read, "Our voices matter."Matthews was given a $3.3 million bond in court on Friday.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

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