Doctor Dave Weldon was Donald Trump’s pick to be CDC director — but he was pulled from the nomination for previous comments he made regarding vaccines.

Weldon was a former congressman who introduced the Vaccine Safety and Public Confidence Assurance Act in 2007, where he stated several issues relating to vaccine safety.

“Several issues relating to vaccine safety have persisted for years. The response from public health agencies has been largely defensive from the outset, and studies have been plagued by conflicts of interest. Legitimate questions persist regarding the possible association between the mercury-based preservative, thimerosal, and the childhood epidemic of neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs), including autism,” Weldon wrote in the introduction of his act.

“I find this very hard to believe,” Sara Gonzales of “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered” comments, noting that the same year, Weldon cosponsored legislation with a Democrat to ban Mercury from vaccines, specifically thimerosal.

Thimerosal is 50% mercury and still remains in some childhood vaccines — particularly the flu shot.

“You look at this, and you look at what he was concluding, which is, ‘Hey, we should be careful with our children,’” Gonzales says, recalling the protocol American families used to follow when a thermometer breaks.

“I remember when I was little, and we had a thermometer that fell on the floor and broke. It was glass, it broke, and everyone in the house was like, ‘Don’t touch it, don’t leave the room, don’t go in here, we’ve got to get gloves, we’ve got to handle it very carefully,’” she says.

“We had that protocol when it was on the ground, and you might touch it, but injecting it into a newborn somehow, totally OK,” she continues.

And the epidemic of autism has only gotten worse since Weldon initially sounded the alarm.

In 2000, one in 150 children was diagnosed with autism. By 2020, the number was one in 36.

“I would say that that’s enough to question. Same thing that Dave Weldon is saying. ‘Hey, maybe we should look at this guys, maybe it’s a bad idea to put something like mercury in vaccines that you’re injecting into young humans,’” Gonzales says.

“Now all of a sudden, we have to figure out who takes Dave Weldon’s spot now,” she continues, adding, “We are in the driver seat now, we are perfectly positioned to finally, I don’t even want to say, solve the health crisis because it’s going to take more than four years to do that, but to at least put us in a good spot to do that.”

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

To enjoy more of Sara’s no-holds-barred take to news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

The National Republican Congressional Committee announced which House Democrats it is targeting next election cycle to expand the GOP majority.

The NRCC has set its sights on 26 “prime pickup opportunities” in light of the GOP’s sweeping victory in November 2024. After taking back the White House, the Senate, and keeping the House, Republicans are eager to expand their power on Capitol Hill.

‘Vulnerable House Democrats have been hard at work demonstrating they are painfully out of touch with hardworking Americans.’

House Democrats will be hit hard in swing states and even in deep-blue states. The NRCC is targeting five Democrats from California, including Reps. Josh Harder, Adam Gray, George Whitesides, Derek Tran, and Dave Min. Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez from the neighboring blue state of Washington is also on the NRCC’s list.

The NRCC is also targeting New York Reps. Tom Suozzi, Laura Gillen, and Josh Riley. Democratic Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, who was the sole Democrat in the House to vote in favor of the GOP-led funding bill on Tuesday, was named as a target.

The NRCC is also keeping an eye on the Midwest, with Democratic Reps. Kristen McDonald Rivet of Michigan, Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, Emilia Sykes of Ohio, and Frank Mrvan of Indiana on its list.

The swing-state Democrats from Nevada are on the NRCC’s radar, including Reps. Dina Titus, Susie Lee, and Steven Horsford. Democratic Rep. Don Davis from fellow swing state North Carolina is also one of the NRCC’s target seats.

After making significant gains with Hispanics, the NRCC is also targeting Democrats with significant Latino populations like Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, Rep. Nellie Pou of New Jersey, and Rep. Gabe Vasquez of New Mexico.

Although the South is usually a safe bet for Republicans, the NRCC is vying for a few pickup opportunities below the Mason-Dixon line, including Democratic Reps. Eugene Vindman of Virginia, Darren Soto of Florida, and Jared Moskowitz of Florida.

“House Republicans are in the majority and on offense,” NRCC Chairman Richard Hudson said. “Meanwhile, vulnerable House Democrats have been hard at work demonstrating they are painfully out of touch with hardworking Americans. Republicans are taking the fight straight to these House Democrats in their districts, and we will unseat them next fall.”

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

A trans-identifying city council official who prefers they/them pronouns was arrested during a protest at Trump Tower last week, and some of his leftist colleagues on the council are coming to his defense.

On Thursday, June Rose, chief of staff of the Providence City Council, joined a raucous group that stormed into Trump Tower in New York City to protest the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, an apparent terrorist sympathizer accused of orchestrating violent, destructive demonstrations at Columbia University last year.

Wearing shirts emblazoned with anti-Israel slogans, a mob of about 150 members of Jewish Voice for Peace burst into a dining area of the Trump building and refused to leave. Nearly 100 of them, apparently including Rose, were arrested as a result.

“Those arrests are for trespassing, obstructing government administration, and resisting arrest by virtue of us having to carry some of the people out of the escalator,” said NYPD Chief of Department John Chell.

“We gave warnings on our pager system, and once we did that warning three times, the NYPD with its professionalism, as you saw, went in and made the arrests. There were no injuries. There were no incidents. There was no damaged property.”

‘We’re making decisions on revenue, where are they? They’re in jail.’

Rose, who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family and community and who still considers himself culturally Jewish, was arrested during the incident. He was released the same day and was back in Providence by Friday, Council President Rachel Miller claimed.

According to her bio, Miller has a long history of “economic, racial, and social justice” activism. In her statement about the arrest, Miller implied that Rose had done nothing wrong.

“This is a perilous moment for our democracy, and taking action is not something to be scorned. June was using vacation time today and chose to use their time to defend constitutional freedoms,” she stated, according to GoLocalProv.

City Councilor Miguel Sanchez, whose X posts reveal a deep animus toward President Donald Trump’s agenda and who was even fired from far-left Democrat Gov. Dan McKee’s Office of Constituent Services for his anti-Israel activism, likewise stands by Rose.

“I’m so proud that we have staff members who not only do so much for our city but also use their voice to fight for a better world,” Sanchez wrote. “As the majority whip of the @pvdcitycouncil, June has my full support.”

Other council members took a different view. Councilman James Taylor even called on Rose, the highest-paid council staffer, to resign for leaving the city “on the busiest council day of the year.”

According to Taylor, last Thursday was “was a big day for the City Council” since the Finance Committee was set to consider a tax-hike proposal from Mayor Brett Smiley.

“All eyes were on the council with the administration, the budget — the most important day, when they’re chief of staff, supposed to be running the council, making sure they get everything they need — the biggest day, we’re making decisions on revenue, where are they? They’re in jail,” Taylor said.

City Council spokesperson Roxie Richner confirmed that Rose makes more than $136,000 per year.

Rose came out as bisexual more than a decade ago and as transgender last year. “I always say that my bullies knew I was queer long before I did,” he previously stated.

This arrest is the second for Rose in less than a year. He was arrested in Washington, D.C., last June in connection with a protest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s appearance before Congress.

Rose also served as Rhode Island delegate to the Democratic National Convention last summer, and he tried to use his vote as leverage for the Palestinian cause.

“My job has always been about outcomes, about winning,” he said in the weeks leading up to the convention in Chicago. “Here, winning means fewer Palestinian children are killed. There would be no greater victory than helping save the lives of Palestinian children living under occupation.”

H/T: Libs of TikTok

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

President Donald Trump
declared early Monday morning that Joe Biden’s pardons are “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT,” suggesting that the former president did not sign them or “know anything about them.”

While the potential voidance of Biden’s pardons could spell trouble for Anthony Fauci, retired Gen. Mark Milley, members of the Biden clan, and others with troubled pasts, Trump indicated that former members of the House Jan. 6 select committee — including Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) — are his favorites to reap the whirlwind.

“Those on the Unselect Committee, who destroyed and deleted ALL evidence obtained during their two year Witch Hunt of me, and many other innocent people, should fully understand that they are subject to investigation at the highest level,” Trump noted on Truth Social.

Earlier this month, the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project
revealed that Biden’s signature on numerous executive orders, pardons, and other documents of national consequence was apparently machine-generated. The watchdog group indicated that with the exception of Biden’s announcement concerning his decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race, “every document” researchers could find “used the same autopen signature.”

‘If in fact this has been occurring, then all those orders are void.’

“The prolific use of autopen by the Biden White House was an instrument to hide the truth from the American people as to who was running the government,” Oversight Project Executive Director Mike Howell
told Blaze News at the time.

Biden’s cognitive decline alone may have been enough to doubt the legal legitimacy of many of the official documents issued in his name and bearing his signature. Suspicions were, however, compounded by reports of
staffers and family members making decisions on his behalf; Biden’s alleged admission to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) that he did not remember signing a consequential January 2024 order to pause decisions on exports of liquefied natural gas; and evidence that Biden’s signature appeared on documents while he was absent — and in one instance, while on vacation.

In a recent letter
demanding that the Department of Justice investigate whether “President Biden’s cognitive decline allowed unelected staff to push through radical policy without his knowing approval,” Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey noted, “It is black-letter law that a document is void, ab initio, when the person signing it lacks mental capacity.”

Bailey added, “Staffers and the Vice President cannot constitutionally evade accountability by laundering far-left orders through a man who does not know what he is signing. If in fact this has been occurring, then all those orders are void.”

‘He had no idea what the hell he was doing.’

After further analysis, the Oversight Project confirmed that “the same exact Biden autopen signature” was used on the pardons for Fauci, Milley, and members of the Jan. 6 committee, as well as on the pardons for several members of Biden’s family
who were apparently involved in dodgy foreign deals with the former president and his felonious son Hunter Biden, and for Gerald Lundergan, the former head of the Kentucky state Democratic Party, who served as state chair for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential campaign and was convicted in 2019 of making illegal campaign contributions.

— (@)

In the wake of the Oversight Project’s damning reports, a former Biden aide
told the New York Post that a key staffer, who was not named, was suspected of unilaterally making decisions to sign documents as the former president’s mental faculties declined. According to the aide, others in the Biden administration questioned the staffer’s routine use of the autopen but refrained from speaking up.

“I feared no one as much as I feared that [staffer]. To me, [the staffer] basically was the president,” said the aide. “No one ever questioned [the staffer]. Period.”

Trump raised the issue of the autopen in his
Friday address to the Department of Justice, calling it a “big deal.”

“You don’t use the autopen,” said the president. “Number one, it’s disrespectful to the office. Number two, maybe it’s not even valid because who’s getting [Biden] to sign? He had no idea what the hell he was doing.”

Trump evidently became convinced of the illegitimacy of Biden’s autopen-signed orders and pardons over the weekend, declaring early Monday morning, “The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen. In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!”

“The necessary Pardoning Documents were not explained to, or approved by, Biden. He knew nothing about them, and the people that did may have committed a crime,” continued Trump.

Trump suggested further that in the case of the Jan. 6 committee members, the pardonees were “likely responsible for the Documents that were signed on their behalf without the knowledge or consent of the Worst President in the History of our Country, Crooked Joe Biden!”

The president subsequently
shared an image of three presidential portraits. The first and third framed images were of Trump, with the plaques below indicating his duration in office. The second image was of an autopen machine writing Biden’s signature with the dates 2021-2025 marked below.

— (@)

Despite his declaration of voidance, Trump reportedly told reporters Sunday evening, “It’s not my decision; that’ll be up to a court.”

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

When Kylie Jane Kremer heard the name Aaron Black for the first time, she was told “he was Nancy Pelosi’s fixer.”

In her first media interview since Jan. 6, 2021, the executive director of Women for America First said she wasn’t familiar with Black’s name before President Donald J. Trump’s rally at the Ellipse — an event her group organized and ran.

– First in a series on the infiltration of Jan. 6 –

That all changed in the days after the violence at the U.S. Capitol. Kremer gathered with some of her event staff in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, having left Washington, D.C., due to the post-Jan. 6 political climate.

‘I felt very unnerved by it.’

Kremer quizzed one of her organizers, Jennifer Lawrence, about a secretive Dec. 29 phone call made by Lawrence’s fiancé, Dustin Stockton. Kremer said she had wondered why Stockton, one of her key event organizers, insisted on getting off the “March for Trump” tour bus to make a private call.

“At one point we had to pull over the vehicles so that Dustin could make a private phone call that he did not want anyone else in the vehicle [to hear],” Kremer said. “And it was very odd. He was acting very weird; he was very secretive about it, would not tell us who the phone call was.”

The bus and support vehicles pulled over in a remote area of Arizona so that Stockton could make his phone call. Kremer asked Lawrence who was on the other end of the line. “Aaron Black,” was the reply.

Kremer said Lawrence told her that Black “was Nancy Pelosi’s fixer, and they had known him for a very long time, going back to Tea Party days back on the West Coast.”

Kremer said she found that revelation disturbing.

Anti-Trump protesters unfurl a banner at the planned Trump campaign rally in Chicago on March 11, 2016. Democrat operative Aaron Black sent agitators to the event and the subsequent violence led to event cancellation. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

“I felt very unnerved by it, because I can’t think of a world that I would have anything to do with anybody in Nancy Pelosi’s office or orbit.”

The possible infiltration of Women for America First is but one example of the left’s involvement in the events that unfolded at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. President Trump and hundreds of thousands of supporters were accused of carrying out an insurrection that day. A deep examination of the actions of the left — directly and by extension — is needed to yield a fuller understanding of Jan. 6, its players, and the violence that was used to justify a government war on conservatives. Central to the infiltration of the Jan. 6 rally is a longtime close associate of former House Speaker Pelosi (D-Calif.): Aaron Black.

Stockton, who has organized conservative events around the country for 15 years, freely admits to his long-standing relationship with the veteran Democrat political operative and campaign strategist.

Stockton adamantly disagrees with Kremer’s story about the clandestine desert phone call to Black, saying, “It was no secret that I knew Aaron Black and that we had an open line of communication going back more than a decade,” Stockton told Blaze Media. “The Kremers were well aware of my relationship with Aaron Black long before January 6.”

Stockton knew Black from Black’s days with the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and Stockton’s time at Breitbart News covering the 2016 presidential campaign. During one March 2016 event, Black arranged to put violent agitators at the Trump rally in Chicago that led to its cancellation, he later admitted in an undercover Project Veritas video.

‘I don’t know the extent of his involvement in the setup of American patriots on January 6, but took it as an unforgivable betrayal.’

Stockton said he asked Black if he was at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and Black replied that he was “out of town.”

“Aaron had told me that he wasn’t in town for January 6,” Stockton said. “After seeing a picture of him and confronting him about it, he admitted he was on the Capitol steps to me and others,” Stockton said.

“I don’t know the extent of his involvement in the setup of American patriots on January 6,” Stockton said, “but took it as an unforgivable betrayal.”

In
sworn testimony before the now-defunct Jan. 6 Select Committee, Stockton expressed his belief that outside individuals or groups came to the Ellipse and the Capitol that day intent on trouble.

“I honestly don’t know if they’re foreign actors or — but it’s clear to me that there was a well-funded, well-paid group of probably 50-ish who were intent specifically on causing violence and chaos that day,” Stockton said, according to the official transcript of his interview.

Democrat operative and Nancy Pelosi adviser Aaron Black admitted to Dustin Stockton that he was on the Capitol steps on Jan. 6, 2021. Photo by Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

Stockton said he believed a “paramilitary group that was well trained at moving a crowd” helped direct people from the Ellipse to the Capitol, where police lines were breached before 1 p.m. and violence later broke out on the West Plaza.

“But I believe they ran the worst and most aggressive elements within, like, the people who had came, and I think they ran them directly into a trap to cause these fights with the Capitol Police and sow this chaos,” Stockton testified.

The goals, he said, were to “create doubt in our American system [and] tarnish all the rest of us.”

Once the “toxic elements” in the massive crowds were steered to the Capitol, “professionals were prepared to, like, lead them into all the violence that occurred.”

Rapid-response man

Who exactly is Aaron Black, and did he play a role in what took place at the Capitol on Jan. 6?

Black describes himself on social media as a senior political adviser to @TeamPelosi, the former speaker’s personal account on X. That information was recently deleted from Black’s X account, but archived images of it are still available on the Wayback Machine.

Screenshot of Wayback Machine

As of March 12, the title is still visible on his account on BlueSky, the microblogging site that is a popular haven for Democrats who fled the Elon Musk-owned X.

“Senior Political Advisor #TeamPelosi,” Black’s BlueSky biography states. “Past: Biden, Harris, Clinton …”

Black’s profile photo shows him with his arm around the former speaker at an outdoor stadium. In the photo, Pelosi is wearing a Washington Nationals baseball jersey under her blazer.

‘Nobody is really supposed to know about me.’

Black appears to have at least one important thing in common with Pelosi: narrative. Pelosi famously said the Jan. 6 Select Committee she appointed in 2022 was designed to preserve “the narrative” of Jan. 6.

In an interview with a group of high-school students in 2018, Black emphasized “narrative” as a key to success generally in campaigns and other political work.

“You can’t win elections and you can’t win issue campaigns unless you are controlling the narrative on the ground, on social media, on mainstream media,” Black said. “It should be authentic.”

Black has said he would prefer that people not know who he is or what he does for a living.

“Nobody is really supposed to know about me,” Black told an undercover journalist for Project Veritas in 2016.

Black has not sought public credit for his more than 15 years as a rapid-response director, event disruptor, agent provocateur, political “fixer,” protest leader, and professional rabble-rouser.

Success in this kind of work means not leaving behind a trail that can lead back to you or your operation, Black suggested in a series of undercover Project Veritas videos.

One of the
core organizers of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, Black went on to become a key political operative for progressive consultant Democracy Partners and, by extension, the Democratic National Committee and the party’s 2016 presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton.

Democrat rapid-response man Aaron Black took credit for getting President Donald J. Trump’s Chicago rally canceled after agitators sparked violence on March 11, 2016. Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

He admitted engineering violence at a planned Trump rally at the University of Illinois at Chicago Pavilion on March 11, 2016. The unrest led to cancellation of the event.

Black bragged about the chaos to Project Veritas.

“So the Chicago protest, when they shut all that, that was us,” Black said on an undercover video. “… None of this is supposed to come back to us, because we want it coming from people. We don’t want it to come from the party.”

Republican primary opponents and Democrats alike blamed Trump and his blunt rhetoric for the Chicago violence.

“Trump’s slogan is ‘Make America Great Again,’ but his campaign for president continues to call out dark forces that divide a polarized America,”
Washington Post pundit Dan Balz opined two days after cancellation of the Chicago rally.

Those dark forces, as it turned out, were at least in part made up of Democratic agitators organized and directed by Black.

Balz’s description could just as easily apply to Black, whom one business associate described as a “master of the political dark arts.”

Black and Pelosi did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze Media.

Bird-dogging GOP candidates

In one 2016 Project Veritas video, Black said female campaign operatives would be assigned to arrive at a Trump rally seven hours early in order to gain prime positions behind the rostrum.

Using a tactic Black described as “bird-dogging,” the operatives would smuggle in provocative signs in hopes of eliciting a reaction from pro-Trump men that would be captured on video and broadcast around the world.

“The latest hidden-camera video posted by Project Veritas shows Aaron Black, an associate at the Democratic consulting firm Democracy Partners, brainstorming about how to make sure pro-Trump men bully hired female agitators,” the
Washington Times reported.

“So we get people behind Trump when he’s at a rally, but we make sure it’s women and they are positioned next to men,” Black said on a Veritas video. “We want images of the men bullying the women who are trying to hold their signs up. That’s what I’m going to do. That is what we’re going to do. That is the hit.”

Black referred to himself in the videos as “deputy rapid-response director for the DNC for all things Trump on the ground.”

After the Veritas broadcasts, Democracy Partners founder Robert Creamer quickly tried to distance his firm from Black, whom he discounted as a “temporary regional subcontractor” who is “no longer working with us.”

Everything Black said on the videos, Creamer contended, was hypothetical and never actually took place.

If Democracy Partners separated from Black after the expose, it was not reflected on the group’s website.

The Democracy Partners staff page continued to show Black as an “associate” until January 2018, when he was elevated to a partner, according to versions of the organization’s website saved by the Wayback Machine. He remained listed as a partner until late summer 2021, according to Wayback Machine screenshots.

President Donald J. Trump speaks to a massive crowd at the Ellipse near the White House on Jan. 6, 2021. The event was organized and run by Women for America First, an organization headed by Kylie and Amy Kremer. Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

Creamer and Democracy Partners sued Project Veritas in 2017, alleging that the videos were deceptively edited and claiming that a Veritas source working at the consultancy violated her fiduciary duty to the company. A federal jury in Washington, D.C., sided with Democracy Partners in a 2022 trial, awarding the plaintiffs $120,000.

Black, 53, whose real name is Aaron Matthew Minter, is drawing the attention of Kremer and other officials who organized Trump’s huge Jan. 6 rally at the Ellipse, previous pro-Trump rallies in November and December 2020, and a “March for Trump” bus tour just prior to Jan. 6.

Amy Kremer and her daughter Kylie, who founded and operate Women for America First, said they are concerned after discovering that some of their organizers, including Dustin Stockton, have ties to Black.

‘I fell off the skateboard and I spilled my glass of wine.’

Stockton has worked with the Kremers organizing conservative events as far back as the Tea Party days in 2009-10.

Stockton said he did undercover investigations on anarchist groups for Breitbart News.

“When
at Breitbart, I infiltrated Antifa group planning to violently attack the NY GOP Gala in 2016,” he told Blaze Media. “Previously, lesser investigations doing protest coverage at G20 meetings. Studied in depth their tactics and maneuvers.”

Breitbart was accused in a
2016 Politico story of coordinating with Black on coverage of his activities during the Republican primaries and in the lead-up to the violence-marred Chicago Trump rally. The news site denied any coordination and said its role was limited to news gathering.

“At no time did Breitbart News reporters or editors, including myself, tell or suggest to Black what to do — he was going to do what he was going to do — we just covered the news,” said Breitbart Washington political editor Matthew Boyle.

Stockton
wrote a story for Breitbart describing Black’s appearance on the Breitbart News Saturday radio program on April 16, 2016. During the call-in program, Black suggested the possible emergence of a new political party because the established parties were not listening to the people.

On Christmas Eve 2021, Black posted a video on X showing Kylie Kremer attempting to ride a skateboard down a hotel hallway just before Jan. 6. Kremer was wearing a bathrobe and carrying a glass of champagne in one hand. She tripped and spilled some of the champagne, the video showed.

— (@)

“This is @kyliejanekremer co-founder of Women for America First. Here she is drinking champagne on a skateboard at the Trump hotel on Xmas eve 2020,” Black wrote. “She was also drunk on champagne at the Willard hotel watching the January riots that she helped plan. Do you see a pattern here?”

Kremer said the X post “was an attempt to humiliate me.”

The video clip posted by Black didn’t explain that Kremer was helping Lawrence carry Christmas gifts for Stockton’s children to a hotel suite where some of the bus tour crew members were hanging out for Christmas.

Jennifer Lawrence and Dustin Stockton were dubbed the “Bonnie and Clyde of MAGA World” by Politico. Dustin Stockton/Facebook

“The skateboard was one of the gifts that I was riding down the hallway,” Kremer told Blaze Media. “I was in a bathrobe, a hair roller. My hair, my makeup was half done, and I was still getting ready for the evening.

“So I tripped. I mean, you shouldn’t be riding a skateboard on carpet in a hotel,” she said. “So I fell off the skateboard and I spilled my glass of wine on Jen and she caught it on video. It was hilarious. We were all laughing about it. We went into the suite to tell everybody else. It was hysterical, and we continued on with our night.”

Kremer said the only way Black could have gotten the video was from Stockton or Lawrence, who shot the footage with her phone. That realization “was very uncomfortable,” Kremer said.

MORE TO COME: This is the first installment in a Blaze News series on the infiltration of Jan. 6 protests by the left.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Joe Pappalardo writes history the way it should be written — loud, unruly, drenched in blood and whiskey, peppered with characters who refuse to be forgotten.

His latest book, “Four Against the West: The True Saga of a Frontier Family That Reshaped the Nation — and Created a Legend,” continues this legacy. It follows the four Bean brothers — Roy, Sam, James, and Joshua — who each left their mark on the Old West, navigating battlefields, courtrooms, and saloons, somehow able to bounce around the Wild West at its most unruly.

‘More reporting is always the answer. If you’re in a jam, call another expert, pull another record, find another angle.’

Roy Bean, famously dubbed “the Law West of the Pecos,” may be the most recognizable of the bunch, and while the book opens with him, Pappalardo makes it clear that the real story is a family saga, not just a single outlaw-turned-lawman myth, although navigating that mythology is a huge part of the fun.

“I thought, let’s do a quadruple biography, candy-cane their experiences together,” Pappalardo told me. “You’ve got a pretty good book that really covers everything about the Old West — the Santa Fe Trail, California, New Mexico, the Civil War, the Mexican-American War. How could you go wrong?”

Just tell the story

I caught up with Pappalardo in early February, three months into his book promotion tour, fresh from a lecture taping for C-SPAN.

As a nonfiction author, Pappalardo captures the enormity of life with cinematic grit, even in his account of the history of the sunflower. What you get when you read his books is writing that breathes, scenes full of motion, carried by sentences that are fun to read.

It’s full of vivid passages like this one, the kind that lift you into the beauty and commotion:

The steamboat creeps innocently upriver, sternwheel churning a wake that shimmers in the moonlight. The vessel is loaded with passengers from New Orleans, where an insidious disease is emerging among recent immigrants there. And some on board, destined for the docks at Kansas City, are contagious.

It’s readable without losing the mysterious vitality of literature. In an era of gimmickry, Pappalardo achieves a forgotten maxim among writers: “Just tell the damn story.”

Pappalardo eschews the jumbled postmodern approach, where time is scattered into shards of disassembled events, for the river-like flow of a sequence in natural order. Better yet, he scripts the historical account in present tense, so the movement feels constant. This intensifies the animating spirit of the era, growing in the reader with each turn of the page: go west, go west, go west.

Manifest destiny

Details. Richness. Scenery. Color. The blood of existence. You get access to the thoughts and feelings and secrets of the characters. Immediately, you’re pulled into their minds, even their souls.

But while “Four Against the West” reads like fiction, all of it has been meticulously verified, woven so nimbly that even the footnotes feel native.

There’s so much nature, so much wildness, so much rugged earth. All the more beautiful when civilization crashes into it, punctured by slavery or cholera.

Like this passage:

Joshua Bean walks out of the Gil’s house, savoring the sunset view of the harbor, the rolling hills of the Mission Valley, and the mountains stretching off to his right. A dirt road from Old Town follows the north bank of the valley to Mission San Diego. The open land surrounding San Diego is crawling with roaming cattle, and every so often he can spot bacteria in sombreros and loose-fitting white shirts, trailing the herd on horseback or lounging in the shade of trees.

Pappalardo’s craftsmanship is silent. One device he uses, for example, is suppositional narrative — he tells us what the characters “must have” felt.

In order to pull this off, a writer has to have gathered an incredible amount of information, far more than what winds up in print.

Then he sprinkles in philosophical observations and moral principles. He captures the social and political realities that dictated the era. Commerce, education, transportation, health, leisure. Legal theory, military strategy, economic orthodoxy, religious dogma — all captured by the flux of the narrative.

Even food and drink: You taste as you read.

Granular details

There’s quite a skeletal system underneath the swirl of this long-form creative nonfiction. Pappalardo fortifies all this storytelling with data.

His background at Popular Mechanics, the Smithsonian, and the Associated Press trained him to dig deep.

“More reporting is always the answer,” he told me. “If you’re in a jam, call another expert, pull another record, find another angle.”

His approach avoids the sweeping generalizations that plague many histories. Instead, he focuses on the beautiful minutiae of the characters he resurrects.

“You learn history better when you see it through the eyes of the people who were there,” he said. That means looking at what they ate, where they drank, how they survived.

Pappalardo’s obsession with granular details led him to Roy Bean’s time in San Antonio, where the infamous judge presided over spectacle and chaos.

Law and disorder

Bean’s story proved irresistible to the anti-Hollywood postmodernists of the 1970s, filmmakers who fought the industry’s sanitized depictions of history — often at the cost of their own careers.

The real Roy Bean — born Phantley Roy Bean Jr. — was no frontier hero. He was a con artist, a rootless huckster who turned justice into a sideshow. His courtroom was a saloon, his rulings improvised, more entertainment than law.

“Roy didn’t just pass through places — he got run out of them. That tells you something.”

The self-styled “hanging judge” is often portrayed as a rough-edged arbiter of frontier justice. In reality, Pappalardo said, Bean was more of a frontier grifter than a judge. “He brought more crime and disorder to his small town than he ever supplied in law and order.”

Still, Roy Bean is the hook, and his mythology looms large.

“Four Against the West” tears down the myths of Roy Bean to reveal the man beneath: outlaw and lawman, con artist and businessman, drifter and legend.

“Roy Bean is sort of a clown later in life,” Pappalardo tells me. ”He was a pioneer for celebrities who were famous only for being celebrities. So he’s a modern creation in a lot of ways. He’s a modern man in that way, coming out of this frontier. And yet he is the symbol of the frontier for a lot of people.”

Assume it’s a lie

When asked how much of Roy Bean’s legend he had to discard, Pappalardo was blunt: “If I didn’t know for sure, it didn’t go in.”

He said that while most of Bean’s biographers did a solid job of documenting his life, Roy himself was an unreliable narrator. “If Roy tells a story, assume it’s a lie. If his brothers contradict him, assume they’re telling the truth.”

One of the biggest revelations came from old newspapers that painted a different picture of Roy’s infamous rope burns — the supposed result of an attempted lynching.

“We don’t actually know what happened,” Pappalardo said, “but we do know he was shot while raging drunk in a store, and the newspaper basically said, ‘Good riddance.’”

That kind of detail reshapes history, giving it the rough texture of real life instead of the clean arc of a Hollywood Western.

“Four Against the West” does just that, peeling back the myth to reveal the men who lived, fought, and lost on the frontier.

In their brother’s shadow

Because Roy Bean’s brothers each shaped the West in their own ways.

“At least two of them,” Pappalardo said, “are probably more historically significant than Roy.”

Sam became the first sheriff in Doña Ana County, New Mexico.

Joshua was the first mayor of American San Diego and an early militia leader.

James saw both success and failure in Missouri, where he played the role of both lawman and first responder.

Together, their lives paint a messier, more complex portrait of a time when civilization and lawlessness blurred.

That’s the history Pappalardo thrives on — the kind that sprawls beyond legend, tangled in contradictions and larger-than-life figures.

“People think these guys were shaping some grand arc of manifest destiny,” Pappalardo said. “But really, they were just trying to get by.”

A crucial breakthrough

Pappalardo spent time in New Mexico, Texas, and California, sifting through archives, walking old trails, and standing in the ruins of railroad camps.

“Going to places always delivers the best stuff,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re going to find until you crack the pages open.”

One of his biggest discoveries came in Mesilla, New Mexico, where he unearthed a never-published interview with Sam Bean. “It was huge,” he said. “There it was, the story of his falling out with Roy and how they reconciled at the end of their lives. I didn’t have an ending until I found that.”

He also spent time at Roy’s old haunts, including the ruins of his first saloon. “You know you’re in the right spot when the ground is covered in broken beer bottles,” he joked.

The forgotten Bean

Of the four brothers, James Bean is the least known, but his story struck a chord with Pappalardo. “He was Independence, Missouri’s justice of the peace, what a justice of the peace should be — unlike Roy, who was a mockery of the role.”

James had terrible luck, getting caught up in a marriage scandal and finding himself at the center of violent crimes. But he took his responsibilities seriously, acting as first responder to suicides and murders.

James’ final years were spent in a poor farm, where he organized a library to give the other residents something to read.

“Even after everything that happened to him, he still had that Bean spark,” Pappalardo said. “And he made sure his story made it into the newspapers, so someone like me would find it.”

A knack for showing up

What emerges from Pappalardo’s work is not just a history of four men but a panorama of an era that refuses to sit quietly in textbooks, too often lost in the antics of fiction.

It’s raw, violent, full of schemes and ambition, and populated by men who, for better or worse, made their mark. Their stories live on, not in sanitized myth but in the dust and grit where they were truly forged.

The gift of “Four Against the West” is the cohesion it accomplishes in capturing the full story.

Despite their flaws, the Bean brothers had a knack for showing up at pivotal moments in history. Whether leading militias, running saloons, or getting tangled in gunfights, they were always in the thick of it. And while Roy Bean became the pop-culture icon, Pappalardo’s book gives his brothers their due.

“The frontier wasn’t a neat, heroic place,” Pappalardo said. “It was a mess. And these guys thrived in the mess.”

“The greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen.”

That’s what Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin said of today’s announcement that the onerous fuel efficiency standards opponents have called a de facto electric vehicle mandate will be rescinded.

‘The American auto industry has been hamstrung by the crushing regulatory regime of the last administration.’

That includes 31 specific regulatory rollbacks designed to unleash American energy, lower the cost of living, boost the domestic auto industry, and give more power back to the states.

Putting the brakes on inflation

The first step: using the Administrative Procedures Act to re-evaluate policies enacted last year by the Biden administration to reduce emissions for light-, medium-, and heavy-duty vehicles. This would have increased the costs of shipping goods, with estimated regulatory and compliance costs of over $700 billion.

That gets passed on to the consumer.

On day one, President Trump signed a series of executive orders on energy policies that he said would tackle inflation after consumer costs soared by 22% during former President Biden’s term in office.

Protect consumer choice

One of President Trump’s executive orders also included reversing a policy that pushed carmakers to make 50% of their output electric vehicles by 2030, which would increase costs and limit consumer choices.

The ultimate goal was to go 100% EV by 2032 — something our power grid simply cannot support.

In March 2024, the Biden administration finalized a rule to require carmakers to dramatically reduce carbon emissions beginning for model year 2027 light- and medium-size vehicles. This is why car prices have increased to an average of $50,000 for gas cars and $66,000 for electric vehicles.

“The American auto industry has been hamstrung by the crushing regulatory regime of the last administration,” Zeldin told the New York Post.

President Trump campaigned on scrapping Biden’s fuel efficiency rules by arguing that consumers should have the options of buying hybrid, gasoline-powered, or diesel-powered vehicles without government interference or mandate.

Waiver bye-bye?

On February 15, 2025, Lee Zeldin, chair of the EPA, sent the California’s Clean Air Act waiver (which is directly connected to the Advanced Clean Cars II regulation) to Congress for review.

We are waiting for this to go to a vote, and we will report to you on the votes and results.

The CRA states that if this is passed, the EPA and federal government cannot reattempt to approve this rule. The process allows the vote to come to the floor in an expedited fashion, forcing all members to go on the record with their votes.

If Congress votes to undo a rule, the agency cannot propose a similar regulation. It would require an act of congress to override the CRA.

To summarize:

The EPA takes its biggest action ever to help President Trump save Americans trillions of dollars, lower the cost of living, and make it more affordable to buy a car, heat a home, or operate a business. And it will boost job growth!

Welcome to the golden age of America!

More people recognize Patrick Henry’s declaration — “Give me liberty or give me death!” — than recall the details of Revolutionary War battles. Words often drive action. They inspire courage, shape conviction, and influence history.

But words can also be empty. The right has spent a generation embracing rhetoric for its own sake, using talking points to signal virtue at the water cooler or from anonymous X accounts. Instead of taking action, many defer responsibility, expecting Moms for Liberty and Riley Gaines to handle everything. That complacency won’t solve anything.

When the emperor wears no clothes, you never bow to him. You either laugh at him or you overthrow him.

Well, Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas) demonstrated clarity last week when he ignored the delusions of a man in lipstick during a subcommittee meeting and addressed him as “Mr.,” as God intended.

That moment carried psychological weight for the nation, especially for men. Despite the constant connectivity of modern technology, people feel more isolated than ever. Many retreat into a world that demands no conflict, rejection, initiative, or risk, distancing themselves from their moral and civic responsibilities.

We have built a demonic treadmill for ourselves. On social media, people unleash outrage alongside thousands who share their views. But in real life, they hesitate. At work or in public, they watch as the Flat Earth Society takes victory laps. Words alone won’t reclaim the high ground — action will.

As this chaos unfolds, we lose our grip on reality. Because when the world keeps getting crazier and all you see are people bowing down to the weakest and most ridiculous gender-bending tyrants of all time, you start to question whether maybe your original programming is just a fairy tale and you should just get it over with and join the circus.

Or maybe not. Keith Self said enough of that. The “MASH” theme song was wrong — suicide isn’t painless. The decline of Western civilization is real, and ignoring it won’t make it go away. It’s time to expose the lies behind transgender activism and refuse to back down.

Hey, crazy person! You don’t have the support you claim. And I don’t think the media can bail you out much longer. Your pronouns and emotional manipulation don’t demand our time. Parents will no longer tolerate your control over their children’s sports teams or bathrooms. Science does not justify mutilating healthy bodies to accommodate feelings.

But maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe the trans mob still has the goods. Maybe they’re somehow sitting on pocket aces. They might have the nuts and I might be called a mean word or maybe even lose my job. But this time, I’m going to make them show me or see me in court instead of giving up before the fight even starts.

Since Mr. Tim McBride from the state of Delaware is utter ridiculousness, we will simply treat him as such and not entertain one more minute of his foolishness. We will dismiss it. We will mock it. But we will never honor it in any way, shape, or form.

Want to know why Christ spent his time at the temple debating his fellow Jews instead of going to the temple of Saturn to debate the pagans? Total foolishness! No point to that! And why was He silent when he went before King Herod? More foolishness.

Just gavel out like Keith Self. We were done when we started. We’re moving on to the sane people now. Because when the emperor wears no clothes, you never bow to him.

You either laugh at him or you overthrow him.

Do not be fooled: The left’s favorite talking point about the Ukraine-Russia war is not designed to promote truth, justice, or morality. It’s meant to silence you into submission.

For years, the left has accused President Trump of being an agent of Moscow, the puppet of Vladimir Putin. It’s not true, of course, but Democrats never let the truth stand in the way of a good narrative. After Trump’s Oval Office blow-up with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last month, Trump’s critics once again regurgitated this trite — and still false — accusation.

Assessing the morality of the war requires us to face reality.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) claimed that the White House under Trump is “an arm of the Kremlin.” Axios accused Trump of enacting a “string of Putin-friendly moves,” while Vox claimed that “Trump’s embrace of Putin is different this time.” Democrat James Carville even suggested that Trump pushed for a ceasefire to help Putin “regroup.”

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

This accusation, however, isn’t only directed at Trump; it’s meant for any American who sees the Ukraine quagmire through the lens of reality.

If you don’t enthusiastically support Ukraine, or you oppose continued American funding of the war, or question the dominant narrative about Ukraine, Russia, and Zelenskyy, you are labeled a “pro-Putin” apologist.

It’s a leftist tactic — now used by bad-faith critics across the political spectrum — meant to bully you into silence for questioning the approved narrative.

Morality, weaponized

The cohort that demands total support for Ukraine wants you to believe the war is an existential battle between good and evil and for the preservation of freedom (i.e. “democracy”).

Ironically, much of this cohort traditionally opposed American intervention in foreign wars. What changed?

Framing the Ukraine war as an existential battle that demands American support — if you are on the side of “good” and “democracy,” anyway — is not proof of sudden trust in the U.S. war machine. Rather, it’s a change in how moral authority is wielded. By their logic, anyone who does not give their complete support to Ukraine is an enemy of (their) progress.

Clearly, this “moral authority” is not fixed in objective reality. Instead, it’s conveniently selective, and it perfectly aligns with the left’s political objectives.

Moreover, framing support for Ukraine as a moral and existential issue — and declaring objectors to be pro-Kremlin authoritarian stooges — is an intellectually dishonest false binary.

It moves the goalposts and neglects the real and legitimate concerns about the war, including:

• The risk of escalating a proxy war with a nuclear-armed power.
• The financial cost to American taxpayers.
• The strategic benefit of prolonging a war that, currently, has no end in sight.
• The corruption and other anti-democratic allegations against Ukraine.
• The fact that American support for Ukraine, to this point, has not yielded a positive outcome.
• The human cost of prolonging the war.

The true moral cost of the war is counted in human lives. While the exact number of casualties remains a secret, the human toll of the war is likely calculated in hundreds of thousands of dead and injured soldiers. And if you consider refugees and other innocent displaced people, that figure rises into the millions.

If the pro-Ukrainian cohort were truly concerned about morality, they would demand an immediate end to the war and seek the most realistic path to stop the fighting — not cheer for it to continue under the guise of “justice” and “democracy.”

Reality is complicated

Don’t get me wrong: Russia is responsible for the war because it launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

But geopolitics do not happen in a vacuum.

Why this war happened at all is a complicated matter beyond my expertise, but the truth about the war and how to move forward is not found in the black-and-white narrative the media, Democrats, and the pro-Ukraine cohort have pushed for three years. To understand the war on its own terms requires acknowledgment that history in that part of the world is complicated and that neither the United States nor NATO are innocent.

The only way to bring the war to an end is to grapple with this complicated reality. Unfortunately, not everyone is willing to face the facts as they exist.

Russell Moore, editor of Christianity Today, frames support for Ukraine in highly biblical and moral terms, suggesting that not supporting Ukraine’s continued resistance (i.e., prolonging the war) is akin to being the wicked King Ahab or Cain, the Bible’s first murderer.

“Who would you rather be, Naboth or Ahab? Abel or Cain?” Moore recently wrote. “The answer to these questions might not solve the war in Europe, but it will reveal something about you.”

Moore even argued that one of the “most dangerous” arguments about the war is “the suggestion that Ukraine is fated to lose.”

This argument is a textbook example of emotional blackmail, one that refuses to grapple with truth.

But it’s clear today, as it has been for several years now, that prolonged fighting is not going end the war. Assessing the morality of the war, therefore, requires us to face reality.

R.R. Reno, writing about the war as it stands today, said it best:

I return to the moral principles of just war. Among them is the following: It is immoral to unleash the violence of war when objectives cannot be achieved, however just those objectives may be. The Ukrainian army is unable to bring an end to hostilities by achieving victory. The nations of the West are unwilling to enter the fray with sufficient force and commitment. These seem to be indisputable facts. Moral reasoning must reckon with realities. Trump’s thinking is far removed from reflection on just war theory. But he is acknowledging reality and taking the steps necessary to put an end to a war that cannot be won.

Americans — and Christians, especially — should heed Reno’s sobering analysis. Otherwise, America will continue to support a war that, at present, has no clear end in sight.

We must continue to question with boldness, not giving blind allegiance to the dominant narrative about the war. And we must refuse to be bullied into silence when we question that narrative.

Democrats, the media, and the pro-Ukrainian cohort can weaponize morality all they want — but they don’t own it. Shaming Americans and Christians for asking questions or not accepting their narrative doesn’t make them right. The truth is that wanting the war to end doesn’t make you “pro-Putin.” Such a desire only means you are facing reality as it exists on the ground.

This war must end. The killing must stop. And no amount of emotional blackmail and name-calling will change that.

Down the road from where I live, a Catholic church is in the process of being built. I’ve lost track of the times I’ve nearly driven off the road staring at it. The in-progress structure sits in a large clearing allowing unhindered sunlight to turn its vanilla walls to a rich honey gold. The spires seem to pierce the blue canvas above, as arched doorways beckon in ways its rectangular counterparts can’t seem to mirror.

I hear that phase two of the building process will see the importation of ancient stained glass windows and a bell for the tower that currently sits vacant.

I’m excited.

I’m maybe more excited than the church’s eventual congregants. You see, I am not Catholic. When those arched wooden doors finally swing open, I will not be one of the people who passes through them.

That’s no indictment on Catholics. It’s just … well, I am what you call a low-church Protestant (born and raised Southern Baptist, if you care to know). And I’ve continued down this path my entire life without so much as a sideways glance in another direction.

My investment in this half-baked Catholic church, therefore, is a bit of a conundrum. Why am I so enamored with it? Obviously, I’ve seen pretty buildings before, but this feels different. Why?

I’ve been chewing on that question for some months now as the building nears completion.

After a good bit of earnest mulling, here’s my official hypothesis: My infatuation with this local Catholic church stems from having never meditated on the marriage of a place of God and a place of man-made beauty. Sure, I’ve seen Catholic churches before, but it’s always been in thoughtless passing. This will be the first one in my community, and it’s the first one I have ever given genuine thought to. I drive past it twice a day, so how could I not?

By comparison, the churches I have attended over the years have been rich in internal beauty — the kind that’s harbored in the hearts of its faithful congregants and its steadfast leadership. I do not take that for granted. The pre-eminence of internal beauty is a hill I will die on. After all, the Messiah is described as having “nothing attractive about him, nothing that would draw us to him” (Isaiah 53:2). If his perfection did not require external appeal, certainly aesthetics in the church are not absolutely necessary.

Beauty is water for the parched, a fire for the cold, a sanctuary for the lost.

Even still, I can’t help but ask: Should it bother me that my brain has God and aesthetics on opposite sides of a Venn diagram, only intersecting when I stumble across the rare Christian artist on Instagram, for example?

Confession: That was a rhetorical question. It does bother me.

After all, God is the author of beauty, the great fountainhead of all we might call lovely. Even the greatest works of man are inferior imitations of his genius. If the artist manages to create something of true beauty, it is because he collaborated with the divine, whether he knows it or not.

If aesthetics belong to God, shouldn’t they have a place in all churches? Do they have something of value to offer?

Half a millennium ago, certain Reformers, specifically the ones who would forge the path for the low church’s “plain-Jane-ness,” said “no” to those questions, wrenched God and aesthetics apart, and charted a new trajectory that would eventually lead to the kind of church I’ve spent my entire life in: gospel-centered but bare-bones.

I wonder if maybe these Reformers (dare I say it?) threw the baby out with the bathwater.

To even attempt to answer this question, we have to first understand how we got here.

The genesis

The severance of God and aesthetics first began in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his “95 Theses” to the wall of a German church, igniting the Reformation and laying the foundation for the modern world.

Interestingly, though, Luther’s theses didn’t directly broach aesthetics. The artistry and craftsmanship associated with the Catholic Church was not an explicit issue for him.

Luther’s sole preoccupation was with the Catholic Church’s moral rot: the sale of indulgences, which turned forgiveness and salvation into cash grabs for the Church; the papacy’s heretical claims to be the gatekeepers of heaven; the intentional resewing of the veil that Christ’s sacrifice tore in the form of keeping scripture out of the hands of the laity; and most notably, the exploitation of the poor to fund artistic opulence.

On the latter, Luther was neither an advocate nor an opponent of the Renaissant art and architecture of which the Catholic Church was both a patron and a vocal enthusiast. The issue for Luther lay not in the art or architecture itself, but in the fact that the poor were being exploited to fund such lavish projects as the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica. He hated that people were starving (both literally and spiritually) while the papacy fattened itself in gilded churches.

It’s a valid complaint.

But Luther never denounced aesthetics outright. In fact, a peek into some of his other works suggests that he was actually an advocate. Perhaps his take on aesthetics is best captured in his treatise “Against the Heavenly Prophets,” in which he confessed, “I am not of the opinion that the gospel should destroy all the arts, as some superstitious folk believe. I would gladly see all the arts, especially music, in the service of Him who gave and created them.”

So if Luther was for “all the arts,” what spurred the divorce?

That is a complicated answer that remains in the fallout of the Reformation. Luther may have heated the metal, but it was a subset of more radical Reformers that forged the blade that would sever God and aesthetics — ultimately paving the way for what I am suggesting is excessive simplicity in the modern low church.

Cutting ties

Admittedly, this is a subject for books, not articles, and so I will attempt to give you the CliffNotes version.

When the Reformation began, Europe was in the height of the Renaissance, a period of art characterized by a return to the values and ideals of classical antiquity — the Greco-Roman era heralded as one of the greatest historical periods of artistic achievement. The Catholic Church, in many ways, was the queen in the chess game of the Renaissance. Not only did it steer art in a religious direction, but its deep pockets commissioned some of the movement’s prodigies, including the beloved trio: Michelangelo, Raphael, and da Vinci.

The result? Gorgeous artwork but malnourished denizens. Enter Luther.

However, as the Reformation caught fire and spread across Europe, other Reformers took Luther’s condemnation of the Catholic Church’s extravagance to draconian levels. Switzerland’s Ulrich Zwingli and France’s John Calvin, two of the most influential Reformers, brought iconoclasm, the rejection and destruction of religious images, to the movement. For both of these zealots, religious art, including architecture, was both distraction and idolatry. It was simply incompatible with the teaching of God’s word. Thus, statues were smashed, murals effaced, and churches stripped bare.

These Reformers created the roots of the modern low church, which, at best, views aesthetics with skepticism and, at worst, outright rejects them, typically with the exception of music.

It’s also worth noting that 30 years into the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution entered the picture with its obsession with reason, quantitative thought, and order. Without really meaning to, the movement widened the already growing gap between the divine and aesthetics. Where radical Reformers wrote off the arts as a distraction from doctrine, scientific thinkers, with their “nature as machine, not miracle” worldview, pushed the arts away from mysticism and toward something more human-centric.

Then, along came the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, Modernism, and Postmodernism — all of which pushed aesthetics further down paths of secularism and mechanization — and eventually culminated in the digital age, where we find ourselves now. It’s an age where, to quote my dear friend and fellow writer Ren Miller, most of our architecture has “separated function from delight” and serves to “gridlock us into brutal ugliness,” while modern art, which society tends to elevate, “is characteristically flat … excessively detached and often grotesque” (Duchamp’s urinal, anyone?).

Or in the words of my favorite critic of modernity, Paul Kingsnorth, “Exchange beauty for utility, roots for wings, the whole for the parts, lostness and wandering and stumbling for the straight march towards the goal … now look at us.”

So we find ourselves in a world that is more machine than human, a world that is, by and large, ugly and getting uglier because what we are creating is a reflection of what our culture values, and what our culture values is an enemy of beauty.

Human beings are always in pursuit of beauty. They can’t help it. They are made in the image of him who is beauty.

Hear me out: One of the things that characterizes the West is mass consumerism. We like our stuff, and we want it fast and cheap. That mentality is an enemy of beauty. We live our lives at breakneck speed, working and grinding like cogs in a machine. That kind of living is an enemy of beauty. We’re obsessed with technological innovation — more screens, more access, and more speed. Such mania is an enemy of beauty.

We’re increasingly secular, wringing the divine out of society like it’s dirty water in need of purging. It’s heartbreaking — and an enemy of beauty.

This is the world the modern church finds herself in.

Suddenly, my adoration of the pretty little Catholic church down the street makes sense. It’s a little sunspot among the drab office buildings, the shopping centers in their various shades of brown and gray, the competing gas stations, the construction zones where trees are being ripped up to make room for more retailers or another development of identical mansions.

Where the town seems to say, “What’s next on the agenda?” the little golden church asks, “Are you tired? Need a rest?”

And it asks these things before it even opens, before internal beauty has a chance to take up residence.

But that’s what aesthetic appeal does. Beauty is water for the parched, a fire for the cold, a sanctuary for the lost. Why does it have this kind of effect on us? Because it speaks of him who is living water, everlasting warmth, home eternal.

I believe that outward beauty has a place in the church, not just because its origins are divine, but because it would make us different from the world that has grown so ghastly in its march toward “progress.”

Christians are called to be different from the world, are we not? I know that command is about our conduct, but might it also apply to the way the church looks? If our “city set on a hill” (Matthew 5:14) was half as beautiful on the outside as it should be on the inside, might we extend our reach? Might we appear as a refuge from the grim machinery of the world only to turn around and offer Jesus, the greatest refuge of all?

I think that we just might. Human beings are always in pursuit of beauty. They can’t help it. They are made in the image of him who is beauty.

Now, I’m not proposing a return to gilded altarpieces, extravagant frescos, and bronze statues. I do not think the church should look like a tourist attraction. But beauty doesn’t need to be complicated.

A few weeks ago, a young ambitious man knocked on my door selling something (I forgot what). He told me that he starts with the homes that have wreathes on the door because those people tend to be the kindest.

And there it is in its simplest form.

Beauty beckons because it means something good lies there. Shouldn’t that be the business of the church?