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What’s the very worst move a TV show can make if it wants to prove it’s a bona fide news outlet?Bring in an unhinged former host for a teary-eyed reunion.He’s loaded and stands as a prime example of our capitalistic system in action. Now, he wants to tear it all down.That’s what “The View” has planned for its 30th anniversary special, at least according to one very unreliable source. The far-far-left showcase has asked ex-host Rosie O’Donnell to join the festivities. And the “Flintstones” alum said “yes.”That’s according to O’Donnell.“The View” has yet to confirm the invitation. An O’Donnell rep told USA Today there’s been no concrete announcement of the star’s return. Who are you going to trust: a rabid conspiracy theorist or a show that chronically peddles rabid conspiracy theories?Extinction-level event"Creative differences” are making a Hollywood comeback.It’s one of the hokiest reasons for a film or TV show to fall apart. This time, it’s the next installment of the increasingly awful “Jurassic World” series. The last film, “Jurassic World: Rebirth” starring Scarlett Johansson, stunk up the joint but still made an outstanding $870 million in worldwide ticket sales.The franchise will have to do it all over again without “Rebirth” director Gareth Edwards. He cited the oft-deployed phrase on the way out the franchise door. If he couldn’t hold his nose and direct the next film in the series, it’s a sign the saga will be about as fresh as pterodactyl eggs ...Dirty joblessMike Rowe may be famous, but he has two feet firmly planted in terra firma. The “Dirty Jobs” host is renowned for his practical approach to life. Gritty, blue-collar Americans cheer him on for it.He isn’t unabashedly on the right, but we can all do the math. And when he speaks, people would be wise to listen. So Rowe went to town on the Democrats’ embrace of all things DSA this week.That’s not a partisan screed, just a cold blast of reality.“If the DSA continues to grow in popularity, and the Democrats actually campaign on their behalf, I think it’ll be the largest political blunder in my lifetime,” he wrote on social media.If anyone can get through to Dems, it's Rowe. Arguing with the purple-haired, 16-gender crowd can't be any harder than chicken-sexing or pig-slop processing, can it?Nolan neggedDid Christopher Nolan step on her cat’s tail?“The Odyssey” director leaned on scholar Emily Wilson’s adaptation of the Homer poem to fuel his box-office sensation. And days after the film hit theaters, Wilson shredded Nolan’s handiwork.Now, like Bruce the Shark in “Jaws,” she’s circling back to slam the film anew. The feminist scholar turned to the Atlantic for a fuller evisceration of the film:The script grandly insists on the importance of human kindness, while the camera shows us an entirely different set of values. In these times of hatred and misinformation, we need more than the "apparent magic" of deceptive images. We need art that is truthful about the costs and the necessity of compassion, and that recognizes that a sense of spiritual superiority may not protect us from lies.Nolan will have plenty of time to rebut her critiques. If he wants the ultimate revenge, he could name-check her when he’s on stage to pick up one of the film’s likely Oscar wins …RELATED: 2,500 reasons 'The View' is pure leftist propaganda — and 1 reason the FCC should leave it alone anyway Al Drago/Getty ImagesMoney MarkCelebrity Net Worth, a popular site estimating how much the rich and famous have in their piggy banks, says Mark Ruffalo is worth a cool $35 million.The in-demand actor has played the Hulk in eight feature films and two Disney+ TV shows. That alone can pad one’s bank account, but he’s been steadily employed for two decades in various films and TV projects.He’s loaded and stands as a prime example of our capitalistic system in action. Now, he wants to tear it all down. He just hasn’t distributed his millions quite yet.The actor used his celebrity clout to back multiple DSA candidates in Michigan earlier this week. Why? They want socialism in the good ol’ USA, he said (with a straight face).“This is our movement coming to bear fruit. I mean, this is what we started in 2016. This is where the progressives have been moving. This is our time. And they have to spend more and more money each time to beat us. And it’s just a matter of time till they flop, and this could be it.”Hulk ... hypocrite! And that’s being kind.

In July, Shane Gillis made comedy history, selling more than 77,000 tickets and setting records for the largest audience for a comedian and the most tickets sold for a solo stand-up act. The achievement put him past names like Kevin Hart, Steve Martin, and German stand-up Mario Barth.It also came just seven years after cancel culture nearly killed his career.Shane Gillis did not beat cancel culture by becoming less offensive. He beat it by becoming too successful to cancel.In 2019, shortly after Comedy Central named him an “Up Next” comedian, Gillis landed the job every comic dreams about: a spot on “Saturday Night Live.” Then old clips surfaced of him doing a mock Asian accent and using a racial slur. Other clips featured supposedly unacceptable jokes about gay people. Within days, SNL fired him. Gillis later described the experience as painful enough to make it hard to “trust people ... for a while.”The timing was brutal. Gillis was fired during what we now recognize as peak woke, when careers could vanish because somebody with a Twitter account dug through 10 years of jokes and found the wrong sentence.He was hardly alone. Sarah Silverman faced backlash over an old blackface bit. Dave Chappelle was attacked for mocking Michael Jackson’s accusers. Kevin Hart’s old tweets were dragged back into the spotlight. Suddenly the internet had discovered a tremendous new power: If enough people pretended to be offended at once, they could get somebody fired.For a while, almost everyone played along.That was always the secret of cancel culture. It was never a magical force. It was a consensual ideology. It worked because institutions submitted to it, employers feared it, and ordinary people convinced themselves that refusing to obey would make them the next target.Words became temporarily unsayable. Leftists rewrote definitions and then declared that only certain people were allowed to use them. “Gone with the Wind” was pulled from streaming. James Gunn and Gina Carano lost jobs. People learned to keep their mouths shut because being called racist, sexist, or homophobic could cost them a career.The woke mob did not win because everyone agreed with it. It won because too many people were afraid to laugh at it.Now, two presidencies removed from peak woke, the whole thing looks much sillier. Plenty of celebrities once declared untouchable have returned to the mainstream. Land acknowledgments and pronoun rituals have become punch lines. “Culturally insensitive,” the kind of phrase that helped sink Gillis, sounds increasingly like a relic from a very stupid age.So people post offensive jokes, recycle old podcast clips, and celebrate that “woke is dead.”I would not start planning the funeral.Cancel culture isn’t dead. It’s hiding.Conservatives have every reason to feel confident right now. Republicans control Congress and the presidency. The administration has attacked “diversity, equity, and inclusion” throughout the federal government. The Supreme Court has handed down major victories protecting women’s sports. It can be tempting to believe the culture could never slide back to 2019.RELATED: BILL PILLED: Maher warns fellow Democrats that they're headed for woke-tastrophe Shannon Finney/WireImage/Getty ImagesBut Donald Trump was president in 2019 too.The first and second Trump administrations are very different, but Trump’s presence by itself does not prevent a woke resurgence. Cultural power does not live only in Washington. It lives in entertainment, universities, corporations, HR departments, newsrooms, and the countless people who decide whether the mob gets rewarded for showing up.Gillis’ comeback is encouraging precisely because he did not wait for those institutions to forgive him.Podcasts gave him somewhere else to go. After SNL fired him, Gillis joked that he could just appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast and everything would be fine. And he was right. Audiences increasingly learned that independently produced shows could be funnier, more honest, and less filtered than legacy television.That shift reached well beyond comedy. Podcasts became a major force in the 2024 election. Trump and JD Vance used long-form appearances to show voters their humor and personalities outside carefully managed television interviews. Kamala Harris’ refusal to sit down with Rogan only reinforced the contrast. In the peak-woke era, scripted liberal slogans might have been enough. By 2024, they sounded canned.Comedy is often the canary in the coal mine because comedy requires tension, risk, and the possibility that somebody will be offended. A culture that cannot tolerate a joke will eventually struggle to tolerate an argument.Gillis rebuilt his career, but comedians are still testing the limits. Jerry Seinfeld said the “extreme left has suppressed the art of comedy,” then later walked that back by saying culture moves and a comedian’s job is to adapt. David Spade criticized L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom for “killing Hollywood” and took heat for it. Nate Bargatze was slammed simply for attending Trump’s UFC event at the White House.RELATED: Colorado fire department employee FIRED over Snoop Dogg doll that ‘evoked’ history of ‘racial terror’ Heidi Gutman/Bravo/Getty ImagesThat is what hiding looks like. The old cultural reflex is still there, waiting for institutions to become afraid again.Woke politics will not return because somebody waves a magic wand. It will return one concession at a time: one employee fired to stop a controversy, one joke declared beyond the pale, one institution deciding it is easier to surrender than tell an angry mob no.That is why conservatives should resist the temptation to declare victory and go home. Free speech survives only when people keep using it. Comedy survives only when comedians keep telling the joke. Culture stays open only when institutions refuse to hand professional hecklers a veto.The late, great Norm Macdonald understood this better than most. Early in his career, he joked: “People were beginning to talk about me, and that’s always good news. As Adolf Hitler once said, all publicity is good publicity.”Shane Gillis did not beat cancel culture by becoming less offensive. He beat it by becoming too successful to cancel. That’s worth celebrating. It is not a reason to stop paying attention.

On August 4, Abdul El-Sayed, the radical progressive Muslim activist who has called for abolishing ICE, universal health care, codifying unrestricted access to abortion, and other far-left initiatives, narrowly beat Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary.His victory bodes ill not just for the state of Michigan but for the United States as a whole, says BlazeTV host Steve Deace, because it exposes a chilling reality about America and the direction the nation is headed.On this episode of the “Steve Deace Show,” the former Michigan resident pulls back the curtain on what’s really fueling America’s downward spiral into radicalization, mental illness, and racial idolatry. “Gretchen Whitmer is probably the most successful Democrat politician the state of Michigan has had in a generation. … A decade as governor, queen bee of the state,” says Deace, “and she just got rolled by an Islamist in a Senate primary who won despite her endorsement of his opponent.”What does this say about the direction of the nation?According to Deace, we’re witnessing an “Islam surge” in the United States because the people have forgotten or rejected America’s intentional design to function like biblical Israel under the Sinai covenant — where the people obey God and receive His protecting and blessing, and as a result, the nation shines as a “city on a hill” that attracts outsiders to the true God.“We want to be, in a civic sense, a covenantal people of the one true God. We want His favor, which means that we need to be a nation of His instruments, and you've seen God bless that,” says Deace. “Otherwise, we wouldn't have lasted as long as we have.”But as it was with ancient Israel, when the people stray, God’s discipline follows.“One of the marks of a covenantal people receiving the discipline of the God you have covenanted with that you also see in the Old Testament is you're overrun with foreigners and foreign gods,” Deace points out.He asks if America’s current predicament — being overrun with illegal immigrants and the rising influence of Islam — could be God’s judgment on a nation that has rebelled against the covenantal design its founders sought to emulate.“The answer, of course, would be yes,” says Deace frankly.“We disobey God to a point collectively that He then removes His restraining hand. This is Romans 1,” he adds.Whether America “lost [its] zeal” for “the one true God” or deliberately embraced “foreigners and their ways,” the “outcome is the same,” says Deace: God gives us over to our sinful ways, allowing us to reap the consequences of our decisions.That’s why Islam is growing in power and influence in the United States, he argues.New York City’s socialist Muslim Mayor Zohran Mamdani “is not an outlier but a herald,” Deace warns.“After 9/11, we imported almost 4 million people from Islam-dominated countries,” and then we embarked on “a rebranding campaign that [Islam] is not a violent religion but one of peace,” he recounts.“These seeds,” he says, “were planted many years ago” and are now being “[fertilized]” with “pagan indoctrination,” creating a spiritual "vacuum.”“And nature abhors a vacuum, and the fake foreign demon gods will fill it for you. And if you won't let them, you're a racist, of course,” Deace observes.“Normie voters,” he says, mistakenly believe that America’s biggest problems right now are “mental illness,” “racial idolatry," and “radicalization.” But those are merely “symptoms” of a far deeper and more terrifying root problem.“The disease is you're up against a rival religion,” Deace warns.To hear more, watch the episode above.Want more from Steve Deace?To enjoy more of Steve's take on national politics, Christian worldview, and principled conservatism with a snarky twist, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

The hardest job in American politics isn’t balancing the budget, but admitting that the other side might have a good idea.I understand this can feel like swallowing glass, but credit belongs where credit is due.Prices fluctuate constantly under normal market conditions. Gas prices spike during oil embargoes. Airline tickets double in December. Retailers drop prices to shift winter inventory. Every consumer understands basic supply and demand.Sustainable commerce requires a baseline of public trust.Now, however, there's a new way of pricing that flouts the usual rules, one most people are still oblivious to. It's known as surveillance pricing.Companies harvest vast amounts of personal data. They then study behavioral quirks and calculate the maximum amount an individual will pay for a given product. New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill (D) recently signed a law, dubbed the Fair Price Protection Act, that tackles this predatory corporate practice.Personalized price tagsWhen a customer goes to buy something online, the algorithm instantly detects a recent job promotion, a broken appliance, and an exhausting 20-mile commute. The system spits out a "personalized offer" that looks like a VIP discount, right up until you realize the VIP treatment is just a bespoke mugging.New Jersey’s new law stops businesses from using personal information to construct personalized price tags for essential goods. The statute leaves traditional coupons, storewide clearance events, and opt-in loyalty programs alone. It places a hard ceiling on using private data to extract extra cash from individual wallets.Every person participating in the economy is a target. Algorithms track physical location coordinates from cell towers, record search histories, and log exact purchasing frequencies down to the minute.Data collection makes sense when it helps a company stock shelves or route delivery trucks. But we're way beyond that now. High-tech logistics phases into loan-sharking when it’s used to calculate just how much price pressure you can bear before tapping out.For example, let's say two neighbors order identical refrigerators from the same website on a Tuesday afternoon. The first neighbor clears browser cookies, runs price comparisons across four tabs, and waits three days to buy. The second neighbor searches frantically because his old unit died overnight, threatening $300 worth of groceries. The algorithm identifies the second buyer as highly motivated (desperate) and jacks up the price tag.RELATED: This throwback app is competing with Big Tech — using a business model out of the 1980s Bryan Bedder/Getty ImagesGrocery shopping exposes the same vulnerability that's ready to exploit. A household managing a strict monthly budget leaves a detailed digital breadcrumb trail across meal-planning apps and store searches. Predictive software analyzes those habits and adjusts item pricing to test the family's financial pain threshold. The family ends up paying an invisible desperation tax at checkout.Stopping invisible pickpocketsIn 1914, Congress created the Federal Trade Commission to stop trusts from fixing prices in smoke-filled boardrooms. Today, those boardrooms are replaced by cloud servers executing real-time financial extraction on millions of cell phones. Technology scales predatory practices at unprecedented speeds. Automated systems run millions of behavioral calculations every single second, adjusting prices faster than a human brain can process.New Jersey’s law creates a blueprint for a uniform federal standard. Geographic boundaries should not dictate basic consumer protections against automated price gouging. A family driving across the George Washington Bridge into New York shouldn’t lose basic economic protections the second they cross the state line.A national policy establishes clear boundaries for market competition. Companies should win customers by refining manufacturing, streamlining distribution, and lowering overhead costs. They shouldn’t win by writing software that hunts down strapped parents searching for infant formula at two in the morning.Free-market economics depend on transparent pricing and informed consent. Adam Smith wrote extensively about the invisible hand of the market, but he never envisioned an invisible algorithm picking pockets in real time. Transactional freedom evaporates when a multibillion-dollar corporate server has complete information on a buyer simply trying to purchase dinner.Capitalism for citizensConservatives traditionally champion market transparency, personal privacy, and fair exchange. New Jersey's statute aligns directly with those values. True capitalism requires open competition, not rigged games where one side owns the deck, the table, and the security cameras overhead.Companies retain every right to generate profits and return value to shareholders. Wealth creation drives technological progress and raises standard of living metrics in America and beyond. Sustainable commerce, however, requires a baseline of public trust. When consumers discover that their own personal information serves as a weapon against their bank accounts, that trust dissolves entirely.New Jersey typically dominates headlines for political corruption trials, abysmal Turnpike traffic, and the inevitable road rage that follows. Yet Governor Sherrill’s administration managed to draw a remarkably sane line in the sand. Washington and the remaining 49 states need to adopt the exact same rule before every price tag in the country morphs into an automated shakedown.