A few days ago, Sharon Says So posted about receiving an AI “fact check” loaded with emojis. Colorful. Confident. Shareable. And almost certainly more about performance than truth.

I’ve been using AI extensively as a writing and research partner for over a year. Emoji-laden fact checks have never been my experience. That gap is worth explaining, because it tells you something important about how AI actually works — and how most people are using it wrong.

The Machine Gives You What You’re Really Asking For

The Nashville Predators held a Pride Night this week. They changed their branding slightly to mark the occasion. They lost to the New Jersey Devils 4-2.

A conservative commentator at Townhall found this hilarious. The joke, such as it was: the team had become “the gay Predators.” He noted that the jokes “write themselves.”

Someone’s talking. You have something to say. You wait for a pause — and it doesn’t come. By the time they stop, the moment has passed. You go home vaguely annoyed at them.

But what if both of you were simply waiting on each other — and neither one knew it?

Conversations Have Implicit Invitations

Let me tell you about a day at Disneyland.

My daughter and I were in line for a ride when I noticed the woman next to us getting increasingly agitated. Gwen Stefani was nearby, getting on the same ride, and this woman had decided — loudly — that Stefani was cutting in line. I could see where this was going. So I kept the woman engaged, deflected her energy, countered her attitude lightly, gave Stefani room to just be a person at a theme park. When Stefani glanced over, I just smiled. That was it. The whole interaction was about ten seconds, and Stefani never knew anyone had run interference for her.

I didn’t tell that story expecting a thank-you. I’m telling it because it’s the normal way to behave when you encounter a celebrity living their private life. You recognize they’re a person. You leave them alone. You might smile. You move on, and later you tell your friends you saw Gwen Stefani at Disneyland, and it’s a fun story.

Nobody wakes up wanting to be furious.

But a lot of us are. At the news, at each other, at systems that seem designed to confuse and exhaust us. And after a while, the anger starts to feel like identity.

It isn’t. Here’s what’s actually happening.

On Tuesday, March 24, the Pennsylvania House Democrats did something that will be replayed in Republican ads for months: they withdrew a Women’s History Month resolution from the floor rather than allow a vote on a Republican amendment to define what a “woman” is.

Fox News covered it with barely concealed glee. State Rep. Aaron Bernstine, R-Ellwood City, offered his amendment — “It defines what a woman actually is — because we do know what that is” — and House Speaker Joanna McClinton pulled the resolution before the chamber could vote. Laughter erupted. Republicans celebrated. The clip went viral.

Democrats will be mocked for this. Some of that mockery is politically effective. Very little of it is intellectually honest.

There’s a revealing moment buried in a 2019 GQ interview with Mark Cuban. Asked whether he’d share his tax savings with employees if his rate dropped to zero, Cuban pivots to equity structures and exit events — a smarter answer than the question deserved. But the question itself contains a flaw nobody caught: wages are deducted before taxable profit is calculated. Paying workers more doesn’t compete with a tax bill. It reduces the income that gets taxed in the first place.

This is not a technicality. It’s the quiet refutation of an entire class of arguments.

When a business owner says “if taxes were lower, I’d pay my employees more,” they’re describing a relationship between wages and taxes that doesn’t actually exist. Under standard accounting, wages are a business expense. They come off the top. The tax rate only touches what’s left after you’ve paid your people.

At the National Prayer Breakfast, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stood up and read from Mark 8. It’s one of the most important passages in the New Testament. He read it well. Then he preached the exact sermon Jesus was warning against.

Here’s what the passage actually does. Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ — the long-awaited King. It’s a triumphant moment. Then Jesus immediately tells his disciples he’s going to suffer, be rejected, and be killed. Peter pulls him aside and rebukes him. You can almost hear the frustration:

That’s not how kings are supposed to talk.

It happens on a reliable cycle.

Someone in power gets called a working-class hero. Someone else mocks the label. The defenders rush in — senators, commentators, the whole apparatus — to perform outrage on behalf of the trades. Plumbers get name-dropped. Truckers get invoked. The dignity of honest labor becomes, for approximately seventy-two hours, the most important thing in American political life.

Then the news cycle moves on. The wages stay the same.

A post went viral recently. A verified account on X wrote:

“The term ‘theological liberalism’ is thrown around a lot. When push comes to shove though, it still boils down to Richard Niebuhr’s summation of what theological liberalism truly is: ‘A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross’ (Kingdom of God in America, 193). Liberal/progressive Christianity is more than that but it is no less than that, and it will always come down to it. Niebuhr’s words 89 years ago are just as applicable in 1937 as they are today.”

54,000 views. The quote is real. Niebuhr did write it. But what’s being done with it is something he never intended — and the post contains a telling error that most of those 54,000 viewers probably didn’t catch.

A screenshot circulating on social media frames the erosion of Western civilization as a six-step program: convince women to hate men, men to hate themselves, minorities to hate whites, whites to hate themselves, the young to be LGBTQ+, and the old that they are backward. “Only takes a generation,” the author concludes.

The post presents itself as diagnosis. It deserves to be examined on its own terms — carefully, scripturally, and without assuming bad faith in those who find it compelling. Many people do find it compelling, and not without reason: something does feel broken. The question is whether this framework correctly identifies what.

Before examining each point, however, it is worth naming the strongest version of the concern — because there is one.

On Thursday, President Trump told reporters in the Oval Office — on camera, in English — “No, I’m not putting troops anywhere.” He paused. Then, apparently aware that this was not quite true, he added: “If I were, I certainly wouldn’t tell you.”

By Wednesday, the Pentagon had confirmed the deployment of elements from the 82nd Airborne Division headquarters, a brigade combat team, and assorted “division enablers” to the CENTCOM area of responsibility. The 82nd Airborne. Paratroopers. People whose entire professional purpose is to fall out of airplanes and land — boots first — on contested terrain, seizing it before follow-on forces arrive. According to CBS News, senior military commanders have already submitted specific requests preparing for ground operations. Pentagon statements indicate the planning includes meetings about where to detain Iranian soldiers if those boots — hypothetically, technically, not yet officially — touch the earth.

“We can confirm elements of the 82nd Airborne Division HQs, some division enablers and the 1st BCT will be deploying to the CENTCOM AOR. Due to operations security we have nothing additional to provide at this time.”

Last week, Brooks Potteiger — evangelical pastor, Pete Hegseth’s closest spiritual adviser, and a member of the Christian nationalist network built around Doug Wilson — appeared on a podcast called Reformation Red Pill to talk about James Talarico. Talarico is a Texas Democratic state representative, a Presbyterian seminarian, and the newly minted Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, running against John Cornyn.

The host, Joshua Haymes, opened by saying he prays “that God kills him.” Potteiger agreed: “We want him crucified with Christ.” Haymes continued: “And if it would not be within God’s will to do so, stop him by any means necessary.”

After the story broke, Potteiger posted a clarification: he wasn’t calling for Talarico’s physical death, he was invoking the imprecatory psalms, praying that God would “kill the old man” in Talarico and raise him to new life. He wants a Saul-of-Tarsus moment for the man. “Talarico of Tarsus,” he said.

There’s a Fox News piece making the rounds today about truckers being pulled off Florida highways for failing English proficiency tests. Embedded cameras, a federal ride-along, dramatic exchanges where truckers respond “No” to questions about road signs. The framing is immigration crisis. The subtext is danger on the roads.

But if you slow down and read it carefully, the article dismantles its own premise three times before you even reach the case studies.

The most revealing moment in the piece isn’t what’s reported. It’s what’s missing.

At the 2026 Oscars, actor Ethan Hawke was asked on the red carpet for advice about unrequited love — a fitting question, since he was nominated for playing Lorenz Hart, a man who loved deeply and was never quite loved back. His answer went viral almost immediately.

“The one who’s in love always wins. It doesn’t matter if you get your heart broken; you’re living. When you’re feeling, you’re alive. The sun doesn’t care whether the grass appreciates its rays, right? It just keeps on shining. That’s you.”

Almost immediately, the internet split. Half the comments were “this changed my life.” The other half were: easy for a man to say who allegedly cheated on Uma Thurman.

There’s a mythology at work in American energy policy right now, and it goes something like this: fossil fuels are power. The more we produce, the more we burn, the more pipelines we build — the more dominant we become. It sounds like empire. It isn’t.

The British didn’t conquer half the world because they loved pepper — they did it by controlling trade routes, monopoly charters, and the chokepoints between producers and consumers. They ate roughly the same amount of pepper before and after the East India Company. What changed was who paid whom to move it. They sat between supply and demand and charged a toll in wealth, labor, and sovereignty. The spice wasn’t the point. The dependency was.

If you want to use a resource to dominate other nations, you don’t consume it. You hoard it, control it, ration it, and make others come to you. You make yourself the chokepoint. That’s how resource imperialism actually works.

It started, as many arguments do, on the internet. A science page posted the classic bait question: which is more painful, childbirth or getting kicked in the groin? Predictably, a chorus of men arrived in the comments armed with a curious argument: nobody asks to be kicked, therefore it must hurt more.

The logic collapses on contact — nobody asks for kidney stones either, or bone fractures, or the kind of grief that makes it hard to breathe. Voluntariness has nothing to do with the intensity of pain. But embedded in the comment thread, almost as an aside, was the point that actually matters: women were historically denied pain medication because doctors assumed they could handle it better. That throwaway line contains an entire archive of atrocity.

This is not ancient history. It is one of the foundations on which American medicine was built.

There is something deeply satisfying about saying it out loud. He’s going to hell. After years of watching cruelty get baptized as righteousness, after watching children separated from their parents get shrugged off by people who claim to follow Jesus, after watching powerful men mock the deaths of people who simply did their jobs — the words feel like justice. They feel like prophecy. They feel like finally telling the truth in a room full of people pretending not to see it.

A recent video making the rounds declares, with theological framing, that Donald Trump is going to hell. I understand the impulse completely. Some days I share it.

But I want to sit with why it’s still the wrong move — not because it’s impolite, and not because we should sand down our witness to avoid offending the comfortable. It’s wrong because it claims knowledge we don’t have, and because Scripture is actually quite clear about who gets to make that call.

Pick up almost any evangelical sermon on 1 Timothy 1:8–11 and you will hear the same argument: the Law is not for the righteous. It is for murderers, fornicators, kidnappers, liars, sodomites. The implication is clear. Decent, church-going people are not the problem. The problem is out there, in the culture, among people who have not yet submitted to sound doctrine.

That reading is comfortable. It is also radically incomplete. And the proof is not in progressive theology or modern scholarship. It is in the Old Testament itself, in the prophets, and in the words of Jesus.

The passage includes “sodomites” in its list of lawbreakers. In modern usage, that word has come to mean one specific thing: male homosexual conduct. But that meaning is largely a product of later interpretation, not what the Biblical texts themselves specify.

There is a persistent idea in Christian circles that justice means punishment, and that mercy is what you extend instead of punishment when you’re feeling generous. By this logic, a society that goes easy on criminals is a society that has been seduced by sentimentality. What we need, the argument goes, is consequences. Law and order. The firm hand.

It sounds rigorous. It sounds biblical. But it has a significant problem: it only ever seems to notice crime flowing in one direction.

To be clear: harm matters at every level of society. When someone wrongs another person — regardless of their circumstances — that wrong is real and deserves to be named. The question is not whether justice matters. The question is whether our theology of justice is actually as biblical as we think it is, or whether we’ve selectively applied it in ways the prophets would not recognize.