Remembering
James Robison

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The Brew: Did the Trump Administration Fire a Christian for Defending Biblical Beliefs?

By John Zmirak Published on June 2, 2025

Editor’s Note: It’s summertime, and you know what that means: People go on vacation. And here at The Stream, that means we’re going to be a little short-staffed for the next two weeks, as John Zmirak takes off for parts not fully known. (We actually do know, but we’re not telling you fine people all the details! More on that in a minute.)

So here’s what you can expect from us until he gets back in a couple of weeks: Our intrepid social media coordinator, Gayle McQueary, will be stepping in to bring you a truncated version of The Brew each weekday. It’ll be two shots of hard news, paired with one sweet story — so we’re going to be calling it The Affogato. Also, Zmirak will be sending us photos from his travels (as long as his internet connection holds out!) and we’re going to ask you to guess the location. Where in the World is John Zmirak? Send your guesses to us at [email protected]. At the end of the two weeks, the person who has the most correct (or close to correct!) guesses will get a gift from us.

 

Nobody’s perfect. The emperor Constantine, who stopped the persecution of Christians and ended gladiatorial slaughters in Rome, also murdered his wife and his son. Charles Martel, who defeated the Muslim invasion of France, was a brutal warlord who owned slaves. We can’t hold out for morally perfect leaders, but neither should we give them a pass when they fail. The squeaky wheel gets the grease in this fallen world, and so we Christians must correct and even pressure friendly leaders instead of being passively, silently loyal.

It certainly seems as if the Trump administration has caved to worldly pressure and backstabbed a loyal supporter for having voiced his mainstream, orthodox Christian beliefs in the past. The Western Journal reports:

CNN is taking credit for prompting the firing of The Western Journal founder and former owner Floyd Brown, who only a month ago had taken a senior position at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

The piece by CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski describes Brown as a “far-right activist” who is a professing Christian and who has made statements in the past critical of the homosexual lifestyle and same-sex marriage….

In February, President Donald Trump announced that he was naming Ric Grenell as interim director of the Kennedy Center….

Brown posted on social media platform X, “I was fired yesterday by @RichardGrenell from the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. One month ago, I was recruited to join the Kennedy Center as a Vice President.

“My firing came approximately two hours after @CNN sent an email asking me to comment on my past writings and statements about traditional marriage and homosexual influence in the @GOP,” he added.

Brown further noted, “Comments rooted in my personal Christian views, which I have made in the past, have no impact upon my work here at the Kennedy Center nor do they impinge on my interactions with colleagues who do incredible work for the patrons of the Center. As a Christian I am called to work with others of different beliefs and worldviews.”

Below you can hear key excerpts from the speech that CNN dug up and sent to (openly gay) Rick Grenell. It points to the role that gay staffers for GOP members of Congress and at the Republican National Committee play in quashing pro-family legislation — a perfectly legitimate topic for discussion, provided you’re not carrying water for that cabal and trying to keep its veto power in place.

So far no comment by Rick Grenell:

Maybe President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission needs to look into this personnel decision.

Are Campuses Cracking Down on Far-Left, Pro-Terror Activism?

One of the reasons that President Trump took action against far-left, increasingly foreign Harvard University is the way it enabled supporters of terrorist groups like Hamas to dominate campus life and make Jewish students miserable. Another is the blatantly illegal discrimination the university practices via its DEI programs and links to foreign despots. As if to prove Trump’s point, Harvard chose a woman with close ties to China’s brutal Communist Party to be its commencement speaker:

Across town, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, politics aren’t that much different. But the administration’s actions are. For one, MIT’s leaders seem willing to admit that the fanatical drive for “diversity” has dumbed the school way down. That’s what ignoring merit for any reason will accomplish, every time.

MIT administrators also are pushing back against students who try to hijack academic events to push radical politics:

Of course, by the time students get to commencement, they’ve already been indoctrinated by peer pressure and biased professors who push anti-Western narratives into every nook and cranny of learning and life. But a school has got to start somewhere. By the way, it’s worth looking into Ms. Vemuri’s own background, since she has appointed herself a global spokesperson for the oppressed.

Peter Thiel Asks “Is AI the Antichrist?”

Okay, this is unsettling. Trump ally and number one “tech bro” Peter Thiel is ruminating about whether artificial intelligence might prove to be the tool of the apocalyptic Antichrist predicted in scripture. Jacob Howland writes at the always provocative online magazine Unherd:

Peter Thiel is a big thinker, and these days he’s been thinking about Doomsday. In a series of four lectures he’s given three times, at Oxford, Harvard, and the University of Austin, he’s tried to understand human history, and particularly modernity, within the framework of biblical prophecies of the End of Days. Thiel believes that the Antichrist, whose identity is uncertain — is it a person, a system, a global tyranny? — is “not just a medieval fantasy.” His free-ranging lectures, moving rapidly between disparate texts (Gulliver’s Travels; Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen) and topics (sacred violence; high-velocity global financial systems), defy easy summary. But their leading themes include the Antichrist’s relationship to Armageddon and the roles of technology and empire in the Antichrist’s rise.

On the one hand, Thiel acknowledges the reasons why we might well think that a technologically supercharged global hive mind that plagiarizes and regurgitates the work of human authors at blinding speed is threatening. It mimics the activities of human consciousness, while only ever really being the fruit of mindless machines processing zeroes and ones. But Thiel tries to turn such fears on their head:

Thiel nevertheless thinks that worries about AI taking over the world are more dangerous than AI itself, because the fear of existential threats plays directly into the cold hands of deracinated elites who are working to establish a global managerial state.

In fact, Thiel’s old friend (and co-founder of Palantir Technologies) Lawrence Karp goes further. He argues that AI actually promises to be the one force on earth that could stop the Antichrist from achieving global domination. Karp warns

that the enemies of the West will prevail unless software developers work in close collaboration with the American government to produce AI-powered military capabilities superior to that of our adversaries, as Palantir has done….

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What is Palantir actually doing? That’s worrisome too, as Newsmax notes:

On Friday, The New York Times reported that Palantir, the AI-focused software and military contractor, has expanded its “work across the federal government in recent months” after it had been tapped by President Donald Trump to create “detailed portraits” or a digital ID on Americans “which could easily merge data on Americans — throughout agencies,” such as from the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, the Health and Human Services Department, the Social Security Administration and the Department of Education.

So let’s get this straight: In order to protect us from the soulless super-pseudoconsciousness controlled by Communist China, we must submit to an American-made ghost in the machine, or else we’re aiding the Antichrist?

We are living in dark, strange times. Pray hard.

Trump Sees Through the Federalist Society

For years, I have been banging the drum about how President Trump shouldn’t trust the Federalist Society as a source for judicial appointments. Its leaders are uniformly establishment Republicans opposed to Trump’s populist refashioning of the GOP, to the point that they supported efforts to ban him from the 2024 ballot on the absurd charge that he was an “insurrectionist.” The organization sold the tepid Justice John Roberts to the George W. Bush White House on the ground that he attended evenings of recollection offered by Opus Dei (a Catholic apostolate).

The Federalists also pushed as a reliable vote Amy Coney Barrett, who’d warned the world that she would recuse herself from votes when the Constitution conflicted with Vatican dictates, and who has frequently voted indistinguishably from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Trump has finally gotten the memo:

Maybe it’s time to look instead to organizations like the Article III Project, or First Liberty Institute. It’s long past time for a least one evangelical Christian to join our nation’s highest court.

Along The Stream…

This video from Apologetics Roadshow asks the hopeful question: Has persecuted British patriot Tommy Robinson found Christ while unjustly imprisoned? Let’s pray for him for many reasons, and pray that this is true.

Later this morning, review the uncomfortable evidence that old-fashioned antisemitism is once more on the rise, relabeled and repackaged for the digital age.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.