NO MORE CANCEL CULTURE: Pastor Luke Ash was fired earlier this year from his second job at the Baton Rouge Parish Library after he refused to use a transgendered co-worker’s “preferred pronouns.” It wasn’t that long ago that such an incident would be a one-day story and the world would move on, in part due to fear of the consequences of fighting back.

Pastor Ash is fighting back, with help from attorneys at the Florida-based Liberty Counsel civil liberties defense outfit, according to the Washington Stand’s S.A. McCarthy.

“Liberty Counsel charges that the library board and supervisors violated Ash’s First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and religious liberty and Fourteenth Amendment rights, in addition to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, Louisiana’s constitutional religious liberty protections, and the state’s Preservation of Religious Freedom Act,” McCarthy reports.

Ash’s attorneys informed the Louisiana parish authorities that the bottom line on their actions in firing the pastor “is this: there is no compelling government interest in requiring Mr. Ash (or other employees) to lie; or to affirmatively use false pronouns that do not accurately reflect biological sex, particularly outside the hearing of the person who dislikes accurate, sex-based pronouns. The Library has acted unlawfully in firing Mr. Ash.”

More to come on this case. Like Trump said, “fight! fight! fight!”

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE PUZZLING: Of the latest trends in American church attendance — young men outnumber young women — plus a bit of a progress report on HillFaith.org. As I contend in my latest Substack column, you don’t have to be a Bible-thumper to appreciate the public policy differences in perspectives represented by the Sermon on the Mount and Critical Race Theory.

NEW CIVIL WAR IN GAZA: Multiple Palestinian clans or gangs are fighting against Hamas and it seems quite possible a final internal convulsion is at hand. Richard Pollock has details on Substack.

THE SKUNK SHUTDOWN DEMS ARE STUCK WITH: Capitol Hill Democrats insist millions of Americans will lose health insurance if those “temporary” Obamacare Pandemic tax credit subsidies aren’t made permanent; otherwise, they will keep the government shutdown.

But, as even The Washington Post editorial board has come to see, the fundamental problem is not the Obamacare subsidies but Obamacare itself, which, as I detail this morning on The Washington Stand, has been a catastrophe for American healthcare.

MORE MEN THAN WOMEN IN CHURCH NOW: For as long as memory serves, women have been more active than men in churches, but, as Amanda Hughes reports on HillFaith this morning, a new data analysis by Barna Group finds the reverse is now true in America.

“Patterns in church participation showed a reversal over the past 25 years in attendance where women led the household in spiritual growth and church activity. Now, research tells a different story where more men, 43 percent, and fewer women, 36 percent, reported attending church on a weekly basis,” according to Hughes.

COLUMBUS, YES OR NO: Was Christopher Columbus the genocidal European maniac who sought out the New World in order to exploit its riches, commit genocide among its peoples and spread incurable plagues to finish them off? Or was he rather closer to the traditional understanding of the significance of his discovery of the New World?

Thank goodness for Prager U to provide a superb 5:30 video hosted by Michael Knowles that lays out the good, the bad and the mythical about the Italian explorer who launched the age of exploration that ultimately led to the founding of America. As explained on HillFaith this morning, the bottom-line issue here is how you view western civilization.

JAY JONES’ TOP DONOR AREN’T TALKING: The Washington Stand asked each of the Virginia Democratic Attorney General candidate’s top 10 donors if they are requesting refunds of their cumulative $5.2 million in contributions. Not one responded

EVERY 21ST CENTURY DEM PREZ DOES IT: Revelations about “Artic Frost” — the Biden era FBI’s spying on eight Republican senators and one GOP House member — quickly prompted comparisons with Watergate. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) called it “arguably worse than Watergate.”

But, as I document in today’s The Washington Stand, nobody should be surprised by Artic Frost or any of the numerous other illustrations of Biden weaponizing the federal government against political opponents.

Starting with Bill Clinton, continuing with Barack Obama and then hugely expanding under Biden, political weaponization has been Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for Democratic Chief Executives.

ISRAEL SHOWS CAPITALISM WORKS: Ignorance here in America of domestic Israeli politics and policy has long been the norm because the MSM either ignores it or subjects it to the tiring Netanyahu-Bad-Man narrative.

The reality is, as Rod Martin explains in great and enlightening detail, that Israel is in the midst of demonstrating the multiple economic miracles made possible when entrepreneurial courage, hard work and individual liberty are encouraged. The fact is Israel is a growing economic miracle with potential that could entirely change the Middle Eastern dynamic at all levels.

When you understand Netanyahu’s central role in bringing this about, long before he first became Prime Minister when he was watching and learning in Silicon Valley and Wall Street, you get why the American MSM, so much of the Democratic Party and the academic establishment can’t stand the man. He actually believes in individual freedom.

$2 TRILLION IN SHUTDOWN SAVINGS: Sen. Joni Ernst, the retiring Iowa Republican who is head of the Senate DOGE Caucus, handed OMB Director Russ Vought an eight-page, single-spaced list of documented waste and fraud problems whose elimination could save as much as $2 Trillion.

FACTS EXPOSE SCHUMER’S ‘MEDICAID CUTS’ MYTH: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) claims Trump and Hill GOPers are imposing “the largest cut to Medicaid in history.” Oops, that’s not what the facts say.

GALLUP FINDS MSM TRUST AT HISTORIC LOW: The divide is along generational and partisan lines, but the depth of distrust overall just keeps getting deeper and deeper. S.A. McCarthy lays out the details for The Washington Stand.

JANE GOODALL RIP: Her trail-blazing observations in 1960 on the shared traits of humans and chimpanzees became the “we’re 99 percent alike” conventional evolutionary wisdom in the 1970s. Now, in the year of her passing, new research blows a huge hole in the familiar narrative.

PRO-PALESTINIANS’ MUTED RESPONSE TO TRUMP CEASEFIRE: Israel and the major Middle Eastern Arab/Muslim nations accepted President Donald Trump’s 20-point ceasefire proposal. But did you catch the silence among the Pro-Palestinian radicals here in the states? Richard Pollock certainly did.

YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW HORRIBLE: The “Red Market,” where human organs are bought and sold, that is. Dr. Jon Spiers, writing in The Washington Stand, brings the most disturbing facts to the fore about the harvesting, trading and transplanting of human organs.

FOR THOSE WHO NEVER HEARD: Dr. Voddie Baucham’s passing last week went mostly unnoticed in the secular Right media, but, even for those who don’t share his faith, his was a hugely significant life.

One need not be a Jesus follower on the Right to appreciate the immense significance of  Baucham’s incisive analysis, for example, of the cultural and political impact of the Left’s debilitating shift to personal identity (i.e. group, sexual preference, etc.) as the basis of one’s persuasiveness rather than reasoned logic and verifiable fact in public policy discussion. That begins at the 32:45 mark.

HillFaith normally doesn’t post videos stretching to 55 minutes, but Baucham’s last lecture, delivered September 17 at New Saint Andrews College, is both typical of his scholarship and persona, and worth remembering for years to come,

HOW MUCH YOU WANNA BET ON THAT: You almost never hear about it in the Mainstream Media, but then the MSM makes billions on advertising paid for by sports gambling interests. Maybe that’s why so little is said about the growing economic and social toll of sports gambling?

LOOK WHO SAYS KIMMEL ISN’T FUNNY: Jimmy Kimmel is back on air, thanks to Disney CEO Bob Iger, but a new survey of a segment of a key age group suggests his return may not last very long.

YOU LIVE IN A ‘SUNSHINE’ OR A ‘SINKHOLE’ STATE? Truth-in-Accounting, the invaluable Chicago-based non-profit accounting watchdog, digs into the debt status of each of the 50 states and finds an even 25-25 split. And I’m betting you can guess which class of states are red and which are deep, deep blue.

ON JOHN BROWN, THEN AND NOW: The old abolitionist fanatic who raided the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 in hopes of inciting a slave rebellion across the South is enjoying something of a revival amid reports of the “John Brown Club” becoming active at Georgetown University and other campuses, according to The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson.

Davidson’s excellent essay provides a useful introduction to John Brown as analogy to the Tyler Robinsons, Jonathan Jahns and other contemporary Radical Leftists taking up arms against ICE, Trump, the police, and everything else associated with America.

What Davidson misses, though, is that the Brown analogy doesn’t end with merely taking up a bolt-action rifle and killing Charlie Kirk, or an illegal alien sitting in an ICE van in Dallas.

No, as I explained in detail a couple of years ago in this PJ Media column, Brown was a thorough-going revolutionary in search of dictatorial powers he viewed as required to carry out his fundamental remaking of American society.

Man, I wish I had finished that doctoral dissertation entitled “John Brown and Gnostic Millenarianism in the American Political Regime”!

COUNT THE COST FIRST: Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) sees the Democrats writing on the wall – They demand President Trump and Hill GOPers effectively abandon the agenda voters put them in office to carry out, or the Democrats will shut down the federal government come October 1. The Washington Stand reports that Ernst is telling CBO to “score” the actual costs of such a scenario before it comes to be.

TWO CONSERVATISMS: Did you catch the two distinctive approaches to defining the issues by speakers during the Charlie Kirk memorial on Sunday? The Washington Stand’s Joshua Arnold did and it’s deserving of wider discussion.

ONE MONUMENT, TWO WORDS: They cannot be seen from ground-level at the Washington Monument, but on its peak there are two Latin words facing the rising Sun each morning.

ERNST TARGETS DOUBLE DIPPING FEDS: One might think the federal government would be able to uncover employees from getting paychecks from more than one department or agency.

But, as Sen, Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) points out this morning in The Washington Stand, there are more than a few such double-dippers in the federal workforce but it’s unclear if the government has the tools needed to prevent such criminal activity.

HOUSING TO NOWHERE EARMARK: Buried in that lengthy list of nearly 14,000 earmarks sought by senators is one for Alaska’s Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski for $2 million in housing project funding. Nothing unusual about that, so far.

Then we learn that the South Naknek housing project is for a village with 67 residents. The place is so remote that the few kids living there must use an airplane to get to and from school! Chuck Schumer has an earmark that will make the New York Met Opera sing, and Hawaii’s two Democrat senators, Hirono and Schattz, want nearly $7 million for a bike path. Details here in The Washington Stand.