Former President Donald Trump is aiming to triumphantly return to the White House, and Republicans are seeking to take the Senate and expand their House majority, but what should Republicans' top priorities be next year if they manage to gain more power? Blaze News reached out to conservative figures including GOP Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, former Rep. Allen West, and Blaze Media's own Daniel Horowitz and Steve Deace to get their thoughts. 'Before we even delve into the deep state, there's the shallow state that' must 'be tackled.' "Republicans always make excuses for the power they currently have by tantalizing voters with promises of having greater power later on," Horowitz told Blaze News. "If you believe in judicial supremacism to strike down every single policy, and if you believe you can never have a government shutdown, then really nothing will ever change." Horowitz said that Republicans must be willing to leverage appropriations bills as well as "critical program reauthorization bills" in order to "force through reforms on popular issues." He mentioned seizing upon issues where a "supermajority of voters agree with you," like "shutting down the border," and then applying leverage to stand steadfastly on the matter. He called for tackling "inflation, invasion, and indoctrination," saying that Trump should wield his power "to immediately suspend almost all forms of immigration" so that "nobody is allowed in" and people are "sent back if they come to the border without a visa." He also mentioned suspending "all new categories of green cards" as well as visas. The conservative commentator said that Trump should fire all civil service members in roles that have an impact on policy and should head into office with a battery of people who can fill those roles. "Before we even delve into the deep state, there's the shallow state that" must "be tackled," he noted, saying that just a "small percentage of Trump's top department and agency picks reflected the values of his supporters during the first term. That needs to change." "We need to see more Russ Voughts and fewer Steven Mnuchins," Horowitz said. Vought served as director of the Office of Management and Budget during a portion of Trump's White House tenure, while Mnuchin served as treasury secretary under the 45th president. Horowitz, who said that there must be a "reckoning on COVID," called for the "full suspension" of COVID-19 vaccines. Roy told Blaze News that he believes Republicans will secure a "trifecta," winning control of the White House and both congressional chambers. 'Dismantling the regulatory state' The congressman pointed to tackling the border crisis and the "regulatory state" as the "two most important" areas for Trump to address. Roy said that Trump would have the power to "massively clamp down" on the border flow simply by "enforcing current law," though he added that fully addressing it would also require action by Congress. The conservative lawmaker called for "massively checking spending ... while dismantling the regulatory state." Other objectives he mentioned included achieving "health care freedom" and a tax policy that is pro-growth. Retired Army Lt. Col. Allen West told Blaze News, "The first and pre-eminent mission for President Trump as the 47th president is to restore constitutional governance to our republic." "That means we must restore the principles of the U.S. Constitution, which is a restraining document on the powers of the federal government. That means we must rein in out-of-control spending, establish zero based budgeting processes. He must reverse the abject lawlessness and disdain for the rule of law that has been the raison d'etre of the Biden administration," West explained. 'And we have to end the scourge of 21st-century human and sex trafficking of children.' West has previously served in the U.S. House of Representatives as a lawmaker from Florida and has also previously served as the chair of the Republican Party of Texas. He is the executive director of the American Constitutional Rights Union. Earlier this year he won a race for Dallas County Republican Party chair. "Our borders must again be secured and the millions of illegal single military-age males and females must be deported. And we have to end the scourge of 21st-century human and sex trafficking of children. We must regain our energy independence and withdraw from the foolishness of the so-called Green New Deal, which has brought us the insidious rates of inflation. Lastly, we have to regain our stance of a global leader, re-emphasize our military strength, ending this lurch towards leftist ideological engineering," he continued. In the event of another Trump term, Deace told Blaze News that he is concerned about the issue of "vision." "My biggest concern for a second Trump presidency would be the vision, more so than the issues. The vision should be that which restores the most autonomy back to the American people, while also de-weaponizing as much of government as absolutely possible," he noted in a written statement. 'A second Trump presidency should seek to return power and control to the people.' "To that end, any GOP controlled-chamber of Congress should look to realize that vision at the statute level, unlike what it couldn't do in Trump's first term. Thus, virtually all the good things Trump did, aside from the tax cuts, were unilateral actions that Biden was able to roll back in about 15 minutes," he wrote. "Autonomy is in the Constitution: 'No person should be denied life, liberty, or property without due process of law.' We have to defend life starting with the unborn, which Trump did a fine job of as president but has disappointed in his rhetoric as a candidate. That should extend to persecuted, non-violent January 6 prisoners, as well as other believers currently being targeted by DOJ for daring to pray at baby-killing clinics. The American citizens should see their autonomy defended with a secure border. Energy independence also confirms our collective autonomy. The Democrats seek power and control. A second Trump presidency should seek to return power and control to the people," Deace wrote. On the question of how Trump could unilaterally use his authority as president to secure major conservative wins and cut down on the out-of-control size of the federal government, West told Blaze News, "I am not a fan of massive executive orders. I prefer regular-order legislative process. However, the issue of illegal immigration adversely affects our economy, our national and domestic security, our education system, our health care system, and advances drug trafficking. If there are two areas where Trump must act unilaterally, it is as Joe Biden did, on the issue of our energy security and illegal immigation." "If Republicans find themselves in control of both Houses, then develop a Newt Gingrich-style 'Contract with America', not some 150-page document as Kevin McCarthy created, but 10 simple policy solutions that they will enact in the first 100 days ... and freaking do it!" West said. "If Republicans find themselves in control of only one of the bicameral legislative bodies, hopefully it is the House of Representatives, then restore regular order. Stop the circular firing squad antics, and pass the legislation that relates to the president's restoration of constitutional governance agenda. It is time to do as Ronald Reagan admonished, paint in bold colors, no more pretty pastels. The time for excuses has ended," he declared. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Every so often, a graduation speech will transcend its time and place, echoing in the culture long after its original hearers have settled into the disappointments and compromises of adult life. By now, it’s safe to say that Harrison Butker did not give such a speech.Generally, a speaker’s best shot at immortality is to include the kind of bite-sized whimsical nuggets of wisdom that appeal to the wide-eyed, rarin’-to-go 21-year-old in all of us. These can be cutesy, nonbinding reflections on the meaning of life (David Foster Wallace: “This is water”), reminders that there is no authority higher than the individual (Steve Jobs: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life”), or vague, quasi-religious exhortations to express yourself (Neil Gaiman: “Make good art”).Instead, Butker went with clunkers like: “Never be afraid to profess the one holy, Catholic, and apostolic church, for this is the church that Jesus Christ established, through which we receive sanctifying grace.”Don’t get me wrong, this played very well with Butker’s intended audience: the devout young Catholic men and women comprising Benedictine College’s class of 2024.But nonbelievers found such language baffling when encountering it on social media. Benedictine College could have avoided the confusion by having a simultaneous interpreter on stage. “Jesus Christ” doesn’t sound so threatening when you realize it’s merely Christianese for “the universe” or “living your truth.”In speaking so rashly and honestly, Butker misunderstood the assignment. In place of the usual harmless bromides, he dared to give actual advice.Strangely, many Catholic observers found Butker’s remarks troubling as well. Mainly, his contention that most of the young women in the audience would be happiest if they emulated his wife, Isabelle, who abandoned her career dreams to stay home and raise their children.Again, the Catholics to whom this was addressed didn’t seem to mind. After Butker choked up describing how much he and his family owed to Isabelle, the audience applauded for 18 seconds straight.But older, wiser members of the church rolled their eyes at Butker’s gall in thinking he could extrapolate from his wife’s example a prescription for all young women. A multimillionaire professional athlete is insulated from the economic and social conditions that make single-income families (especially with many children) increasingly difficult to pull off.Even more crucially, Butker doesn’t seem aware of how difficult it is to find a suitable husband in the first place. The lingering effects of the sexual revolution, newly energized by app-based dating, encourage feckless, noncommittal behavior in men. The marriage market is broken, and even the most proactive bride-to-be must consider the possibility that she may be on her own for well into her twenties and even thirties.Excellent points, all. But I detect in some of the criticism a hint of disdain for Butker’s lack of nuance and sophistication. I detect it in myself.It’s a bit of the valedictorian’s disdain for the homecoming king. Who is this dumb, good-looking jock, so handsomely rewarded by secular society, to speak about the challenges of living a truly Catholic life? Is this half-baked collection of clichés, delivered in stilted, halting speech and interrupted by maudlin sentimentality, supposed to pass for wisdom?The same questions occur to me. Speaking as someone who’s only been Catholic for a few years, I humbly suggest that here we might check our own pride.Catholics with an unconventionally large number of children (as someone with a relatively modest three, I don’t count myself) may be familiar with a certain passive-aggressive defensiveness beneath the well-meaning comments of strangers. “Oh, I could never handle that many kids. Just two drive me nuts as it is!”It’s as if the mere choice to live differently — to defy the unspoken agreement about what’s “normal” — is a personal indictment.Of course, we’re used to thinking of this defensiveness as running in the opposite direction. As H.L. Mencken famously defined it, puritanism is “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”Fair enough, but this suggests a corollary definition for liberalism, surely more prominent than its counterpart these days: “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, has rejected your assumptions about what it means to be happy.”Convicted by convictionI vividly recall the disorientation of my first serious encounter with such alternative beliefs. That it didn’t happen until my early 40s is either a testament to God’s providence or my arrogance.It was during the lead-up to the 2016 election. I had reconnected with an old high school friend, only to discover that the gothy, rebellious drama-club girl of my fond recollections had somewhere along the line become a Catholic pro-life activist.She promulgated her beliefs with the same unyielding, impolitic vigor with which she used to adhere to punk orthodoxy. After a few pointless skirmishes in the replies, I figured it was better to agree to disagree.But I remained fascinated by the posts and articles she shared. Who were these people, and how could they believe such nonsense? I gaped at such oddities as a hipster atheist chick who considered abortion misogynistic, a cheerful black guy who unironically proclaimed “all lives matter” when explaining the skewed demographics of terminated pregnancies, and a gay dude who truly believed his faith demanded that he remain celibate. What first drew me to these characters where the pleasures of hate-reading: not only were their opinions beyond the pale, but they were also expressed in thuddingly earnest and prosaic language. I could never agree with writers who wrote with so little cleverness and panache.What I didn’t realize then was that obsessive focus on style is often in inverse relation to the belief that you have something important to say. The more I reveled in their bumpkin-like obliviousness to how they sounded, the more I had the sneaking suspicion that what really kept me reading was their utter conviction.Had I been less confident in my total immunity to religion, I might have walked away. But I wasn’t about to let this growing awareness spoil my fun. This was simply too delightfully cringeworthy to stop. So, I kept reading and clicking and watching and relishing the sheer misguidedness of it all until one thing led to another, and I was received into the Catholic Church during Easter Vigil in 2019.I guess I showed them!Benefit of the doubtAny Catholic convert who is remotely online quickly realizes that the church is no haven from the ideological bickering and name-calling that divides the larger world. In fact, it might even be worse.I try to stay out of it for the health of my soul, but I’m only human. In life, I’m hardly “trad.” My wife makes more money than I do and often travels for work. We didn’t marry until age 34 (after a few years of cohabitation) and didn’t have our first kid until 36. I made no attempt to drag her or my kids along with me into the One True Faith. I go to Mass every Sunday. They don’t.And yet, I do find myself leaning “conservative” in my thinking. I faithfully attend a Novus Ordo parish pastored by priests I greatly respect, yet part of me wishes the local Latin Mass were closer. I’m allergic to anything that suggests “outreach” or “changing with the times,” from calls for female priests to Fr. James Martin’s bridge-building.For the most part, I believe I’m right but will be the first to admit that despite my voracious reading, I’m still a relative beginner. And that my rigidity may betray a certain insecurity. If the church is wrong about divorce and gay marriage, what else is she wrong about?Nonetheless, the twists and turns of my “faith journey” (as they called it in Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults) have led me to give a guy like Harrison Butker the benefit of the doubt. I think back to long-forgotten Facebook posts that first baited the hook.Had my old friend been more moderate in how she stated her beliefs, I barely would’ve noticed. Had she used the language of certain prominent liberal Catholics and framed abortion as a “complicated” problem requiring “dialogue” and “listening to women’s experience,” I would’ve said “that’s nice” and moved on, happy to let my intellectual inferiors enjoy their demented little hobbies.But someone I knew, someone I thought was one of us, coming right out and saying abortion was murder? That aggression simply couldn’t stand.Many of Butker’s critics, including the Benedictine Sisters who founded Benedictine College, seemed to interpret his remarks as a veiled declaration that working outside the home is fundamentally incompatible with womanhood.Even if this were a wholly reasonable interpretation, surely the young Catholics exposed to Butker’s rhetoric are catechized well enough not to mistake his opinion for official church teaching. And surely, they’ve seen enough of the modern world in their 20 or so years to realize that he may not be right, exactly, but he isn’t necessarily wrong, either.Either way, Butker’s address was for them, not us. In speaking so rashly and honestly, Butker misunderstood the assignment. In place of the usual harmless, carpe-diem-but-also-be-nice bromides, he dared to give actual advice.The problem with advice is that it implies the existence of a wrong thing to do. That’s always going to ruffle some feathers. But if we really believe that college is a time for students to confront ideas that challenge their habits of thought and cherished assumptions, there’s no harm in giving them one last thing to grow on as we send them off.Even from as unlikely a sage as the player with the second-highest field goal percentage in pro football history. If something good can come from Nazareth, then why not the NFL?

The problem with comedian Bill Maher is he swallowed the green pill and rejected the red one. The green pill (capitalism) is only effective when taken in combination with the red pill. Greed, not moral clarity or cultural enlightenment, fuels Maher’s outreach to political conservatives. He’s Gordon Gekko from the movie “Wall Street.” Absent religious conviction, Maher has succumbed to the religion of money and its ability to solve all problems. Bill Maher is not a common-sense leftist. There is no such thing. Maher is a common-sense businessman.Remember what Gekko said: “The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed — for lack of a better word — is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed — you mark my words — will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.”I find Bill Maher entertaining and tolerable. I don’t find him trustworthy or particularly authentic. Monday night, the HBO talk show host participated in Greg Gutfeld’s nightly roundtable on Fox News. The cross-pollination between conservative and liberal comedic pundits was hailed as a big moment, a thawing of the ice among political rivals, a further burnishing of Maher’s brand as a common-sense leftist. He’s not a common-sense leftist. There is no such thing. It’s the equivalent of calling me a low-calorie obese person. It’s not true. Maher is a common-sense businessman. He’s “Republicans buy comedy show tickets, too.” He wants to be the Michael Jordan of joke cracking. So, with a new book to sell, Maher joined Dr. Drew, Kat Timpf, and Dana Perino on Greg Gutfeld’s set and repeated his middle-of-the-road, surface-level talking points. “I can’t hate you,” he said. “I’ve said it a billion times. You can hate Trump, you can’t hate all the people who like him. It’s half the country. I’m certainly not blind to Donald Trump’s faults. I get it why people choose to vote for him. You know, somebody who’s conservative once said to me, ‘What you don’t get, you liberals don’t get about Trump is that we don’t like it either. We just see him as a bulwark against the nonsense on the left.’ And I understand that because there is a lot of nonsense on the left and that’s in my book, too.”Nothing pleases some political conservatives more than affirmation from celebrity leftists. Whenever a simple-minded rapper disavows Biden and supports Trump, it’s treated as an epistle. I don’t get warm and fuzzy when idiots support Trump. I warm when I see people following the truth wherever it leads. That’s what bothers me about Maher. He’s smart. But he’s unwilling to follow the truth wherever it leads. Maher still pretends that January 6 was some sort of threat to democracy. He still pretends that Donald Trump is the second coming of Adolf Hitler. “Trump is someone who does not concede elections,” Maher said Monday night. “It’s the most important thing. You don’t seem to see it that way. That’s the most important thing that’s going on in this country. He didn’t concede the last election. He’s not going to concede this election.”“He’s an insurrectionist who doesn’t believe in democracy ... he’s also insane and a criminal.”The truth is more important than any political affiliation. Maher is not a slave to truth. Maher and other leftists have invented a new crime for Trump. Felony election denial. When Hillary Clinton or any Democrat denies the results of an election, it’s a simple misdemeanor. When Trump does it, it’s a crime worthy of prison time. Calling Trump an “insurrectionist” is a flat-out lie. There was no insurrection. Frustrated voters walking around the Capitol were not trying to overturn the 2020 election or overthrow the government. This is my problem with Maher. He’s taking no real risks. He’s playing both sides. He’s found the sweet spot for entertainers and populists. He can smoke weed and party with leftists and proudly tell them he hates Trump. And he can sell comedy show tickets to conservatives and crack jokes about the liberals who believe men can get pregnant.The truth divides and bruises. Maher is afraid of being truly divisive except with one group — people of religious faith. He’s unafraid of Christians because he knows that Christians actually practice tolerance. We respect Bill Maher’s right to be a greedy idiot.

Halo's Forge mode has always been a haven of creativity. Matchmaking in Reach was filled with obstacle courses, Grifball, infection, and even a made where you scaled a ramp while avoiding falling debris. Halo Infinite has mostly kept that tradition alive (when Forge finally arrived), offering up fan-made tabletop RPGs and even an entire battle royale mode. Now though, 343 has sanctioned an entire Call of Duty Zombies tribute and put it in matchmaking for a limited time. Continue reading Free Halo mode brings CoD Zombies inspired co-op for a limited time MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Halo Infinite system requirements, Halo Infinite Bosses, Halo Infinite ranks

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