I wouldn’t have lasted a month before being shot.

I would almost certainly have hesitated if a perpetrator ignored my commands and climbed back into his car, only to come out with a loaded Glock in his hand.

Thus, I am naturally very reticent…

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The American Right is in the middle of its most dangerous moment since 1964.

A loud and growing chorus -- led by Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, and Florida state representative Randy Fine -- has declared open ideological war on Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and anyone who questions unlimited U.S. aid to Israel or dares interview Nick Fuentes.

Their weapon of choice is excommunication: public denunciations, donor pressure, and calls for primaries.

The goal is noble in their eyes -- defending Israel and marginalizing antisemites.

The result, however, is catastrophic.

Point 1: Splintering the coalition is electoral suicide

Donald Trump won in 2024 with the broadest Republican coalition in modern history: 74 million votes, the first GOP popular-vote majority since 1988, and massive gains among young men (up 18 points with under-30 males versus 2020, per AP VoteCast). Exit polls showed 41% of 18–29-year-old men backed Trump -- the highest Republican share ever recorded for that demographic.

That youth surge was powered by economic frustration, anti-war sentiment, and distrust of institutions. If the MAGA tent shrinks to exclude anyone skeptical of $20 billion annual foreign commitments while American cities crumble, the 2026 midterms become a Democrat massacre.

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The Left -- currently led by AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Zohran Mamdani, and the DSA wing -- will not hesitate to exploit a divided Right. History is merciless: the GOP lost the House in 1964 after the Goldwater purists purged the Rockefeller wing. We cannot repeat that mistake when the stakes are infinitely higher.

Point 2: Jewish safety and the tragic irony of the purge

No group suffered more from real Nazis than the Jewish people. Six million murdered, an existential trauma that still echoes. When Nick Fuentes or anonymous X accounts traffic in tropes such as Jewish control of media and politics, the reflex to isolate and condemn is completely understandable.

Yet the cold strategic reality is this: handing Congress to a Democrat Party whose progressive caucus now contains open opponents of Israel’s existence will hurt Jews far more than a few thousand edgelords on the internet ever could. In 2025, 68% of House Democrats voted against a resolution simply condemning “from the river to the sea” rhetoric.

The ADL’s own 2024 audit showed antisemitic incidents in the U.S. spiking 337% after October 7 -- driven overwhelmingly by far-left and Islamist sources, not paleocon Twitter.

AOC’s squad grows stronger every cycle; MAGA’s pro-Israel record in government (Abraham Accords, Golan Heights recognition, moving the embassy) remains the strongest in history.

Throwing away that alliance simply to police speech on the margins is a tragic miscalculation of the actual threat vector.

Point 3: The excommunication campaign is failing -- spectacularly

• Tucker Carlson’s subscriber base on his own network grew 28% in the three weeks after his Fuentes interview (Nov 2025 data, Tubulus Analytics).

• The Fuentes conversation itself has 21 million views and counting.

• Candace Owens’s daily YouTube show averaged 1.4 million viewers per episode in Q4 2025 -- higher than Shapiro’s peak daily numbers.

• On X, posts containing “Ben Shapiro” + “excommunication” or “purge” generated 4.2 million impressions in the last 30 days; sentiment analysis shows 72% negative toward the tactic (Brandwatch, Nov 2025).

• Marjorie Taylor Greene’s fundraising actually increased 34% after Trump called her a “traitor” over Ukraine/Israel aid votes (FEC filings).

• Nick Fuentes’s Cozy.tv concurrent viewership is up 312% year-over-year -- precisely because every public denunciation drives curious zoomers straight to him.

In other words, the Streisand Effect is on steroids.

The more loudly Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin swing the “banhammer,” the more the targets grow. The excommunicators are burning their own cultural capital to feed their opponents’ rise.

Point 4: Conversation and facts beat cancellation every time

The MAGA base is not antisemitic; it is exhausted.

Young white men -- the demographic most receptive to Fuentes’s messaging -- face the worst economic prospects of any cohort since the Great Depression: real wages down 4% since 2021 for under-30 non-college males, student debt at $1.7 trillion, homeownership rates at 1930s levels.

Fuentes tells them “the system is rigged by a hostile elite that hates you.” That diagnosis lands because parts of it feel true. Where he goes wrong -- and where he must be called out -- is the scapegoat.

The villain is not “the Jews.”

The villain is a bipartisan ruling class that shipped their factories to China, addicted their cousins to fentanyl, and sent their brothers to die in forever wars while spending $150 billion in Ukraine and $20 billion in Gaza with no accountability.

Direct the righteous anger at the actual architects -- McConnell, Pelosi, the Davos set, the military-industrial complex -- and Fuentes’s appeal collapses. We win with truth, not with excommunication.

1. The pro-Trump, pro-MAGA path forward is clear and unifying: Reaffirm ironclad support for Israel’s right to exist and defend itself.

2. Demand transparency and debate on every foreign dollar -- because American citizens should come first.

3. Expose actual antisemites without alienating millions of patriotic young men who just want a future.

4. Keep the coalition big enough to win.

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It’s often said that the LPE is no longer considered a valid argument. It supposedly has succumbed to purely logical objections raised by the Christian…

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These experts claimed that there are structures underlying biological organisms, on both the anatomical and molecular level, that are so complex – “irreducibly complex,” as they put it – that the only plausible explanation is that these structures did not arise through the evolutionary process of natural selection but were, instead, planned by an intelligent designer.

The leaders of the movement insisted that they were making a strictly scientific proposal, not a religious one, and that the designer to which they were appealing was not necessarily God. The movement was met with skepticism, even outright hostility, by many scientists, legal professionals and the media who derided it as pseudo-science, even likening the movement to the so-called “creation science” popular among some conservative Christians.

Overview of the Intelligent Design Movement

Future historians could date the founding of the ID movement to the encounter in the early 1990s that Phillip Johnson, a University of California professor of law, had with Richard Dawkins’s polemical and bestselling 1987 interpretation of evolution, The Blind Watchmaker. By his own account, Johnson was appalled by the unproven assumptions that undergirded Dawkins’s book and set about, with lawyerly thoroughness, to examine and rebut these assumptions in a series of equally best-selling books, most famously Darwin on Trial (1993). Johnson himself is a lawyer, not a scientist, and he focused his attack on Dawkins and evolution by concentrating on the unproven philosophical assumptions and faulty logic that, he claimed, lie throughout The Blind Watchmaker.

Very soon after Darwin on Trial appeared, however, others joined the ID crusade, including some with scientific credentials. Perhaps most influential was the Catholic biochemist Michael Behe who did his best to provide the scientific ammunition that Johnson lacked in his assault on standard evolutionary theory. In two influential books, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (1996) and The Edge of Evolution (2007), Behe attempted to provide a theoretical framework for the claim that the theory of unguided evolution does not, and even cannot, explain all of the complex biological phenomena in nature.

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Behe was joined by the mathematician William Dembski and together they developed a positive vision of a scientific alternative to standard evolutionary theory which they called Intelligent Design. Although Behe is a Catholic and Dembski Eastern Orthodox, not all proponents of ID are religious. Some of those open to ID arguments, such as the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, are impressed by the philosophical criticisms that ID presents. What’s more, ID proponents such as Behe go out of their way to stress that ID is a scientific movement, a criticism of standard evolutionary theory from within science itself.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Intelligent Design was championed by the Discovery Institute in Seattle and by some conservative and evangelical political organizations. These sought to pressure local school boards to include ID ideas and materials as part of the teaching of evolution in schools. This led to a famous court case in 2005, reminiscent of the original Scopes Monkey Trial, in which a conservative judge and practicing Lutheran ruled that ID could not be taught in schools because it is “not science,” fails to meet the requirements that “limit science to testable, natural explanations” and constitutes an attempt to impermissibly advance a particular religious viewpoint.

At the center of ID’s critique of standard evolutionary theory lies the concept of “irreducible complexity.” According to Behe, there are entities within biological systems that are so complex that they could not have evolved through the normal pathways of evolution, that is, through random genetic mutations and natural selection. Among the entities that Behe cites are the bacterial flagella, blood clotting and the elaborate assemblies of protein molecules that appear, within cells, like “an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines.”

In Darwin’s Black Box, Behe defined an irreducibly complex system as “a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.” He adds that such a system “cannot be produced directly… by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition non-functional. In other words, for Behe an irreducibly complex system has parts that have no other functions than those of that particular system and which are essential to that system.

Behe points to the bacterial flagellum as an example.

The flagellum is a kind of microscopic propeller system used by different types of bacteria for propulsion. As Behe explains, it consists of a long, hair-like filament embedded in the cell membranes that is attached to a rotor drive. Powerful electron microscopes have revealed that this rotor drive is powered by energy produced by ion exchange through a flow of acid into the bacterial membrane and which turns the filament like a propeller. Behe claims that the three parts that make up the flagellum – a paddle, rotor and motor – show that it is irreducibly complex.

“Gradual evolution of the flagellum… therefore faces mammoth hurdles,” he writes, by which he means it almost certainly was designed, not evolved through small, incremental changes over billions of years. “Even though we are told that all biology must be seen through the lens of evolution, no scientist has ever published a model to account for the gradual evolution of this extraordinary molecular machine,” Behe writes.

Denis Alexander’s Criticisms of Intelligent Design

Sophisticated ID advocates like Behe concede that the natural selection mechanism proposed by standard evolutionary theory provides reasonable explanations for some complex systems, just not for others – such as the bacterial flagellum. Behe agrees that evolution can explain biological complexity in principle and merely argues that we have no evidence for how it could do so in specific cases. According to critics of ID like the Christian biochemist Denis Alexander, however, the problem with arguments like this – so-called arguments from ignorance – is that new information has a way of popping up unexpectedly and ruining your case. For example, Alexander argues that scientists have discovered that some of the parts that make up the flagellum do have functions in other organisms, such as the ion exchange energy system that powers the flagellum filament. This seems to undercut the perception of design in this case because this part is not unique to the flagellum.

Alexander makes the same criticism for another example of an irreducibly complex system that Behe proposes: blood clotting. In Darwin’s Black Box, Behe argues that the complex biochemical system that is blood clotting – the way the body forms blood clots to stop bleeding when someone cuts his or her finger, for example – is irreducibly complex. Behe describes in great, professional detail the myriad steps that go into forming blood clots – how proteins called Hageman factor stick to cells near a wound, and then another protein called HMK activates the first proteins to turn another protein, called pre-kallikrein, into kallikrein, which then starts a whole chain reaction of complex biochemical transformations that result in the attraction of sticky platelets that flow through a wound and eventually congeal into a plug that stops the bleeding.

It’s an unbelievably complex, delicately balanced process involving a “menagerie of biochemicals” that Behe likens to a Rube Goldberg machine and before which, he says, “Darwinian theory falls silent.” What Behe means by this is that biologists have no explanation for how such a clotting mechanism could have gradually arisen through incremental, evolutionary steps.

Alexander’s reply is that this is simply incorrect. In fact, he claims that an evolutionary mechanism could explain how blood clotting arose “quite easily.” The details are difficult for a non-expert to follow, but in essence Alexander argues that all that is required to show an evolutionary pathway is to find simpler blood clotting systems in other animals from which larger animals evolved – for example, starfish.

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They are waking up, and, perhaps for the first time, finally realizing just how murderous their heroes on the political Left really are.

The cold-blooded assassination of conservative activ…

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The European Union has began aggressive implementation of the Digital Services Act (DSA), an Orwellian legal regime that compels platforms to swiftly remove vaguely defined “illegal content” across all member states, which incl…

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This week, I’ve been in Istanbul, visiting historic mosques and reading the Quran back at my hotel at night.

As is my custom, I tal…

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After wandering the ancient streets of Istanbul’s Sultanahmet district, past the towering minarets of the Blue Mosque and the Byzantine dome of Hagia Sophia, I finally located the nondescript building.

The setting…

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The Greek vendors just looked blankly at me, bored, not saying a word.

In the Middle East, they would be all over you, hawking their wares, asking you your na…

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During the last Hamas-Israel war, in the summer of 2014, I was staying at the Catholic research center at Tantur, next door to Bethlehem.

Once a week, the center leaders would say a rosary to Our Lady of the Wall—the Wall being the massive concrete border wall, 30 feet high, that Israel built along the entire Green Line of the West Bank, from north of Je…

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You’re experiencing two complete civilizations layered on top of each other like some incredible historical sandwich.

There’s Christian Rome, the realm of the Vatican with its soaring basilicas and countless churches.

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And then there’s Roman Rome—the Rome of the Caesars, the gladiators, the empire that once ruled the known world.

Behind me in the video is the magnificent statue of Marcus Aurelius, one of the truly good Roman emperors.

This bronze masterpiece has quite the story.

I first stumbled upon it back in 1979 or 1980 during my initial Roman adventure, and it absolutely captivated me.

The last time I visited, it had vanished, whisked away for restoration and tucked safely inside some museum.

But now it’s back where it belongs, back in its original spot, and seeing it again felt like greeting an old friend.

Marcus Aurelius represents something profound about Rome’s dual nature. He was a Stoic philosopher — emperor, virtuous and contemplative, ruling at the very moment when pagan Rome was beginning its slow transformation into what would become Christian Rome.

As he himself wrote in his Meditations, he embodied the Roman ideal of duty and virtue that would later find new expression in Christian Rome.

This statue sits in the heart of Roman Rome, practically next door to the Forum where Julius Caesar’s body was burned after his assassination.

You can see those imposing statues of Roman senators looking down, and everywhere those four letters that define the Roman spirit: SPQR — Senatus Populusque Romanus, “The Senate and People of Rome.”

These letters are literally everywhere in the city, even stamped on modern manhole covers, because they represent something that never really died.

But here’s what’s remarkable about Rome. You can’t walk fifty feet without crossing from one civilization to the other.

The Romans themselves understood their city’s grandeur.

Emperor Augustus famously boasted, “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.”

By 117 AD, their empire stretched across the entire Mediterranean and beyond, with Rome as its beating heart—the first city in history to exceed one million residents.

The monuments they left behind still take your breath away. The Colosseum, seating 50,000 screaming spectators, remains the ultimate symbol of Imperial might.

Saint Venerable Bede captured its significance perfectly: “Rome will exist as long as the Colosseum does; when the Colosseum falls, so will Rome; when Rome falls, so will the world.”

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Walking through the Roman Forum, you’re treading where senators debated the fate of empires. The Pantheon, dedicated around 126 AD to all the gods, still boasts the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome nearly 2,000 years later—a testament to Roman engineering genius.

Then came the seismic shift.

In 312 AD, Emperor Constantine had his vision at the Battle of Milvian Bridge—”In this sign (the Cross) conquer”—and everything changed.

The Edict of Milan in AD 313 granted religious freedom, and suddenly temples were becoming churches. By AD 380, Christianity was the official state religion under Theodosius I.

Christian Rome rose from the ashes of persecution to become the spiritual capital of the world. St. Peter’s Basilica, built over the site of St. Peter’s martyrdom, became the world’s largest church and the heart of global Catholicism.

Mark Twain perfectly captured its majesty: “From the dome of St. Peter’s one can see every notable object in Rome… a panorama that is varied, extensive, beautiful to the eye, and more illustrious in history than any other in Europe.”

The Vatican Museums now house the world’s richest art collection, including Michelangelo’s breathtaking Sistine Chapel.

The city boasts over 900 churches—from the grand basilicas like Santa Maria Maggiore to tiny neighborhood chapels, each preserving centuries of faith, art, and history.

What fascinates me most is how these two Romes don’t just coexist—they’re completely intermingled. The Pantheon itself tells this story: originally dedicated to all the Roman gods, it was converted to a Christian church in 608 AD when Emperor Phocas donated it to Pope Boniface IV. Same building, completely different spiritual universe.

The great filmmaker Federico Fellini understood this perfectly: “In ‘Roma,’ I wanted to get across the idea that underneath Rome today is ancient Rome. So close. I am always conscious of that, and it thrills me.”

That’s exactly what you feel walking these streets.

You’re literally walking on layers of history, with pagan grandeur and Christian splendor sometimes occupying the very same stones.

Today, Rome draws over 10 million visitors annually, with the Colosseum attracting 7.7 million and the Vatican Museums over 6 million. Each visitor experiences what Goethe meant when he wrote, “Only in Rome is it possible to understand Rome.”

As Lord Byron called it “the city of the soul,” Rome remains what it has always been—Caput Mundi, the “Capital of the World.”

Whether you’re drawn to the echoes of gladiatorial combat or the whispered prayers of pilgrims, you’ll discover that in Rome, yesterday and forever meet in every single step.

Robert J. Hutchinson is the author of numerous books of popular history, including Searching for Jesus: New Discoveries in the Quest for Jesus of Nazareth (Thomas Nelson), The Dawn of Christianity (Thomas Nelson), The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible (Regnery) and When in Rome: A Journal of Life in Vatican City (Doubleday). Email him at: roberthutchinson@substack.com

As of 2025, updated figures from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center show that college enrollment in the U.S. has fallen by about 15% since 2011, which is a decline of roughly 2.7 to 2.8 million students.

The decline has hit every sector, public and private, four-year and community college.

What’s more, 41 percent of students who start college fail to finish after six years, often because they can’t afford to continue.

In 2025, the average net cost to students in the U.S., after financial aid, is $20,800 per year for public universities and $36,000 for private universities.

As a result, fully 70 percent of U.S. college students now incur student loan debt. 

The most recent figures are that some 44 million Americans now owe an estimated 1.7 trillion in student loan debt – an average of $41,000 per student for the class of 2029.  That’s more than all auto loan or credit card debt.

This is not true in most of the world. 

Only Americans tolerate what is, in effect, a systematic fleecing by the higher education establishment – which has raised costs at 8 times that of U.S. wages over the past decades.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the cost to attend a four-year public university has risen by an astonishing 31 times since 1969, far outstripping the rate of inflation. The average cost of tuition at U.S. schools is now a whopping $25,000, after aid.

In contrast, university education throughout most of Europe is virtually free.

That’s partly because European universities are stripped down, no-nonsense affairs with an emphasis on learning over lifestyle and a centuries-old commitment to meritocratic testing as the key to advancement. 

A few years ago, during a research trip, I toured a number of universities in Berlin and Vienna, schools where the likes of Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein received their educations. 

There are no climbing walls at Berlin’s famous Humboldt University, no gourmet cafeterias at the University of Vienna. 

The marble floors are cracked, the walls often need paint.  German students complain that there are often not enough desks for everyone to sit.

As a result, the cost to attend these prestigious universities, even for foreign students, is often less than $5,000 per year.

The average net cost for students at an undergraduate university is $500 per year in Germany, Norway and Finland, and $182 per year in France.

Netherlands, Spain and Austria can be more expensive with undergraduate tuition being between $1,800 and $4,500 per year.

(The UK is more like America, with the cost to attend elite universities like Oxford or Cambridge being as much as $12,000 per year for a British student.)

Coronavirus gave online education a big boost

Providentially, the explosion in online classes that the coronavirus crisis forced upon America’s universities and colleges was the catalyst for a long-needed reform of America’s over-indulged, over-priced higher education establishment.

A year before the pandemic, I took a year-long online course in German through a community college.

I travel to Germany frequently on business, and, after seven years of visits, wanted a thorough overview of German grammar and basic vocabulary.  It was an excellent course, difficult and thorough. 

My teacher prepared weekly videos that summarized the topics of that week.  I had about 15 to 20 separate assignments to complete every week, including video dialogues, along with quizzes and tests. 

I also interacted with my fellow students through Skype and telephone calls.  My professor also spoke to us regularly to see how well our conversation skills, practiced with fellow students, were progressing.

The course surprised me.  I have taken “in person” language classes most of my life – including four years of French in college and two years of Hebrew in Israel.  

Yet I was astonished to find that my online German course was nearly as rigorous as, and in many ways more challenging than, the traditional language classes I have taken in which 40 students gather daily in classrooms. 

I also saved a tremendous amount of time that would have come with driving 30 minutes to and from the college, finding parking, and sitting at a desk every day for 50 minutes.

The cost:  $264 per semester. 

Had I taken the same class at the private Catholic college my daughter then attended, I would have paid $7,500 per semester – or 28 times more.

Of course, it’s true that some fields, such as engineering and medicine, require intensive, in-person instruction that simply cannot be replicated adequately online.  And there is no doubt that at least some traditional in-classroom teaching would be ideal.

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Newman’s elevation, announced on July 31, 2025, finally gives proper due to a thinker whose ideas influenced not just Catholic theology but…

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I mean, they’re frozen solid, not moving, not generating any energy.

They were once alive... but now they’re no longer alive.

But are they DEAD?

And if they’re dead, does that mean thawing them out and reanimating them is bringing the dead back to life?

The Nature of Life and Its Definitions

And what does all this mean for the nature of life itself?

And are there any implications for what it means to be a human being?

If we’re not a continuous biological process, but one that can be put on pause – put into a non-living state for decades, if not centuries – then what does that mean for life after death?

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I always took the common sense view that a living thing is radically different from a non-living thing.

Life is notoriously difficult to define, but biologists usually say things like life is a self-sustaining, complex, organized chemical system that grows and develops, responds to external stimuli, can reproduce and adapts to its environment. (Which is why crystals and viruses are not alive.)

When something can no longer do these things, we usually say it’s dead.

But what about a frozen embryo?

The State of Suspended Animation

Well, they’re NOT alive according to most criteria.

They do not exhibit the active biological processes that define life in most scientific definitions.

Their metabolic activity is halted, and they do not grow or respond to stimuli while frozen.

But they’re not exactly dead, either – not if you define death as a permanent state in which life processes are irreversibly halted.

Doctors will tell you that frozen embryos exist in a state of suspended animation, neither dead nor alive, similar to hibernation in animals or dormancy in seeds.

They are not alive since they lack active biological functions.

But they’re not dead because they retain the potential to restore normal biological function after thawing and implantation.

I’m asking this because I recently met a former frozen embryo.

A Personal Encounter and Global Practice

He was a cute red-haired kid, about twelve, whose doctor parents created him in a test tube 20 years ago, kept him in a freezer for 10 years, and then re-animated him once they had time in their busy schedules to raise him properly.

The kid was implanted in his 50-year-old mother’s womb, and then brought into the world like any normal kid. She looks like his grandmother but is actually his mother.

This is not all that unusual.

Governments deliberately hide data on this practice because of a substantial amount of societal resistance to it – although the Frankenstein doctors who pioneered this technology are a powerful lobby.

However, it’s estimated that hundreds of thousands—likely well over a million— children have been born worldwide after being frozen embryos, at least temporarily.

In fact, experts say that the majority of children now born from IVF come from frozen embryos.

The Technical Process of Embryo Freezing

The way it works is like this.

Eggs are fertilized with sperm in a laboratory to create embryos, which are then cultured for several days until they reach a suitable developmental stage (often the blastocyst stage).

Embryos are then treated with cryoprotectant solutions—special fluids that replace water in the cells—to prevent ice crystal formation, which could damage the cells during freezing.

The embryos are then rapidly cooled in liquid nitrogen, instantly turning them into a glass-like state without ice crystals – a process known as vitrification.

They are then placed in tanks of liquid nitrogen at extremely low temperatures (around -196°C or -321°F), which halts all biological activity and preserves them indefinitely.

When the time comes to reanimate them, embryos are removed from storage and quickly warmed to room temperature, then to body temperature (37°C).

They are gradually soaked in special solutions to remove cryoprotectants and restore water to the cells, reversing the freezing process.

The Thawing and Implantation Process

Thawed embryos are checked for survival and “quality.” If viable, they are placed in culture media to recover and resume normal metabolism.

Those found sufficiently stable are then transferred into the uterus to attempt pregnancy.

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Not surprisingly, many nations ban embryo freezing outright.

The practice is illegal in many European nations, including Italy and Germany, those nations with experience in unethical medical experimentation on human beings. (Nazi Germany had long experience experimenting on embryos in their eugenic quest for perfect Aryan babies.)

It is highly regulated in most other countries.

Some countries, particularly those influenced by religious or prolife perspectives, consider embryos to possess significant moral status or even personhood from the moment of fertilization.

Freezing, discarding, or using embryos for research is viewed as morally problematic.

The process of freezing and thawing can damage embryos, and surplus embryos are often discarded or left unused, raising ethical questions about the creation and disposal of human life, even if it a state of suspended animation.

Studies have shown that children born from “FET” (frozen embryo transfer) are at higher risk of childhood cancer than children born after fresh embryo transfer and spontaneous conception.

Finally, there are concerns about what happens to embryos when individuals or couples cannot be contacted or no longer wish to use them, leading to dilemmas over indefinite storage or destruction.

It’s estimated that there may now be more than 1 million frozen embryos locked away in liquid nitrogen freezers in a kind of legal and ethical limbo.

The American Exception and Statistics

The exception is the United States... where the overwhelming majority, 78%, of all embryo transfers using frozen embryos have been done.

The practice of manufacturing children in the lab for later use is largely an American pastime.

In the United States, between 2004 and 2019, there were 21,060 frozen donated embryo transfers, resulting in 8,457 live births from donated embryos alone.

This does not include the much larger number of births from non-donated (autologous) frozen embryos.

The longest-known successful frozen embryo transfer resulted in twins born in 2022 from embryos that had been frozen for 30 years.

Individual cases, such as Emma Wren Gibson, born from an embryo frozen for 24 years, highlight the viability of long-term embryo storage.

Not all parents are proud of their foray into “The Island of Dr. Moreau” reproductive experimentation.

The parents of the former frozen embryo I met, the cute kid, do not want him to know about his origins.

I wondered: why not?

The Ethical Implications of Frozen Embryos

If it’s all completely kosher from an ethical point of view, manufacturing children in a lab for storage and then later use, at your convenience, why not talk about it?

Why is it something to hide from the very people who resulted from it?

At the moment, I’m just interested in the metaphysical issues — what frozen embryos say about what life is… and what human beings are.

Strangely or not-so-strangely, given the lack of curiosity in our corporate media, most Americans know very little about frozen embryos.

Polls show that most Americans support in vitro fertilization, creating test tube babies, but few really understand that “extra” embryos are frozen and stored for later use.

Some polls show that 79% of Democrats and 63% of Republicans say IVF access is a good thing, indicating bipartisan support.

However, about one-quarter of Americans favor banning the destruction of embryos created through IVF, while 40% are neutral and about one-third are opposed.

Around 30% say the statement “human life begins at conception, so a fertilized egg is a person with the same rights as a pregnant woman” describes their views extremely or very well, but even among this group, a majority still support IVF access.

What do we do with the 1 million frozen embryos locked away in a state between life and death?

Catholic moral theologian Kent Lasnoski argues that these embryos exist in an unjust state of “suspended animation” - neither truly alive nor dead - and that Catholic teaching obligates believers to seek their good rather than leaving them indefinitely frozen or deliberately exposing them to death through thawing without implantation.

Drawing on Church documents like Donum vitae, he contends that maintaining embryos in frozen storage constitutes treating them as property and slaves, while thawing them without attempting implantation would be a deliberate exposure to death, both of which are morally impermissible.

It’s a conundrum that only our amoral medical profession could create, a profession that equates what is technologically possible with what is both permissible and morally good.

Robert J. Hutchinson is the author of numerous books of popular history, including Searching for Jesus: New Discoveries in the Quest for Jesus of Nazareth (Thomas Nelson), The Dawn of Christianity (Thomas Nelson), The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible (Regnery) and When in Rome: A Journal of Life in Vatican City (Doubleday). Email him at: roberthutchinson@substack.com

I am enjoying the day off, lounging about, drinking coffee, and boning up on my ten words of Italian.

The Italian is because next week I’m off again to Roma. I have to pick up my British grandchildren in London, and, as is my custom, I am using them as an excuse to explore a bit first. This time I am visiting Rome for nine or ten days before flying to Heathrow. It should be a bit like my trip to Budapest in that it will be scorching hot, in the mid-90s Fahrenheit.

Another excuse I have for the trip is that I’m working on a new book about the “Two Leos,” Leo XIII and Leo XIV, and how their parallel lives shaped or will shape the development of Catholic social teaching.

We think of Pope Leo XIII as the pope of Rerum Novarum, the first big social encyclical, but he was actually far more than that.

Leo pioneered the Church’s response to the social and political forces that both transformed, and partly destroyed, much of Europe: the Industrial Revolution... the revolutionary nationalism that changed Europe from a quasi-feudal collection of fiefdoms into what we know today... political liberalism or libertarianism... critical Biblical studies... the renewed interest in Thomas Aquinas.

By taking the name of this illustrious predecessor, Cardinal Robert Prevost of Chicago signaled that he intends to walk in Leo XIII’s footsteps and confront the equally-monumental social and economic forces that are shaking our own societies.

These include mass migration and globalization, artificial intelligence, the whole gig economy, so-called surveillance capitalism, artificial methods of reproduction, and more.

I hope to write a “dual biography” of the two popes, but one that traces the development of Catholic social teaching as it struggles to chart a path to a more human future.

We or maybe just I tend to shrug off CST as just the pious boilerplate of bishops and academics, mere platitudes.

But when you really look at things historically, you see how the Church confronted truly destabilizing social and economic forces and tried to figure out whether and how to make peace with them.

As always, the world offers Christians a series of false dichotomies: empire or jingoistic nationalism, laissez-faire capitalism or totalitarian socialism.

With the light of Christ and an eye on the common good, the Church must discern the good and evil in complex realities, highlighting what is worthwhile and what must be rejected. We live in a fallen world in which wheat and weeds grow side by side. The Industrial Revolution was a Mordor-like wrecking ball that destroyed entire communities and ways of living… and yet it also undoubtedly led to an increase in living standards worldwide that benefited billions. Leo XIII thought long and hard about that.

Another complex social reality he had to confront was the rise of nationalism.

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He was referring, of course, to Israel’s then-recent attack on Iranian nuclear research facilities and researchers.

It stopped me.

My first reaction was, Huh? So I …

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