Easter came and went on April 5th, and I’m certain I’m not the only person who felt vaguely underwhelmed by the entire proceeding. The stores had their displays, and the churches had their signs, but the actual day of Easter came and went without any particular fanfare, barely being noticed in the endless stream of one day into the next.

At first I just attributed this to the world’s general sense of existential dread, what with the President of the United States using Easter Morning to demand that Iran open the Strait of Hormuz or else they would be “living in hell.” However, it’s not just Easter that’s felt off lately; most holidays have lost their luster. It’s rare that I get excited for an actual holiday tradition at this point, whether it’s New Years’ Eve fireworks, birthday cards, or the Thanksgiving Day parade, and on further inspection, that lack of joy stems from the hyper-materialization of holidays.

Consider, for a moment, the following celebration. People spend money on gifts of some form or another; they spend money on special themed candy or snacks; they spend money on selecting a message from a generic pile of themed and printed cards; they spend money on overly specialized home decor which is only ever out for a couple weeks of the year; they spend, they spend, and they spend. I hope everyone agrees that this is less an authentic celebration and more an opportunity to push everyone to buy things they don’t need.

Why is it, then, that most holiday celebrations in the 21st century are increasingly resembling that description? Whether it be Christmas, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, Easter, July 4th, or even family milestones like birthdays, celebrations have become flat and vapid. We no longer emphasize the opportunity to be with rarely seen family and friends or have a unique celebration that makes each holiday meaningful. Instead, we gather in search of the greatest spending: The finest candies, nicest seasonal decor, and prettiest bits of cardstock filled with board-approved platitudes and one-liners. None of those things were made by us or have any clear value besides the money spent on them, and the holiday spirit gets diluted by every egg-shaped paper plate or inflatable yard Santa.

This rampant materialism in place of actual celebration is bad enough, but there’s a second problem that needs to be addressed: Advertising and brand exploitation. Nearly every major event in the world has wound up with a big old brand slapped across its face, from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade to Coca-Cola’s AI Christmas ads to the tech companies sponsoring the White House Easter Egg Roll. It’s hard to feel genuine about a celebration or community event when the speakers are namedropping corporations and every celebratory item has paid-for logos plastered on.

Beyond the incessant advertising, companies also needlessly transform their purportedly universal products during the holiday season just so they can sell new and exclusive variants. This can come either through special holiday promotions, like the annual Happy Honda Days in November and December, or through unique product variants. Candy companies are by far the worst offenders in this latter category; just by way of example, PEEPS has over 40 different variants, most of which are themed around particular holidays (Pumpkins and ghosts for Halloween, trees for Christmas, rabbits for Easter, and more). When every holiday is an excuse for Hershey’s to generate a new shape of Reese’s Peanut Butter trees/hearts/eggs/pumpkins, it’s hard to get excited about any one of them.

Unfortunately, the cat is well and truly out of the bag when it comes to corporate involvement and materialism in holidays. The solution, then, is not to somehow ban corporations, but to instead de-monetize and re-personalize holidays. If global-scale traditions are no longer holding value, create new personal traditions. Rather than buying a pile of plastic decor or a pack of holiday cupcakes, consider learning to make a dessert that can become a new family favorite, or involving guests in custom-making decorations. Centering personal joy and connection over sponsored corporate slop will take more effort, but it might just restore a little of the luster that capitalism has drained away.

I will die on this hill: spoilers do not ruin a good story. If a single sentence can “ruin” an entire book, movie or show, then maybe it wasn’t that good to begin with. A truly great story isn’t just about what happens; it’s about how it happens. Knowing the destination doesn’t make the journey any less meaningful.  

People act like hearing one detail completely destroys the experience. But think about it: we rewatch movies all the time. We reread books. We replay games. And somehow they’re still enjoyable, even when we know everything that’s coming. In fact, sometimes they’re more enjoyable. The second time around, you’re not scrambling to keep up with the plot; you’re paying attention to everything else: the dialogue, the pacing, the small choices that build toward the ending you already know.

That’s because the value of a story was never just in the surprise. Surprise is cheap. It’s easy to shock an audience once. What’s hard (and what actually makes something good) is earning that moment. A twist only works if the story has quietly been preparing you for it all along. And spoilers, weirdly, can reveal just how well a story does that. When you know what’s coming, you start noticing the foreshadowing, the subtle hints, the structural precision. You see the craft instead of just reacting to the outcome.

There’s also a difference between knowing what happens and understanding why it happens. A spoiler can give you the bare fact—this person dies, they betray someone, they end up together—but it can’t replicate the emotional experience of getting there. Context matters. Timing matters. Performance, writing, atmosphere all of that is what actually makes a moment hit. And honestly, half the time the so-called “spoiler” is so out of context that it barely means anything anyway. You might know a major event, but you don’t know how it fits into the narrative, what it costs the characters, or how it reshapes everything around it. 

Now, I’m not saying you should go around intentionally spoiling things for people. That’s chaotic, a little inconsiderate, and mostly just annoying. There’s a difference between arguing that spoilers don’t ruin stories and ignoring that people like experiencing things fresh. But if your entire enjoyment of a story depends on not knowing anything beforehand, then maybe what you actually enjoy is the feeling of surprise, not the story itself.

A good story can survive being known. In fact, it should. It should hold up under repetition, under analysis, under familiarity. It should reward you for coming back to it, not punish you for it.

“They are to be stoned.” Exodus 19:13, NIV

Hello, fellow Jewell students! I am excited to announce that I am finally starting my own student organization. I know not a lot of people agree with me, so I’m prepared for a lot of pushback and persecution, but I think it’s finally time for me to stand up for what I believe in. I’ve really been working on taking up the space to tell my story and be myself, so I hope you’ll support my newest endeavour. Let’s change the world!

Yes, that’s right. It’s about time someone started a Burning Joint USA chapter at this college. Honestly, it’s surprising to me that I’m the only one here with the guts to do this. I mean, at least someone’s not afraid to speak out about real Christian values like being chill as hell. Since this college is formerly Baptist affiliated, I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of the words written in the book of Mary chapter 4 and verse 20: “And then said the LORD, ‘Pass that blunt around again, for I desire that my followers be freaking baked, and also bring thou in the Bagel Bites, for behold, all who follow me shall be fed with a multitude of calories. For does it not speak in the Prophets of the burning bush, or something like that? Whoa, dude, these bagels are my body, and the tomato sauce is my blood. The mozzarella cheese – thou canst figure that out for thyself. Anyways, pass that shit so I can get a hit. Hey, that rhymes, haha. Hehe.’” I think we need to take the Bible more seriously in this age of persecution and stop ignoring verses we don’t like just because of culture war issues. That’s why it’s so important that the Jewell community commits to representing and lifting up Christlike voices in this age of atheism.

But, you might be thinking, how in the world are we going to pull off this religious organization at such a worldly and sin-ridden college? Won’t we have trouble finding support from the faculty here? Won’t we be hated and run out of town? Well, that’s the good news, Cardinals: BJUSA doesn’t need college support to be an official college-affiliated organization! Turns out, we’ve never needed a faculty sponsor to sign off on a form in order to start a club: I can’t believe it’s taken us all this time to realize that!¹ This is great news, because I know someone who’s perfect to lead a BJUSA chapter at William Jewell College: my stepdad Rob. He has his own basement where we can go light one up, and he’s super chill. He’s pretty much always passed out on the couch. Also, his smoke alarm doesn’t work, so we don’t have to worry about waking anyone up, and he doesn’t mind if we eat some of his mini muffins as long as we give him a ride to work sometimes to pay him back. 

Now that we have the practical stuff out of the way, all I need to do is get that form signed, and William Jewell’s inaugural Burning Joint USA chapter will be up and running! Finally, we will have a college-affiliated – even if not college-supervised – space to enact our religious freedom. Join BJUSA to support the cause and smoke up for the teachings of Jaysus Christ in a world that is against us!

1.  I spoke to Ernie Stufflebean about this in relation to the TPUSA chapter recently established on campus without a faculty advisor and he said that there has never been a requirement to have a faculty advisor when starting a student organization. Surprising given the struggle many student organizations have had in the past to find a faculty advisor for their student organization to become official. Must have just been a big misunderstanding. ︎

Content warning: This story addresses the killing of Alex Pretti.

“The party told you,” wrote George Orwell at the end of 1984, “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

I write this piece after federal agents executed Minnesota native Alex Jeffrey Pretti, who worked as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA Health Care system. Pretti was shot at least ten times in the span of five seconds. This is the second killing by federal agents in three weeks, after Renée Nicole Good was killed by I.C.E. agent Jonathan Ross on Jan. 7.

Video footage taken by eyewitnesses and obtained by a variety of news organizations suggests that Pretti was not violently resisting federal agents; instead, Pretti was assisting a woman that had been pepper-sprayed by agents. He did not threaten agents with the firearm he was legally carrying. In fact, federal agents disarmed him as they were holding him. 

Yet the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immediately sought to frame Pretti as a domestic terrorist. Less than two hours after Pretti’s death, official DHS social media accounts claimed, without evidence, that “this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” 

In a press conference, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem questioned why a law-abiding citizen would be carrying a gun: “I don’t know of any peaceful protestor that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign.” Yet Pretti was legally armed: he had a legal conceal-and-carry permit, which satisfies Minnesota state law requiring a permit to carry. Minnesota law notwithstanding, the Second Amendment has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to broadly protect citizens’ rights to carry firearms.

The federal response to Pretti’s death suggests that the evidence of our eyes and ears—especially those of the eyes and ears on the ground—ought to be rejected. DHS officials understand that the Department is gaslighting the public, as one anonymous officer told CBS:

“It’s unclear who at DHS thought it would be a good idea to make such claims before any facts were established, but it was a terrible miscalculation… When we gaslight and contradict what the public can plainly see with their own eyes, we lose all credibility and it’s going to damage our reputation for generations.”

Indeed, critical analysis of this case suggests that the government’s narrative has fabricated key aspects of the story and lied about Pretti’s motivations, with no attempts made to rectify this.

How Not to Find Truth

There are two tempting yet improper approaches when following a story.

The first is to follow a narrative without considering other perspectives. If you let one source define your understanding of the scenario, you will go eighty miles towards their preferred conclusions before you even consider other facts. That applies to all sources, as one source never has sufficient evidence on its own. Finding reliable sources of information, especially on-the-ground or local sources, is crucial. Eyewitnesses,, are often more reliable than secondary reporting; video is even more reliable.

The second erroneous path is to conclude that the problem is too complex to untie, and that staying out is the best and/or safest option. This is sometimes necessary in academic or professional settings, but is unhelpful for navigating daily life. Thinking, processing and responding to tragedies is part of the logical and emotional loops that make us human. (In this particular case, not caring about the result— a man being shot by federal agents—might suggest a different, more sinister, kind of emotional response.)

The Steps of the Coverup

When critically evaluating conflicting narratives, it’s important to look for evidence of a coverup: places where the government, media outlets, or other sources of information seek to omit or misrepresent critical evidence.

The government’s official telling of events (off the record, DHS officials are confident the public-facing story is wrong) omits evidence for a key aspect of its case. It claims, without presenting evidence, that Pretti “brandish[ed]” a gun at federal agents. At the time of writing, existing video analysis suggests that Pretti did not “brandish” a firearm, at least not in the threatening sense of that term. Indeed, by the time of the shooting Pretti had already been disarmed. Moreover, Secretary Noem declined to answer direct questions about the timeline of the alleged “brandishing.” This is atypical behavior given the circumstances on the ground, and Noem’s avoidance suggests there is more to be discovered here.

In addition, the absence of body-worn or other cameras from I.C.E. agents is telling. I.C.E. agents are required by DHS policy, updated under the Trump administration, to “capture footage of Enforcement Activities… as soon as safely possible.” At time of publication, the White House confirmed the existence of body cam footage but has declined to release it. If the government wishes to substantiate its claim that Pretti is a “domestic terrorist,” it should provide evidence that the agent was indeed threatened or had a reasonable fear for his life, which would justify claims of self-defense. The release of such footage would complement rather than hinder existing video analysis, as current accounts do not show significant portions of the lead-up. 

A third item suggesting a potential coverup: federal investigators, in an uncommon move, have blocked state and local authorities from accessing the crime scene or conducting their own investigations. This occurred both in the killing of Pretti and the killing of Renée Good. In Pretti’s case, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension has been denied access to the scene even though they have a signed judicial warrant granting them access. If indeed the officers in these cases acted correctly, state investigators’ access to the scene would have led them to the same conclusion. The DHS intends to investigate itself and find itself free from wrongdoing.

When The Party Lies

Like Big Brother, Homeland Security has attempted a brazen retelling of the narrative. Orwell’s quotation about the “final, most essential command” does not end there. It goes on to say that the protagonist’s heart “sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate…” While “Party intellectual” might be a touch oxymoronic in this context, Orwell’s emphasis on trusting our eyes remains. In the face of a powerful state actively attempting to sanctify its assassins and change how its own history is understood, truth remains a powerful defense—as long as we let it. Instead of addressing the killing of Alex Pretti as a tragedy that must be investigated, the administration’s response seeks to vilify the dead without providing a shred of evidence. Americans must not fall for such an easy excuse. We must demand accountability from those in power. 
As with Ms. Good, the blood of the innocent is in the air. Last week, Americans celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr., whose famous speech claimed that “[s]omehow the preacher must be an Amos, and say, ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.’” This demand for justice, and for truth, must never go unanswered. Minneapolis faith leaders are already heeding the call. So should we.