The Garrett Ashley Mullet Show

My first day off after seven on, yesterday I resolved to reorganize our home library.  Between homeschooling and my wife having been a librarian in another life, plus the both of us loving to hit up used bookstores online and IRL, we have a few titles in our home. And it's been a while since, so everything got all mixed up. But now I am in the process of setting things right. So my wife's boo...

As some of you may know, I am a fan of word games, but not a fan of either the public schools or Critical Theory.  Scrabble, good. Marxism, bad. That's the big idea. Imagine my dismay then at this Harris Rigby post at Not The Bee highlighting undercover reporting by Accuracy in Media, exposing public school teachers and administrators in Iowa and Tennessee openly admitting that recent legisla...

Last night while Lauren and Andrew went to ladies' small group, the rest of our kids and I watched the sci-fi flick 'Ender's Game' based on the 1985 novel by the same name by Orson Scott Card. Having just read that book for the first time over the weekend, fascinated by the premise and the themes that work explores, I wanted to share it with my children and hear what they thought of it. As almost...

In 'Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation,' author Kristin Kobes Du Mez seeks to solve the mystery of overwhelming American Evangelical support for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, yet ends up mostly recounting major scandals among conservative leaders due to, as she sees it, toxic masculinity and the patriarchy. Dr. Du Mez is a profes...

First published in 1756, then republished with significant additions the next year, Edmund Burke's 'A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful' is a seminal work in the subject of aesthetics. What characteristics and attributes do things we universally call "beautiful" possess? So also, whatever else we might call what Burke categorizes as "sublime," there is...

Today is Good Friday, and what does that mean? Or why do we say that this Friday is "Good" in the Christian calendar? It's not because we Christians are so good, only ever doing and saying what is right and pleasing to God. If we had been really and truly good there would have been no need for a Savior in Christ Jesus. Yet "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." Good Friday marks the day...

On a short list of Scriptures that come charmingly to mind from time to time, and comfort me when they do, 1 Thessalonians 4:9-12 is nestled in quite cozily and will not be dislodged. There the Apostle Paul writes to the church at Thessalonica: "Now concerning brotherly love you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another, for that indeed...

A Paul Washer sermon excerpt was sent me this morning on the topic of dating and marriage. Given the fact that I'm writing a book on marriage right now, I was keen to give a listen and consider what he had to say. If you'd like to hear the sermon in its entirety, you can find the link I was sent here. Suffice to say for the purposes of this discussion, however, I found many things to agree with, b...

In this episode, I want to talk about my eldest two sons - Josiah and Elihu - attending a dance for homeschooled teenagers this past Friday. Spoiler alert: their telling of the whole business was pure comedic gold, and had their mother and I laughing until we cried about it. Also, my brother-in-law Kris Duff came to visit us for the weekend from North Dakota. So the whole lot of us piled into our...

On receiving my share of inheritance from my Grandma Ranew's estate, I ordered some new furniture for my sons. With selling our home in Montana this week, we're now changing out our daughter's furniture as well. Maybe it sounds silly, but I find rearranging and swapping out furniture to be a kind of simple pleasure in life, particularly when the new arrangement promises to better serve the people...

In 'White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America' by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, a disturbing and tragic tale is told of indentured servants in Great Britain's colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The importation of black Africans as slaves early in American history gets a lot of attention, and rightly so. But all too often, the narrative seems to be b...

News broke yesterday that Elon Musk, the world's richest man at a net-worth over $200 billion, bought 9.2% of Twitter. The social media giant has become the de facto public square in our day, and significant changes are widely expected as Musk will now be joining the company's board of directors as the single greatest shareholder, owning nearly four times the number of shares as company founder an...

Typically when I choose books to read, factored into my decision is what is going on in the rest of life - at home, at work, at church, in my extended circle of friends and family, or in broader society. To gain insight, perspective, context, understanding, or to counterbalance excesses, I'll choose books that check boxes. Yesterday I finished 'China: The Novel' by Edward Rutherford. Published May...

My wife and I bought our first home in Sidney, Montana in April of 2014. Eight years later to the month, we have now sold our first home. Six months of it being on the market followed two years of renting it out to others. Being out-of-state homeowners and landlords was a stretch and taxed our resources in both tangible and intangible ways. Only now as that circumstance comes to an end are we begi...

Will Smith got all worked up about a joke being made by Chris Rock. Mrs. Smith's alopecia is off-limits, it turns out, so Will got jiggy with cuffing Mr. Rock really hard for all the world to see. An open marriage, meanwhile, is nothing to blush at, as Hollywood sees it.  Marriage equality is of a piece with deconstructing gender and sexuality. But if you hold fast to the conviction that God...

Born in Montana, I was raised there until the age of ten. That's when my parents moved our family to southern Ohio. At twenty-five I moved back to Montana with my wife and our four boys. At thirty-two, we moved to Colorado with seven children in tow. My parents - a dad who was raised Mennonite and a mom who went to Pensacola Christian and Bob Jones - met at Cedarville University; my wife and I bot...

Imagine yourself a contestant on Wheel of Fortune, where you and two others are solving word puzzles to win $10,000. I'll play Pat Sajak and read the clue for you as 'Democrats.' You and your fellows each take turns buying an H, A, K, I, N, G, and B. So the puzzle is part-ways solved as follows. "_HAKING HAND_ AND KI__ING BABIE_"  It's your turn now, and you are going to solve. You shout out...

Curious about who I had been crossing social media swords with prior to my current Twitter suspension, I did a little digging. It turns out @chrisjollyhale ran for U.S. Congress in 2020 as a Democrat candidate for Tennessee’s 4th District.

I am now 20-hours into my 12-hour suspension from Twitter - which just goes to show that the folks at Twitter are about as good at math as they are fair in their application of penalties and interpretation of their own rules. What, you may ask, was my violation? "Violating our rules against illegal or certain regulated goods or services." That for telling @chrisjollyhale "I say this with respect -...

After getting home from taking my wife - who is definitely a woman, by the way - out for dinner at Nordy's in Loveland, I clicked on a notification Facebook had sent me about a post from someone I know. The post was a meme of a doctor holding up a newborn baby with the following captions. Mother: "Is it a boy or a girl?" Doctor: "I have no idea. I'm not a biologist." Having seen this meme a few ti...

Surveying the present troubles, you worry for the future of your country. Everything is scandalous. Everyone is either lying or all worked up about telling the truth. Wars and rumors of wars assail you in the notifications on your phone and the emails in your inbox. Each time you turn on the news there is some new accusation of bad faith being leveled.  "So much death. What can men do against...

Some folks don't think the Jews should have a country, and that is a puzzlement to me.  'O Jerusalem!' by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre is the story of how the Jews founded the modern state of Israel in 1948 after the close of World War II and a failed but ambitious effort on the part of Nazi Germany to exterminate their race. Being now in my mid-30's, I think it's difficult for my gen...

Not the Bee reported yesterday on Twitter suspending The Babylon Bee for supposed hate speech, and we need to talk about that. In case you haven't heard, the infraction is tied to the satirical news site declaring transgendered person Rachel Levine their "Man of the Year" in response to USA Today naming the Biden administration appointee their "Woman of the Year." Once again we see how the Left ca...

Dan Jones' second book, the 2012 title 'The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England' spans the nearly three centuries of the dynasty from the reign of William the Conqueror's great-grandson Henry II (1154-1189) to its end with the death of Richard III (1452-1485) at the Battle of Bosworth Field. If you can keep all the various kings Henry, Richard, and Edward straight, 'The Pla...

For years, Ecclesiastes 7:16 has puzzled me. I come back to it again and again. How can the wisest man who ever lived tell us to not be overly righteous or overly wise? To counsel as much is the same thing as declaring that there is such a thing. You can be excessively righteous. You can be excessively wise. But how can that be? The answer has everything to do with motives. Wisdom and goodness are...