The Garrett Ashley Mullet Show

As a jumping off point for this episode, I offer up for your consideration 'Jesus and John Wayne among the Deplorables' by Michael Young.  Published March 11th at American Reformer, the subject of the book review is a title from last summer by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, 'Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.' With a name like that, you can't but hel...

Broad brushes get a bad wrap. How come no one ever says someone is painting with a broad brush in a good way?  Think of it, though. Suppose you are painting the side of a house. You don't go for those little craft brushes your mom used to buy you for water colors. Supposing a sprayer is out of the question, what you use instead is - wait for it - a broad brush. The reason for this is simple e...

For the fun of it, plus also as a way of thinking about the importance of honesty by examining its opposite - dishonesty - consider the curious case of Fletcher Reede and Cal Lightman - two fictional characters used to explore the subject of lying. First, Fletcher Reede, Jim Carrey's character from the comedy 'Liar, Liar' - he's a compulsive lawyer - I mean liar. But I repeat myself. Second, Cal L...

As part of an ongoing personal quest to improve communication, understanding it rightly so as to do it better, the thought occurs to me that radical honesty may make us feel better for a time, but it may not always be the best service either to ourselves or those we are communicating with. For instance, when it comes to prioritizing what information we share and in how much detail, we must conside...

Closely related to the question of manners from our last episode is the topic of honesty.  Every adult learns the reasonable limitations on honesty depend on one's audience and subject. And speaking frankly, how honest we can afford to be in a given circumstance often depends on the power others possess to reward or punish us for what details are included or else left out in our communiques.&...

Do good manners exist anymore? And what are they if they do? America is divided on seemingly every question of truth and morality. As a result, what is meant by being polite or rude can be relied on to differ as well.  Depending on the religion and politics of the part of the country you find yourself in, and depending on the people you are interacting with there, what might pass without noti...

Should we continue buying oil from Russia, or should we produce it ourselves? On the one hand, we certainly could try to content ourselves with shutting Russia out of the global economy to punish Putin for what he is even now doing to the people of Ukraine in trying to reconstitute the former Soviet Union. We could confine ourselves to grandstanding, decrying his barbarous aggression, superimposin...

Was Edmund Burke a genius, and have we given him enough consideration? Many Americans know little to nothing more about the 18th century statesman than perhaps recognizing his name. But the more philosophically minded, particularly those concerned with conservative political philosophy, harbor something of a reverential regard for Burke. I should add here for those unacquainted that Edmund Burke (...

"Give me liberty or give me death" as American founding father Patrick Henry so famously and passionately said nearly two-and-a-half centuries ago. Yet defining liberty and what it means to us can prove surprisingly difficult. I was reminded of this difficulty last night during the weekly meeting of our In Gladii Veritas writing club when one of my fellow club-members brought the question up durin...

Is man free to do whatever he chooses, or are all his paths both foreknown and forechosen, predetermined by the Almighty hand of Providence? On the one hand Arminian theology says that man must be free to choose in order to be held accountable. How else could God punish sin unless the sinner were personally able to choose to sin and to not sin? And how else could man truly be saved except by choos...

Last night was Joe Biden's first State of the Union address since being sworn in as president late last January. As annual fare goes in terms of the strict number of minutes, I was surprised to hear it came in on the short side. It did not feel like a short speech. It felt intolerably long. To borrow a line from the only piece of Adam Sandler's 1995 film 'Billy Madison' I have ever seen, "Everyone...

" Then Yahweh God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him."" Thus the Biblical narrative introduces the first woman, Eve. She is made after the first man Adam, and indeed after every other created thing. Last but certainly not least, she is a kind of crowning glory.  You need not take my word for it. The Apostle Paul says as much in his first l...

For about a week now, a bad cold has been working its way through my household. Starting with our second youngest son John and now firmly entrenched in myself and my wife and most of the other kiddos, this weekend has been a lot of laying low and trying to rest and take it easy. Yesterday, not feeling like doing much of anything else except intermittent napping and watching old favorites TV shows,...

I hear a lot of talk over the past several days to few weeks about how the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is none of our business here in the U.S. This is not our fight, and though it's sad what is happening to the Ukrainian people, we don't need to be concerned or involve ourselves in this as a primary stakeholder. And that is true if you look at these sorts of things from a very short-sight...

Like Alexis de Tocqueville, Os Guinness is a figure I have heard quoted often in books and interviews for several years but never read directly myself - until now.  His 2021 work, 'The Magna Carta of Humanity: Sinai’s Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom,' is then really my first experience considering his views and appraisals in something approaching their entirety. On that note, th...

Carl R. Trueman published a piece in WORLD Magazine yesterday titled 'Decadence on display: Depravity is no disqualification at Biden's Department of Energy,' not so much taking President Biden and his administration to task as scrutinizing the #NeverTrump evangelical arguments regarding the last election in light of where we find ourselves now. With the appointment of "queer activist" Sam Brinton...

Francis Schaeffer's 'How Should We Then Live?' was published in 1975, making it 11 or 12-years older than I am. No matter. Schaeffer could have just as easily have been writing today. The thoughts and accounting here are not old, they are timeless. And their timeliness may only be greater today than when he first published because the fruition of some of what he explains is more and more becoming...

In this episode: Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President - Candice Millard Is Tik Tok a THREAT to American kids? #shorts - Titus Ellis Smith, YouTube China: The Enemy Within - Lee Smith Docuseries, The Daily Wire Former Amb to Russia: Could Be 'The Largest Conventional War In Europe Since 1939' - Frank Camp, The Daily Wire Senator Tuberville: Focusing On...

In this episode: "Why would anyone keep their money in a Canadian bank after this?" - NTB Staff at Not the Bee, Feb. 18, 2022 "Things just keep getting more fasci-tastic in Canada as Ottawa police threaten the media with arrest if found in "areas undergoing enforcement" - PlanetMoron at Not the Bee, Feb. 18, 2022 Amusing Trudeau Headlines - The Babylon Bee 'Freedom Con...

“What the masks showed us, the parents, the most powerful group in the country, is that we are taking back the wheel.” So said Brian Echevarria at a school board meeting in North Carolina. “We are taking back the wheel from Washington to Raleigh all the way to the local school board. Because CRT - the parents don’t want it.” Meanwhile, the host of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher sounds increasingl...

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has definitely not declared open season on the most basic freedoms of Canadian men, women, and children either actively protesting continued lockdowns and mandates related to COVID, or else actively supporting the protests.  Trudeau's administration declaring a national emergency is most certainly not a move to silence dissent or crush his political oppo...

Executive Director and publisher for Baptist News Global, Mark Wingfield writes February 7, 2022 a truly appalling hit piece titled 'It’s time to stop the insanity that is killing public education' in which he repeatedly calls "insanity" American parents doing such laudable tasks as opposing CRT and the propagation of LGBTQ+ and Gender Theory ideologies and sex education, the teaching of evolution...

Maybe it's just me, but for as long as I can remember Super Bowl commercials have been a primary rather than secondary reason to watch at least one game of football per year. This year the Super Bowl commercials seemed to feature two distinct patterns worth commenting on. One was the conspicuous absence of white people. The other was the conspicuous absence of beautiful people. And not only were t...

"Why can't a woman be more like a man?" So sings Professor Higgins, played to perfection by Rex Harrison in the 1964 musical 'My Fair Lady.'  Such a tidy summation of the real war on women, as opposed to the phony alleged one you have been sold a bill of goods with. And radical egalitarianism could not ask for a more apt explanation of what it champions. Women should not need to become men in orde...

Adam was created first with a little bit of soil and the Lord Himself breathed the breath of life into his nostrils. So far so good with the image-bearer of the Almighty. But the first thing God ever said was not good was that the first man was alone.  If anyone but God had said it, the typical trendy Christian literature response might be to say that Adam had his relationship with the Creato...