Opinion
By Jeff Childers
10/31/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Halloween! In today’s spooky roundup: shivery warning about voting in the upcoming elections to avoid a Freddie Kruger-style nightmare; scary tale of Bakersfield family plagued by literal skulls in shopping bags; ghoulish developments in the transgender revolution as shrinkage occurs; liberals terrified by cryptic tales of young people outpacing parents in historic boom in church attendance; angry atheists vanish like ghosts at daybreak; and Trump officials retreat to DC military base homes to avoid evil trick-or-treaters (or maybe an even bigger monster).
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Soon we need to have a serious conversation about what happened last time in 2018, when some of us were enjoying Trump 1.0 a little too much and got lazy about voting, and before we knew what happened, we faced an impeachment-happy Democrat House and right after that, Joe Biden was ringing the doorbell dressed in a lab coat and holding a tray of needles.
For a local example, yesterday the Main Street Daily News ran a story headlined, “Early voting opens Friday for Gainesville special election referendum.” My woke city commission is attempting to claw back control of the local utility, which already has the highest rates in the Sunshine State, so they can use it as a piggy bank to fund drag concerts. By the time we realize they are actually electrocuting our bank accounts it will be too late.
Every Republican in Gainesville must vote in this special election, even though everything seems like it’s going great down here.
The same is true with this November’s special elections wherever you are, all over the country. Vote like you don’t want Joe Biden back. Drive your friends to the polls if you must.
Soon we must get massively organized for next year’s midterms, so that we don’t experience a nightmarish repeat of 2018, when Trump 1.0 lost the House. Imagine that horrifying prospect, and you won’t need to watch any scary movies tonight.
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There is nothing I wouldn’t do for you, my loyal audience. (Except pick you up from the airport this weekend; I would love to, honestly, but my car is in the shop and Michelle, completely unreasonably, won’t let me drive her Tahoe since she found out I wagered it in a bet.) Anyway, I diligently searched for a 2025 Halloween-based lead story and found this People article, published yesterday, and headlined, “Bizarre Twist After Police Swarm Woman’s Yard to Investigate a Skull Found Inside a Bag (Exclusive).” The cover pic was even more bizarre and twisted than the ‘exclusive:’
I mean, she seems downright delighted about it. But just wait.
California college student Haley Torres, 20, lives with her parents in a quiet residential neighborhood in boring Bakersfield, where interesting things never happen. Last week, Haley left the house with her boyfriend and couldn’t help but notice that someone had tossed a darkly-colored “Dia De Los Muertos” shopping bag on her front lawn.
Immediately concluding, as any sane Gen-Z person would, that the bag might contain something valuable, Haley directed her useless boyfriend to investigate. He picked it up. It was heavy. He looked inside and saw dirt. Meaning, soil— earth. So, employing keen intelligence and a work ethic that would put an average SNAP recipient to shame, he dropped it back in the gutter, and the kids left to run an errand.
Hey, maybe it was somebody’s special dirt, and they would be coming back for it soon. You never know.
A short time later, Haley’s mother noticed the unattractive and trash-like bag now decorating the sidewalk in front of her house and went to remove it to somewhere less likely to result in her neighbors calling codes enforcement. As she approached, thinking (as anyone would) that it must be a bag of rocks, she noticed a mysterious-looking maggot poking out and bugs crawling all over it.
Gingerly picking it up, Haley’s mom shifted the contents and her blood ran cold: she saw what looked remarkably like a soiled, child-sized human skull. Shocked and appalled, she immediately dropped the bag back in the gutter, and ran inside to get her husband to take care of it, with the dirty job now having quickly ascended through the entire Torres family’s chain of authority.
After pausing a very important sports game right at the least convenient moment, Haley’s dad dutifully trudged outside. He dumped out the bag, revealing the aforementioned dirt, now appearing very graveyard-like, a small hand trowel, and a distinctly skull-like object. He called the cops. (And took some pictures with his phone, for the official record.)
Within an hour, eighteen alert Bakersfield detectives, police officers, and crime-scene specialists responded, along with the department’s best crime-scene equipment, vans, cameras, soil testers, and a Mexican food truck. (It was a slow crime day.) They carefully examined the scene of the crime for over three hours and took statements from each of the Torres family members, plus the (still unnamed) boyfriend.
“Honestly, I was in disbelief,” Mr. Torres later told reporters. Then, in unmatchable understatement, he added: “It’s not every day that a human skull is placed on your front yard.” No kidding.
Police took the skull back to their high-tech crime lab, x-rayed it, and spent two weeks conducting various tests and attempting to collect DNA evidence and so forth. But the investigation was stymied, and Bakersfield was forced to close the case, after an alert technician determined the child-sized skull was a concrete replica.
During the on-scene investigation, in peak Gen-Z fashion, traumatized young Haley Torres made a TikTok about her gruesome experience, which went viral (1.8 million views, 200K likes).
So this Halloween ghost story ended happily. No children were murdered, Bakersfield police got to try out all their fancy crime-fighting technology, Haley became a social media influencer, Haley’s dad’s team lost anyway, so he didn’t miss anything, and the Torres family is currently debating whether they need an exorcist or only a replica of an exorcist.
Epilogue. Haley recently made a follow-up TikTok, adding that, around 20 years ago, someone was murdered in the house directly across the street. The same week the murderer was released from prison, the concrete skull showed up on her family’s lawn.* (* Facts not confirmed by People.) Cue the theme song from Halloween.
Boo!
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We now move on to ghoulish developments in the transgender movement, which, if you think about it, is just like if Halloween 2015 got stuck. It never ended. The kids kept their costumes on, which would have been amusingly odd, except for their mentally ill parents, who fetishize horror movies and combine heavy-R ratings like Saw XI with their children’s more innocent dress-up fantasies in a horrifying attempt to surgically transform their playful children into the characters they were dressing up as. But I digress. On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal published a provocative op-ed titled, “Evidence Backs the Transgender Social-Contagion Hypothesis.”
The good news appeared in the sub-headline: “The share of young people claiming another ‘gender identity’ exploded. Now surveys show it is receding.”
The author, Colin Wright, is a PhD evolutionary biologist and former Penn State professor who now works at the conservative Manhattan Institute. (His doctoral dissertation examined social networks in insects.) Despite his nonjudgmental, science-first approach to the issue, trans activist groups have labeled Wright as an “anti-transgender activist.”
In fact, it was Wright’s application of science to the transgender debate that most offended trans activists. They sneeringly call him a “Darwinian fundamentalist,” since Wright applies an obscure, little-known branch of biological science to the debate— called “evolution.”
Anyway, in 2020, Wright was just an obscure researcher at Penn when two science words got him canceled. In February, 2020, he posted a link to a UK Guardian article headlined “Sweden’s Board of Health confirmed a 1,500% rise between 2008 and 2018 in gender dysphoria diagnoses among 13- to 17-year-olds born as girls.” Wright’s brief, two-word remark said, “Two words: social contagion.”
Within hours, Wright’s colleagues judiciously denounced him as a transphobic bigot. Anonymous activists emailed universities to poison his job prospects. A professional job board published mock job listings warning others not to hire him. His academic career never recovered. And now he works for a conservative think-tank. So. Trans activists created their own Frankensteinian self-fulfilling monster.
Trans activists —as recently as this summer, in a lawsuit filed to enjoin War Secretary Hegseth’s policy of excluding from military service those with “gender dysphoria”— argue passionately that transgenderism is an immutable, unchangeable, biological characteristic (cue the horse’s laugh). Dr. Wright thinks “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” is better explained as “the spread of ideas or behaviors through peer influence,” which were then hardened into concrete by ideology and institutional reinforcement.
Wright’s article cited two new studies. First, an analysis of campus surveys by a researcher at Buckingham University found the share of college students identifying as transgender fell by half just between 2023 and 2025. That finding was strengthened by a separate YouGov study by psychologist Jean Twenge, who also found transgender identification among 18- to 22-year-olds declined by nearly half during a similar period (2022 through 2024).
Personally, I haven’t seen the data, but if pressed, I would guess the majority of the decline occurred this year, in 2025. For some reason.
Dr. Twenge concluded in her study that, “it looks like the peak of trans identification is in the past.” One can hope.
Is Transoween perhaps slowly winding down, like in my nearby neighborhood, Town of Tioga, where on Halloween the Homeowner’s Association orders residents to switch off their porch lights promptly at 8 o’clock, and rented off-duty deputies start officially encouraging costumed treaters to head home?
The evidence appears to suggest it might be time for the trans activists to take off their costumes and head home.
Postscript. I wish to stress that I am sensitive to the plight of adults experiencing real gender dysphoria. If it makes them feel better to live their lives as the opposite gender, fine by me. I say good luck to them. It’s a wonderfully free country. But let’s keep the kids out of it, everybody use the right bathrooms, and for the love of Dracula stop canceling people for disagreeing.
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The kids aren’t out trick-or-treating; they’re going to church. A new study on religious adherence was terrifying to progressives. Religous polling service Barna ran a story this week headlined, “New Barna Data: Young Adults Lead a Resurgence in Church Attendance.” The fact of younger people attending church more often was not the news; all year, we’ve been covering the wonderful resurgence in younger generations attending church. The actual news was: the two youngest generations have now surpassed their parents in church attendance rates. That is huge.
According to Barna’s latest survey, Gen-Z and Millennials are now the top church-attending generations. That is due both to increasing rates of younger people going to church as well as the two oldest generations growing less likely to attend every week. (We Gen-Xers, straddling the middle as usual, have held steady.) For decades, progressives trumpeted falling rates of young people claiming belief and cheered the “great greying” of church congregations.
Progressives prematurely declared a victory of ‘science and reason’ over faith. It may have something to do with their ‘science and reason’ being exposed as pseudo-science and emotional manipulation. But I digress.
Now, that long-standing pattern has flipped. It’s hard to imagine a more significant psycho-social development. It is also worth noting that, at present, this remains an America-only phenomenon. Unlike here in the States, Europe’s Christian characteristics remain moribund. Whether the US revival will ultimately lead the world remains to be seen. It is also worth mentioning that, while this trend has been building for several years since the pandemic —Gen-Z and Millennial attendance has doubled since 2020— the trend recently got rocket-fueled following Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
All the way back in 1966, the year before I was born, Time Magazine ran its now-infamous cover story asking whether God was dead. (Check out the ferret attached to Prussian philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s upper lip; now we know where John Bolton got the idea.)
In 2013, I experienced a dramatic and completely unexpected religious conversion event —complete with visions— and began studying everything I could grab. So I well remember how, at that time, scientific atheists occupied the high ground in the great religious debate. YouTube videos circulated endlessly featuring ‘famous’ sneering scientists and atheist intellectuals like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris, and even Mark Zuckerberg.
In fact, in 2007 —long before we knew the two-by-four of covid was coming right at us— three of the top five bestsellers in the world were written by atheist influencers attacking Christianity. (God is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens, The God Delusion by biologist Richard Dawkins, and Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam by Michel Onfray.)
Dawkins, for example, said that folks who saw the world as he did were the “brights.” So.
Before you ask: yes, what all these arrogant, over-credentialed intellectuals argued was just science, shut up, a smart-sounding rallying cry that lost much of its force when later in 2020 they tried using the exact same argument in favor of strapping cut-up t-shirts to our faces to filter tiny airborne virus particles.
But anyway, things in the Great Debate have changed. A lot. They’ve changed rapidly and profoundly. Last year, Culture Watch posed this poignant question:
I hadn’t even noticed the top atheists were missing till people started asking whether we needed to send a welfare check team to their homes. In 2021, Eric Metaxis boldly (and a little snarkily, reminding readers of the 1966 Time cover) published his book, Is Atheism Dead? (Get it?) Two years ago, British Christian influencer Justin Brierly published The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.
The post-pandemic period unleashed a flood of resurgent faith. In Denis Alexander and Alister McGrath’s 2023 book, Coming to Faith Through Dawkins: 12 Essays on the Pathway from New Atheism to Christianity, the authors included a dozen biographical tracts written by philosophers, artists, historians, engineers, and scientists, all explaining how trying to grapple with the claims of arrogant atheists like Dawkins actually led them to God, rather than away from Him.
One standout example was Josh Timonen, who, for a long time had been Dawkins’ right-hand man, helping edit Dawkins’ books and maintain the scientist’s website. But Josh told Christian apologist Ray Comfort in a recent video that his own atheistic beliefs began changing during the pandemic, as he questioned everything he once believed. Now he follows Jesus.
Josh wasn’t nearly the only one. Dawkins himself may even be wavering. Last year, Dawkins tweeted, “Maybe there is still something for me to learn when it comes to religion. My dear friend and former atheist, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has become a Christian.” It’s a kind of spiritual flood.
It’s not just scientists and philosophers. During the same post-pandemic period, we have watched top cultural influencers come to faith, from former celebrity witches like Kat Von Drachenberg and OnlyFans ‘stars’ like Nala Ray, to media giants with massive audiences like Tucker Carlson and Russel Brand, and even podcast superstar Joe Rogan dipping a tentative toe into religious waters.
This week’s Barna survey provides more evidence of something historic and unprecedented in the modern era. The slow ebb of religious belief that started with the rise of global communism in the last century appears to have been suddenly and unexpectedly reversed. And —against all odds or rational reckoning— the reversal seems to have been prompted by a pandemic. And not any natural pandemic sent by God, but a pandemic sent to us by stupid scientists.
They’ve lost the debate and disappeared, like the ghosts of Shakespearean set pieces. Goodbye, Caspar! (Or King Lear, either way.)
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Finally, if you want to trick-or-treat at the door of a top Trump official, you’ll have to go through security first. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story headlined, “Trump Officials Move Into Military Residences in D.C. Area.” Can you blame them?
Pete Hegseth, Steve Miller, Kristi Noem, Marco Rubio, and Dan Driscoll have all quietly rented houses on base at picturesque Fort McNair in Washington, DC. Despite wild liberal claims, they pay market rent. Hegseth, for example, coughs up $4,655.70 a month. The practice is not uncommon. Over the years, many public officials have occasionally rented homes on the base, for security or convenience. It often saves the government money, since the cost of providing security on a military base is much lower than guarding an apartment in downtown DC.
So there isn’t a whole lot for corporate media to complain about (not that they need any excuse). But what is different this time is how many of Trump’s top officials are now quietly living on base.
The Atlantic, which broke the story, and which itself is one of the worst offenders at ginning up hatred against Trump officials, surmised that at least six Trump officials moved there to be “shielded not just from potential violence but also from protest.” Those are just the ones they know of; there could be more.
Kristi Noem’s spokeslady said the Homeland Security Secretary moved in after she was “horribly doxxed and targeted” to the point that she was “no longer able to safely live in her own apartment.” The story also described Stephen Miller’s family being driven out of their neighborhood by constant protests, thinly veiled threats, and even an ad-hoc association of their ‘neighbors’ calling itself “Enough”— with its own group-messaging app and locked Facebook group explicitly dedicated to ‘non-violently’ depriving the Millers of any peace and quiet.
This news sparked a flurry of online speculation about the Trump Administration’s next steps, with some more imaginative individuals envisioning more extreme scenarios, such as a declaration of national martial law. Who knows. But it does suggest that Trump’s officials don’t see things quieting down anytime soon, which is good enough news for me. And I am grateful our team need not deal with protestors or problematic neighbors like the Millers’. In fact, hope the kids toilet-paper their homes tonight, so they can see what it feels like.
They only deserve tricks.
Anyway, add this news nugget as one more treat in our plastic pumpkin candy carrier, which is already spilling over. Happy Halloween! And, don’t eat too much sugar, it’s bad for you.
Have a very Happy Halloween! Be safe, and haul yourselves, costumed or not, right back here tomorrow morning, for a stellar Weekend Edition roundup of essential news and commentary.
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