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A man who submits to no authority above himself becomes a danger to everyone around him. The alleged assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents' Dinner exposes the rot of unchecked ideology. Submit to God first — then lead.
Saturday, May 2, 2026 • Today's Principle: Submission
The alleged assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents' Dinner raises a deeper question than security — it's a formation question. A man who submits to nothing above himself is dangerous, and today's episode drives straight at the principle of Submission: a man who won't bow to God has no legitimate authority to exercise anywhere else. The charge is direct — get under the Word, get into real accountability, and let your household see a man who actually submits before he leads.
Scripture: James 4:7
Today's Charge: Place yourself under God's authority through daily Scripture and genuine accountability, then live that submission visibly before your household this week.
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Today's Submission chapter reference: Ch 2 — Submission Before Authority
The Republic Briefing is a daily news podcast for men who take their faith, their families, and their responsibilities seriously. Host Carlos Reyes covers the same headlines everyone else is covering politics, culture, economics, world events but reframes them through Scripture and challenges men to respond with conviction, not reaction. Every episode ends with The Republic Charge: a direct call to lead your household, govern yourself, and steward the republic entrusted to you. The news. The standard. The charge.
This is The Republic Briefing. I'm Carlos Reyes. For men who govern themselves, their households, and their public square — this is your daily charge.
Today's principle is Submission — and what happened at the White House Correspondents' Dinner this week reveals something every man needs to hear about what happens when a man submits to nothing above himself.
On the night of April 26th, a gunman allegedly attempted to assassinate the President of the United States at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. The suspect, Cole Allen, was taken into custody. The Secret Service responded. The model worked — mostly. But experts are already saying that luck played a role in the outcome.
That's the headline. Here's what matters to you.
Cole Allen reportedly came out of Cal State University Dominguez Hills — a campus now being scrutinized for the kind of ideological formation it produces. What made this young man? What shaped his sense of right and wrong? What authority did he submit to — what framework told him that killing a president was not only permissible but perhaps necessary?
You don't pick up a weapon and walk into a room like that on a whim. You do it because something formed you. Something told you that you were the arbiter of justice. That you answered to no one above your own judgment.
That is the end result of a man — or in this case, a young man — who has submitted to nothing above himself. No God. No law written on his conscience. No authority he actually feared or respected. Just his own ideological certainty. His own rage. His own moral framework built in a classroom where submission to God is treated as weakness and autonomy is treated as liberation.
This isn't just a security story. It's a formation story.
And the question it puts to every man listening right now is this — what are you submitting to? Because something is forming you too. Every single day.
So what does a man do with this?
Today's principle is Submission. Not the weak kind. Not the coward's version where you bend to whoever yells loudest. The Republic kind — the kind that starts with God.
Chapter two of Men of the Republic calls it Submission Before Authority. And the argument is direct: a man who won't submit to the authority above him has no legitimate authority to exercise over anything below him. His household. His community. His public square. It all collapses — because the foundation isn't there.
Submission is not weakness. It is the first act of a man who knows who he is and who God is.
Here's what we're watching in Cole Allen — and in the broader campus culture that shaped him. When you remove the fear of God from a young man's formation, you don't get a liberated thinker. You get a man who has appointed himself as the final judge of all things. And that man is dangerous. Not just to presidents. To everyone around him.
The principle puts a direct question to every man in this audience: are you actually under authority? Not performing submission on Sunday and then running your home, your mouth, and your decisions like you answer to no one. Are you actually under God's word?
Now look at what the Scripture says. James chapter four, verse seven. "Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." That's the ESV. And the sequence matters — James doesn't say resist the devil first. He says submit to God first. Resistance to evil comes from a posture of submission, not from autonomous moral certainty.
The context of James four is a rebuke to men who are fighting, quarreling, and chasing their own desires. James diagnoses the root: "You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions." The man who won't submit to God is a man driven by his own appetites dressed up as conviction. That's not righteousness. That's idolatry wearing a cause.
The formation we watched come out of that university — the ideology, the entitlement, the certainty that one man's judgment could justify violence — that's the fruit of a generation formed without submission to anything above themselves.
Now apply it the Republic way.
It starts with you. Are you in the Word daily — not as a ritual, but as a man placing himself under authority? Are you accountable to your church, your elders, your brothers? Because a man who won't be corrected can't be trusted with authority.
Then your household. Your kids are watching what you submit to. They are learning what authority looks like from the way you treat God's word, your wife, your pastor, your employer. You can't teach submission by demanding it. You teach it by living it.
Then the public square. The men who walked into that dinner hall to protect the president submitted to a chain of command. They trained under authority. That's why it worked. And the man who walked in with a weapon submitted to nothing — which is why he's in custody.
Which brings me to your charge for today.
Submit. Not someday. This morning.
Here's what that looks like right now — this week, in your house. You open the Bible and you read it not as self-improvement content but as a man placing himself under the authority of God Almighty. You don't skip the hard parts. You don't skip the parts that convict you about your anger, your pride, your appetite, your passivity. You read it and you let it land. Then you take one thing it says and you do it. That's submission.
It looks like calling your pastor and putting yourself in genuine accountability. Not a text. A real conversation where you say, "I need someone to speak into my life and I'm going to listen." That's not weakness. That's what a man who actually believes does.
It looks like going to your wife or your kids tonight and letting them see a man who is under authority — not a man who just demands it. You can't produce sons who fear God if they've only ever watched you fear nothing.
Here's what disobedience costs. The young men who come out the other side of our universities — formed by ideology, submitted to nothing, certain they answer to no one — they don't wake up that way on graduation day. They were formed over years. In homes where fathers didn't lead. In churches they never attended. By the absence of a man who showed them what it looks like to bow the knee to God before standing up for anything else.
Your son is watching right now. What is he learning submission looks like?
The cost isn't abstract. It's a generation of young men who are certain of their own righteousness and accountable to nothing above themselves. And that is more dangerous than any single gunman.
"Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." James chapter four, verse seven. That's the word. That's the anchor. That's where you start today.
If today's charge moved you, Men of the Republic is where this goes deeper. The book is at carlosreyesiii.com. I'm Carlos Reyes. Govern yourself. Lead your household. Take your square. This is The Republic Briefing.