There are events you attend and events that attend you — ones that find you, reshape you, and send you home different than when you arrived. The Gathering, held on March 20, 2025, in Mountain Brook, Alabama, was the latter kind. Organized by Linda Evans, a woman whose quiet tenacity has long made space for conversations that most rooms aren’t brave enough to host, The Gathering brought together Alabamians hungry for something more than talking points. What they got was David Gornoski — and nothing in that room was quite the same afterward.

Linda Evans and the Art of Making Room

Before we get to the message, let’s honor the one who made the room.

Linda Evans has been doing this work quietly, persistently, and without fanfare. Organizing isn’t glamorous. It’s phone calls that don’t get returned, logistics rebuilt from scratch, and the courage to stand at the front of a room and say: this conversation needs to happen here, tonight, with these people. That’s what Linda did.

Mountain Brook is not a town that typically invites disruption. It is prosperous, polished, and politically comfortable. That’s exactly why it was the right venue. You don’t just preach to the choir. You show up where the choir hasn’t heard the song yet. Linda understood that. She built the stage, filled the seats, and handed the microphone to one of the most distinct voices in American political and theological discourse working today.

David Gornoski: Prophet Without the Piousness

David Gornoski is not easy to categorize — and that’s the point.

He is the founder of A Neighbor’s Choice, a media and ideas platform rooted in the belief that mimetic rivalry — the ancient human tendency to define ourselves by what we oppose — is the root of most political evil. His work draws from René Girard’s mimetic theory, the teachings of Jesus, the Austrian economics tradition, and a confrontational love of truth that refuses to soften itself for anyone’s comfort.

When Gornoski closed The Gathering that evening, he didn’t arrive with slides or a call to action. He came with Scripture, interpretation, and the connective tissue that links the eternal to the immediate without losing the thread of either. He read from the text. He interpreted. He correlated. And then he said the things that needed to be said.

Ron Paul Was Right. Trump Knows It.

Gornoski pointed out something too few people in either political camp are willing to acknowledge: many of President Trump’s most popular policy positions didn’t originate with Trump. They originated with Ron Paul.

No taxes on tips. No taxes on Social Security. No foreign aid bleeding the American taxpayer dry. No more wars built on lies and maintained by inertia. These weren’t new ideas in 2024. They were Ron Paul ideas — ideas the Republican establishment spent twenty years mocking, marginalizing, and burying. Ideas that the media laughed off as fringe libertarianism not fit for prime time.

And then they became prime time.

Gornoski said this not to diminish Trump but to honor the lineage — to remind the room that truth has a genealogy, and that ideas which survive long enough eventually find their moment. Ron Paul planted seeds in the American consciousness that are now bearing fruit in the mainstream political conversation. That matters. That deserves acknowledgment.

Epstein, Power, and the God Who Doesn’t Need a King

Gornoski did not avoid the harder conversations. He addressed the Epstein Island scandal — not as a rabbit hole, but as a theological and anthropological case study in what happens when power concentrates without accountability.

The Epstein network represents something ancient and ugly: the belief that certain men are above the moral law governing everyone else. That wealth and connection provide not just privilege, but immunity. This is where Gornoski’s Girardian framework becomes not just intellectually interesting but morally urgent. Scapegoating — the mechanism by which communities discharge their violence onto a chosen victim — is the oldest political technology in human history. The machinery that protected the powerful was the scapegoating machine, running in reverse.

Then Gornoski turned to Jesus.

Not Jesus the nationalist. Not Jesus the culture warrior. Not Jesus the endorsement for your preferred candidate. Jesus the anti-scapegoat — the one who absorbed the violence of the system without returning it, who exposed the mechanism by refusing to play by its rules, who showed us that redemption doesn’t come from the throne room.

It comes from the neighbor.

His message to The Gathering was direct and uncomforting in the best sense: stop waiting for kings or princes to save you. They won’t. The structure of power doesn’t permit it, and the theology of Christ doesn’t promise it. What we have is each other — our communities, our willingness to act locally and sacrificially, without the guarantee of recognition.

That is the neighbor’s choice. That is the only real political act.

Why We Rock Network Was in That Room

We Rock Network exists because nights like The Gathering deserve to be more than a memory. Good News. Good Music. Good Works. The good news is that people like Linda Evans are still building rooms. People like David Gornoski are still walking into them. The good works are what happen when people leave those rooms and actually do something.

Alabama is not a backwater. It is a bellwether. The conversations happening in civic halls across this state are seeding something that will matter nationally. You deserve to hear them.

Follow David Gornoski on X: @DavidGornoski Visit aneighborschoice.com for more.

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