Once a person understands Democrats’ pathological need to harvest new victims, it becomes obvious that they are not in the business of solving problems.  Fixing anything in society only reduces the number of future Democrats.  By celebrating victimhood, Democrats are committed to making things worse today than they were yesterday and even worse tomorrow than they are today.  Their growth model depends upon perpetual misery.

Americans saw this self-destructive phenomenon play out during Obama’s presidency.  Before the 2008 election, race relations between black and white Americans had steadily improved since the ’60s.  Racism was widely rejected as a repugnant practice of the past.  In fact, discrimination based upon the color of a person’s skin had become so offensive that courts were dismantling affirmative action programs that explicitly prioritized race over merit.  A lot of Republican voters, unhappy with their party’s nomination of Senator John McCain, crossed lines and voted for Barack Obama’s nebulous promise of “hope and change” with the expectation that a post-racial America would take root.

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder chose another path.  They looked for ways to inflame racial tensions.  They deconstructed a half-century of American racial progress by routinely injecting racial controversy into matters that had nothing to do with skin color.  A black Harvard professor is detained in the Democrat stronghold of Cambridge, Massachusetts?  That’s because all cops are unconsciously racist (even the black ones).  A black male dies in a confrontation with a neighborhood watchman?  That’s because black boys are hunted outside their own communities.  Americans don’t want to pay more for worse health care?  That’s because wealthy white Americans are too selfish to understand the appeal of socialized medicine.

Whenever policymakers fought Obama administration policy, charges of racism were not so subtly leveled against them.  Instead of finally terminating affirmative action programs and other race-based discrimination, Obama and Holder reinvigorated an otherwise dying system of racial preferences and rebranded discrimination as a “virtue” under the umbrella of the Marxist tripe we know now as “diversity, inclusion, and equity.”  When Obama was elected, race relations inside the United States had never been better.  After eight years of an Obama-Holder strategy to make every policy dispute a racial dispute, race relations had severely deteriorated.  There is perhaps no better example of how backward Democrats’ notion of “progress” truly is.

Setting aside the tangible social harm that Obama and Holder inflicted upon Americans, it is not difficult to understand why they chose division over unity.  Had President Obama framed his election victory as vivid proof that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream was reality — proof, in other words, that the content of an American’s character matters much more than the color of that American’s skin — a generational struggle against racial prejudice would have been largely resolved.

Had Obama declared victory over racism, he would have become a transformational figure in American history.  But Democrats are not in the business of solving problems.  Solving problems diminishes the supply of potential victims.  And Democrats’ political success depends upon an ever-growing class of self-identifying victims.

When seen from this perspective, it is easy to understand how cancerous the Democrats’ governing philosophy is.  Unity — or the cultivation of a common national identity and purpose — is antithetical to Democrats’ Marxist directive to rally the “oppressed” against their “oppressors.”  By design, Democrats cultivate grievance and conflict.  They isolate subsets of American society, convince those subsets that they are victims, and cynically exploit Americans’ shared desire to seek justice for the oppressed.  For Democrats, whether some isolated group has actually been treated unfairly or unjustly is irrelevant.  They stir social passions by maximizing perceived insults felt from real or imagined grievances.  Then they feed on those passions to create explosive political movements capable of transforming imaginary victimhood into real political power.

Since the nineteenth century, Marxism has tried to cultivate grievance among a majority of blue-collar workers, but America’s working class has stubbornly resisted.  However bad working conditions might have been in the United States since its inception, the country long maintained the highest rate of intergenerational social mobility in the world.  The children of indentured servants became farmers.  The children of farmers became skilled tradesmen.  The children of skilled tradesmen became entrepreneurs.  The children of entrepreneurs became lawyers, bankers, and even politicians.

In other words, for most of America’s history, the United States has been a “land of opportunity” unburdened by traditional strictures of social caste.  Marxists found it difficult to create a class revolution when American workers were too busy making money and buying land.  Coincidentally or not, intergenerational social mobility in the United States declined only after the rise of the Federal Reserve central banking system, the implementation of broadly enforced income taxes, growing encumbrances upon private property, and the rapid expansion of the twentieth-century regulatory state.

In the absence of a politically potent class conflict in America, Marxists turned to another unique characteristic of the United States: its ability to attract workers from all over the world.  For four hundred years, immigrants from distinct cultures and speaking different languages have arrived on America’s shores, and within a single generation, those immigrants have blended into America’s vibrant society.  America’s ability to fuse separate peoples into a common culture gave it the enviable reputation of being a “melting pot” — a land that could take quarrelsome strangers and bind them into an alloy of unusual strength.

American Marxists, having found insufficient power in class conflict, have spent the last century and a half trying to deconstruct this “melting pot.”  Common national identity and purpose forestall Democrats’ Marxist impulse to cultivate grievance and conflict.  That’s why, in recent decades, they have explicitly rejected any virtuous connotation of America’s historic “melting pot” and embraced pluralistic societies living inside and among each other.

What they champion as “multiculturalism” and “diversity” is really a malicious compulsion to turn constituent groups against one another.  Perceived victimhood cannot flourish in societies that value national unity.  Victimhood requires a steady supply of unfounded outrage and fake oppression.  This unhealthy addiction is the source of preposterous Democrat claims that racial minorities in the United States are today treated worse than antebellum slaves.

Why is the Democrat party so hostile to President Trump and his “Make America Great Again” agenda?  The simplest answer is right there in his famous political slogan.  He is interested in lifting all of America — and not just some constituent part of it.

Calling MAGA a “political slogan,” though, hides its real threat to Democrats.  In truth, it is President Trump’s clarion call to the American people: let us get our hands dirty, America.  Let us build and innovate and bring prosperity back to our towns.  Let us dream and turn our dreams into reality.  Let us remember that we are the descendants of revolutionaries who fought for freedom, explorers and adventurers who tamed a continent, and tough and gritty settlers whose courage and resilience fashioned the greatest of nations.  Let us fight when necessary and make peace when possible.  Let us resist all those who insist we are in decline.  Let us accomplish so much so quickly that future generations have no choice but to call this the beginning of America’s “Golden Age.”

MAGA rejects the pessimistic worldview of perpetual victims.  And a united America is Democrats’ undoing.

Bandit replied, “But bureaucrats don’t do work.  They wouldn’t have a clue how to do anything useful, and I’m sure they don’t have the mental capacity to learn.”

Il faut savoir noted, “Working on farms is hard and demanding.  We have produced SOFT generations, heads down on their cell and social media, and have hyped their worthless degrees as big deals.  Getting some time on the farms and doing hard hand labor would not only get them in shape, but show them what the true value of work means.”

Finally, Beth Nicolaides dreamed, “I’d like to see a new IRS hire picking lettuce.”  (Me, too, Beth!)

I think this online conversation gets to the nub of the most pressing crisis in America: there has been a decades-long disconnect between the vast government bureaucracy and the American people whom that bureaucracy purportedly “serves.”

When President Wilson first empowered a permanent administrative state to handle the “business of governing,” he envisioned an educated workforce immune from the day-to-day passions of politics but uniquely qualified to direct the operations of the American state.  That was at best a naïve dream and at worst a calculated strategy to deprive the American people of their democratic powers and elevate a faculty lounge of Wilson clones as a new noble class.  (When it comes to academics, it’s difficult to know whether their love for impractical theorizing or narcissistic god complex is the root cause of their real-world failures.)

Without any doubt, the steady expansion of the federal government over the last hundred years has been an unmitigated disaster.  From its inception, Wilson’s “modern” bureaucracy became a home for scarcely camouflaged Marxist-socialists who wished to burrow inside the federal government and “transform” America’s Constitution from within.  They sabotaged Americans’ interests and undermined Americans’ individual liberties.  By hook or by crook, they constructed a hiring system that prevents their subsequent removal.  No matter how poorly they perform or how malicious their intent to damage the United States, bad government workers remain employed.

“Rule by mediocrity” has created a widening gulf between the American people and their government.  It has enabled a few million bureaucrats to work around the will of voters.  It has effectively transitioned America from a representative republic to a “blob”-ocracy that listens to and represents only the blob.  Consequently, Americans see their government as something separate from themselves — an exotic beast that has grown in spite of the Constitution’s explicit limitations.

Adding insult to injury, none of Wilson’s dreamy benefits materialized from the construction of a “professional” government.  Elevating “experts,” he insisted over a century ago, would allow the federal government to react quickly to domestic problems and foreign challenges.  “Smart” people who were well trained for the tasks at hand would be equipped to overcome any difficulty at a moment’s notice.  Do those descriptions remind anyone of the federal government?

It’s been four months since Hurricane Helene devastated the southern Appalachians, and FEMA still can’t find western North Carolina on a map.  The Pentagon wasted billions of dollars over the last four years fighting “climate change” and “white supremacy” while fast-tracking delusional men with fake breasts into positions of command.  California — which prides itself as a kind of premier “laboratory” for the federal government — cut its firefighting budget, stopped executing controlled burns of dangerously combustible brush, and diverted record rainfalls into the Pacific in order to save a “sacred” fish.

When wildfires predictably destroyed parts of L.A., California’s inept “laboratory” of “professional bureaucrats” were not smart enough to understand that empty fire hydrants had been the city’s undoing.  Instead, the “experts” blamed their own incompetence on “global warming.”

Those are just three well known examples of lethal bureaucratic failures.  An honest auditor could start making a list of government-created crises, and the list would never end.  Because most of the government’s auditors are equally incompetent (or corrupt), the “professionals” who monitor all the other “professionals” rarely see anything wrong.  Negligent supervisors breed government malfeasance exponentially.  Like a hydra-headed monster, as soon as one bureaucratically engineered problem is fixed, ten new problems take its place!  (For those keeping score at home, this is why President Trump recently fired a score of inspectors general whose investigatory faculties appeared crippled by willful blindness.)  Rather than proving themselves skilled managers capable of deftly executing solutions, as Wilson promised, the permanent bureaucracy operates the “business of government” at a glacial pace.  During the “reign of experts,” Uncle Sam has demonstrated remarkable flexibility only in his uncanny ability to stick his head up his own derrière.

The online commenters whom I quoted at the beginning of this essay articulate our predicament adroitly.  After a century of bureaucratic expansion, we have millions of unnecessary employees who greatly overvalue their own contributions to American society and remain  oblivious to the reality that non-government workers are the country’s only essential workers.  People who grow, build, move, and fix things are the lifeblood of our nation.  Government bureaucrats are leeches who drain that blood in the form of taxes and senseless rule-making so that hacks with few skills can pretend to be “professionals.”  Professionals in what?  Who knows?  Even most of the “experts” realize that they are expert only at doing little and getting paid.

After President Trump’s executive order forcing federal workers back into the office, Wilson’s “professional government” ran to social media to shriek about the horrors of having to put on pants and function as adults.  Who would watch their children?  How would they ever be able to work that second job that they do when they’re pretending to work their federal jobs?  How can they be expected to rejoin their coworkers when it’s been only five years since the beginning of COVID?  If you watch enough of these videos online, it is impossible not to conclude that a substantial percentage of the federal workforce do absolutely nothing to justify their burden to American taxpayers.  They are the definition of dead weight.

Unsurprisingly, many of these federal parasites are advocating for sabotage of the Trump administration.  The clever writers over at Twitchy have highlighted a lengthy post from an intelligence officer who describes in detail how federal workers can undermine the president while hiding behind a pretense that they are doing their jobs “by the book.”  The fact that unelected bureaucrats feel so untouchable that they publicly incite subversion is sufficient evidence that the administrative state should be dismantled and disbanded.  As one commenter properly concludes, “if they are not going to do their jobs in an apolitical manner … they should be treated like political appointees and forfeit the protections of the civil service.”

The administrative state is a giant python that chokes the Constitution and swallows the American people whole.  It should be destroyed.  If it cannot be destroyed, it should be chopped into little pieces and dispersed across the frontier wilderness of Alaska.  If Congress and the courts prevent federal workers from being terminated, then President Trump should set them to better tasks.  He’s already “immediately halted” the hiring of IRS agents.  Now it’s time to do as Beth Nicolaides suggests above and send remaining IRS agents into the fields to pick lettuce.  Transitioning the federal workforce into farmhands would give bureaucrats a chance to earn an honest living.

One could be forgiven for wondering whether, at the end of his remarks, Old Joe might try to scooch Jimmy’s body to one side and join him in the casket.  Both literally and figuratively, we buried two terrible presidents this January.

Of course, all of America’s living ex-presidents attended Carter’s funeral.  Sitting in the same pew at Washington’s National Cathedral, they appeared a perfect rogues’ gallery of corruption and failure.  Bill Clinton still looks like the “after” picture for a high school class on the consequences of contracting venereal disease.  George W. Bush has aged like a man whose conscience torments his waking hours.  Barack Obama resembles a worn photograph of a forgotten celebrity from a bygone era.

Seated among them were the former first ladies.  Well, not all of them.  Michelle Obama was reportedly so appalled at the thought of sitting next to President Trump (as protocol required) that she decided to ditch tradition and hang out with a wine box in Hawaii.  (Personally, I think she dreads having to spend time with her husband and probably resented the public expectation that she pay respects to a white Southerner — even if he was a Democrat.)

On the other side of the pew from Michelle’s void, bitter Hillary Clinton scowled while wedged between her lecherous husband and her “brother,” Dubya.  Hillary’s miserable and angry visage reflected the dark and damaged soul of someone who has given everything to the Devil for the promise of power only to see that power ripped from her claws.  Her glowering expression fairly represented the sordid group of exes as a whole.

Then there was President Donald J. Trump — no doubt a major trigger for Hillary’s shrewish ire — who almost looks younger and more spirited with each passing year.  The contrast in appearance between the vigorous Trump and the rotting Establishment that he has repeatedly outflanked was stark and revealing.  Indeed, the image of a happy and confident President Trump separated from a crusty “ruling class” in various stages of decay was difficult to ignore.

On a pew filled with failed former presidents, a returning president was most certainly not like the others.  All life gravitated toward the world-historical figure and his beautiful wife seated on the far end.  That makes sense.  Bill, Hillary, Dubya, Barack, and Old Joe represent America’s mismanaged past, whereas President and First Lady Trump are leading America away from decades of accumulated damage and toward a more promising future.

In an essay years ago, I asked a simple question: “What do Democrats fear in Donald Trump?”  I offered a straightforward answer: they fear his potential for greatness.  One look at the necrotic assembly present for Carter’s funeral provided visual proof for my asked-and-answered query.  The National Cathedral was packed with some of the most powerful Americans from the last half-century — presidents, military chiefs, intelligence heads, central bankers, and Wall Street titans.  Not one — aside from President Donald J. Trump — will be remembered as historically exceptional.

The decrepit club of failed former presidents attests to this point.  Bill Clinton will be remembered for cheating on Hillary with a White House intern barely old enough to legally drink alcohol.  He will be remembered for using the Oval Office as a bordello and renting out the Lincoln Bedroom by the hour.  He will be remembered for handing military technology and most-favored-nation trading status to the Chinese Communist Party in return for campaign cash.

He will be remembered for initiating the vast offshoring of America’s industrial and manufacturing jobs to third-world countries and the vast transfer of middle-class Americans’ wealth to foreign adversaries.  He will be remembered for privatizing the prison system and filling new cells with black Americans.  He will be remembered as a venal and lascivious liar whose proclivities for self-aggrandizement, fraud, and falsehood were surpassed only by those of his even more corrupt wife.

George W. Bush, I am sorry to say, will be remembered for only three things: (1) failing to prevent the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, (2) launching a global “war on terror” that cost too many lives and too much money for questionable strategic objectives, and (3) constructing a post-9/11 national security surveillance state that trashed the Bill of Rights and turned every American into a criminal suspect.  By advocating for mass amnesty while using the PATRIOT Act to destroy Americans’ Fourth Amendment right to be secure from unreasonable and warrantless searches, Bush left Americans both less safe and less free.

Barack Obama forfeited his shot at greatness.  He could have united the country by framing his presidency as the visible culmination of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s worthy “dream.”  He could have offered his election as evidence that America is becoming a post-racial society that values character over skin color.  Had Obama done so, support for his brand of politics would have been so great that there might not even be a Republican Party today.  Instead, he and “wingman” Attorney General Eric Holder spent eight years rubbing salt in old racial wounds and dividing the country for expedient political victories.

Transforming the architecture of Bush’s unconstitutional post-9/11 surveillance state into a Deep State machine for monitoring, censoring, and criminally punishing political foes, Obama and Holder further dismantled the Bill of Rights and diminished America’s historic foundations in individual liberty.  Because petty vindictiveness has always blinded Obama, he squandered any chance at greatness.

The words “Joe Biden” and “greatness” look odd in the same sentence because Dementia Joe has always been an unimpressive politician of low character and even lower intelligence.  He is the poster boy for mediocrity, and the Deep State alone is responsible for his installation as president.  The Intelligence Community defrauded American voters during the 2020 election by claiming that Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop was “Russian disinformation” and censoring the story.

Democrat officials ignored election security laws by allowing political operatives to flood Democrat-controlled precincts with unverified (and most likely fraudulent) mail-in ballots.  To this day, no mainstream news “reporter” can explain how President Trump could lose an election in which he won nearly every traditional bellwether county by double-digits.  No credentialed “journalist” can explain how Joe Biden — a man who struggled to win Democrat primaries — could wind up with more votes in the 2020 general election than any candidate in U.S. history.

No national pundit can explain why the “most popular” politician of all time would have to bow out of the 2024 race.  Americans know the truth, even if Establishment censors insist on telling lies.  Cheating his way into office precluded Biden’s achieving greatness of any kind.  Acting as a puppet for Barack Obama, in fact, precluded his even being a real president.

Sitting next to all those failures and frauds at Carter’s funeral, President Donald J. Trump stood out.  He’s faced the fire and pushed forward.  His enemies have thrown everything at him, and still he stands.  The Deep State allowed two separate assassins to threaten his life, and the man never stopped fighting.  Impeachments, Democrat-funded civil lawsuits, criminal trials, FBI raids, attempts to remove him from state ballots — the Establishment Class has done whatever it can to keep Trump from representing the American people.  Yet he returns to office with a huge political mandate.

This presidency will break the mold.  History will be made.  Buckle up.  Get ready.  This is going to be great.

This is not the age of tranquility.  There have been epochs for which that description might be apt — when people were born and died without experiencing much change during the course of their lives.  The technologies that existed never advanced.  The universe of human knowledge never expanded.  Time stood more or less still, as if humanity were stuck in amber.

We’re not stuck in anything.  The technological revolutions from the late nineteenth century forward have remade the world time and again.  We’ve gone from telegraphs to telephones to cellular phones to smartphones.  Mass communication has evolved from printed newspapers to radio broadcasts to television news to internet chatrooms, email, and social media.  In the last twenty years, individuals have seized control over the instruments of mass communication — becoming self-created news reporters, entertainers, influencers, and celebrities.  In the last ten years, governments and their corporate allies have tried desperately to claw back control over the mass media monopoly they once had.

Global wars have jumbled history’s trajectory and shifted the balance of power more than once.  In some ways, World War II never truly concluded.  An Iron Curtain demarcated the world for another half-century, and even thirty years after the Cold War, its battles rage on.  Russia’s tense relationship with former Warsaw Pact members, China’s belligerent insistence on swallowing Taiwan, Israel’s generational defense of its sovereign borders, post-colonial Africa’s cauldron of bloody civil wars, and the continuing state of war between North and South Korea are but five of the most prominent examples of conflicts that have continued, in one form or another, for eighty years.

Religious belief has surged, dwindled, disappeared, been replaced, been reimagined, and perhaps even been rediscovered.  Interwar nihilism and self-indulgence that took root during the apocalyptic atmosphere of WWI fully blossomed with the generation that arrived after WWII.  Europe and America rejected their Christian foundations and invented “new age” religions for the public’s consumption — repackaging the language of Christian virtue into hippy-dippy self-help guides, mindful meditation, “social justice” movements, environmental doomsaying, and other malleable yet commercially successful hogwash designed to sate humanity’s spiritual needs.

The “greenies” rejected Jesus Christ but told us that we’re all going to die for our “fossil fuel” sins.  The central bankers and globalist oligarchs joined this self-hating bandwagon because the “climate change” religion offered them a chance to maximize wealth and power.  For years, they have elevated a line of “global warming” popes — Al Gore, Klaus Schwab, John Kerry — all claiming to have influence with planetary gods that might be willing to save us from Armageddon if we do exactly what the rich people vacationing in Davos, Switzerland say.

The World Economic Forum updates its globalist bible every year so that laypeople know what to believe and what to worship.  The “climate change” clergy even promote young know-nothings such as Greta Thunberg, who play-acts as a modern, “truth”-telling “green” Jesus.  Global “elites” love the “net zero” religion because they can make up new commandments as needed, condemn naysayers as selfish apostates, and rebrand totalitarianism as philanthropic virtue.  “Global warming” pseudoscience allows the U.N., the WEF, and other religious denominations to tell everyone else how much to pay in taxes, how much freedom to give up, and how to behave.

And yet there is substantial evidence that a very real Christian revival is gaining energy.  Older people who have perhaps lost their way are picking up dusty Bibles to see just what truths lie within.  Well known commentators — including Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Russell Brand — are doing something that few could have predicted even five years ago: they are publicly discussing the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Young people, too, are finding their way to Christ.  What would have seemed quite unusual last decade is becoming almost commonplace: athletes, musicians, actors, and academics are bearing witness to Christ’s purposeful influence upon their lives.  Even politicians who forgot Jesus’s name as they became worshipful converts to the “green” religion are slowly recovering from decades of amnesia and remembering the King of kings.

In this wildfire of technological change, global conflict, and spiritual upheaval, the challenges all around us feel daunting.  If you will allow me to offer minor encouragement, it is this: do not look away.  Do not let the noise distract your thoughts.  Do not let the madness drive you mad.  Do not let potential dangers drown you in fear.  Be resolute.  Be purposeful.  Be hopeful.  Be brave.

Consider this clearly: there has never been a moment in history when so many lies and so much propaganda have been mercilessly directed toward the human race.  Intelligence agencies and corporate news platforms bombard our brains every day with false information.  Governments have abandoned truth for the “narrative,” and the “narrative” is nothing but a psychologically valuable weapon for achieving political victory.  Meanwhile, political victory is defined not as something that is beneficial for all people, but rather as something that gives those with great wealth and power even greater reserves of both.

In 2025, so-called “democracies” pursue the same totalitarian objectives as the “authoritarian” regimes those “democracies” vilify.  They seek to control minds, monitor movements, police behavior, regulate speech, and subjugate free will.  European and American politicians may talk a big game when it comes to “democracy” and “freedom,” but they have long been the greatest threats to both.

Yet they are afraid.  They are losing.  We are winning.  How do I know?  Their absolute abandonment of even the pretense of supporting free speech is a dead giveaway.  Western leaders are so fearful of losing power that they have become overtly pro-censorship.

Former European commissioner Thierry Breton openly brags that Europe and U.S.-NATO scuttled the recent Romanian election because voters chose the “wrong” leader.  He promises that Eurocrats will do the same in Germany if German citizens vote “incorrectly” this year.  How can a prominent European statesman defend such brazenly anti-democratic tyranny?  He blames free speech.  Voters, he alleges, are reading and listening to the wrong voices.

Breton’s authoritarianism echoes placeholder-president Joe Biden’s denunciation of Mark Zuckerberg’s “shameful” decision to purge left-wing “fact-checkers” from their years-long role as professional censors who monitor and delete public debate on Facebook and other Meta platforms.  Biden called the move away from government-directed censorship “completely contrary to everything America is about.”  The so-called “leader of the free world” and a man constitutionally duty-bound to defend the Bill of Rights thinks it’s “un-American” to protect the First Amendment.

Failed governor “Nero” Newsom insists that Biden censor online criticism of his administration’s disastrous response to California’s deadly wildfires.  Fellow tyrant Hillary Clinton wants Americans who “engage in misinformation” to be “criminally charged.”  Of course, Hillary also expects that she, Newsom, Biden, and Breton will continue to exercise a monopoly over official “truth.”  These shocking abuses of power reveal just how deeply afraid Western despots have become.

Of what are they afraid?  They are afraid of you.  They fear your voice, your private thoughts, and your desire to be free.  You have untapped power that they see.  What an interesting time to be alive.

The captain gathers his trusted advisers in secret to discuss the dilemma.  One side is not worried at all.  Scientists from this coalition point out that before the ship departed, Earth engineers fully expected future inhabitants to continue innovating and improving the vessel’s capabilities.  An agricultural adviser explains that the ship has exponentially increased its food production in the last few generations alone.  Speaking to this point, the original doomsayer stands and says, “That’s just the problem.  The more food we produce, the healthier our people become.  The healthier they become, the more children they have.  And the more children they have, the faster we will run out of resources in the future!”

The doomsayer proceeds to paint a picture of the future in which the spaceship is severely overcrowded, and the space travelers are forced to fight for clean air, water, and food.  “When such a time arrives,” the doomsayer insists, “there will be riots, famine, and war.  There will be revolution.  Desperate people will rebel against the ship’s government and hang the privy council!”

“What’s your solution?” another council member asks.

“Depopulation,” the doomsayer answers dispassionately.  “We must begin to cull those passengers who offer no benefit to our mission or future survival.”

Many in the gathering are shocked.  They demand that nothing so drastic be considered until the whole ship has had a chance to vote.  “Are you mad?” the doomsayer snaps.  “The people will never vote for their own elimination.  And if they did, we’d be the first ones they’d eliminate.  No, we must do this in secret — for the passengers’ own good!”

At this point in the animated discussion, a priest stands in opposition.  “Fellow members of the privy council, I cannot believe what I’m hearing today.  We are not here to destroy human life.  We are here to foster human life across the galaxy.  We cannot play God.  We must pray, seek the Almighty’s guidance, and use the gifts that He has given us to find solutions that safeguard our future.  If we start killing others to save ourselves, we betray our ultimate mission as human beings.”

In anger, the doomsayer points an accusatory finger at the priest and shouts, “Don’t tell us about your imaginary God, sir.  You are a charlatan, and your Bible is nothing but an opiate for the masses.  You are meant to keep the passengers docile, peaceful, and relatively happy.  You know nothing of science, and you can save no one with your thoughts and prayers.”

The priest begins to answer, but the doomsayer’s friends shout him down and threaten his removal.  “Continue ignoring science and pushing God, sir, and we will begin our depopulation efforts with you.”  Silence and fear permeate the room.

The ship’s captain clears his throat and asks the doomsayer what he has in mind.  “We need to act on the margins,” the doomsayer responds.  “We need to manipulate the spacecraft in subtle ways, so that fewer people are born and more people die suddenly.  But we need to make it impossible for passengers to discern what is happening to them.”

The doomsayer, having clearly thought about his plans for human culling in great detail, begins to unveil elaborate proposals for social engineering on a massive scale.  There are four main parts, he says.  We must (1) destroy the family, (2) keep passengers at war with one another, (3) eliminate uncontrolled innovation by strictly controlling education, and (4) develop the tenets of a “new religion” that elevates the worship of the spaceship above all else.

Women, the doomsayer contends, must be provoked to resent their role in the family.  They should see motherhood as a burden, something that distracts them from career success and ship-wide recognition.  Being a mother and wife should be scorned as something ugly and outdated.  Female passengers should be reminded that there is a secret conspiracy among men — let’s call it the “patriarchy” — that exists to subjugate them.

Furthermore, the doomsayer argues, we should encourage promiscuity and abortion.  Loving families produce children.  Sexually adventurous singles do not.  There’s no reason to stop with women, either.  It would be good if we can convince men to see marriage as a form of imprisonment.  It would be great if we can convince everyone to doubt the science behind biological sex.  What better way to slow population growth than to so confuse passengers about sexual reality that they are too busy experimenting with strange fetishes to get married and have kids?

Next, the doomsayer continues, we must pit the passengers against one another.  We must divide them by race, ethnicity, and religion.  We must establish new political parties that create tribal loyalties and exacerbate meaningless distinctions.  We must keep passengers suspicious of one another and constantly at each other’s throats.  We should make some groups’ living quarters too small and hot and blame those conditions on others.  We should starve one group and overfeed another.  We should maximize resentments and ossify hatreds.  Then we should step back when war breaks out and let the passengers “depopulate” themselves.

If peace ever lasts too long, we can just start an outbreak of disease on one side of the ship and watch the spread of chaos fuel future conflict.  Nothing divides a population so quickly as a series of disasters that force everyone to fight for survival.  Either through food shortages, contagions, or war, any resulting trimming of the passenger manifest will look quite natural.

Here’s the key, the doomsayer insists: we must control education.  It is simply too dangerous to allow everyone to learn whatever he likes.  Knowledge provides a foundation for asking sensible questions.  Asking questions leads to critical thinking.  Critical thinking arms a mind with the tools necessary for questioning authority.  Questioning authority will eventually get the privy council hanged!

So above all else, we must keep passengers in the dark and ill equipped to question anything!  Fill their minds with superstitions.  Teach them to obsess over meaningless ethnic differences and absurd sexual identities.  Tell them that mathematics is “racist.”  Convince them that reading is “extremist.”  But don’t let them learn how to think!  Thinking invites innovation, and innovation nurtures talent for solving problems.  Some freethinking passenger might one day conclude that there is a better answer than “depopulation.”  We can’t have that!

Once the passengers have been deprived of a decent education, the doomsayer concludes, they will be desperate for some greater meaning in their lives.  In that void, we will offer them a “new religion.”  We will teach them to love and worship this spacecraft as a god!  We will convince them to sacrifice their health and happiness for the ship’s survival.  We will give lonely people purpose, and they will gladly accept their miserable fates.  We will tell them that choosing suicide to “save the ship” is the most “humanitarian” thing they can do.  In a few short generations, passengers will “depopulate” themselves for the ship’s salvation.

I don’t know exactly what goes on during private meetings of the Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, or World Economic Forum.  But I suspect that those privy councils see Earth as their own private vessel hurtling through space and the rest of us as mere stowaways depleting vital resources.  One day, there will be a mutiny.

To be sure, Democrats and propagandists in the press will continue to frame January 6, 2021 as worse than Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and the Civil War — fantastically false claims that make the speaker look dumb, deceitful, and historically illiterate.  Still, it will be difficult for Establishment automatons to continue pushing J6 lies when January 6th’s bête noire is celebrating re-election.

Democrats, Uniparty Republicans, and unelected bureaucratic tyrants have spent eight years trying to turn Donald Trump into a social pariah.  They called him a Russian spy, an illegitimate president, a misogynist, a racist, and a cheat.  They committed perjury in sworn affidavits and in testimony before Congress just to sully his name, maliciously prosecuted his friends for nonexistent crimes, and defrauded the American people with their Russia collusion lies.  They turned the DOJ and FBI into lawless “Get Trump” gangs, impeached him twice, hunted down his voters as “insurrectionists,” and accused him of treason.  The American people voted overwhelmingly for President Trump anyway.

Congress certifying his victory on January 6 while simultaneously denouncing him as some kind of un-American dictator would be as incongruous as Congress remembering the attack on Pearl Harbor while simultaneously making December 7 a day of national recognition for Japanese achievement.  Many members of Congress are stupid enough to try, but for all intents and purposes, the Establishment’s misguided efforts to transform the sixth of January into a day for national mourning are over.  The pretense is shattered.  The jig is up.  Far from being destroyed, Trump and his MAGA political movement are ascendant.

What remains of this four-year propaganda operation to slander President Trump and his voters as “domestic terrorists”?  Nothing good for the crusty Establishment barnacles that have long clung to the American hull.  In trying to delegitimize Trump and his supporters, the parasitic “ruling class” has only further delegitimized itself.

During his lucid moments as president, Joe Biden never missed an opportunity to label the January 6 protest a “deadly insurrection,” but the only people killed four years ago were Trump voters — including unarmed Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt.  Instead of subsequently de-escalating tensions and pursuing national unity, the Gestapo FBI dedicated tremendous resources to terrorizing patriotic grandparents for the “crime” of behaving like tourists and snapping pictures inside the Capitol.  The psychopathic DOJ unconscionably drove defendants to bankruptcy and suicide for doing nothing more sinister than strolling calmly around the “People’s House.”  Political prisoners who refused to accept bogus guilty pleas have languished inside jails without pre-trial bail and served years in prison for minor trespassing or vandalism offenses that never would have been pursued against the FBI’s Antifa and BLM friends.  The odor of two-tiered “justice” has been rank, and nobody with a nose can stomach the federal government’s revolting cruelty.

January 6 will be remembered for decades to come, but not for the reasons D.C.’s occupying clans have long hoped.  More akin to the Boston Massacre, the date will remain a rallying cry for public defiance against government villainy.  “Remember January 6” will acquire the same connotation as “Remember the Alamo” — provoking patriotic fervor in the face of despotic Big Government brutality.

Had the information warfare specialists gamed this scenario properly, they never would have taken the chance of turning January 6, 2021 into a sacred day of remembrance for the very people they wished to minimize, censure, and condemn.  The propagandists will regret their role in creating an enduring symbol for their enemies.

Americans who have long wished for the government to leave them alone see in January 6 the glowing embers of growing tyranny.  When public calls for liberty rise against the inevitable excesses of the metastasizing national security surveillance state, “Remember January 6” will roll off tongues with the same fervor of our forefathers’ exhortation to “live free or die.”  Far from burying the MAGA movement, January 6 emboldened it.

As for the intellectually challenged stenographers who enjoy journalistic sinecures in corporate newsrooms and the Old Guard “ruling class” who see political power as a birthright, I want to explain clearly why their J6 intelligence operation failed.

President Trump’s first term in office provided a “Great Awakening” for millions of Americans, who saw for the first time how the federal government and its media co-conspirators routinely lie to the public.  For decades, institutional authorities had been given so much deference that attempts to question official “narratives” were dismissed as uninformed opinion or denigrated as “conspiracy theories.”

Donald Trump almost singlehandedly upended this cursed arrangement.  He called out the federal government’s penchant for endless wars, reckless spending, bad trade deals, open borders, and industrial outsourcing.  In turn, the Establishment Class told American voters that putting Trump in the White House would trigger nuclear war, economic depression, and national collapse.  When Americans ignored the “experts” and voted for Trump anyway, he gave middle-class Americans real economic growth, more secure borders, and a remarkably effective peace-focused foreign policy.  In short, the political “outsider” proved more competent and truthful than the political “insiders.”

Despite Trump’s numerous policy successes, he committed the political “sin” of exposing the “ruling class” as the un-American snake that it is.  Consequently, the Deep State snake dedicated all its resources to sabotaging Trump’s presidency and harassing him with criminal investigations.  In the old days, the institutional onslaught against him would have surely succeeded, but this time around, the Establishment’s ruthless partisanship and litany of demonstrable lies proved its undoing.  There are only so many times that a reasonable person can hear Adam Schiff, Hillary Clinton, Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi, or John Brennan babble about “Russian collusion” before Americans accept that institutional authorities cannot be trusted to tell the truth.

The Americans who showed up in D.C. on January 6, 2021 to protest for free and fair elections were not armed and were not trying to overthrow the U.S. government — no matter how many years lying politicians, prosecutors, and credentialed “journalists” continue pushing that inane fantasy.  They showed up because Democrat operatives used COVID as an excuse to flood battleground states with anonymous and unsecured mail-in ballots and succeeded in overturning substantial Trump vote leads days after the election.  President Trump not only won ten million more votes than in his 2016 election, but also won nearly every traditional bellwether county by double-digits.  Joe Biden had never been a popular politician, had failed in several previous presidential campaigns, and was already showing signs of dementia, yet the American people were told that the basement-dwelling Biden somehow won millions more votes than any candidate in American history.  Nothing smelled right about the 2020 election.

Voters tried repeatedly to litigate claims of vote fraud in court.  Judges refused to do their jobs and scrutinize the elections.  Democrat secretaries of state certified vote counts that could not be replicated — including from precincts recording more votes than voters.  Democrat attorneys general refused to investigate allegations of fraud.  The news media ignored every story that cast doubt on a Joe Biden “victory.”  It was in this atmosphere of organized crime and journalistic apathy that ordinary citizens came to the nation’s capital to seek redress.  Little did they know that political leaders would weaponize their exercise of free speech and destroy their lives — all in the name of “democracy.”

President Trump, free the J6 political hostages.  Pardon those who have suffered due to government malice and corruption.  Remedy these awful abuses against the American people.  Use your victory to save their lives.  Remember January 6 — now and forever.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

And you thought that I struggled to locate a terminal period for some of my longest sentences!  In Dickens’s defense, it is one hell of a sentence!  It is also a sophisticated description of the tumultuous events that accompany transformative eras such as our own — what many have come to regard as a “Fourth Turning,” when crisis and social upheaval dominate life for a generation.

Will we be able to “Make America Great Again”?  Will this be the beginning of a new American “Golden Age,” as President Trump suggests?  Or will we soon endure economic collapse and war the likes of which none of us has ever seen?  As 2024 comes to an end, it is fair to say that uncertainty is only accelerating and that the prospects for peace and prosperity are running neck and neck with their opposites.

We are surrounded by creature comforts that our relatives living during the First World War would have struggled to imagine.  Flat-screen televisions with enough high-definition detail to transport us onto athletic fields of live sporting events or into realistic scenes of whatever shows we happen to be watching.  Handheld computers that allow us to track down information and interact with strangers from all over the world.  Online markets that link buyers and sellers who never would have found each other even twenty years ago.  For most of human history, the wealthiest kings and queens never lived as luxuriously as many of the poorest people in the West live today.

Yet there is a darkness burbling beneath all this technological magic.  Even before our televisions were “smart,” the programs on their screens provided manipulative actors the means to “program” what we believe.  I refer not to the glitzy celebrities, but rather to those agents in boardrooms and committee rooms who use those celebrities to push messages we don’t always consciously see.  Situational comedies have made us laugh for eighty years, but their product placements have subtly influenced what we buy.  Their storylines have subtly influenced our opinions regarding politics, morality, and war.  We turn on televisions to be entertained, but corporations and governments use television to shape our thoughts and keep us under their control.  Mass propaganda does not work without our willingness to disengage our brains and let the “boob tube” do our thinking for us.  There’s nothing “smart” about that.

These handheld computers that we call phones are similarly Janus-faced.  On the one hand, I have felt fortunate to live during a time of intellectual nirvana, when no branch of knowledge lies beyond my reach.  Esoteric subjects that once required me to seek out small collections in far-flung libraries are now instantly available in the palm of my hand.  If knowledge is nourishment, then the rapid evolution of the internet combined with inexpensive mobile computers has given us an incomparably delectable feast.

On the other hand, we now see how those who manipulate us for a living will use the tantalizing smorgasbord of information at our fingertips to poison our minds and keep us in the cages they built for us long ago.  For a while there, it seemed as if we had broken free from those cages.  Governments’ monopolies over both mass communication and the availability of information appeared to have been shattered, as if Prometheus had stolen fire from the globalist gods and given it to the eight-billion-strong human rump that the infinitesimally small number of planetary “elites” prefer to keep in the dark.

Now that fire is slowly dying.  Libraries and newspapers are retreating behind paywalls.  Sources of information that conflict with governments’ preferred “narratives” are disappearing from corners of the internet.  Government censors work with secretive “non-governmental” organizations to bankrupt independent news sites and criminalize dissent.  Once-contrarian websites (such as the Drudge Report) have started toeing the Establishment line — as if they were quietly taken over by ideological enemies or their owners were threatened into submission.  “Misinformation” and “disinformation” — words that meant little to Westerners two decades ago — have been elevated to national security bogeymen on par with nuclear weapons, so that governments can justify censorship on an industrial scale.  We live both in a “Golden Age” of free speech and access to information and an unstable cauldron of viewpoint discrimination, intellectual suppression, “woke” bowdlerization, and State-sanctioned propaganda.

In this stomach-churning stew of technology-enabled propaganda and censorship, our favorite devices are also our jailers.  Our “smart” phones and televisions spy on our conversations, monitor our movements, record our social interactions, and scrutinize our purchases.  Our daily “selfies,” retinal and fingerprint security verifications, and health-tracking apps collect our biometric information while logging changes in our physical and psychological well-being.  Technology companies and their government partners have complete access to our phone calls, text messages, emails, and social media histories.  Our digital contacts provide intelligence agencies with a tidy list of our “known associates.”  And these same devices that permit corporate and government spies to watch everything we do simultaneously allow those agents to bombard us with a constant stream of propaganda in the form of fake news (actual “disinformation” in government parlance).

Yet the best and worst features of modern technology merely distract us from a far more serious problem.  For more than a century, the Federal Reserve System has printed paper money and constructed an unsustainable world of unfathomable debt.  We cannot avoid the financial tribulation headed our way; we can only delay its arrival, just as Ponzi-scheming bankers and profligate politicians have done for decades.

In order to postpone economic collapse, the fraud-inducing Fed and its fraud-enabling partners in government have (1) placed downward pressure on wages by encouraging women to join the workforce, (2) decoupled from the gold standard, (3) imposed the petrodollar upon global markets to stimulate artificial dollar demand, (4) offshored entire industries to slave-labor nations, (5) regulated markets, (6) spent recklessly, (7) started wars, (8) used COVID lockdowns to contain inflation, (9) imposed “climate change” taxes, and (10) completely opened U.S. borders to illegal aliens willing to work for slave wages.

These policies were never about feminism, “free trade,” health, security, or multiculturalism.  They were implemented to slow the catastrophic (and mathematically inevitable) inflation naturally resulting from a century of money-printing.  Nevertheless, the U.S. dollar has lost 99% of its value since 1971.  We have “fundamentally transformed” from a society in which a single breadwinner could earn enough to support a large family to a society in which two parents must work multiple jobs even for a small family to stay afloat.

As 2024 ends, we should be filled with determination and hope.  But we have much to do if we are to survive the consequences of a century of government malice, predation, and foolishness.

Is it Paul Revere’s historic engraving of the Boston Massacre?  Or Emanuel Leutze’s famous Washington Crossing the Delaware?  Or perhaps John Trumbull’s The Declaration of Independence?  Those are all good answers, but the image of which I write is of George Washington kneeling in silent prayer near the Continental Army’s winter encampment at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in December 1777.

You can conjure that picture in your mind almost immediately — the tall, striking figure of General George Washington with knee and sword touching the snowy ground, his military coat draped around his shoulders, his cocked hat removed and at his side, his bare fingers firmly interlaced, and his head bowed in solemn contemplation.  To his right stands Blueskin, Washington’s strong and noble war horse whose fearlessness during battle was well known.  Blueskin’s whitish-gray coat blends with Washington’s whitish-grey wig, while the war horse’s visibly cold breath blends with the frigid Pennsylvania snow.  A ray of morning light crosses before the general and his loyal companion, as both man and horse appear intimately aware of God’s presence.

When you think of that image, you can feel the chill.  You can hear the crunching of frozen snow beneath their feet.  You can briefly experience the weight of responsibility one man bore to shape his nation’s destiny.  You can almost walk into that moment during the winter of 1777, when so few sacrificed so much for all of us alive today.  Our emotional bond to that instant in time reflects our recognition that Washington’s prayer is also our country’s birth.

The most famous depiction of that moment today is Arnold Friberg’s The Prayer at Valley Forge, which the artist produced for the bicentennial of the United States.  President Reagan prominently displayed Friberg’s painting in the White House while he was in office.  The “most sublime picture in American history,” the president noted, “is of George Washington on his knees in the snow at Valley Forge.  That image personifies a people who know that it’s not enough to depend on our own courage and goodness.  We must also seek help from God our father and preserver.”  Even in this cynical age, Americans know the truth of Reagan’s words.  In Friberg’s painting, we see the “Father of America” in humble supplication before Our Father Who art in Heaven.  There can be no America, in other words, without God’s continued blessing.

Christmas at Valley Forge was rough.  The British, having defeated the Continental Army at the Battle of Brandywine on September 11, easily captured the colonial capital of Philadelphia in the weeks that followed.  For the Americans, the loss was an enormous strategic and emotional blow.  General Washington was forced to withdraw and seek winter shelter for 12,000 soldiers, wives, and children.  Valley Forge offered a defensible plateau about a day’s march from Philadelphia, but British raids had left American troops with dwindling supplies.

By December, the fugitive Second Continental Congress granted General Washington authority to direct the war at his discretion.  At the same time, after the loss of Philadelphia, some members questioned whether he should remain commander-in-chief.  Perhaps because of this uncertainty, Congress failed to fix severe deficiencies in the Continental supply chains meant to reach Valley Forge.  Washington’s men lacked winter clothes, shoes, and food.  They were forced to build makeshift shelters in the freezing cold.  The wartime settlement was the fourth largest community in the colonies.  The fate of the Revolution depended on whether weary colonial troops could survive a brutal winter.  Tragically, some two thousand succumbed to cold, hunger, and disease.

However, the difficult Christmas at Valley Forge forged a formidable army.  Washington wrote that there had never been an “instance of an army’s suffering such uncommon hardships as ours has done and bearing them with the same patience and fortitude.  To see men without clothes to cover their nakedness, without blankets to lie on, without shoes (for the want of which their marches might be traced by the blood from their feet), and almost as often without provisions as with them, marching through the frost and snow, and at Christmas taking up their winter quarters within a day’s march of the enemy, without a house or a hut to cover them till they could be built, and submitting without a murmur, is a proof of patience and obedience which in my opinion can scarce be paralleled.”

The resiliency of Washington’s troops was also proof of his remarkable leadership.  Throughout their terrible ordeal at Valley Forge, General Washington admonished his soldiers to “fear God, to put away wickedness … and to practice Christian virtues.”  Martha Washington, who joined her husband for part of each winter encampment, encouraged others through “her presence and submission to privation” and by “strengthening the fortitude of those who might have complained … giving hope and confidence to the desponding.  She soothed the distresses of many sufferers, seeking out the poor and afflicted with benevolent kindness, extending relief wherever it was in her power.”  Together, General and Lady Washington provided tremendous spiritual leadership during a time of tremendous physical suffering.

It was from this Christmas season that various accounts later emerged of General Washington’s early morning prayers.  Although twentieth-century historians questioned whether Washington’s “Prayer at Valley Forge” is more American myth than American history, there are numerous contemporary descriptions of the great man praying for God’s protection and guidance.  Officers recorded in their own writings General Washington’s habit of praying each morning and whenever he presumed to be alone.  Washington regularly encouraged others to be obedient servants of God.  A Lutheran minister named Henry Muhlenberg observed of Washington’s Christian virtue: “Therefore, the Lord God has also singularly, yea, marvelously preserved him from harm in the midst of countless perils, ambuscades, fatigues, etc., and has hitherto graciously held him in his hand as a chosen vessel.”  George Washington continually sought God’s blessing, and he continually directed those under his command to be God’s instruments here on Earth.  Those facts are often overlooked in modern history books.

Heartfelt prayer at Valley Forge did work.  Food, clothing, blankets, and ammunition eventually arrived.  The alliance with France and the arrival of the Marquis de Lafayette boosted colonial morale.  A Prussian drillmaster named Baron von Steuben turned Washington’s volunteer army into a disciplined unit.  Weeks before they should have run the Schuylkill River, protein-rich shad fish swam up to the Valley Creek.  Soldiers starving for food and encouragement found both.  In their own way, each event was its own miracle at Valley Forge.

Writer Rick Chromey observes that despite the hardships experienced at Valley Forge, soldiers optimistically sang this carol together: “God rest ye, merry gentlemen / Let nothing you dismay / Remember Christ our Savior / Was born on Christmas-day / To save poor souls from Satan’s power / Which long time had gone astray / And it is tidings of comfort and joy.”  Following General Washington’s lead, they put their faith and hopes for salvation in the hands of Almighty God.

As stories of Valley Forge reached American colonists, a shared national bond formed around the army’s suffering.  The soldiers’ sacrifice united disparate peoples into one country.  One story, however, transcended the rest — that of General George Washington praying in the Pennsylvania snow.  That image was treasured and reproduced and passed through each generation to the present.  Those who fought and died for America sent us a clear message: there can be no America unless we Americans are obedient to God.

This Christmas, let us listen to our ancestors.  Let us bow our heads.  And let us pray.

So, in the op-ed pages of the failing New York Times and during the prime-time group therapy sessions broadcast from the bankrupt studios of CNN and MSNBC, Democrat operatives tiptoe around many taboo subjects while suggesting to their fellow congregants that the Democrat party must atone for its loss of earthly power.  Influential clergymen from Barack Obama’s own “woke” order have even gone so far as to publicly confess the commission of what is by far the gravest Democrat sin: “We’re losing the culture war.”

Egad!  That’s the one war Democrats are unwilling to lose!  They must be perceived as the “cool” ones at all times.  So imperiling is the prospect of surrendering their reputation for being hip and trendy that Democrats will do anything to remain relevant.  Smug pretentiousness doesn’t look sexy when you’re constantly being depantsed in viral videos and on social media.  Glib aloofness looks a lot like stupidity when ignorant celebrities can’t hide behind their pop-culture mystiques and glamour shots.

If Democrats aren’t in charge of the culture, they can’t be in charge of anything else for long either.  Without a monopoly over the haute couture of fame and public adulation, they are no more than an odd collection of doomsayers, snake oil salesmen, carnival barkers, streetwalkers, has-beens, pseudo-intellectuals, hormone-raging adolescents, and empty suits.  If the public sees them as they actually are, they will never be allowed to hold power again.  It’s never good policy to let the inmates run the asylum.  It’s downright deadly to give the inmates nuclear weapons and control over the economy.

Understandably, Democrats are freaking out about their loss of social prestige.  They expected the public to defer to the wishes of noted climatologist (snark!) Greta Thunberg as she dictates to farmers across the globe what they can and cannot do with their private lands.  They expected fearful citizens to obey the pandemic-loving Anthony Fauci’s every command.  They expected women to vote for Kamala Harris because Taylor Swift endorsed her from a pyrotechnic-lit stage.  They expected blue-collar workers to reject President Trump’s “America First” agenda because Robert De Niro wasted the last eight years playing an angry, old man with a single line: “F*ck Trump!”  They expected Green Day’s hatred for MAGA voters to keep the “cool kids” caged on the Democrats’ soul-crushing plantation.  Celebrities flooded the 2024 pop-culture space with anti-Trump histrionics, cringeworthy temper-tantrums, and a glut of Democrat party endorsements.  The public tuned out all the noise and voted for Trump anyway.

You mean the Hollyweirdos, fake scientists, lip-syncing twerkers, aging rock stars, and teenaged “influencers” have lost control over the mind-melded masses?  Gaia forfend!  Quick, call in the liposuction plumbers, the botox brigades, and the lighting specialists: we must remind Americans that the celebrity class is filled with bona fide stars!  Who do the folks living in the lowlands of the Missouri Bootheel think they are?  When Bob De Niro, the queen of Swifties, and boy bands who are old enough to qualify for senior citizen discounts tell you to vote for Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris, you better hop to it!  Being rich and famous entitles dumb people to tell working-class people what to do.

Or…just spitballing here…maybe Americans have grown tired of caring about the opinions of a bunch of California communists who pal around with sexual predators, debaucherous drug enthusiasts, habitual rehab guests, angry narcissists, profligate poobahs, and intellectual poseurs who can barely read.  Perhaps Americans finally see Hollywood’s undeservedly rich and famous as the dimwitted, morally vacuous cretins and reprobates they’ve always been.  Could that be why “woke” Disney, late night scolds posing as comedians, and politics-pushing actors have lost their influence over the American people?  There’s no question that Hollywood’s stars have dimmed.  Even aw-shucks “everyman” Tom Hanks now suffers at the box-office after pimping for the Democrats’ favorite flavors of socialism the last few years.  (Spoiler alert: all the flavors of socialism taste like dirt because socialism always leads to murder, starvation, and mass graves.)

Americans have definitely seen through the celebrity class’s layers of plastic surgery and recognized Hollywood for what it is: a feeding ground for lost and damaged souls.  Voters have rejected the political pablum of Rob Reiner, Rosie O’Donnell, Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, Mark Ruffalo, and other Tinseltown snobs because their opinions hold no weight.  Americans can think for themselves.  The good people of “flyover country” have nothing to learn from the vain pontifications of coastal “elites.”

There is a more salient reason why Americans of all backgrounds now avoid the Democrat party’s army of celebrity influencers as if their opinions were as malodorous as spoiled milk sitting under an Arizona sun: there is absolutely nothing “cool” about being a Democrat these days.  If you want to get a stern lecture, you hang out with Democrats.  If you want to have a good time with other happy people, you go to a Trump rally.  If you scrutinize all jokes for their compliance with the tenets of “political correctness,” then you vote Democrat.  If you make jokes without worrying about “triggering” somebody, then Democrat operatives are most likely censoring whatever you say online.  Nobody likes being censored.  And as shocking as this must be to Deep State Democrats, censorship isn’t “cool.”

Over Thanksgiving, President Trump released a Christmas Vacation parody in which he comically roasted his Democrat rivals.  Vice President-elect Vance shared Norman Rockwell’s iconic Freedom from Want oil painting of Thanksgiving dinner and photoshopped the father and mother figures with Trump and Vance serving their family a beautiful map of Republican-voting America.  Both posts were hilarious holiday treats that millions of Americans enjoyed seeing.  Democrats, however, found the light humor terribly disturbing.  After all, they’ve decried Donald Trump as “literally Hitler” for eight long years, and Americans should not be amused when “Hitler” trolls the political opposition with funny Internet memes.  Haven’t Americans been listening to Democrats’ stern lectures: “Democracy” is at stake!

Democrats are not the party of “live and let live.”  They are not the party of individualism, intellectual open-mindedness, or rebellion against the status quo.  They are not the party of free speech or free expression.

They are the party of rules, regulations, and intrusive laws.  They are the party of mandates, de-banking, social “cancellation,” and dogmatic beliefs.  They are the thought police.

If you want to be told what you can and cannot do, you vote for Democrats.  If you want to make your own decisions, you never vote for Democrats.  The Democrat party has become nothing but a religious cult intent on punishing Americans for their heretical transgressions.  It is no wonder, then, why Americans are running away from leftism and towards President Trump’s MAGA coalition.  As Elon Musk’s mom recently observed, President Trump seems to be “having fun.”  Happy Americans want to have fun, too.  They voted accordingly.

Turning around to return to camp, they quickly realized how close they had come to death.  Nailed to the backs of the trees, German signs warned, “Minen!”  Had they moved through the woods earlier that morning, they would have been “blown to bits.”

Weeks later in mid-December, Mac got a letter from his mother.  “Can you remember where you were on Thanksgiving Day?” she asked.  His mother explained that she had awakened just after midnight with a sense of terror.  “I had a strong feeling that you were in great danger.  When I opened my Bible, a phrase in Second Chronicles [20:17] gleamed on the page: ‘Stand ye still and see the salvation of the Lord with you…’”  Stand…ye…still.  Mac had definitely received his mother’s Thanksgiving message.

I came across Mac’s story in this collection of inspiring Thanksgiving miracles.  It spoke to me because I have had my share of similar moments in life — when a whisper stopped me in my tracks and moved me in a different direction.  In each of those instances, the choice before me seemed small, but the voice inside my head insisted that it would be consequential.  That voice has always been right.  So it is in this world: sometimes a single step is our undoing, and sometimes a single step is our salvation.  When you hear an unexpected whisper, it’s best to listen.

We don’t always listen, though, do we?  Sometimes we ignore any misgivings and continue down our original path.  And when those choices burn us down the road, we have an even more consequential decision to make: do we let our past mistakes define our futures, or do we use our newly gained wisdom to defeat challenges yet to come?

It is not easy to admit when we’ve been wrong.  It is even harder to find peace when our bad decisions harm others.  It is tempting to cover up one bad choice with another.  You do that enough times, though, and you eventually realize that you’ve done nothing but bury important truths.

When I was younger, a wise man told me to be thankful for my regrets.  “Thankful?” I remember thinking in disbelief.  I preferred to carry my regrets like weights around my neck.  I refused to let them go.  Living like that means living with inconsolable pain.  But there was something else that old philosopher said that stuck with me: your regrets give you a chance to be a better person today than you were yesterday.  Be thankful for your regrets, he argued, because they are the instruments that mold our character.  Use your pain to grow, or your pain will one day use you up.  Some of the best people around us have profound regrets.  Often, it is their profound regret that has shaped them into such morally excellent people.

Be thankful for the hard lessons.  Wisdom is rarely obtained with ease.  If it were, everyone around us would be wise.  Wise people stand out because wisdom comes with a cost.  We humans all suffer in one form or another.  Only some of us, however, learn to use that suffering to become better versions of ourselves.

Sometimes bits of wisdom seem contradictory.  In a single evening with friends, you might hear one argue, “People never change,” and another insist, “People do change.”  Are our natures set in stone from the moment we enter this world, or are we capable of real, substantial growth?  I have always been fond of what the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus had to say on the matter: “A man’s character is his fate.”  Who we are affects our decisions, and our decisions ultimately affect our futures.

But think about the advice from the old wise man I mentioned above who encouraged me to be thankful for my regrets.  If our character is shaped by how we handle our regrets, then surely we have some measure of control over our fates.  Perhaps the more we understand about ourselves, the more capable we become of creating our own futures.

There have been only a few times in my life when I was near someone who gave me the shivers.  If you’ve ever found yourself around such a person, it is difficult not to believe in the existence of evil.  Aside from truly evil human beings, though, most people are capable of doing both bad and good things.  You can take a boy without a family, give him a gun, and tell him to protect his neighborhood gang.  Awful acts soon follow.  You can give a boy a family, help him learn from his mistakes, and encourage him to protect his community.  The same boy becomes a selfless police officer.  Often, it is not a question of whether we humans change or not but rather how we channel our inherent natures.  When we are wise enough to learn from our mistakes and listen to those who wish to help us, we become better people.

As Mac St. Johns’s Thanksgiving Day story from WWII shows, sometimes the difference between life and death is a steadfast faith in God.  Will we listen when He whispers, or will we walk the other way?  Will we allow Him to shape our character, or will we insist on doing so without His help?  So much is at stake.  At any moment, we might face the most consequential decision of our lives.

As we celebrate Thanksgiving this year, many of us are also celebrating President Trump’s election victory.  Something has been rotten in America for quite some time.  Our national borders, shared history, and common love for freedom have been disappearing.  Multinational corporations and international bureaucrats have long exerted more influence over our country’s direction than the people who call America home.  Our national debt is unsustainable.  Our government is corrupt.  Our Constitution is ignored.  Our Union is divided.  Our culture is vulgar.  Our moral compass is broken.  President Trump’s return to office offers the prospect of needed change.

The questions now are straightforward: will we learn from our past mistakes?  Will we admit that we have sometimes taken the wrong path as a nation, caused unnecessary harm, and hurt ourselves?  Will we stop covering up one bad choice with another?  Will we make use of our suffering and grow stronger?  Will we learn from painful experiences and gain wisdom?  Will we choose to be thankful for our many regrets?

A country’s character is its fate, too.  Any country is capable of both tremendous good and shocking atrocity.  Any country can nurture its people’s best impulses or exacerbate its people’s worst instincts.  Any country can submit to evil or seek God’s guidance and forgiveness.

If we have been given a second chance this year, let us be supremely grateful.  Let us be penitent.  Let us demonstrate wisdom.  Let us harness the best parts of our natures.  Let this be the first of many joyous Thanksgivings to come.  Above all else: let us be still…and listen.