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.

After his first election, President Trump arrived in D.C. with Republican majorities in Congress, too.  He expected that the people who had promised to repeal Obamacare for seven years would have a legislative package ready for him to sign into law.  He expected that Republicans who had campaigned on securing the border for four decades would be prepared to do what it takes to achieve that goal for the American people.  His expectations were met with the disappointing reality of squishy Republican backbones and Uniparty backstabbing.

While Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell informed President Trump which of his potential nominees would get Republican support (McConnell’s wife, for instance, would have no problem winning confirmation), House Speaker Paul Ryan told him that there was just no money to build a border wall (because Ryan had already spent trillions supporting Barack Obama’s policy agenda).  Both Republicans took turns publicly laughing at Trump for arriving in D.C. with the misguided belief that the work of government could be anything other than slow.  McConnell and Ryan wasted most of President Trump’s first year in office bickering about how best to dismantle Obamacare before finally throwing up their hands in feigned exasperation after Senator John McCain saved the Democrats’ costly expansion of government-directed medicine with his final “screw you” vote.

On the other hand, McConnell and Ryan took the Russia collusion hoax very seriously.  Although Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Brennan, Jim Comey, and numerous other coup-plotters inside the Intelligence Community had created that fantasy as a mechanism for illegally spying on candidate Trump before his election and as a mechanism for overthrowing President Trump after his inauguration, congressional Republicans treated the matter as if it deserved their utmost attention.  McConnell and Ryan both knew that the allegations against Trump were ridiculous, but they eagerly assisted Democrats in their efforts to paint the president as a Russian spy.  Why?  Because holding Trump’s fate in their hands gave them power over his presidency.

President Trump entered office in 2017 beholden to no one.  No secret billionaires had funded his campaign.  No foreign governments had secretly supported his run for office.  Unlike other politicians who are easily controlled once the Intelligence Community digs up enough dirt from their pasts, President Trump has never had a problem showing the public exactly who he is.  How do you manipulate a man who has few secrets and whose peccadilloes are already widely known?  You make him “Putin’s puppet” and enlist Republican leaders to legitimize the farcical intelligence operation.  With “friends” like McConnell and Ryan, President Trump was surrounded by enemies.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, you can play that phony card only once.  There will not be another round of Uniparty and Intelligence Community hijinks engineered to divide the American people and stifle the MAGA agenda.  The “news” organizations that ran Russia collusion stories for years have exposed themselves as mere propagandists for the State.  The credibility of the media, Intelligence Community, FBI, DOJ, and Uniparty lies in tatters.  The “Trump Train” has left the station, and it’s picking up speed.

Heads must roll.  People who fabricated the Russia collusion hoax must pay a price.  Because nobody ever suffered for inflicting this fraud upon the American people, the worst offenders just continued offending.  We got the fake quid-pro-quo Ukraine impeachment (which was designed to cover up real quid-pro-quo crimes of the Biden Crime Family and other powerful political-crime families in D.C. that rake in a great deal of money from foreign regimes).  We got the J6 psy-op in which demonstrators protesting for free and fair elections were condemned as “insurrectionists.”  We got the unending lawfare from Democrat prosecutors and Merrick Garland’s Department of (in)Justice designed to imprison Trump, his friends, and his voters.  These crimes against the American people will not stop until the perpetrators are brought to justice.  Conspirators, fraudsters, and government employees who used their offices to persecute innocent Americans for their political beliefs must be held accountable.

While President Trump and his new administration sort through the nest of vipers in D.C., they will keep the guilty preoccupied.  It is difficult to respond to the president’s constant moves when you’re spending fifteen hundred dollars an hour on legal representation.  Expect President Trump to show Establishment Republicans just how much can be accomplished in Washington when the overarching command is simple: Let’s get s— done.

Illegal immigration, inflation, crime, economic malaise, bureaucratic regulation, “woke” indoctrination, censorship, and the growing likelihood of WWIII are the consequential issues that broadened and strengthened President Trump’s MAGA coalition in 2024.  Americans feel that their country is vulnerable and in decline.  They overwhelmingly believe that their country is on the wrong track.  They are desperate for the federal government to take their worries seriously.  With their votes, they have spoken loudly.  President Trump has been given a mandate to execute on his policy initiatives and to prove to the American people that their voices have been heard.

President Trump will give the Deep State a magic show.  As is his wont, he will move fast, change directions, and keep his opponents off guard.  He will juggle numerous balls in the air and still surprise his adversaries with a rabbit from under his hat.  Pay attention.

President Trump is serious about mass deportations.  The American people cannot be made to feel unsafe in their own communities.  Expect to see the Obama-Biden handouts for illegal aliens come to an end.  Expect to see violent criminals rounded up.  Expect to see border security reactivated.  Expect to see the completion of a border wall.  And expect international cartels currently in control of the U.S. border to be designated as terrorist organizations.  The old way of doing things is over.  Those who have been destroying America with fentanyl, human-trafficking, and organized crime have no place to hide.  Their days are numbered.

Bureaucratic regulations operate like hidden taxes that increase the cost of necessary purchases, such as food and fuel.  When agencies issue new rules, they steal liberty from the American people and empower themselves with additional authorities.  Expect President Trump to send in the equivalent of several Special Operations Forces to wage war on the administrative state.  Their mission is to slash red tape, battle the bureaucratic Leviathan, liberate markets from undue restraints, and return freedom to the American people.

Expect President Trump to return to tariffs as his preferred tool for battling international foes while increasing economic opportunities for America’s middle class.  Wall Street hates tariffs because multinational companies do not benefit from “America First” policies.  Main Street, however, benefits greatly.  When the cost of doing business overseas is greater than the cost of producing goods in America, domestic manufacturing rises.  When foreign regimes respond with their own tariffs, it becomes more expensive for American-produced food and energy to be exported.  Those supplies stay home, and domestic prices decrease.  Expect President Trump to accomplish through deregulation and tariffs something that the “experts” say is impossible: deflation in the United States.

President Trump sees America’s natural resources and the American people’s unmatched ingenuity as the country’s greatest weapons.  He will unleash domestic productivity and, by doing so, use the nation’s economic strengths as both sword and shield against foreign enemies.  The rabbit under his hat is the prospect of global peace.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0.

Arguably, it was not just the most iconic visual of the campaign, but also one of the most iconic images in American history.  The picture of a bloodied but defiant American president reaching toward the heavens and expressing a sense of resolute calm in a moment of chaos will remain in many people’s minds for the rest of their lives.  President Trump’s bravery is seared in their memories.

In any other election cycle, the contest would have ended on July 13.  On a sunny day during a festive campaign rally, a shooter murdered a husband and father protecting his family, injured two other attendees critically, and nearly assassinated a former president.  Such outrageous political violence should have sufficiently shifted public sentiment toward Trump’s favor to make his victory a foregone conclusion.  (For what it’s worth, President Biden dropped out of the race eight days later.)  Fearing that possibility, the propaganda press immediately worked to erase the incident from the public’s thoughts.

After becoming one of the most famous photographs in the world, the image of President Trump’s raw courage disappeared from publications and websites.  Reporters barely talked about the murder of local Pennsylvanian Corey Comperatore or the serious injuries to other rallygoers.  Anonymous FBI sources initially downplayed the attempted assassination by speculating that Trump had not actually been shot but had instead been cut by flying pieces of broken glass.  Cable news pundits openly mocked the bandaging around Trump’s ear and acted as if being shot in the face is no big deal.  To this day, FBI investigators preposterously claim that they are unable to ascertain the shooter’s motive.

This is the unfortunate reality of America in 2024.  One of the most consequential public figures in the world comes within millimeters of being assassinated, and the great majority of corporate news sources invest all their resources in covering up the seriousness of the event.  Reality cannot be permitted to interfere with their preferred political narratives.

Imagine if President Biden, President Obama, or Vice President Harris had been the target of an identical assassination attempt.  The press would have been talking about the incident nonstop over the last four months.  Newspaper headlines and news show chyrons would have kept the word “assassination” in front of Americans’ eyes.  Reporters would have demanded daily press briefings from the Secret Service, DOJ, and FBI.  We would have been repeatedly reminded that “democracy” is “literally” under attack and that violent Republicans are a “threat” to the stability of the Republic.  July 13 would have been memorialized as another “date which will live in infamy” because Democrats and the propaganda press would have settled for nothing less.

On January 6, 2021, tens of thousands of unarmed Americans protested for free and fair elections outside the Capitol, and Democrats have made sure Americans never forget that date.  Corporate reporters have falsely called protesters “insurrectionists,” “terrorists,” and “violent extremists.”  Politicians have accused Trump’s voters of trying to somehow overthrow the federal government without firing a shot.

In contrast, an assassin kills one Trump-supporter, injures several others, and nearly takes President Trump’s life, and the propaganda press acts as if it never happened.  If that glaring inconsistency does not vividly demonstrate how fake the J6 “insurrection” narrative has been, nothing else can.  Unlike Kamala Harris, Donald Trump was nominated for president through a democratic process, and when democracy actually came under attack, the news media minimized it as a trifle.

The outcome of this election will have serious consequences for Americans.  We will find out whether we are a nation willing to protect its citizens or a bankrupt welfare state with wide-open borders.  We will learn whether runaway inflation and economic uncertainty have become our permanent way of life or whether money-printing and crony capitalism have finally come to an end.  We will discover whether the Bill of Rights and Constitution still mean something in the United States or whether concerned Americans will have to fight for their most basic freedoms once again.  The stakes could not be higher.

On top of all these life-and-death issues, one weighs most heavily: will the struggle for truth survive?  Will Americans beat back a Deep State committed to mass censorship?  Will Americans dig their heels into the ground and defend free speech?

What we have learned over the last four years while the Biden-Harris administration attacked dissenting opinion as impermissible “disinformation” is that the death of the First Amendment means the proliferation of everything that is fake.  When scientific debate is censored, we get fake pandemics and fake vaccines.  When allegations of election fraud are treated as crimes, we get fake votes.  When political speech is vilified and the right to assemble is ignored, we get fake insurrections.  When Democrat elites overrule primary voters, we get fake presidential nominees.  When ill-prepared vice presidents are incapable of answering simple questions, we get fake accents!

Because Democrats and their corporate news allies have declared war on free speech, all we get is fake news.  And in a world where fake news dominates the headlines, assassination attempts against President Trump are erased from history.

In the place of news that greatly matters, the propaganda press has filled the airwaves with demonstrable lies in the days leading up to the election.  Fake journalists lie about President Trump taking away birth control and forcing women to have babies against their will.  After covering up Joe Biden’s dementia for years, they now lie about Donald Trump showing fake signs of fatigue.  They parrot the FBI’s fake crime statistics and lie to Americans about the safety of their communities.  They parrot the CDC’s fake COVID statistics and lie to Americans about the success of lockdowns, mask mandates, and fake vaccines.  They parrot fake jobs reports and lie to Americans about economic growth.  Despite the fact that Kamala Harris has the lowest approval rating for any modern vice president, our fake journalists lie to Americans about her remarkable popular appeal.  And after mocking President Trump for being the victim of two separate assassination attempts, the propaganda press now pushes the lie that his words somehow threaten RINO Liz Cheney’s life.  The Deep State spews blatant lies, and the propaganda press treats those blatant lies as irrefutable truths.

There is good news.  After eight years of unremitting propaganda demonizing President Trump as the most dangerous threat to the United States, he has never been more popular.  Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and every other prominent Democrat in the country have called Trump a “fascist,” a “Nazi,” and “Hitler” reincarnated for years.  An MSNBC reporter recently asked a New York voter, “How does that message resonate with you?”  The voter paused, looked at the reporter, and replied, “It doesn’t.”  The reporter seemed surprised, but Americans see through their lies.

President Trump survived an assassin’s bullet for a reason.  This is the time to choose a side.  All we must do is vote!  May God guide and protect us.  And remember: “Fight!  Fight!  Fight!”

You can tell it was a smashing success because the propaganda press hasn’t stopped talking about it.  Any honest journalist would tell you that it was an electrifying political rally that united Americans of all backgrounds and from all walks of life.  Because today’s “reporters” do not tell the truth and instead push an ideological agenda at all times, they are following Hillary Clinton’s marching orders and smearing the MSG event as some kind of twenty-first century Nazi hatefest.

Their lies prove only how panicked they are at the sight of President Trump’s broad appeal.  Democrats talk endlessly about skin color and ethnicity and celebrate physical “diversity” as if it were a noble virtue.  They are obsessed with how a person looks to the exclusion of everything in a person’s mind and soul that makes each of us unique.  That said, Democrats could never have packed Madison Square Garden with such a diverse group of Americans united in common cause as Trump did — at least not without busing in paid actors to meet their rigid racial quotas.

When the Trump campaign made tickets available to the public, they were gone almost immediately.  Who grabbed them?  Oh, just about every kind of American you could imagine.  Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Catholics, Protestants, agnostics, and non-believers.  Black, white, brown, and every shade in between.  Blue-collar workers and billionaires, tradesmen and suits, young and old people alike.  Every kind of dirty job, white-collar profession, and socio-economic rung was well represented.  Lifelong Republicans, libertarians, independents, and former Democrats all sang patriotic tunes together.  Truly, President Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally demonstrated in striking fashion just how attractive his policies are to Americans of every demographic.

It was an astonishing scene, and if any campaign event were to demonstrate the magnitude of the political realignment (if not ideological revolution) that Donald Trump has unleashed in America, MSG’s joy-fest was it.  It should take its place in the history books as prima facie evidence that the “Great Awakening” is here.  The Democrats’ and corporate media’s outrageously malicious attempts to paint the political rally as “dark,” “threatening,” and even “fascist” should similarly be regarded as demonstrable proof of their moral turpitude, deceitfulness, and irrelevancy.

I don’t usually write about physical diversity.  Appearances, like book covers, tell us next to nothing about the stories inside.  I have been fortunate enough to interact with all kinds of human beings — good and bad — and get a decent sense of both the great things our species can accomplish and the horrifying deeds we are all too willing to commit.  We humans have no trouble uniting to save strangers in mortal danger, but we also have no trouble killing each other for our beliefs.  What a world it would be if we worked as hard to avoid murdering each other as we do to rescue a child trapped in a well.  Alas, that’s not who we are, and no race of people on the planet has a monopoly on either vice or virtue.

I suppose that’s why the Madison Square Garden rally stood out.  Because of their ideological compulsion to separate the electorate into distinct groups of “oppressors” and “victims,” Democrats of every generation demonize some group for special targeting.  A century ago, Democrat President Woodrow Wilson wanted to use the “science” of eugenics to eliminate black Americans.  Today, Democrat leaders speak of “white supremacy” as a disease that must be similarly eliminated.  Who knows which group of people displaying some combination of physical attributes the Democrat Party will choose to vilify next.

In contrast, President Trump’s MSG event showed just how much his message is directed not to any one class of people but rather to all people regardless of how they might look, speak, and act.  It doesn’t matter what color your skin is; anyone can be an ardent defender of free speech against government and corporate censorship.  It doesn’t matter how you pray (or even if you pray); anyone can be a resolute protector of religious freedom against government persecution.  It doesn’t matter whether your ancestors came over on the Mayflower, or whether your parents worked hard to gain their American citizenship; a promise to defend the U.S. Constitution from its enemies holds the same weight.  None of us was around when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and made clear to the whole world that the purpose of government is to safeguard every person’s God-given rights and liberties.  No matter how we look, how old we are, or what part of America we call home, all of us are capable of fighting for and preserving freedom.  Regardless of the stories we hold inside, we can choose to stand together and against government tyranny.

Give me a country filled with people as physically diverse yet wholly unified in their loyalty to the Bill of Rights as those who showed up at President Trump’s MSG rally, and I’ll show you an America that will lead the world for centuries to come.  I’ll show you a country capable of building new and exciting things.  I’ll show you a country reenergized and focused and ready to defend its way of life.  I’ll show you a country whose demise is greatly exaggerated and whose greatness is just beginning.  I’ll show you a country that is “awakening” from an odd slumber and slowly but surely coming back to life.

That’s not supposed to happen.  Democrats were all suckled on some version of Marx’s historical materialism in which human society marches forward inexorably toward communism.  They call themselves, “progressives,” because they erroneously believe history proceeds in only one direction.  Those of us who resist their planned dystopia are “reactionaries,” “deniers,” “deplorables,” and “conservatives” stuck in the past and unable to bend.  That’s why Democrats are obsessed with berating us that we must join “the right side of history.”  So sure are they of the future that they arrogantly believe anyone who refuses to join their sad, hate-filled, envy-ridden descent into collectivist totalitarianism is destined to be either forgotten or reviled in the pages of history.

They are wrong.  Marxism is intellectual tripe.  Collectivism denies humans the opportunity to flourish as individuals.  Totalitarianism is as ugly today as it was last century.  And a growing movement of freedom-minded Americans is rising once again to preserve liberty in its hour of need.

It used to infuriate me that Republican backstabbers such as Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan would disparage President Trump’s governing philosophy as appealing only to an insular, white, working-class fringe.  The man won far more votes than McCain or Romney, won over ten million additional votes in his 2020 campaign, won the highest percentage of minority votes of any Republican in over sixty years, and is expanding that historic support in his 2024 campaign today.  How could anybody credibly argue that Donald Trump has done anything but strengthen the Republican Party?

Then I finally realized that no matter how “conservative” RINOs claim to be, they have either consciously or unconsciously bought into the Democrats’ Marxist philosophy.  They have deluded themselves into believing that the world is destined to be dark, uninspiring, and unfree.  President Trump disagrees, and a hundred million Americans have joined him to fight for a future that cherishes human liberty.  That’s how we really make history.

Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

America will one day have a female president.  She will be smart, articulate, prudent, and brave.  She will treat her campaign for office as a chance to prove to the American people that she has their best interest at heart.  She will be thoughtfully prepared to answer any and all questions.  Nobody will say it’s “her turn” or pretend she is more talented than she really is.  Nobody will hold her to a lower or higher standard because of her sex.  She will rise to the top because she earns it.  Americans will listen to her speeches, watch how she conducts her personal life, and conclude that she is the right leader for the time.  And when she is elected, no one will mumble, “She won only because she’s a woman.”  She will win on her own merits.

The Democrats have done women no favors by pushing the candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.  Neither has the necessary disposition for holding the highest office in the land.  Both are rash and unwise.  They are selfish and unjust.  They are intemperate and vengeful.  They are self-conscious and uncertain.  They are unkind, impatient, and self-serving.  They exude no faith in God, inspire no hope in others, and display no courage.  They are weak in mind and soul and encourage such weakness in others.  They are unfit to lead.  They are not remarkable women.

That Democrat party elites have forced Hillary and Kamala on the American people shows how little they actually think of women.  Hillary is an inveterate liar and shameless shrew whose chief accomplishment in life has been to obtain enough dirt on Washington insiders to stay out of prison.  She won a seat in the U.S. Senate because New Yorkers pitied her when it became clear that her president husband is a lecherous creep incapable of moderating his own depravities.  Giving Hillary a prestigious government job after Bill’s Oval Office debauchery with an intern barely old enough to drink legally was a Hallmark card kind of way for the American people to say, “Sorry your husband humiliated you while you were first lady.”  Had voters known that Hillary was already scheming for the top job and only pretending to be wounded by Slick Willy’s philandering, they would have been much less likely to overlook her own personal qualities.  And they certainly were not hoping that Hillary’s presidential ambitions would one day return both immoral Clintons back to the White House!

Yet that’s what the elitist Democrat party gave the American people.  You get Hillary!  She will break the glass ceiling and become the most powerful person in the country!  She will do what no woman has ever done before!  Because…well, she put up with Bill’s womanizing…and because Barack gave her the State Department gig as a consolation prize even after she outed him for being born in a foreign nation…and because…well, because it’s her turn, dammit!

Democrats expected Americans to forget that Hillary has always been an unlikable person with a notorious reputation for venality and vindictiveness.  They expected Americans to forget the scandal-plagued years of the Clinton White House, during which stories of Hillary throwing pieces of fine china at Bill Clinton’s head and screaming obscenities at Secret Service agents regularly leaked.  They expected Americans to forget Hillary’s involvement in the cover-up of the 9/11 Benghazi attack that left four Americans dead and which Hillary falsely blamed on a random internet video in order to preserve Obama’s 2012 election viability.  Democrats told Americans to ignore a lifetime of evidence that Hillary Clinton is a vile person and vote for her anyway…because she’s a woman.

Americans would have been better off if Bill and Hillary Clinton had been forced to serve time for selling state secrets to communist China.  Had they ever paid for their various crimes over the years, the Clintons’ hold over official Washington would have disappeared.  Hillary would never have been in a position to seek the presidency.  She and her accomplices would not have been able to commit fraud against the American people with the Russia collusion hoax.  The Democrats would not have spent the last twenty-five years pretending Hillary Clinton should be trusted with the reins of power.  Hillary would be in prison today instead of on television encouraging further acts of violence against President Trump.

Americans would also not be facing the peril of a Kamala Harris presidency.  The reason is simple: by excusing Hillary’s immoral and unethical character, Democrats convinced themselves that her failed presidential campaigns could be attributed to her immense political baggage.  Because she has been a divisive national figure since the ’90s, her supporters blamed “deplorables” for not giving poor, sweet Hillary a chance.  Stuck in that misguided mindset, political operatives came up with an even more misguided solution: to put a woman in the White House, they needed a blank-slate candidate whose public utterances are inscrutable and whose political convictions are always shifting.  Voilà — the vaunted rise of Kamala Harris!

Kamala is that rare breed of public speaker who says less and less the longer she talks.  Once a listener perceives a cogent thought forming from the stream of words exiting her mouth, she takes a linguistic hard left and drives straight over a cliff of utter nonsense.  Trying to make sense of her gibberish is like following Alice down a rabbit hole while tripping on psychedelics and translating Arabic manuscripts into ancient Greek.

Joe Biden’s cognitive decline causes him to ramble incoherently before shouting meaningless words with great enthusiasm.  The Pravda press’s inability to continue hiding his debilitating condition is why the Democrat party chucked him from the top of the ticket without even consulting primary voters.  Kamala Harris speaks just as incoherently as Dementia Joe, and the same state media are doing everything they can to hand her the presidency.  Perhaps if Joe had swapped his tie for a string of pearls and transitioned to “Joan” Biden this last year, the Deep State would have allowed him to finish his run for re-election.

Democrats seem to believe that a woman can ascend to the presidency only if she is as conniving and ruthless as Hillary Clinton or as fatuous and ditzy as Kamala Harris.  They see no value in supporting women with proven intelligence, virtue, courage, and authenticity.  Those attributes are apparently attractive only in male politicians.  Talk about the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

What else would one expect, though, from a political party that holds women in such low regard?  Democrats encourage men to dominate women’s sports.  They push men into women’s locker rooms, domestic violence shelters, and prison cells.  They promote men who dress up as women in the workplace and let men take credit for “female first” accomplishments.  They tell real women that the best thing they can do for the planet is avoid having babies.  For a party that talks feverishly about destroying the “patriarchy,” Democrats sure do seem committed to making sure that a man in high heels shatters the “glass ceiling.”

What the Democrat party peddles as “female empowerment” should offend all women of integrity.  Women deserved much better than Hillary.  They should expect much more than what Kamala has to offer, too.

If the answer is, “No,” why not?  Don’t human traffickers and international drug cartels depend upon a supply of paper currency that they can move back and forth across borders and launder through unrelated businesses for future use?  If there were no money except for the digital ones and zeroes created and monitored by national governments, surely major criminal organizations would have no way to operate and nowhere to hide.

How could prostitution and corner drug sales survive within a system that traces all digital transactions in real time?  How could black market trades in illicit commerce or between sanctioned nations continue if Western central banks actively surveil each digital dollar that changes hands?  Surely the imposition of government-mandated digital currencies would usher in a more peaceful planet that is relatively free of crime…right?

If you’re still not convinced, let me suggest what might be tripping you up: your instincts tell you that criminals will find a way to skirt any future digital surveillance.  Somehow, human ingenuity will succeed in creating effective workarounds to government-imposed central bank digital currencies.  The sale of illegal narcotics, weapons, and other banned materials will continue around the world because, at the end of the day, humans adapt and overcome whatever obstacles stand in their way.  Crime will continue to exist because criminals will continue to exist, and criminals will continue to exist because in every generation some faction of the human race behaves immorally, disregards social mores, or flat out refuses to obey.

If this is your conclusion — and I think it is the correct one — then don’t ordinary, non-criminal citizens also have a choice about what the future holds?  If you believe that criminals are wily enough to fashion workarounds to totalitarian government, then shouldn’t you expect defenders of liberty to be similarly inventive?  If so, then perhaps our worries about the future do not revolve around the idea that ordinary citizens will have no way to evade and overcome government tyranny but rather that the path to doing so might make many of us “criminals,” too.

An immoral law is no law at all — which is to say, whenever governments use the force of law to coerce citizens to do immoral things, moral citizens will choose to become “criminals.”  This is more difficult than it sounds.

It is natural for people to overestimate their willingness to stand up to the State in matters of conscience.  From the comfort of our armchairs, we often judge too harshly those who yielded to tyrants in the past because we cannot step faithfully into our ancestors’ shoes.  We cannot accurately feel what they experienced as the coercive machinery of the State operated in their day.  Would we have hidden Jews in our cellars while the Nazis were rounding them up to be murdered in camps?  Would we have taken a strong stance against Japanese internment during WWII?  Would we have opposed racial segregation laws in Brazil and the United States, caste oppression in India, or ethnic cleansing in Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East?  Many people would proudly say, “Yes.”  Most would be sorely mistaken.  Standing up to evil when it is backed by the authority of government offices and enforced by real human beings with guns and badges is no easy thing.  Moral people too often balance an abundance of conviction with a scarcity of courage.

The question of moral courage becomes even more difficult when we ask ourselves what we would do in situations that don’t rise to the level of evil we associate with persecution and genocide.  In 1933 President Roosevelt ordered Americans to hand over their gold savings.  Although justified as a policy for fighting the worsening depression, critics warned that the action was nothing short of government-sanctioned robbery and would only increase inflation and exacerbate economic suffering.  The critics were right, and a substantial number of Americans denounced the president’s order as entirely immoral.  Still, most complied.

What would we do if the government came for our greenbacks, gold, silver, or bitcoin today?  If the Federal Reserve and the Department of Treasury joined other Western central banks in making all digital currencies illegal except their own, would you comply?  What if the FBI claimed that uncontrolled, decentralized currencies are used only by criminals who are most likely narco-terrorists and child sex-slavers?  Would federal officials’ concerted efforts to use your morality and sense of shame as psychological weapons ultimately succeed?  If the U.S. government used those same moral arguments to trash the Second Amendment and confiscate Americans’ firearms, would you hand over your weapons?  What if all your favorite athletes, movie stars, and musicians told you 24/7 that we must disarm ourselves in order to “save the children”?  Would you allow others to shame you into compliance?

Many Americans might do their best Charlton Heston impression here and declare, “From my cold, dead hands.”  But how many of those same Americans quickly submitted to the government because of a virus not too dissimilar from the common cold?  How many wore masks in Walmart in order to avoid accusatory stares from strangers?  How many sat in cordoned-off stadium seats at empty ballparks or paid full tuition for college classes taught entirely online?  How many did what they were told when faceless bureaucrats demanded that they stand six feet apart or isolate inside their homes?  How many ultimately took at least one injection of an experimental “vaccine” because employers threatened their jobs, hospitals threatened not to treat their unrelated health conditions, or police officers threatened them with arrests and fines?  As Hannah Arendt so insightfully observed, crimes against humanity usually come not from the hands of monsters but from those of ordinary people.  Because they are ordinary, we too often disregard our worries, avoid conflict, and comply.

Every act of compliance comes with two costs: we lose whatever liberty we freely hand over, and we invite further encroachment upon our liberty in the future.  Loss of personal freedom is like a loose thread that gets only longer with time.  Before you can repair the damage, you must make sure that your rights and liberties stop unraveling.  There has to be a moment when people say, “Enough.”

In other words, there has to be a moment when citizens accept that the State sees them as common criminals.  The price for speaking our minds will not stop with censorship.  It will not stop with de-banking.  It will not stop with professional blacklisting.  It will not stop with the J6 political prisoners.  It will not stop with all the Republican attorneys who have been disbarred and prosecuted for fighting election fraud.  It will not stop with the DOJ’s efforts to imprison President Trump.  It will not stop with all the servicemembers whose military careers came to an end because they refused to submit to the government’s experimental “vaccines.”  Like a loose thread coming undone, the State will continue to yank at our freedoms until we are left naked.  Only we can decide whether to remain so.

Because we have a choice, we don’t really fear that there is nothing that can be done about growing totalitarianism in the West.  We are apprehensive about what will be required to thwart it.  That’s a fine and prudent feeling to have, but it’s altogether different from the miserable dread of acquiescence.  Knowing that a fight is coming and worrying about its costs do not reflect weakness.  Nor does it matter whether an immoral government calls moral people, “criminals.”  We’ll have to get over that.