Author: Resolve

By Steve Woodward

Conservative talk radio personality Chris Plante coined a brilliant word to describe short-term memory loss among members of the corrupt corporate media.

Newsheimer’s.

It is diagnosed as the involuntary — or willful — failure to recall recent historic events, especially the most consequential.

Ask a Newsheimer’s addled Lefty in Summer 2023 how we have arrived at this grim moment in time for America, its cultural fabric frayed and tattered. You are likely to be greeted by a blank stare. Then, of course, you’d resort to flash cards as if preparing Joe Biden for a press conference.

Hunter Biden. Who? The Wuhan Lab. What? Election Day 2020 fraud. Where? Defund police. When?

And you could keep going: Diversity, inclusion, equity. Social distancing. “We are all Ukrainians”. Open borders. Drag queen story hour for kids.

More blank stares. These were the crucial elements of the Left’s Trump loathing narrative, artfully woven to crush the economy and trample basic freedoms beginning in 2020. The Left did not unleash the virus but it made it a more virulent weapon than all but the most evil hearted could have imagined.

Newsheimer’s also rears its head as an excuse for full blown historic revisionism. Consider these newsy nuggets from way back when in 2019-20. Trump’s Mideast peace accords have been vaporized. Energy dominance, aka, $2/gallon gasoline, never happened. A U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, merely a footnote. Mexican military patrolling the southern border at Mexico’s expense? A fleeting moment now forgotten. Record low black and Hispanic unemployment of 2019 might as well now be considered highly classified data stored in Biden’s Delaware garage.

On ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and NBC, and in the pages edited by the Biden cult-enablers at the New York Times and Washington Post, the citizenry is portrayed as incapable of connecting the dots from then to now. The Left has elevated delusion to new heights. The deliberate politicization of China’s bioweapon, the Wuhan Virus (aka, Covid-19), played no role in crippling the economy and compromising how election officials carried out — or neglected — their duties in Fall 2020. The beginning of time traces back no further than January 6, 2021.

Overnight, a roaring U.S. economy, geopolitical stability and border security ambitions screeched to a halt, even as the absurd notion that Joe Biden would be a viable presidential candidate gained traction amid a tsunami of suspect mail-in ballots bearing unverifiable (or no) signatures.

Fifty years ago (pre-social media and cable TV), President Richard Nixon was on the ropes because he was accused of risking his presidency to “cover up” a burglary inside the Democrat party’s Washington headquarters. The Washington Post, which back then was heralding the NFC champion Washington Redskins advancing to Super Bowl VII, conveniently overlooked that Nixon did not authorize the break-in ahead of the run up to his landslide re-election in November 1972.

Consider how American history might have shifted if Nixon had been a Democrat. Similar to today’s ongoing revisionism, the Watergate Hotel burglary would quickly have been sent down the collective memory hole. One or more Nixon surrogates would have been smeared into oblivion (i.e., Hunter’s former business “partners”) after which attention would have turned to assigning blame for the Viet Nam war, campus unrest and a coming decade of economic malaise to Republicans.

Newt Gingrich observed this as a young, just elected Congressman, and he is watching today with bemusement.

Because of the Watergate fiasco, “John Mitchell became the first attorney general to be sent to jail,” Gingrich wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Examiner last May. “He was found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury. He was ultimately sentenced to 19 months in a minimum-security federal prison.

“Mitchell is an extremely important parallel to the current disaster, because Attorney General Merrick Garland seems to be doing a lot more obstructing of justice than Mitchell ever dreamed of doing. Mr. Garland’s Justice Department reportedly instructed the IRS to disband the unit investigating Hunter Biden’s taxes. He has used the FBI to harass former President Donald Trump and a wide range of Republicans.

“And he has turned a blind eye to every report of foreign money going to the Biden family ($3 million in one Chinese transaction, a diamond sent to Hunter Biden, millions of dollars sent by the widow of the mayor of Moscow, etc.).”

Yet, James Comey, John Brennan, Garland, Hunter Biden, Anthony Fauci, Christopher Wray, and Nancy Pelosi (who refused National Guard reinforcements on January 6, 2021), never will be demonized as modern day John Mitchells. A Hollywood hit on the heels of Nixon’s downfall shared the title of Bob Woodward’s epic book, “All The President’s Men”. The inference was that Nixon was surrounded by loyal, lawless henchmen

Quaint. Today’s Marxist loyalist henchmen, defenders of the rising, thuggish Left, are The Sopranos in contrast to Nixon’s mere choir boys.

This truth will not be as easily forgotten.

By Steve Woodward

Summer reading, aka, short subjects.

Subject 1

We live in a time — now — during which what is trending is at once hilarious and terrifying.

Go to the back of the alphabet to understand more deeply. Generation Z. That we must acknowledge there is nothing after the letter Z is alarming enough. But get a load of these Zs. Born between 1997 and 2012. There are 68 million of them, and it’s safe to say the sector born between 1997 – 2001, college graduates eligible to enter the workforce, formerly known as “life”, are even more annoying than citizens born in 1996, let alone even the older, wiser among us.

We are learning that corporations, agencies, small businesses, are torn. They need to hire Gen Z but the talent pool is, shall we say, thin. The Zs do not know how to dress, how to show up for work, how to communicate and how to participate in an office environment. The Office, a television series of great renown, seems old school in contrast to the challenges management confronts with these Gen Z snowflakes.

Gen Z views the workplace as an eight-hour-a-day therapy session.

A professor claiming expertise on understanding the Gen Z mindset places the onus on those entities who seek to hire them. In other words, the lunatics will run the asylum.

“Gen Z are digital natives and they’ve always communicated online, so their interpersonal skills, or soft skills, have suffered,” said the University of San Diego’s Tara Salinas. “They took an even bigger hit because of Covid-19, and it has shifted the way that we need to interact with them in the workplace.”

Or? Try an alternative approach: This is the job description. These are your responsibilities. Here is your security badge. Our hours are 8:30 am – 6 pm. Men wear slacks and collared shirts and shoes made of leather uppers. Women wear slacks or modest skirts and business casual tops and closed-toed shoes.

If you need counseling, go to church on Sundays.

Subject 2

D.I.E. RIP

Someone wisely re-ordered the tedious social construct “diversity, equity and inclusion” as “diversity, inclusion and equity” to create an informative acronym, DIE.

Seems this was prescient.

Corporate America is memorializing the demise of DIE. The James Dean of the “woke” era. Young and invincible. Until it was not.

Reported the Wall Street Journal in July 21, 2023, editions:

“Diversity, equity and inclusion—or DEI—jobs were put in the crosshairs after many companies started re-examining their executive ranks during the tech sector’s shakeout (in Fall 2022). Some chief diversity officers (CDOs) say their work is facing additional scrutiny since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions and companies brace for potential legal challenges. DEI work has also become a political target.

“The number of CDO searches is down 75% in the past year, says Jason Hanold, chief executive of Hanold Associates Executive Search, which works with Fortune 100 companies to recruit HR and DEI executives, among other roles.

“Demand is the lowest he has seen in his 30 years of recruiting. At the same time, he says, more executives are feeling skittish about taking on diversity roles.

“’They’re telling us, the only way I want to go into another role with DEI is if it includes something else’, he says of the requests for broader titles that offer more responsibilities and resources. He estimates that 60% of diversity roles he is currently filling combine the title with another position, such as chief human resources officer, up from about 10% five years ago.

DIE also is drawing skeptics in the world of academe. A retired accounting professor from with the California Community Colleges system notes that emphasis on equity and inclusion, in particular, is derailing higher education.

In a letter published by The Wall Street Journal, Mark Fronke of Long Beach, CA, recalls being encouraged by administrators to “lower my grading standards” to “promote equity” so as not to discourage students unequipped to tackle “the rigors of the course.”

While some inevitably will retire to escape DIE, its death knell will not sound until college faculty begin rejecting its absurdity in significant numbers, or when students and their parents stop underwriting it by rejecting inflated tuitions.

Subject 3

Why is SB90, a bill to liberate school children and their parents from government tyranny, languishing in the North Carolina Senate?

It’s principal sponsors are well intended, and the central focus of the bill is timely, but it was not embraced universally by Republican lawmakers in Raleigh because it’s also loaded with elements bordering on overreach.

Nonetheless, a reform group in Moore County, Moore Families First, has joined a campaign launched by Pavement Education Project to reinvigorate lawmakers before the bill potentially dies in a House committee, where it has been stalled since June 13, 2023. It passed the Senate 49-0 on March 28.

CarolinaJournal.com in July reported that the Senate version was entirely overhauled by the House, though its principal objective remains to address how searches of students in school are to be conducted. (By a same-sex administrator witnessed by an adult).

If SB90 withers on the vine all will not be lost in the cause to oppose a war on parents by the Left’s gender groomers and pornography providers (administrators and teachers) because a sweeping Parents’ Bill of Rights (SB49) passed in July, whereupon it was vetoed by Gov. Cooper (as predicted) on July 5. An override vote by the GOP-majority Senate is expected in August.

Of course, Cooper and fellow Democrats are seething because the bill makes it illegal to include gender identity and sexual orientation in official curriculum in grades K-4. Let that percolate for a moment.

By Steve Woodward

I observe with astonishment the willful desire of fellow Americans to exist in a vacuum outside of which exists reality.

Yes, I know, this signals a certain arrogance, or a dampening of spirits. But I can’t get over it. So with that said I am retreating to a summer mountain paradise for awhile. I will continue to monitor our broken culture via social media and podcasts. I am not cutting the cord, writing poetry or imposing on my body a violent juice cleanse. I will enter my WiFi password within minutes of inhabiting our temporary home. And re-engage.

The objective is mainly to escape the oppressive humidity of the Sandhills for a few weeks. I do not view climate change as an imperative. If I desire a different climate, I travel until I find it. In my case, west, and ascending to a place where morning fog is welcome and mental clarity is achievable.

This journey still fails to deliver me from the vacuum, as much as I try. I do not dwell in it but it surrounds me. It’s not about me, really. It’s our culture. It is a weakened culture. It is a vulnerable culture. If the Marxist Left that infiltrates our politics, our education system and our entertainment industry was properly acknowledged, Americans would put on ideological masks and submit to quarantines to protect our communities and families from this perpetual “virus”.

In Moore County, we have a choice. We can pretend that we’re a sleepy retirement community comprised of “white supremacist golfers” (claims the Left) and encroached upon by wealthy golf tourists celebrating the fruits of their labors by recklessly spending their money on tee times, cigars, cocktails and steaks. Or, we can recognize that Marxists have infiltrated from west and north, infecting religion, education and daily life. And, more alarming, some of the radicals among us are home grown. Yes, native North Carolinians poisoned by the state’s compromised universities or by religious denominations strangled by “woke-ism” are living next door.

They’re here. It’s time to call them by name. It’s time to expose their agenda.

Unite NC Town Hall is one such insurgent body. It is a ripple in the stream championed by the Moore County NAACP, the League of Women Voters of Moore County, and the recently formed Sandhills Coalition for Peace, Love and Justice, among others. They infiltrated Carthage on July 24, 2023, to fret about “dangerous legislative proposals” in Raleigh such as a bill vetoed by Gov. Roy Cooper (D) that would spare children in public schools from subjection to puberty blockers and gender “reassignment surgery”.

In the July 23 Pilot, marginally a newspaper, a “neighbor” complained about efforts by the Moore County Board of Education to regulate access by elementary students to books in school libraries that celebrate under-age sexual encounters and gender fluidity.

Wrote Jay from Southern Pines: “Students want to learn about the dynamics of race and gender and history as it actually happened. Books can help students see that they have feelings and experiences (emphasis added) similar to other students.”

This would make a lot of sense if we were talking about college students. But the targeted are children who are not equipped to comprehend “the dynamics of race and gender.” How does he know what a 10-year-old wants to learn?

The challenge before us is to take up a zero tolerance offensive as if we are on a war footing. We are at war. The good news is that the Left does not know how to fight when Americans rise up. The Bible, in Ephesians, advises that we put on the armor of God and stand up.

When we do, the Left will retreat into its vacuum. They call it a “safe space”. They choose safety imposed by government. We choose freedom.

By Steve Woodward

The church where I worship recently welcomed a young associate pastor who, owed to growing up in the mid-1980s and during the 1990s, draws from a more contemporary trove of cultural memories.

When during a Sunday sermon he referenced a heavy metal rock band known as Guns N’ Roses and its lead rocker, Axl Rose, along with its hit recording, “Welcome to the Jungle”, I was fairly certain that I had never heard a pastor compare the secular world to lyrics composed by a heavy metal rocker.

It’s also a safe bet that 90 percent of the congregation had no idea where the pastor was going with the opening passages of his sermon, but the intent came to light when he shared a few lines of “Jungle” lyrics.

“Welcome to the jungle, it gets worse here every day. You learn to live like an animal in the jungle where we play.”

The gist of the sermon was that the world in which we dwell outside of the walls of the church is wrought with savages, peril, lust, greed, conflict and pain. And it seems to get worse every day, every month, every year.

In contrast, a Christian has a choice to make. The good news is that there is a choice that will lift us above the fray of the jungle and armor us to weather its torment. But a lot of Christians fail, or refuse, to make the choice. They either pretend to believe, or believe on Sundays when it’s convenient, or yield to the jungle entirely and suppress, or discard, their beliefs.

So it is when we consider the coexistence of core, uniquely American principles — and Americans who stand for them — and the intrusion of the Marxist Left into our culture on multiple fronts — education, the media and, yes, religion.

Ronald Reagan’s most enduring speech on America’s future was presciently entitled, “A Time for Choosing”. It was a speech that found the America we knew and loved at a crossroads in 1964. With all due respect to Axl Rose, its words were considerably more eloquent.

“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny,.” Reagan said. “We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.”

Reagan’s speech had one glaring deficiency. It was 60 years premature. Yes, America has come through dark hours over the decades since Reagan launched his political career — Viet Nam, 1960s assassinations, 1970s economic stagnation, Watergate, the space shuttle Challenger, 9/11, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the scourge of a Chinese bioweapon assault, aka, Covid-19.

But could Reagan have imagined how close we are in this moment to sentencing our Republic and, thus, our children to death? The United States is essentially on a war footing with a nuclear rival, China, which is sending deadly fentanyl across our southern border with Mexico to kill our citizens. Our national infrastructure is incredibly vulnerable to a crippling cyberattack.

The American corporate media is so obscenely corrupt that we will never see an honest investigation into how the 2020 Presidential election was compromised by pandemic hysteria that fueled wholesale election law violations, and mishandled and improperly mailed ballots. We likely won’t see the willful suppression of the scandalous content of Hunter Biden’s laptop brought into the light of day, or how Hunter’s role as a hustler and conduit for this father, Joe Biden, has compromised America’s standing with China.

Even a federal judge’s ruling last week to demand that social media platforms stop colluding with Democrat party forces to censor content posted by Republicans, or purveyors of truth about Covid “vaccines” and the Left’s war on medical liberty, has been derailed by an activist court.

Mainstream Catholicism, and major Christian denominations, have been hijacked by “woke” overlords. A recent report identified 6,000 United Methodist church congregations breaking away to protest open acceptance of LBGTQ marriage and related deviance.

The Presbyterian church also is in a state of upheaval with a decline of 700,000 members in the past decade. It has pledged greater inclusiveness and the ordination of gay and transgender priests. In a 2019 report about a Manhattan Presbyterian church that has dropped all pretense of a faith-driven congregation, The New York Times made this blanket observation: “Houses of worship — including Christian churches from a range of denominations, as well as synagogues — have positioned themselves as potent forces on progressive issues, promoting activism on social justice causes and inviting in the L.G.B.T.Q. community.” Times readers love this, of course.

The aforementioned decline in America’s Christian foundation is no doubt fueled by a ruthless hijacking of education by the Left, which first drove God and freedom of speech out of universities before it sent its pre-wired graduates into the education workforce to target high schools, then middle schools and, now, elementary schools. Curricula has been dumbed down and the aim of educators today is hidden in plain sight: Everything is viewed through the prism of race and gender fluidity. The children are endangered in the hands of unenlightened parents, they insist, even as these same parents rescue their kids from public schools in droves.

The recent annual conference of the National Education Association (the Left’s most reliable source of funding) featured a throwing down of the gauntlet by NEA President Becky Pringle, who is black. She delivered a speech that conjured memories of Nation of Islam cult leader Louis Farrakhan’s fiery rants.

The NEA, Pringle intoned, will “reclaim public education as a common good, and transform it into something it was never designed to be: racially and socially just, and equitable.”

The Marxist Left, the media and education overlords are, effectively, the jungle. As Christians and Americans in 2023 we have only one choice. Put on the armor of God, embrace the spirit of or America’s founding fathers, and stand in the breech. Or step into darkness of the jungle.

 

By Steve Woodward

The Moore County School Board met for a daylong work session. Around the lunch hour, members took a break to feast on a catered lunch paid for on the taxpayers’ dime.

Throughout the meeting the board chairman was dismissive of board member David Hensley.

The chair was quite deferential to the Moore Schools superintendent, however.

The chair expressed concern that the budgetary outlook for schools is grim. But when Hensley pointed out that the cost per student budgeted in Moore County Schools has risen about 50 percent in just three years, to $14,701 per student, there was silence.

When Hensley noted that $750,000 has been spent to hire architects to remodel six school gymnasiums, noting that a single architect could have been hired full time for considerably less than $750,000, there was mostly silence.

Around the same time, a staff member reported that the fourth quarter 2022-23 budget would exceed earlier projections by $805,556, which is only slightly more than $750,000.

Hensley presented a report to the board showing how students are forced to pay nominal fees for the “right” to attend school, take an art class, or participate in graduation. He noted that the fees are collected in direct violation of the North Carolina Constitution, which provides for a free education for every student.
Hensley suggested removing some of the fees, but the board chair dismissed the fiscally conservative proposal, saying, “I don’t think we can pay for it right now.”

Another board member spoke up during a discussion about identifying age inappropriate books in school libraries and targeting these for removal. A fellow board member said, “We should not be in a position of banning books.”

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that your humble author lapsed into Biden-esque confusion and mistakenly posted a commentary written after a school board meeting in 2019-2020, when board chair Libby Carter and, later, board chair Pam Thompson, repeatedly were dismissive of Hensley for daring to address uncomfortable topics involving excess spending. 

But you would be wrong. The aforementioned took place during the board’s July 10, 2023, work session. Today.

The board seated last December, with Robert Levy named chair, had been elected, first in 2020 after victories at the ballot box by Hensley, Philip Holmes and Levy, and in 2022 (after Ken Benway, Pauline Bruno and Shannon Davis won their races), to reform failing schools, restore campus discipline and rein in profligate spending. Rightfully, there was optimism that a 6-1 conservative majority would steamroll bad policies and banish poisoned curricula of the past.

Now we know why so many citizens decry politics and campaign promises. While this board has several shining achievements worthy of praise, the past three months have seen all of that positive energy replaced by hostility.

The responsibility for this unfortunate about-face lies at the feet of chair Levy, who is deliberately ignoring the will of voters by failing to demonstrate leadership, by ignoring the work of school board sub-committees to help navigate important items onto the monthly agenda, and by alienating his former, most staunch ally, Hensley. It is painful to watch.

Meanwhile, some of the other board members seem at a loss to respond to Levy’s open hostility. They mostly sit silently, bringing little passion to the proceedings. Indeed, they appear hesitant to challenge Levy or question his disruptive conduct. At one point during the aforementioned meeting, Levy interrupted Hensley, shouting, “You’re just wrong!”

Levy referred to Hensley’s contention that a funding “deal” he and Superintendent Tim Locklair have hashed out with the county Board of Commissioners, which controls local education purse strings, is a bad deal.

Hensley, who is a well qualified chair of the school board finance subcommittee, was excluded by Levy from discussions with the commissioners.

He contends that agreeing to a fixed 38 percent cut of the commissioners’ annual pie leaves the school budget vulnerable to inevitable economic fluctuations.

Hensley rightfully fears that fixed annual funding coming from the commissioners will preclude the board from going back to the commissioners when a crisis arises, or inflation surges upward, to request additional funding.

Commissioners chair Nick Picerno has said he will allocate the funds with the understanding that “you guys make it work”. Or as Hensley puts it, Picerno is saying, “Don’t come back asking for an extra nickel.” In other words, live within the means of your 38 percent.

There always will be debates about budgeting and spending on public education.

But Moore County citizens did not vote for a school board hijacked by a chair who has lost his way, obsessed with silencing conservative advocate Hensley. If he cares about education reform, Levy resigns.

Board member Bruno said it best about Levy’s tyrannical bent.

“This stops right now. We are trying to win (community) respect, their trust. To do this is awful. You are destroying the work we have done since we were elected.”