Author: Resolve

By Steve Woodward

Growing up in Fairfax County, Virginia, near our Nation’s Capitol, every day a new edition of The Washington Post arrived at the end of the driveway. And on afternoons we received The Washington Star, which later became the Star-News.

I was obsessed with these newspapers. At the top left of the Post‘s front page the number of sections and pages comprising any given edition was indicated. A row of stars informed you which edition you were reading. The more stars, the later the edition. Back then, morning newspaper printing presses began running around 8 p.m. and continued into the wee hours of the next day.

I eagerly read columns by political pundits like Jimmy Breslin and Haynes Johnson, and sports writers including the legend of that era, Shirley Povich, with little comprehension. But I read them all, nonetheless, and loved the ink rubbing off on my fingers. During a summer vacation, I read a book — on my own without intervention by a parent — entitled, “The Boys of Summer”, by Roger Kahn. It chronicles Kahn’s experiences as a junior reporter, in his early 20s, covering the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team in the early-1950s.

This was an era in which a working class kid could go to work as a flunky in a newsroom and come out on the other side as a reporter or columnist. Trained on the job. No college diploma was required (although Kahn attended New York University). The training defaulted to a simple premise: Observe, inquire, report. Reading Kahn’s book influenced my life. I would become a sports journalist in high school, a campus newspaper editor as a college student and, in 1982, a hired newspaper staff member.

I cherish these memories, dating back to “publishing a newspaper” during late 1960s boyhood, hand written on notebook paper and “delivered” to the neighbors, my earliest attempt to produce content.

From there I evolved into a “typist” who generated content banging on the keys of a noisy contraption, an Underwood. It was a manual typewriter, the gold standard of its era. It was my first “desktop”. It certainly was not portable. It was as indestructible as its spool of ink ribbon was fragile.

Something about a typewriter kept its operator honest. Each keystroke was a commitment. Today, our words appear on screens as we write, editing themselves on the fly as technology spell-checks our words and corrects grammar. Our mooring to reality constantly is distracted by the meta-verse and its cesspool of parallel realities. It as if we type one thing and, before we know it, something more nuanced, less true to ourselves, flashes before our eyes. The passage before us suddenly has been sanitized and censored by Microsoft or Apple

But we are not defenseless against these perils. Artificial intelligence has not come for our brains — yet.

My cherished memories of journalism before it died are fading. There is a silver lining, though. We have reverted back to the days of Roger Kahn’s youth in Brooklyn, New York. Like Kahn, we are instinctual journalists. The trained, Ivy League journalists have prostituted themselves so completely that they nearly are extinct, their credibility lost and their reputations shattered.

Rapidly advancing technology has many downsides, as we well know. But a huge upside is that emboldened Americans have more opportunities to learn and become informed, and to share what we learn via thoughtful analysis and searing commentary.

The point is we had better get started. But it’s overwhelming, you say. Where do I begin? One place is alternate digital media. Do a daily deep dive at Citizen Free Press, the leading aggregator of content for conservatives. Clicking links at CFP will send you hurtling into a galaxy of content producers, including some ranking among the most virulent haters of the MAGA movement. That’s OK. It is vitally important to know what lies and distortions they are circulating.

Along with researching, posting comments to news sites and blogs is extremely liberating but it also makes a difference. We’ve all known people who actually call their elected officials, or gallantly walk door to door amid campaigning season, but are there ever enough of them? Never. And there never can be enough comments posted, links shared or blogs published. These in fact are more powerful acts of volunteerism than the aforementioned.

You do not have to be William Buckley to write and share your writing using a basic blog platform such as WordPress (home of RESOLVE), or its no-frills cousin, BlogSpot, or Blogger. You do not have to be Rush Limbaugh to launch an audio or video podcast on a web-based platform such as Riverside or BuzzSprout.

Do we really believe that every founding father, every framer of our Constitution, was bursting with confidence, gifted with oratory brilliance or born natural authors? Of course not. But they met the moment. They rose to the occasion, knowing their reputations, their families and their finances would come under siege.

This is our moment. Any number of famous quotations by Lincoln, or Eisenhower, or Patton, or Reagan come to mind, but a German-born writer, perhaps the greatest of the 16th and 17th centuries, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, said it well.

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

By Steve Woodward

In American politics of a bygone era affiliation with the Republican Party put an “R” next your name, and it extended to other “R” attributes including reliable, respectable, and reputable.

As a candidate for governor of California in 1966, and a newly converted Republican, Ronald Reagan borrowed an edict from a state party leader of the era, a so-called 11th Commandment, that said, “though shalt not speak ill of another Republican.”

I am an unapologetic admirer of Reagan and hold him in high regard as one of the great American patriots of the 20th century. But the time has come, in fact it’s overdue, to declare the 11th Commandment obsolete.

It is a vast understatement to observe that the political universe has changed dramatically since 1966. So has our culture. It has eroded, and it’s not done. Civil discourse is dying. Journalism is dead. The media is a corrupt surrogate of the Democrat Party, which no longer is liberal but hard left and hurtling toward Marxism.

The Republican Party also is compromised, ruled by an elitist, establishment iron fisted cabal embodied by glassy-eyed Sen. Mitch McConnell (KY). It is indifferent toward conservatism and hostile toward America’s Judeo-Christian heritage. The latest mantra is that Republicans must “get over themselves” on their pro-life stances and “come around” on abortion.

Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously observed that Americans were renowned for doing the right thing only before exhausting all other possibilities. Like Reagan’s 11th Commandment, Churchill’s sentiment no longer holds true.

The American statesmen Churchill knew in is his era were imperfect but principled. Today, we observe Republicans who would not know the right thing if it was placed before them adorned in neon and surrounded by fireworks. The right thing, the honorable thing is not expedient, it does not curry favor with donors, and it might get some of them run out of office. Can’t have that. What we see today are Republicans as rotten to the core as Democrats. Remember the late Sen. Harry Reid scoffing when reminded that he stood openly on the Senate floor and lied about Mitt Romney’s failure to pay taxes for a decade.

Here we are in 2023. Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (photo nearby) is demonstrating serious disregard for keeping his word, for upholding Republican values on spending as he pledged to do when he was desperate to be named Speaker. He seems to underestimate the zeal of the Trump MAGA movement, which one might align with a new 11th Commandment. “Though shalt not disregard or diminish the American people.” Never let us forget: January 6, 2021, was a civilized revolt hijacked by Democrats itching for a televised massacre.

We find McCarthy parroting the Left’s manufactured hysteria about a looming “government shutdown” unless a lame 30-day “continuing resolution” passes before September 30. The poorly conceived bridge agreement — likely to be stopped in its tracks by genuine fiscal conservatives including N.C. Rep. Dan Bishop — leaves 92% of runaway government spending intact as Americans stare down the barrel of a $33 trillion national debt. Unchecked spending must be slashed, not delicately pruned.

In Texas, a Republican attorney general has just survived impeachment — 16 counts were rejected — after 70 percent of Texas House Republicans voted in support of Ken Paxton’s impeachment last spring on baseless corruption charges. These Texas RINOs wanted Paxton gone because he posed too great a threat to their establishment priorities.

In North Carolina, Senate president and lifelong Republican Phil Berger is slaughtering his legacy in a most deliberate fashion. Berger’s doubling down on his lust to legalize casino gambling in counties he represents is trampling the will of a majority of Republicans across the state.

Berger is brutally defiant in a manner that would be shrugged off if he was a Democrat. He’s sure acting like one. But is it an act? The state’s budget bill was his first hostage in reckless pursuit of casinos. Now he is sharpening his talons again with a ploy to drag legalized casinos across the finish line on the coattails of Medicaid expansion. Genuine Republicans are against both, and they should be.

Republicans at last have narrow majorities in the North Carolina House and Senate, and, finally, the ability to drain Democrat Governor Roy Cooper’s veto pen. House Republicans are dead set against casino legislation passing, although never underestimate Speaker Tim Moore’s retractable spine. A few Senate Republicans have caved to Berger’s side. Cooper’s veto pen has been replaced by a giant Berger Sharpie, and it’s being used to draw a big middle finger out on Jones Street.

The scenario is so atrocious, and it’s so obvious that Berger (photo nearby) is on the take, that a Cooper tweet over the weekend was impossible to dismiss: “Something has a grip on Republican leaders and it’s not the people of NC.”

Something has a grip on elected Congressional Republicans, too. A singular figure who has stirred the passions of true Republicans, and even some Democrats and independents, Donald Trump, who pollsters say is surging in popularity ahead of the 2024 election, has been falsely indicted four times by rogue district attorneys. But the so-called leaders of the Republican Party, McCarthy and Senate leader/fossil McConnell, are mum on Trump’s plight and are holding onto hope that he will just go away.

Trump will not comply. (He has an army of ardent supporters, aka, the War Room “posse”. The host of this live streamed alt-media juggernaut, Steve Bannon, is coming to Moore County to rally Republicans on October 27 as headliner of the Moore GOP Lincoln Reagan Dinner). Learn more.

Modern day Republican frauds do not deserve the “R” next to their names. But they’re not going away either, and their disingenuous instincts are re-defining the “R”. They are reprehensible.

By Steve Woodward

It’s suicide prevention month. We’ve got a lot of work to do. How, as a society, a community, or members of a family, do we intend to prevent suicide when before us is a minefield specifically concocted to compromise the joy of living while trampling gender norms?

We face an education industrial complex obsessed with gender grooming and pronoun pandering. They can’t start the head games soon enough, it seems. And the perpetrators become furious when parents and religious organizations expose their intentions.

In California last week, lawmakers, elected no less, decided they’d seen enough of parents intervening in their children’s decisions to “change” sexes. The Democrat-dominated California Senate passed a bill linking child custody to transgender “rights”.

It specifies that parents who refuse to participate in transgenderism (pretending that their child is a different gender) could be guilty of failing to provide for the “health, safety, and welfare” of their child—therefore losing custody to another parent or the state. (The Daily Signal, September 8, 2023)

These Marxists push the trans agenda despite studies finding high rates of suicide attempts, and suicide deaths, within transgender populations. And you’ll never guess how they react. They defend gender affirming procedures (mutilation) and flatly dismiss their impacts on mental health. Instead, they blame the suicides on the awful people who bully and berate the transies, playing the victimhood card that has served them so well in the gay marriage arena. Which is to say, the Left will accept a certain amount of collateral damage (deaths) to keep the trans train rolling.

New Jersey-based HCP Live, a medical news aggregator, cites a report by “researchers” who conclude that grooming and gender transitioning in all forms is good for mental health. It’s the curious rejection of truth — that gender is determined at birth and by God — that’s costing lives via suicide.

“Transgender and nonbinary youths have particularly high rates of poor mental health outcomes compared with their (natural gender) counterparts. … (This is) a consequence of social rejection, lack of support from parents, bullying and discrimination,” a team of epidemiologists at the University of Washington concludes.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, in his most egregious veto of a Republican-supported bill, went all-in last month on expanding the chasm between parents’ rights and and the cults of child manipulators. The Youth Protection Act — later restored by a GOP legislative override — prevents minors from receiving puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries, and aims to treat gender confusion through alternative therapies, reported a North Carolina watchdog, Education First Alliance.

The Alliance also broke news this past summer exposing toddler grooming clinics coming online within healthcare networks tied to Duke University and East Carolina University.

“As ECU doctors prepared to open its Pride Clinic, they applied to the Fenway Institute’s Pediatric Trans Echo program for training on diagnosing and treating ‘transgender’ children,” reported Alliance founder Sloan Rachmuth.

“Among the ‘doctors’ involved in the training was Dr. Michelle Forcier, a professor of pediatrics at Brown University’s Alpert Medical School. … Forcier claims that even infants know that their gender “identity” is separate from sex and that it is never too early to start transgender treatments.”

The delusion is even more pronounced at Duke, where the lead doctor at its Child and Adolescent Gender Care claims that gender identity is not only the preferred basis for determining sex, but “the only medically supported determinant of sex.”

“It is counter to medical science to use chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia (emphasis added), or secondary sex characteristics to override gender identity for purposes of classifying someone as male or female.”

It is counter to common decency and every fiber of our God given human compassion to believe that this evil mission does not end well. On the not too distant horizon, suicide prevention month will lower its bar to become suicide reduction month and, ultimately, suicide acceptance month.

How did we arrive at this dark moment in history where quality of life is hijacked by those committed to protecting the quality of the lie? Babies were born to be transitioned. Climate change is setting the planet ablaze. Government decides when a health crisis arises and how to mitigate it. Shut down. Lock down. Mask up. Take a jab or lose your job, your pension and — oh, just by the way — maybe your life.

The world inhabited by normal people did not need “studies” to conclude that the Left’s reorienting of society in recent years under the false pretense of COVID-19 “safety measures” would trigger a spike in mental illness, depression and suicide.

But one study among many found precisely that. Researchers at the Center for Suicide Prevention and Research at Nationwide Children’s Hospital found that, in the United States, youth suicides increased during COVID-19, with significantly more suicides than expected among males, non-Hispanic American Indian/Alaskan Native youth, and non-Hispanic Black youth. The study was published in February 2023.

Predictably, legislators, governors, education administrators, and their ilk, now are looking for scapegoats as the damage they have done is exposed.

Reports the Carolina Journal, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board is suing major social media companies for contributing to a “mental health crisis” among American children. The board filed its 184-page complaint on (September 7) in U.S. District Court for North Carolina’s Western District.

The suit targets owners of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube. Defendants include Meta and Google.

This board might be onto something, but not for the reason upon which it is suing. Charlotte-Mecklenburg will fail if it tries to prove that parents were defenseless against the lure of social media. That’s a ridiculous premise. If parents and other adult influencers simply accepted responsibility, as did their parents and grandparents, social media would be on par with unprotected sex and drunk driving.

Where social media is complicit is in its blatant censorship of content that would otherwise expose gender grooming and the overthrow of medical liberties. Even now we see it. Make COVID Great Again.

Suicide Prevention Month is a quaint notion. The Left’s war on societal norms and Judeo-Christian values is killing our culture and killing our kids. Who is suicidal?

By Steve Woodward

A media report on a day in the life of Durham’s streets:

Durham (N.C.) police are investigating a fatal shooting after a man died early (on September 2, 2023) near downtown. Police responded to a ShotSpotter alert. … They found a man suffering a gunshot wound and transported him to a local hospital. He later died from his injuries.

This is the third fatal shooting in Durham in two days

A media report on a day in the life at UNC-Chapel Hill:

The anger and frustration on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus was palpable (on August 30) as hundreds of students demanded during a rally that lawmakers address gun violence across North Carolina and the rest of the country.

The lockdown that students, faculty and staff were forced into (on August 28) ended after authorities arrested Tailei Qi, a 34-year-old graduate student in UNC’s Department of Applied Physical Sciences, later charging him with shooting and killing his faculty adviser, Zijie Yan.

The contrast could not be more stark. On the hallowed Chapel Hill campus students gushed with moral indignation (photo nearby) that a law on the books, or a law that should be contemplated, did not stop a random gunman from shooting and killing a professor. If only the deranged Mr. Qi had stabbed his professor to death. That outcome would have allowed reasoned consideration of Qi’s mental health state and, more importantly, likely would have spared UNC’s fragile snowflakes from the trauma of a campus wide lockdown and hours of “terror”.

About 18 miles away, near Durham’s N. Miami Blvd., two men and one juvenile were shot on August 31. Devon Rogers, 22, later died. The shooter was not apprehended. A few minutes earlier, Robert Terrell, 45, was found shot to death on Holloway Street, two minutes away. 

The next day, September 1, Jaylen Routt, 20, opened fire with a gun on North Carolina State Troopers in Raleigh. Fire was returned. Routt was killed. Later that day, David Gillette, 27, was shot near Raleigh’s Glenwood Avenue by Tyrell Moore, 23, who was charged with murder by the Raleigh Police Department. 

That’s four in less than 48 hours. A fifth man, unidentified, died after being shot in the incident described at the beginning of this post. The finality of his death is no less or greater than the death of the UNC professor, but you wouldn’t know it by the unhinged reaction to the latter. Read more.

There is no reporting to indicate that students attending classes at UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke University or N.C. State University rallied to demand that lawmakers address these “routine” shootings beyond their campuses. There was not a hint of outrage or remorse. Classes were not cancelled. Counselors were not enlisted. If universities in these and other metropolitan areas held vigils to mourn gun violence that kills nameless innocents, campus life would be disrupted into perpetuity.

Remember how Joe Biden rushed to get in front of TV cameras after a white shooter in Jacksonville killed three black students on a university campus in late August? Meanwhile, radio host Chris Plante aptly noted a man, 18, was slaughtered on the streets of Washington the same day. The White House never utters a word about gun deaths in D.C., mostly involving black shooters and black victims.

To date, D.C. has seen 175 homicides in 2023 compared to 154 in 2022.

Recently, in Southern Pines, at our doorstep, three separate shootings were reported and just as quickly forgotten by the end of the seven-day weather forecast. Last spring, Sandhills Community College locked down its campus owed to the mere concern of an individual who expressed a threat to the security of the campus. Towns and neighborhoods would be locked down forever if every looming threat was considered.

A teen was gunned down in the heart of Southern Pines, murdered, last October 8 but this once unthinkable occurrence sparked little community outrage. Earlier that same day, in broad daylight, reported The Pilot:

Witnesses at the scene said they saw, “An African American man dressed head to toe in black with a black face mask that covered most of his face. (He) got out of the driver’s side of a white sedan and fired shots into the driver’s side of a dark blue Honda Pilot.” No injuries were reported after approximately 15 shots were fired (emphasis added).

In contrast, protestors raged in the streets of Southern Pines two months later, on December 3, because fellow citizens peacefully assembled to oppose a live drag queen show scheduled the same evening inside the Sunrise Theater. 

Advocates for fetus killing rally annually for so-called Women’s March events. Who can forget their subtle pink stocking caps in 2017 after Donald’s Trump’s inauguration? But rarely do citizens gather for the “March for Lifeless Black Young Men Shot Dead by other Black Young Men”. It’s just not top of mind, and it won’t fit on a t-shirt. 

What’s the point? It’s as clear as the hypocrisy that makes some deaths at the hands of gunmen deeply tragic and others run of the mill. It’s not the guns, it’s the sons — the sons of single parent teens born into poverty, destined for neglect and hard wired for violence. The Left’s generational soft tyranny of low expectations, and its ramped up war on the nuclear family, are only expanding the threat of random murder, from Durham’s worst pockets of lawlessness to little old Moore County.

The Second Amendment does not enable this unbroken chain. So, what breaks the chain? The Second Coming, perhaps?

By Steve Woodward

It only was a matter of time. The Wall Street Journal’s “newsroom”, a quaint way of describing the editors and reporters now in its employ, has been compromised, or worse. Hijacked.

We knew this was coming. When media mogul Rupert Murdoch, an Australian, cared solely about making money he acquired The Wall Street Journal and the Fox News Channel because they were valuable assets delivering loyal audiences. His holding company’s name, News Corp., could not have been more vanilla sounding.

Back then, Murdoch, seemingly, had no intention of delving into the day to day content generated by the newspaper, long a beacon of objectivity, or the cable news channel, which had become credible and influential under the late Roger Ailes. Even The New York Times heralded Ailes as having built an empire at Fox News in his published obituary in 2017.

As Murdoch approaches 90, media insiders continue to debate which of his children will seize control of the marquee assets. Son James Murdoch in 2020 abruptly resigned from News Corp’s. board of directors, ending, for now, the presumption that this devout champion of the Left would overhaul the Journal even if it meant alienating longtime subscribers. (Business Insider reported James and his spouse donated $1 million to the 2020 Biden presidential campaign, which surprised no one).

But the nuclear event that wiped out center-right objective journalism at the Journal arrived when editor-in-chief Matt Murray, who had been with he paper for more than two decades, was replaced by Emma Tucker of The Sunday Times of London. She was not only the first woman named to the Journal’s top post. Tucker obviously was anointed to quell restless reporters who want the Journal to be more politically aligned with and socially “compassionate” like the New York Times and The Washington Post. 

Tucker is delivering. (And, over at Fox, a similar tipping point brought the firing of Tucker Carlson). This background is useful in exposing and de-constructing a curious front-page story in the Journal’s August 26-27 weekend editions, “Group Identity Eclipses Policy As Driver of Partisan Divides”. Translation: Republicans are Trump cultists.

The central premise is this: “Decades of social science research shows that our need for collective belonging is forceful enough to reshape (emphasis added) how we view facts and affect our voting decisions.” 

The reader of the this weakly premised blather must forge ahead to the ninth paragraph to arrive at the first reference to “research”. The article’s third paragraph actually forecasts what the Journal is up to — conservatives are nothing more than pathetic, Kool-Aid soaked sponges. This is no thoughtful assessment of America’s polarized politics in 2023. This, friends, is a Trump hit piece poorly disguised as “interpretative journalism”.

“The former president has been especially adept at building loyalty by asserting that his supporters are threatened by outside forces,” reporter Aaron Zitner writes. 

The writer does not identify these forces, but two come to mind. One, of course, were the violent, swarming looters and vandals who destroyed American cities after George Floyd’s drug-addled body became a corpse in the arms of a Minneapolis police officer. (Another Black Lives Matter element waged similar terrorism on college campuses where clubs and faculty invited the “wrong” guest speakers). A second force is the Department of Justice and it’s quite blatant targeting of parental rights groups exposing gender grooming and curricula hijacking in public schools. 

Other “forces” that inspired 74 million Americans to vote to re-elect Trump are just as obvious. 1. The Russian collusion narrative spun by multiagency federal government operatives. 2. A compliant corporate media that does not even bother distorting because lying is so much easier. 3. Social media oligarchs willfully censoring “misinformation” content and alternative media posts to run cover for Hunter Biden’s damning laptop, which was a storage vault of transcripts of Biden crime family exploits.

The forces to which the Journal assigns a murkiness are in fact hidden in plain sight. But reporter Zitner is not done yet.

“(Trump’s) false claims that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election … have been adopted by many of his supporters,” the Journal scolds.”

Hold on to your MAGA hats. False claims? Why was it not only yesterday — July 4, to be precise — that a U.S. District Judge, Terry Doughty, ordered the federal government to stop telling Big Tech what social media content to censor. Absent deliberate censorship there is indisputable evidence that January 6, 2021, never happens because the lead-up to the election of November 3, 2020, would have played out very differently.

Wuhan virus hysteria deliberately fueled by the Left would have been countered, even marginalized, because social media’s smack down of common sense reactions to the pandemic would not have enabled widespread harvesting of absentee and mail-in ballots. And, independents and informed Democrats would have known all about the depth of Biden family corruption and its reliable bag man, crack and sex addict Hunter Biden.

Over on page A6, the Journal’s treatise rambles on. We finally read about a Pew Research Center Study finding 60% of Republicans view Democrats “very unfavorably”. (The real question is what in the hell is wrong with the other 40%?). 

The inclination of Republicans and independent America First conservatives (there are more of the latter than ever) to remain loyal to Trump’s pro-Constitution, pro-growth, pro-energy independence, pro-border security policies (in other words, substance not saliva) is best explained away as old fashioned brainwashing, concludes the Journal. These very tangible reasons to vote a certain way directly refute the Journal’s disingenuous “group identity” headline. 

“The human brain in many circumstances is more suited to tribalism and conflict than to civility and reasoned debate,” the Journal’s stenographer writes without evidence. Seems he might have plucked this line out of story about English soccer fans.

But let’s try giving this assertion the benefit of the doubt to see where it leads. Does tribalism explain open borders that facilitate the arrival of criminals and deadly fentanyl into our homeland? Is it tribalism that excuses unfettered black-on-back murders in urban streets but condemns a white insane person for shooting black or Jewish people? Do “tribalists” naturally demean and defund law enforcement as cities implode into chaos? 

If so, how can it be that Biden loyalists who ignore stark reality at every turn are never dismissed as lunatics who vote in lockstep? They are never mentioned in the Journal’s hit piece. Neither are the adherents to “trust the science” and “climate change”. There was no curiosity, or research, about their groupthink, yet it destroyed our robust economy overnight. 

Trump’s supporters are inspired by his determination and loyalty to America First. Biden’s rag tag army is blind to his dictatorial dementia and loyalty to China and Ukraine.