COVID-19 – RESOLVE

Two years later

By Steve Woodward

While generally skeptical about so-called resolutions prompted by one month bleeding into another, I nonetheless resolve to torment hypocrites and Marxists (Democrats) as never before in 2023.

What other choice do we have? Anthony Fauci is retiring but his legacy — gain-of-function, fear, masking, boosters — is not going away. In fact, it is going to places heretofore uncontemplated. Vaccinated sheep (citizens) we are told now are more vulnerable to upcoming “variants” of the Wuhan virus. And pay no attention to vaccinated healthy young adults becoming ill or dying “suddenly”.

The blank canvas that is 2023 should not be frittered away at the hands of status quo Republicans. The battle in the U.S. House of Representatives to name its speaker reinforces a pressing need to deflect establishment forces. Our Founding Fathers did not create their framework to limit conflict within a party; they envisioned a battlefield upon which bold ideas and deep passion would overwhelm hypocrisy and political fraudsters.

Were we to summon a fraction of the determination that drove the Founders just think what we might accomplish. Locally, we would create a coalition to insure that a drag show never would darken our community again. We would direct our school board to eradicate gender grooming and race theory from public education. And we would challenge our county commissioners to marginalize the county board of health — over which it presides — so that it never again intrudes on public education by recommending school closures, masking and subjecting children to experimental mRNA injections.

But we also must stand resolute against purveyors of revisionist history as we approach the second anniversary of the unity rally of January 6 in Washington, where your correspondent traveled to chronicle what would unfold. We know many brothers and sisters who came and went without so much as raising their voices an octave, while raising objections that D.C. government chose to limit rest facilities apparently in an effort to disperse the “mobs” of seniors, families and young Republicans. The choice was clear: urination or defend the nation.

Apart from the planted, scripted disrupters who raged into the Capital two years ago, those who merely showed up are now, two years on, still sobered by what our nation looked like after the crowds went home and the Biden Administration ascended. Where we are in 2023 affirms that our motivation to assemble in Washington on that fateful January day in 2021 was prescient.

To the extent that a few hundred people swelled into the Capitol we now see how that modest demonstration pales in comparison to the trampling and burning down of societal norms in the aftermath. We might ask, where was the outrage on that January afternoon amid news that the lone fatality was an unarmed military veteran (Ashli Babbitt) who was gunned down in cold blood by a Capitol police officer? Why does January 6 merit a “commission”? Where are the commissions denouncing violence on America’s streets that, by comparison, make that citizens’ rally look like a county fair? Innocents who participated that day still rot in D.C. jail cells charged with taking selfies. But who was doing the plundering of our democracy in reality? Facebook and Twitter, of course. When will those digital accomplices be shackled and sent away?

Two years on, the Left is waging its own insurrection. Look no further than an essay I endured in a recent, Dec. 31-Jan. 1 weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal. It is worth noting that, in order to fill up the sections in weekend Journals, editors give voice to authors who would prefer to be published in The New York Times. The Journal helps them audition.

Zachary Karabell, who is the founder of the ominously named Progress Network, wrote to praise 2022 as as year in which “far more went right … than most of us recognize”. One can only imagine from which penthouse or city brownstone the author was perched as he typed fervently to remind us that 2022 was the year “climate technology was supercharged” by $400 billion allocated through Biden’s absurd Inflation Reduction Act. (In China, the equivalent would be the Oppression Reduction Edict).

Mr. Karabell is positively giddy in reminding readers that voter suppression laws failed (but misses the point that no such laws existed). Without a hint of irony, he claims “voters surged to the polls in (2022) despite fears (expressed only by left wing media) that laws passed in states such as Georgia and Texas would lead to voter suppression.”

The illogical Mr. Karabell goes on in his rambling essay to praise wage gains for citizens he disparages as “workers” — up by 6% in 2022 — “that did not (emphasis added) for most of the year keep pace with inflation.” Not to worry, he writes, “inflation moderates”. Just as urban crime waves sweeping our nation moderate. Some nights are less deadly than others.

2022 was a train wreck but, apparently, Mr. Karabell blissfully travelled on a parallel track.

The reliably moderate Gerard Baker, in his weekly Journal column, tried to ease into a new year by calling for an ideological truce. “Can we start to work to eradicate the binary mind-set that has seized our thinking about the kind of society and world we think we should live in?” Baker asks.

He answers his own question near the end of the column — as if the more he kept typing the more he was talking himself out of the premise. (As editor emeritus, Baker should impulsively have send the column back for a re-write).

Baker continues: herein is “the great conundrum for the more skeptical among us: Advances in the lot of humanity have rarely come from calls for moderation and humility, but from true believers — zealots who convinced enough people that the choice they faced really was a binary one between good and evil.”

Citizens who endure wages ravaged by bad economic policy, and law and order dysfunction driven by the “woke”, deserve our fierce defense of their liberties, no matter the cost.

If parents with children in government run indoctrination centers (schools) must become zealots to reform the system, let them do so boldly. If mechanical ballot tabulation presents a binary choice between integrity and fraud, we must go full binary to expose the Left. If U.S. border security is de-emphasized even as Ukrainian border security is funded by an American Congress to the tune of $100 billion; if medical tyranny advanced by thinly veiled lies threatens livelihoods, mental health and the well being of healthy young adults; if we observe the normalization of transgenderism and the rejection of Judeo-Christian values in our communities; if the very foundation of American exceptionalism is crumbling under the iron boot of the Left’s Great Reset in pursuit of a one-world order; well, then what?

With grudging apologies to Mr. Baker, the task is not to eradicate a mind-set. The task is to eradicate enemies within.

Cowering like it’s 2020

By Steve Woodward

Our kids now can go to school, free as birds, but only if smothered beneath unsanitary masks, and pumped full of experimental serum, to protect them from, at worst, a chest cold.

Our kids conversely are made to stay home from school because three inches of snow that has melted into residual clumps makes traveling by bus potentially hazardous, or so say our unelected authorities. What’s next, a Dry Pavement Alert? A Blue Sky Glare Advisory? Fresh Air Delirium Syndrome?

If I am a school age child in 2022, what is my default mode? Bold individualism endowed upon me by the fortitude of the American spirit? Or, am I a bowl of jello, quivering in fear of disease and Mother Nature?

The answer is obvious and it is the latter. Sponge Bob and his sidekicks are in charge. Our children are gelatinous beings, trained to recoil whenever the ruling elite or weather forecasters proclaim foreboding doom.

But don’t blame the kids. The fault lies firmly at the feet of a group now passing as “adults”. There was a Greatest Generation, those who fought in, died during and emerged from World War II to forge an even greater America. But here in the 21st Century, we are stuck with the Gravest Generation, a class of citizenry best described as weak, self-absorbed, delusional and lost.

They existed among us for who knows how long but have been exposed by the hysteria imposed upon normal day to day life by the Wuhan Virus that escaped a U.S.-funded laboratory in China in 2019.

And we are understanding that it is all but impossible to marginalize these most un-American of Americans because they are put forward by corporate, mainstream media as normal, rational Americans who just want every citizen to “stay safe”. Even small-town newspapers are trying to show how “woke” they are, just like their highly paid brethren in the prestige media outlets in New York and Washington.

In its January 23 editorial, The Pilot issued an impassioned plea to the rubes it calls readers: Do your part to curb COVID! The premise for yet another frenzied treatment of the topic is that “there is virtually no aspect of life that isn’t being affected these days by COVID-19 and its highly contagious Omicron variant.” And if we don’t return to crackdown mode we will be blindsided when, inevitably, the next variant “comes along”. This warning raises suspicion that The Pilot must have access to Anthony Fauci’s emails.

Listen up, insists The Pilot (specifically, editor John Nagy and his staff death-watcher, Jamie Baxley), “we owe it to everyone around us to do what we can to safeguard public health.” The Pilot essentially is calling for another round of lockdowns. Virtual classrooms. No church services. No elective surgeries in hospitals. Take-out only restaurants. Vaccine passports. And testing, testing, testing of asymptomatic mass murderers, our children.

But public opinion is turning. Despite the best efforts of the county health department and school board to quell their optimism, determined Moore County citizens trekked to Washington on January 23 to join thousands assembled across the National Mall for a “Defeat The Mandates” rally. A lean, mean machine known as Freedom Matters NC, formed in 2020 by Lydia Boesch and Mitch Lancaster, held its banner high in frigid DC. The mandates are going down.

Freedom is making a comeback, and it really ticks off the Left. Just when absolute tyranny was beginning to feel normal. At least to them. (A reporter at Joe Biden’s marathon stumble-fest January 21 actually asked what the President would say to parents “frustrated that there is no vaccine for children under 5?” By all means, let’s inject the least vulnerable and roll the dice on side effects).

Meanwhile, allow me to take on our local rag’s wrist wringing, point by point:

Deaths with Covid never have been separated from deaths BY Covid. That shell game certainly suggests “inflated” data points. Same goes for “cases”.
With the sudden shift — by the Fauci-ites — to the new conventional wisdom that cloth masks are ineffective compared to the N95 cone masks, little wonder precautions have been “scoffed at”. Normal people knew the face diapers were symbolic signals of virtue from the start.
Schools are struggling to stay open because administrators continue to “test to stay” among asymptomatic kids. And, furthermore, there is outright denial that the vaccinated are at least as vulnerable to Omicron as the unvaxed across all age groups.
Beware the next wave that “comes along”? Omicron, say credible members of the medical community (when not censored), is nature’s vaccine. It will drive herd immunity. Why would you dwell on the threat of a “next one”? How about the next killer, three-inch snow storm, or the next routine flu season? Best hunker down inside your bunkers on Pennsylvania Avenue.
This is an “unchecked and ignored” pandemic? Citizens have had every aspect of normal life taken from them. Replaced by: Masks. Social distancing. Gloves. Vaccines. Boosters. Denial of therapeutic drugs to promote recovery. Travel restrictions. Unchecked? What a very Australian point of view.
Masks are awesome. Quit saying they equate to “child abuse”. The consequences of masking children will not be known for years. If it is not abusive it certainly is dangerous. Many experts believe it is inhibiting speech development in the very young. How could it not?

This just in. 2020 phoned The Pilot’s newsroom. It wants its hysteria back.

Nice try

By Steve Woodward

I was wrong. After Governor Roy Cooper issued a statewide restaurant lockdown order — without consent as required by the state’s constitution — on March 17, 2020, I was asked to articulate my greatest fear about what was to come.

The topic was local restaurants. All of them were shut down at 5 p.m. on St. Patrick’s Day. Some immediately accommodated carry-out only. Others were not ready for an overnight transition.

My biggest fear was “that they won’t be here” in a few months. I feared many of our restaurants, both long established and newcomers, would go out of business. I was wrong. We lost very few in comparison to the nationwide averages; several reinvented themselves and soldiered on, adding delivery options, improving carry-out operations. A few new places opened despite the lockdowns and are thriving.

In early 2020, local restaurants battled to survive on take-out orders and gift cards.

They did so despite promises of federal support evaporating. They did so despite banks demonstrating they were ill prepared to keep up with demand for funds moving through the pipeline from Capitol Hill to Main Street. They did so even as fattened unemployment checks disincentivized staffs from returning to work as restrictions on dining eased.

Local government finally awakened to the dire circumstances after a few vocal elected leaders stood up and proposed expanded outdoor dining, using parking spaces that often are unoccupied during evening hours. Southern Pines led the way; Pinehurst soon followed.

My forecast was wrong because I did not give enough credit to living in Moore County. We were under the same tyrannical lockdowns as the other 99 counties, but, apparently, we are blessed to live in communities with fewer hysterical residents than those who bowed at Cooper’s feet in places like Mecklenburg and Wake. Our locals recognized that adhering to a stay-at-home “order” was not practical and, potentially, the first step toward economic suicide and sweeping malaise.

Many, not all, ventured out to visit restaurants they’d never tried before. They learned that carry-out dining is not such a bizarre alternative, and when local dining spots added delivery options using smartphone apps we all discovered ever more great places across our dining spectrum. Additionally, customers heeded the call to buy gift cards with every order, to infuse more cash into the restaurants. Our Moore Republican Party then collected stacks of those cards and delivered them to frontline healthcare professionals at FirstHealth. A classic win-win.

Restaurant owners and chefs rarely wear their ideological persuasions on their sleeves. But we staunch conservatives share in common with these now heroic figures qualities that surely brought us together during the slog that began one year ago this week. We are capitalists. We believe in and defend personal responsibility, loyalty and liberty as protection from the iron boot of government. We prefer to earn a living, rather than living to be bailed out.

This story does not have a feel-good happy ending. Not by a long shot. One owner told me his retirement plans were set back five years. Many of the charitable pursuits that bind our restaurants to the community have ground to a halt, which means those in need have been temporarily left wanting. Some restaurants that closed temporarily are now closed forever, taking jobs with them. And owners of dining establishments and other retail businesses now know how easy it is for government tyrants to lock us down without regard for consequences, immediate or long term. American resilience proved too much for the tyrants this time. Nice try.

Thankfully, that is not the only awakening trigged by China’s unleashing of a global virus. There is this: The pursuit of absolute safety is the enemy of freedom, and a futile pursuit, indeed.

Betrayal

By Steve Woodward

North Carolina Republican Party chairman Michael Whatley described Sen. Richard Burr’s vote to convict President Donald Trump after his Senate impeachment trial as “shocking and disappointing”.

Allow me to respectfully disagree. Burr’s track record during the Trump era strongly suggested he would, ultimately, join six other Republicans in voting against Trump’s certain acquittal. Nothing shocking about it. Disappointing? How about revolting? Or, vile. And, perhaps worst of all, calculated.

Who can doubt that a career swamp creature such as Burr would be tempted by a deal with the Devil? Consider this sheer coincidence: an investigation of Burr’s trading of 33 stocks timed around Wuhan Virus vaccine development was dropped by the Department of Justice the moment the Biden administration seized power. Or, perhaps, no coincidence. Wink, wink.

While the media and the Left conveniently forget about events of a week, or a month, or even years ago, as if they never happened (Ukraine’s extortion of $1 billion through then-Vice President Biden), even Republicans seem to not recall the manner in which the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Burr before his forced resignation amid insider trading allegations, aided and abetted the Russian hoax.

The Federalist’s Tristan Justice, writing in May 2020, referred to the revelations about the committee’s conduct in an early 2018 column put forth by a Federalist colleague.

Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway wrote in March that the recent (stock trading) scandal is only the latest reason Burr should be stripped of his powerful chairmanship after perpetuating the grand Russian collusion conspiracy theory implicating President Donald Trump was an agent of the Kremlin.

“The only notable thing to have happened in that committee over the course of the Russia collusion hoax was the arrest of one of its staffers for lying regarding his leaks of information to reporters he was intimate with,” Hemingway wrote.

But Burr assured Americans in an April 2020 statement that the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of Russian “collusion” was solid and indisputable.

Burr: “In reviewing the ICA, the Senate Intelligence Committee looked at two key questions: first, did the final product meet the initial task given by the President, and second, was the analysis supported by the intelligence presented? We found the ICA met both criteria. The ICA reflects strong tradecraft, sound analytical reasoning, and proper justification of disagreement in the one analytical line where it occurred.”

The fatal flaw in this assessment is that the ICA was informed from the outset by an infamous document known as the Steele Dossier. The genesis of the Steele Dossier discredited it from day one.

“The Clinton campaign and the (Democrat National Committee) paid 12 million dollars to an American company called Fusion GPS for the purpose of digging up dirt on then candidate, Donald Trump,” writes former CIA station chief Brad Johnson, founder of Americans for Intelligence Reform. “It was Fusion GPS that then hired Steele. In so doing GPS would have obviously kept much of that $12 million for themselves. Neither the Clinton campaign, nor the DNC directly hired Steele.

“There has never been any announcement, or evidence presented, as to how much of the $12 million GPS kept for itself, and how much it paid Steele to further the ‘opposition research project’.”

Here is the bottom line on Richard Burr. Career politician. Complicit in advancing the Russia collusion hoax to bring down President Trump. Although not alone on Capitol Hill, not opposed to “selling off up to $1.7 million in stocks following classified congressional briefings on the coming pandemic from the novel Wuhan coronavirus” (The Federalist, May 14 2020). One of seven Senate Republicans whom history will record as voting to impeach a private citizen in defiance of the Constitution.

Just be glad you are not his book agent.

Channeling C.S. Lewis

By Steve Woodward

Following Nazi Germany’s relentless bombing campaign in 1940 and 1941, Londoners would face many more years of hardship until World War II ended in 1945. There was fear of occupation. There was rationing. And, everywhere, there was destruction.

Through it all, Brits had come to depend on the reassuring counsel of C.S. Lewis, arguably among the most famous writers of the era, first as a novelist and by the 1940s owed to his writings on Christianity. The Irish-born, former atheist was an accidental celebrity to say the least. The Village Chapel’s Pastor John Jacobs, a Lewis expert, says he seemed to appeal to readers across the spectrum of religious allegiances because he wrote about his newfound faith as a lay person, not as a theologian.

In 1941 the British Broadcasting Corporation, through its director of religious broadcasting, asked Lewis if he would agree to deliver brief radio commentaries to its listening audience. He accepted. In the years to follow, the 15 minutes Londoners spent with Lewis on Sunday nights were viewed as sacred; an appointment not to be missed.

The gift Lewis gave to his war-weary citizens was quite the opposite of the inspiring, rhetorical flourishes delivered by Winston Churchill. Lewis made common sense out of Christianity and made it relevant to the vulnerable.

“What’s the sense of saying the enemy is in the wrong,” Lewis said, “unless right is a real thing?”

Here in 2021, do we not repeatedly ask this question, knowing that it is the central question? But I would ask another question first. Do we have a yet undiscovered C.S. Lewis in our midst in the 21st Century in America?

We have Anthony Fauci, a Swamp creature annoyed by all of us because we want to live as free citizens. We have Rush Limbaugh. We as conservatives are blessed to have Rush as our ideological voice but the other side was thrilled by Limbaugh’s lung cancer diagnosis a year ago. We have Franklin Graham, who honors his father’s legacy by delivering God’s love tangibly to the world’s suffering. We have Tucker Carlson, to whom we owe our gratitude for crushing hypocrites and exposing deception at every turn.

But what America desperately needs today is a C.S. Lewis, a scholar who dreaded the scholarly, an author who wrote not for peers but for real people, and who stepped forward as a servant of God at a moment in history when no else could have served as well. Imagine, today, fringe talk show host Bill Maher, a witty, far Left atheist, converting to Christianity. That would be a wake up call.

First, it must be said that Great Britain, in 1941, identified entirely as a Christian nation. In 2021, the U.S. is a Judeo-Christian nation teetering on the brink of becoming a Socialist nation in which religion has long been marginalized and is increasingly persecuted, even despised.

If we have in our midst a C.S. Lewis he will not be invited by the establishment media to come forward to console us. He will emerge at a considerable risk to his livelihood, his security and his reputation.

Perhaps we delude ourselves thinking there is one such person in this social media age. Perhaps the answer to our dilemma is not found in a person but in a chorus.