COVID-19 – Page 2

RIP journalism

By Steve Woodward

In another lifetime I was a young newspaper journalist who had fallen in love with the profession as a teen after reading The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn. It was a book about the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers, but it also was a book about Kahn’s experiences as a cub newspaperman who eventually covered the team during a bygone, or more precisely, long gone era.

The Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1957, and Brooklyn never was the same. It was part of a decaying New York City in the 1960s and ‘70s. Today, pre-Wuhan virus, Brooklyn has made a ferocious comeback. All the cool New Yorkers want to live there, real estate is (was) sky rocketing. Brooklyn once again has a professional sports team, the NBA Brooklyn Nets.

Journalism is not making a Brooklyn style comeback. Sportswriters are, today, cultural commentators. They have no time for games, box scores or the crack of the bat. Journalists generally have forsaken everything that moored a Roger Kahn. Apart from sportswriters, newspaper legends such as Jimmy Breslin, or Jack Anderson, or even, in his prime Bob Woodward, are not being replaced.

Unlike Don McLean who can pinpoint “the day the music died” (1959), I cannot say for sure when journalism died. It’s demise probably is similar to a senior relative who is the life of the party until, one day, he’s not. It just happens and you do not see it coming.

Journalism’s illness probably was undiagnosed, or, in the current vernacular, asymptomatic, around the time that the political media dropped all pretense of objectivity to worship at the altar of Barack Obama. And, thus, began the revolution that would deem all of American life irredeemable and racist. Before we knew what had hit us, journalism was compromised and became an agenda driven cause, no longer a legitimate profession (although they’ll still take the money to masquerade as hard-hitting reporters).

This is a rather lengthy pretext to explain why I am not capable of being shocked by the revelation, reported by our new generation of citizen journalists, that the editor of The Pilot, John A. Nagy, and the Director of Communications of Moore County Schools, Catherine Murphy, are partners in a real estate transaction that will result in ownership of a lot on which, presumably, a home will be built.

If you are surprised that journalists are readily compromised by the company they keep, you have not been paying attention. This is small time collusion, friends. In Washington, the celebrity journos are married to scions of power and influence. Their children attend the same private schools. They attend the same parties in the Hamptons and on Martha’s Vineyard. And at 6 am weekdays, they all receive the “talking points” issued by the keepers of the Deep State. This is not conspiracy theory. This is certainty. But be not dismayed. Journalism is committing suicide right before our eyes. Knowing this, we can do their jobs for them until there are no more jobs. For them.

Miscalculation

By Steve Woodward

Set this scene in your mind. Two high level Chinese government apparatchiks, chain smoking in a conference room. Their frustration levels are high.

What is it about this “American spirit”? These American farmers keep farming even when we punish their exporting potential with tariffs. Their manufacturers keep producing. Their consumers keep buying. Their citizens keep worshipping a god. And they elected Donald Trump, a man who mocks us, as their President.

We have flooded the United States with addictive fentanyl. We have flooded their pharmaceutical industry with tainted generic drugs. We have robbed their corporations of intellectual property. We have compromised them at the highest levels of their government. We own Barack Obama and Joe Biden. And Biden’s son.

What more can we do? Cigarettes at the ready, they contemplate more deeply.

One inhales a cloud of nicotine. “We have the lab in Wuhan.”

Seven months into the Great Wuhan Virus Lockdown in the United States and across the world, intelligent people have attempted to connect the dots between the origin of the virus and the objectives of its perpetrators. These attempts repeatedly are shot down by the Left in our country as conspiratorial, anti-science and, in all cases, irrelevant because the virus is here, and we’re all doomed. And, since it’s convenient let’s just blame President Trump.

Maybe Chinese researchers were not actually so evil to the core that they willfully unleashed a mysterious virus across the planet. Maybe it was accidental. But what is no accident is how quickly the Left and the corrupt American media turned on a dime to exploit the virus right on cue in an election year.

The Biden “campaign” is calculating that it can run out the clock, blame Trump for all of the collateral damage inflicted by the Wuhan Virus, then sit back and let the media pile on. It is so confident that this will play out that even the emergence of Hunter Biden’s scandalous business deals with China and Ukraine have been no cause for overt panic. (Hopefully, this week’s presidential debate will force Joe Biden to explain why he brokered these deals for his son and the Biden family).

Federal, state and local Democrat candidates, incumbents and challengers alike, are supremely confident as well. As long as they have a death toll and daily cases to magnify, they will assure themselves that Americans will oblige and vote for Democrats as a vote for life and a permanent presumption of absolute safety. They’re just as certain voters will ignore the Left’s endorsement of Black Lives Matter’s Marxist anarchists.

We watched last week, during a pro-freedom rally ahead of the Moore County Board of Education’s scheduled meeting as Democrat U.S. House candidate (NC-52) Lowell Simon shouted down a registered nurse for daring to inform the assembled of his recent experiences. The nurse said cases of patients being treated for Wuhan Virus minus accompanying health conditions at Moore Regional numbered no more than eight. “That’s a lie,” retorted Simon, his rage masked, literally.

The Left can swarm our communities with virtue signaling mask police all it wants, but it will never succeed at masking the carnage imposed on our country and its largely healthy people when it leveraged the Wuhan Virus so deceptively so many months ago.

There is something else spreading as a result: Outrage among people lining up even now at early voting sites. Citizens are outraged by a crippled economy that was robust seven months ago; outraged by the devastation of Governor Roy Cooper’s savage lockdowns, which are compromising public education, forcing parents to quit jobs to stay home with their kids; and outraged by a Democrat-infested Moore school board that says K-5 students will not return to school on a regular schedule until January 2021, at the earliest.

We are “science deniers,” scolds the Left, hiding behind science-driven theories proven wrong so often. But what they cannot hide has been their lust to impose tyranny on the American people, and they’ve miscalculated the fallout. You read it here.

Proactive patriots

By Steve Woodward

It is understandable that millions of Americans do not know that the Middle East’s sovereign nation of the United Arab Emirates in August established diplomatic, “normalized” relations with Israel. Bahrain followed earlier this month. Saudi Arabia’s royal family is debating a similar decision.

The United States is leading the discussions and brokering the historic breakthroughs. The New York Times, believe it or not, acknowledges that the Bahrain-Israel pact “leaves open the possibility that more Arab states will follow.”

For Americans who’ve followed closely the game changing achievements domestically and abroad during the Trump administration since 2017, re-electing President Donald Trump this November is a no-brainer.

But as the countdown to early voting dwindles to a matter of days (beginning Oct. 15) there is much to talk about beyond the realm of U.S. foreign policy and America’s fast recovering economy in the era of Wuhan Virus hysteria.

When we look over the two-page sample ballot now in circulation there are 31 other choices to make beyond President and Vice President. A ballot really is much more than a roster of names and multiple choices. It is a series of questions: How much does a strong economy matter to you? Do you demand choices in matters of health care, education for our children and energy consumption? Or, are you OK with higher taxes to punish capitalists, fewer thriving charter schools and severe environmental restrictions impacting daily life?

With the radical Left now firmly in control of a 21st Century Democrat party, these questions do not exaggerate the choices before us as Americans in Moore County, N.C. And the radical left is deeply embedded in our state. They came here for the quality of life, the moderate climate and the business friendly environment. But when the welcome mat was rolled up, they set about to transform and “re-imagine”, and here we are. Living in the American South but occupied by the Left.

Vote the ballot, all the way, from back to front. Or front to back. Please finish the ballot. In order to do this, you just might need to become a proactive patriot. You will need to “read up” on the candidates who, if elected, will protect North Carolina from a silent coup. We have a web site and a link therein that will introduce you to all of the fine men and women running to be re-elected or elected for the first time. Here it is: moore.nc.gop.

Silent coup? Marxist militants aligned with Black Lives Matter are not silent. In fact, they’re quite the opposite. But while their terrorism fills up our new cycles, their enablers quietly, silently, funnel millions of dollars into races for North Carolina Governor, U.S. House of Representatives, state Supreme Court, N.C. Secretary of State and Superintendent of Public Education. And they sit back and count on us to block out the “noise” of election ads, complain about yard signs and, worst of all, to fail to flip the ballot over and vote to the end.

Countless American patriots have risen to the challenges of their times. They’ve risked everything. They’ve sacrificed. They’ve taken up arms to oppose tyranny. They’ve died on desolate battlefields. Today, we are asked only to read, to be informed, to comprehend the magnitude of the choices before us. At the worst, this effort might subject you to a paper cut. Take that chance.

Let’s surprise these arrogant manipulators. Let’s make their heads explode on November 4, the morning after Election Day. Let’s not give them the ability to declare the races are “too close to call”.

Let’s celebrate as the virulent Left tears away its masks to scream to the heavens as defeat courses through its veins, at last. And, in that moment, the virus will disappear from our daily discourse.

Certainty

By Steve Woodward

In these “uncertain times”, I never have been more certain about so many things.

I am certain that if you live in this world expecting certainty you will be perpetually disappointed. If we did not know that before China unleashed the Wuhan Virus, we do now.

I am certain that if we do not exit our comfort zones and march into our communities extolling the virtues of the Trump administration (not the Orange Man, but the substance), we will be less free than any Americans in our history in short order.

What does that mean? It means that the Moore County Republican Party should not have to beg and arm-twist likeminded (patriotic) citizens to put aside your “routines” and join us in the fight of our lives. When we announce that door knocking brigades will head out, we mean brigades that include you, and your neighbor, and maybe even someone who never has done it before. These folks might never have the chance to do it again, at which time they will regret their apathy as an iron boot suffocates them.

I am certain that citizens must inform our Moore County Board of Education, in no “uncertain” terms, that re-opening our schools 100% can not happen soon enough. Think about this. I’m a kid who lives in a trailer. Every day I am not in school there likely is no parent working with me to complete lessons online. I am not eating lunch some days because I am not in school. They tell me I am safer at home. But for how long will I compromise my personal development and mental well-being to sustain a presumption of “safety”. This is not hypothetical. I know this kid. He has a name.

I am certain that more small businesses will close. They’ve held on as long as possible. They’ve cut payroll. Cut hours they are open. They’ve invested in sanitizers, gloves, masks. But their customers, hysterical because the mainstream media tells them to be, are not persuaded. Even the farmers who sell their fresh produce at the farmers markets — beneath Carolina blue skies in the great outdoors — are wearing masks and encountering masked customers, but fewer of them.

I am certain that if we do not embrace unwavering faith in the God who blessed the founding of this nation, the God from whom we received inalienable rights as free citizens, the God who implores us to have faith and trust His will, that our nation will be unrecognizable as the last, best hope of man on Earth.

There is no place to go from here. Of that I am certain.

The seduction

By Steve Woodward

She normally might have worn a beaming smile while walking alongside her Mom on their way to the Carolina Hotel parking lot. But a darling little girl, perhaps all of three or four, was instead holding her breath with a hand over her mouth. This was her “mask”. She appeared to be genuinely afraid as I passed by. Mom was wearing an actual mask.

We can assume that there are two schools of thought among young, woke parents about children and masks. One, the Wuhan Virus will kill my child if she is not masked in public. Or, two, wearing a mask signals that you care about others and are obedient and respectful toward authority.

8A59950C-705F-4F9E-A556-4D55E42D86CD copy — A Moore County Citizens for Freedom member, July 25.

Snowflake parenting is threatening to impose on our society a future generation so fragile the flakes will not form in the first place. They’ll be as delicate as raindrops. Maybe it was inevitable but virus hysteria will guarantee it, and it will not end with this crisis. The presumption of absolute safety, revealed to be far more prevalent than we knew, likely will find children wearing masks out of habit, lest a head cold or bout of flu looms.

In a matter of months the Left and its compliant media have cast over our nation a cloud of absolutism. We are absolutely obligated to be fearful of a virus with an overwhelmingly high recovery rate. We are absolutely a nation founded under white supremacy and irredeemable to this day, and absolutely the epicenter of systemic racism worldwide.

Law and order is inherently a racist desire. Tyranny, on the other hand, is salvation. As long as our tyrant mayors and governors adopt separate standards for rioters, looters, vandals and police assassins, of course. What is not absolute are standards of the Left. Their standards are applied only when convenient.

Many of us are asking, how did this happen? How, in a few months’ time, did a health crisis infect core values, courage and decency? How did radical left Marxists so dramatically rise out of the shadows to leverage race to pursue impure outcomes? How did so many elected leaders fail to lead in order to allow deliberate destruction of private property, historically significant monuments and religious symbols? How did we arrive at a place when pastors and priests willingly locked the doors to our houses of worship?

A pastor of a church in White Lake, N.C., Rev. Cameron McGill, addressed many of these questions in a recent sunrise, lakeside video, which you are urged to watch and share (it runs just nine minutes). Click here. Skip ahead to the 1:45 mark to hear the essence of McGill’s message.

He quotes II Timothy 3:13 as the principal explanation for the rapid deterioration of our culture: “But evil men and impostors will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.”

McGill explains that Americans ripe for being deceived have been seduced. Throughout history, when evil has prevailed and derailed entire societies, it has done so through seduction. Socialism is seduction in its most glaring form. Seduction is how sin prevails despite the efforts of many to be “good people”. Seduction explains why socialist dictators easily murdered tens of millions of innocent people in the 20th century alone (Hitler, Stalin, Mao). Marxism is rooted in seduction. How else do we explain throngs of college educated white Americans swarming the streets of cities such as Portland, Ore., where destruction and police baiting has gone on unabated for two months?

Perhaps where seduction is most dangerously imposed is when we set aside common sense because “experts” are telling us to be guided by science and data, regardless of whether the numbers are accurate or reliable. Health experts, empowered by governors, seduced millions into accepting that crushing the economy, putting people out of work, closing churches and schools and turning neighbor against neighbor is all worth it to keep us safe. The promise of safety is perhaps the ultimate seduction.

We now know that there are many in our midst who will yield everything to feel safe. Even if it deprives them of a sweet little girl’s smile.