Fake news – RESOLVE

Domestic jihad

By Steve Woodward

It was striking that Election Day and Veterans’ Day fell 72 hours apart last week. Both events, one a duty, the other a sacred observance, have reliably and boldly reflected American priorities and values across the years.

There was indeed much to celebrate among values-based conservatives after November 8, Election Day 2022. There was much for which to be thankful and sobered on November 11, Veterans’ Day.

In Moore County, the conservative values wave sent the left crashing into the jagged rocks of irrelevance. Voters overwhelmingly chose morality and stewardship when offered the alternative – cultural secularism and reckless spending. More on these triumphs later. Let’s simply say that where public schools and the Moore County Board of Education are concerned the status quo rubber stamp has been placed permanently in a drawer, and citizens who attend future meetings can rest assured they will not be subjected to metal detectors, masks, and intimidation by security personnel.

But the bigger picture is disheartening, and not for reasons about which the corrupt mainstream media would dare pontificate.

Two examples. Republicans did not seize iron clad majorities in the U.S. House and Senate because they ran too many tainted, Trump-backed “election denier” candidates who are not, and never will be, electable. BS.

Are we to accept this absurd notion even as The Big Steal 2.0 plays out before our eyes in Arizona, California, Nevada and Oregon? Election integrity is taking another hit out West, where “officials” are complacent and, likely, complicit.

The Left is not a wing of the Democrat party in 2022. The Left IS the Democrat party. Its candidates and its voters are not fixated on the so-called insurrection of January 6, 2021. Their fixation is abortion on demand, climate change, LBGTQ rights and gender fluidity. They do not care about our “institutions”, and they are not Never Trumpers. They barely noticed Trump because they never cared about low unemployment, peace through strength abroad, energy independence and restoring the greatness of America. Trump’s foe was and is corporate-owned media.

We can no more understand the radical Left than can we understand that which drives Islamic jihadists to commit acts of unthinkable terror. But we must acknowledge what drives them to vote, what inclines them to go all-in for John Fetterman (PA), Gretchen Witmer (MI), Mark Kelly (AZ), et al, allies of the Left who have no obvious popular appeal.

It’s not about ideology. They have no ideology. They have a religion that is untethered from Christianity, or even common sense. Common sense tells us that citizens of all political stripes would reject unbridled inflation, rising urban crime spreading into formerly “safe” neighborhoods, energy dependence on our enemies and crippling prices for gasoline and heating oil, a military significantly weakened by vaccine mandates, and endless January 6 commissions that crucify Trump but seek no remedies for election fraud.

Second example. It is the default mode among Americans of a certain generation to honor and salute military veterans. But the aforementioned Left views the military industrial complex, alive and well, as a channel through which wokeness and transgenderism will be further engrained. Thus, we honor our veterans one day a year but, should we lose focus, we will witness the demise of the brotherhoods that sustained them in times of war and peace. The Left is in charge in the upper ranks. The faces of valor they see in the black-and-white photos from past World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, leave them cold. They are not moved by these men and women who fought unconditionally. The woke military brass of the 21^st Century prefers conditions for those who serve. They must be vaccinated, indoctrinated, and emancipated from the past. Duty is not inherent; it is irrelevant. Duty gets in the way.

Savor we must the victories gained this first week in November that will subdue the march of the Left. Treasure we must military valor of ages past. But the stark reality of this moment is that we no longer can take for granted the absolute certainty of Election Day “results”, or the sanctity of future missions of those sworn to defend our homeland from enemies foreign and domestic.

In fact, domestic enemies are thriving in a perpetual open season, and they know it.

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.

Turned to ashes

By Steve Woodward

“Progressives think that hating not only (Donald) Trump but all conservatives settles their debts and cleanses them of sin,” writes Lance Morrow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “It gives them a certain moral luster.”

But Morrow does not go so far as to dismiss their hatred as off-the-rails hysteria. Like many who never became comfortable with Trump’s ascendency to the White House, who were quick to cringe over a Rosie O’Donnell tweet but slow to celebrate a policy triumph, he gives progressives something of the benefit of the doubt.

“Whatever else one may say about Jan. 6, it was one of the stupidest afternoons in American history,” Morrow writes. “(Four centuries ago) Russia’s new (religious) orthodoxy eventually burned the archpriest (patron of the ‘old believers’) at the stake. The 21st-century left would do the same to Mr. Trump if it could. It may not be necessary. He’s a burnt-out case, an exhausted volcano, in Disraeli’s phrase. Let Palm Beach have him.”

This is where Morrow misses the source of the anger that sent thousands to Washington two months after the curious developments surrounding the Nov. 3, 2020, election. Their swarming of our Nation’s Capital never was driven by Trump’s “rhetoric”, the central talking point of the Left serving media. These were patriots, not zombies. It was fueled entirely by the many cases of voter fraud that were mounting ahead of and during Georgia’s Jan. 5 special elections for U.S. Senate seats (cases which in Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania are being fortified by audits and investigations).

Nevertheless, the stupidity to which Mr. Morrow eludes in his June 18 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “America’s Old Believers Need to Move Past Donald Trump”, I would acknowledge could be properly assigned to those massive throngs gathered on and near The Ellipse on January 6.

Why might I agree with Mr. Morrow’s harsh criticism? Because many – including myself — did not layer adequately to protect themselves from bone-chilling, gusty winds as President Trump spoke. Quite stupid, for sure. Thus, plans to parade to the U.S. Capitol were scrapped in the name of practical concerns such as warmth and restrooms. It is a shame. Had thousands more trekked to the Capitol to assemble and hear from speakers – as was the intent by organizers – the contrast between militants assigned to “storm” the building and the rest of the assembled would have been even more stark. It would have been quite obvious that the vast majority had come to rally peacefully and to display unity.

But if we give credence to Mr. Morrow’s conclusion, that some of these acted stupidly, how then do we characterize the Marxist rioters, looters, arsonists and murderers who devastated American cities across a long violent summer of 2020? Are theirs the actions of merely stupid, misguided youth? While the Trump era certainly is not reduced, as Mr. Morrow contends, to smoldering embers; the burnt-out small businesses, restaurants and public squares of urban America are today boarded-up, vandalized memories, ashes scattered to the winds.

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.