Political blood sport

Trump ascends

By Steve Woodward

There is a Santa Claus, after all. His name is Jack Smith. Rather than jolly, he is a petulant, tormented “special counsel” who was tasked with sending Donald Trump to prison for a long time. Smith, and his enabler, Attorney General Merrick Garland, had it all figured out. Almost. They missed one detail. They never imagined Trump’s resurgence as a presidential candidate in 2024. They never thought he would win. Again.

Framing the Thanksgiving season as the start of the most wonderful time of the year is, suddenly, more than just a recitation of an old lyric. Smith has made it so by dropping, suddenly, baseless criminal cases against Trump. The highest profile was a four-count case purporting that Trump and his allies sought to “overturn” the 2020 presidential election results. An even more flimsy case also was halted — the one alleging Trump improperly retained classified documents in his Mar-a-Lago residence (though he had every right to possess them).

Smith was unapologetic even as his pirate ship sunk into the murky waters of irrelevance. “This outcome is not based on the merits or strength of the case against the defendant,” Smith insisted in a statement after the November 25, 2024, announcement. He would have us believe that Trump was doomed if not for those pesky elections results earlier this month.

This, of course, ignores more significant defeats Smith absorbed at the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court throughout the arduous process. A July 1 SCOTUS ruling was the kill shot. “The court issued its landmark opinion in Trump v. U.S., which gutted the J6 case by concluding most of the conduct cited in the indictment represented official acts protected by presidential immunity,” writes independent reporter Julie Kelly.

“Even if Trump had lost the election,” Kelly continues, “the J6 indictment would not have survived another immunity test before the Supreme Court.”

If Smith is Santa, assign head elf status to New York Judge Juan Marchan, who recently delayed indefinitely the sentencing of Trump in connection with 34 so-called felony convictions Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg manufactured last summer. Like Smith, Marchan faced the reality that the persistent “lawfare” gig is up. It’s over, folks. Trump dodged a real bullet and now has been spared this unprecedented judicial firing squad.

Our American legal system is not as fungible as those who sought to exploit it had presumed. This year we can ignore seasonal advertising campaigns to ignite our Christmas “spirit”. Instead, in this historic season, we can embrace something much more inspiring than a TV ad showcasing a Mercedes-Benz topped by a giant red bow covered by fake snow.

Look no further than the pollsters. They have pivoted from swing state prognostication on Trump vs. Harris to polls seeking to gauge the “national mood”. Even some Democrats are feeling giddy, and admitting it.

A recent CBS News/YouGov poll (November 19-22, 2024) instructs us that more than half of Americans (55%) feel happy or satisfied about Trump’s win. Even more revealing is this: Among Democrats surveyed in the same poll, 56% said they are motivated to support Trump or, at least, are not motivated either way (to support or oppose his policies). What is left unsaid is the likely conclusion that these Americans can’t imagine Trump will not deliver measurable improvements easily surpassing the Biden-Harris dumpster fire.

YouGov conducted a separate poll (November 17-19), through which we have learned that 57 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 hold a favorable view of Trump. That is staggering optimism coming from a bracket of young people who have been educated to regret their nation’s founding and condemn its inherent racism and inequality. In fact, the further we are removed from Election Day’s verdict, the more that palpable optimism is building among the youngsters. Trump’s favorability increased by 19 points compared to YouGov’s poll posing the same question between November 9 and 12.

I encountered a young man who is part of the 18-29 demographic after he arrived in Pinehurst for Thanksgiving week. He attends an elite East Coast university where woke anti-semites have protested to demand a “free Palestine”. But none of that was on his mind when our paths crossed.

Without prompting this came out: “I’m so happy that we have a new president,” he said.

So much for college kids being swept up by a Harris-Walz wave of joy. It’s beautiful to behold. College students rejected them. Black men abandoned them. Hispanic voters will be taken for granted by Democrats no longer. Consider that in 2020 about one-third of Hispanic Catholics voted for Trump. He saw their support surge to 53% in this election, according to CNN exit polling.

A concerted effort by Ralph Reed and his Faith and Freedom Coalition to inspire Christian voters to cast ballots for Trump — a new survey released earlier this year revealed that 51% of “people of faith” planned to sit out the election (decline to vote) — delivered results, too.

From ReligiousNews.com: Exit poll data from CNN and other news outlets found that 72% of white Protestants and 61% of white Catholics said they voted for Trump. Among white voters, 81% of those identified as born-again or evangelical supported Trump, up from 76% in 2020.

While cable TV’s arrogant chattering class panics, as its ratings and relevance plunge toward an abyss, cultural commentator Bill Maher suggests acknowledging that the American people brutally rejected the narrative that MSNBC and CNN have repeated, first to protect a mentally declining Joe Biden, and ultimately to help people decipher Harris-Walz “messaging”.

“(Trump) is not who I would choose to administer the colonic, but it’s not like the bureaucracy isn’t bloated,” Maher said. “It’s not like the debt isn’t $36 trillion. It’s not like there aren’t thousands of regulations that do stop people from living lives that they could live better and don’t do anything. There is woke in the military. Whatever they’re going after … I’m not going to pre-hate anything.”

The pre-hating of Trump’s cabinet appointees already is under way. Matt Gaetz for attorney general, as it turns out, was pre-hated by Republicans who remain deeply skeptical of the MAGA movement (at their peril) even more than the media knives that were out for Gaetz. Don’t be surprised if the next act in this saga is a Gaetz boomerang that destroys these Swamp creatures, including South Dakota Sen. John Thune — the new Republican majority leader — who was fine with Merrick Garland for AG in 2021 but would not stomach Gaetz. (Thune has an ally, North Carolina RINO Sen. Thom Tillis).

Eventually, Trump will have his cabinet of disrupters and change agents, and the Leviathan will be tamed. The ascension of MAGA will not be deterred as it was during the first Trump administration. But even more glorious to behold will be the comeuppance imposed on the Jack Smiths, the Braggs, the Merchans, and the frothing D.C. judges who have maniacally jailed American citizens who entered the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to defend what our founders and American soldiers died for.

As legal scholar Mike Davis observes, the Conspiracy Against Rights clause of the federal code can (must) be used to charge these judges with felonies for violating the Constitutional rights of Americans.

“These judges are culpable,” Davis said during a November 25, 2024, appear on Steve Bannon’s War Room program.

If there is a thread of justice left in this world, these January 6 judges soon will occupy the same cells vacated after Trump pardons the patriots who sat in them and were vilified because they refused to back down in the face of a massive fraud plot in 2020. They arrived at the U.S. Capitol with a viable request: Delay certification and audit the small number of states in which massive shifts in vote totals occurred between the evening of November 3, 2020, and the following morning after which, in the case of Pennsylvania, poll workers were sent home in large numbers.

Meanwhile, the snowflakes at The Atlantic are melting down and turning on their own, placing blame for Jack Smith’s demise on AG Garland, owed to his habit of being “obsessive about proceduralism” (following the rules) because this “attention to detail meant the system failed to do the basic work of holding (Trump) accountable (for) … serious crimes.”

But what the fierce defenders of Trump Derangement Syndrome never will understand is that the 2024 election outcome never was about these sham lawsuits and court cases. They occupy a smoldering pile of discarded ploys and narratives also littered by masks, social distancing and needles that dispensed dangerous mRNA serums.

Playwright David Mamet seizes on why voters rejected all of it and embraced Trump’s MAGA revolution. He expresses it beautifully.

“The horror of the past four years—the appeasement of terror, the slavish support of our enemies, the abandonment of the state of Israel, the assaults on free speech—seemed to me the descent into chaos which has been the end of every world power,” Mamet wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

“Rome, Greece, Nineveh and Tyre, Babylon, Nazi Germany—all were eventually returned to dust. … The Old Testament is a record of decline of those civilizations which fall away from God; and promises that a return to his precepts will restore his grace. We know that one day America, as all things, will go one with Nineveh and Tyre. But not today.”

Not in our time. America’s comeback begins now. See ya, Kamala. Good luck, Jack Smith.

One path

“Blessed is the man who (will not walk) in the counsel of the ungodly.”
Psalm 1

By Steve Woodward

Americans increasingly are asked to chose a path. Go in one direction or the other. We must chose.

Apart from earners of university degrees during the past 20 years or so, many Americans (74 million, at least, whose votes for Donald Trump’s re-election were miraculously counted) see but one choice: protect and defend the United States in which we were blessed to be born and raised. The alternative choice, formerly a decision about voting (Republican or Democrat), is the certain dissolution of these United States. From the mountains to the prairies.

The Democratic Party is not any longer concerned with sustaining democracy. It has been subverted, taken over, by the Left. The party of slavery in the 19th century is the party of Socialism in the 21st century. Today’s Democrat Party, notes radio talk host Chris Plante, is closer to Lee Harvey Oswald than John F. Kennedy on the ideological spectrum.

“Reaching across the aisle,” was how lawmaking got done in a bygone Washington. Today, it’s impossible. Arms can not reach across a chasm.

The choice has become ever more stark, to the point where choosing is not viable. Look no further than what Biden-Harris voters chose. A southern border humanitarian crisis. Childhoods ravaged by isolation and neglect during an ill-advised lockdown of American life. Even amid recovery from the Wuhan virus’s economic devastation, businesses that can not operate because employees, intoxicated by government “paychecks”, refuse to come back to work. Israel facing a scorched spring triggered by America’s betrayal, erasing the blossoming of peace under Trump.

The 2020 election outcomes, from the White House on down, laid bare that we still have a two-party political system but only one choice going forward if we hope to recognize our nation a decade hence.

“This is evil that we’re facing,” said 2022 U.S. Senate candidate Mark Walker, a Republican from Guilford County, NC, of the Left.

A former pastor, Walker referenced another Psalm, Psalm 139, during a recent Sandhills visit. “If only you, God, would slay the wicked! Away from me, you who are bloodthirsty!They speak of you with evil intent.”

Or speak not at all. Issuing a proclamation on May 5, the National Day of Prayer, Biden did not reference God. Read more. He did, however, urge a coming together as a nation (except if you see someone not wearing a mask, berate and assault him).

The guidance of the Psalmist to reject “the counsel of the ungodly” seems a particularly timeless piece of advice amid the rapid emergence of the Left’s new obsession: Critical Race Theory. The most important thing to know is that nothing is theoretical about it. If a circle of tedious academicians were merely writing papers about CRT, they would be properly relegated to obscurity.

But it’s worse than that. It is creeping into K-12 curricula in counties and states across the nation. To ensure that CRT achieves maximum saturation, the Biden administration is proposing a national mandate through the U.S. Department of Education. The essence of CRT is that public education can not exist in its current state, that it must be overhauled so that every element of learning is presented through the lens of race and the nation’s shameful “white supremacy”.

“The Biden administration now plans to supercharge (imposition of CRT) through federal rules and regulations, access to billions in taxpayer funding (for school systems), and the imprimatur of the federal government,” writes Lindsey Burke and Inez Stepman for The Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal.

Karl Marx never revealed the end game of Marxism for the same reason that CRT supporters push back on their many critics. Yet the CRT lexicon does not veil its objectives: Rejecting “whiteness”; identifying “micro-aggressions”; “racial mapping”; locating where a given teacher lands on an “oppression matrix”; and encouraging “equity teams” in classrooms (because equity sounds similar to equality, although it is not similar).

Christianity long ago was banned from the classroom. Now, the Left is coming for the rest of our values as Americans, and using children as its pawns to complete the job.

In a 1964 speech during a rally for Republican Presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, an up-and-coming figure named Ronald Reagan warned that we had come to a crossroads, a time for choosing. The choice he described was not merely Goldwater or incumbent Lyndon Johnson, and it was not even as black and white as Republican or Democrat, back when the differences were narrowly ideological. The choice was the American way or Communism. It was the specter of the latter that had driven Reagan out of the Democratic Party.

The choice in 1964 involved a threat from a distant land and its dictators. The choice before us today is the threat to our God given freedom posed by the power obsessed, Socialist, ungodly Left. It is not a distant threat. It is surrounding us. The threat is made worse because so many do not recognize it, even after a year of unprecedented Wuhan virus tyranny.

Reagan’s warning so long ago rings with alarming truth: “When the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically.”

Unless we choose the only viable path.

Cancel socialism

By Bill Demastus

I am a good, hard nosed Republican with conservative views on most issues in America. With that said, there is something happening in our country today that is very concerning, at least to me.

I believe many of our good conservatives have drunk the Kool-Aid and truly believe that we have to be, at least, “concerned” about what played out on January 6 at the Capitol.

It is the “we” that disturbs me. It was not good conservatives who stormed the Capitol and brought down the wrath of God on our heads.

We conservatives have nothing to be ashamed of, or to feel responsible for. We were there in January but, when the trouble started, we turned and left the scene. Just look at the facts of who is being arrested almost daily since the occurrence. It isn’t us. Social media and fake news painted everyone who dared to travel to D.C. with the same insurrection brush. That does not change the facts. We are not insurrectionists.

Little by little, it is becoming more and more clear that it was, in fact, a well-rehearsed, well-implemented insurrection by individuals not riled up by our President, Donald Trump; but those riled up by issues in America tracing to the 1960s.

During the last 60 years we have become more and more guided by principles totally outside the framework of a Constitutional federal republic. A system wherein the people elect citizens to represent them, (the people), to uphold Constitutional issues and that which impacts the people. That’s what this country was founded on and that is what we were, with hic-cups along the way, until the ’60s.

We now vacillate between a Socialist state and a Constitutional republic, depending on which party is in power. Much to our chagrin, the Socialist state is expanding, no matter which party is in power.

These newly elected Socialists, and they are so far Left, many Communist admittedly so, might well deliver good news because their overreach improves chances that Republicans will regain the House and Senate in two years. Though not guaranteed, it is a good bet. Why, because, as always, the liberal left now have complete control except for the Supreme Court that refuses, under John Roberts, to engage in “politics.” Even when our elections are subverted.

President Biden’s endeavors from the very first day indicate just how radically they will push an agenda down the throats of Americans. Can we all remember ObamaCare? Seems the Left already has assured tough elections ahead. Still, they cannot help themselves. They are like kids in a candy store…or a better comparison may be a drunk in an ABC store.

Another standard Leftist attitude is their firm belief in “cancel culture”. They are rabid in their belief that everything and everyone that does not follow their agenda need to be taken out.

Under President Trump’s leadership, the Left spent most of its time going after him. Now that he is gone it isn’t a surprise, with the help of social media and fake news, to have them going after individual Americans. That is definitely the case for outspoken Trump supporters in our communities: Capt. Emily Grace Rainey; David Hensley; and Sherry-Lynn Womack. Get ready. Almost anyone who currently supports President Trump’s policies, or him, will find themselves in cross hairs.

So, what do we do? I believe we should do what good conservative Republicans have always done; nominate and elect strong conservatives in municipal elections in 2021, and great Conservatives who emerge to run for state and federal seats in 2022 and 2024. The journey begins now.

Will those who seek and secure these jobs all be people that agree with all of us who work to get them elected? No. And, if they were, they would not be Republicans. We tend to not agree with each other about a lot of things. But one thing we should learn from the leftists is to not fight among ourselves. They stick together to advance their miserable agendas, even at the risk of their own jobs; but it helps them win elections.

We cannot fight the government; we can fight issues and we can fight against candidates and for candidates, but we can do neither as a fractured party. This is exactly what the leftists wish us to be, fractured.

Keeping me awake at night is the fact that I was so sure that President Trump would be re-elected because he was GOD’S CHOICE. I just could not understand how God would permit him to lose to a party that believes in abortion, no God in church, no God in schools; in fact, no God anywhere. Believe me I have asked my Lord that question over and over during the past several weeks.

Yesterday in church, I think God gave me the answer. I listened to a very conservative, God-fearing minister explain that, heart breaking as this election loss may be for us, we should, of course, pray for ourselves and for our country. However, not for what I thought would be the reason, but because of what half of our country believes in and how they live. He says he believes we are just where the Kingdom of Judah found itself. It’s people persisted in their ungodly ways, even after years of God’s prophets warning them to repent. They chose to live otherwise. Not all of them, just half of them. But God didn’t just give Nebuchadnezzar half of Judah; he gave him all of it. Thus, all had to pay.

Our minister said he doesn’t mean that we, the believers, should give up or quit fighting issues and policies but it doesn’t mean we should not expect to suffer with those that caused HIS edict. We have to change the system with prayer and teamwork. We cannot change it with Sig Sauer or a long knife.

Stop the finger pointing. Stop the backbiting. Fight those who caused this mess. God will be on our side.

Fight

“When they had brought these kings to Joshua, he summoned all the men of Israel and said to the army commanders who had come with him, ‘Come here and put your feet on the necks of these kings.’ So they came forward and placed their feet on their necks. Joshua said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged. Be strong and courageous. This is what the Lord will do to all the enemies you are going to fight’.” The Holy Bible, Joshua 10:24-25

By Steve Woodward

One the final day of his presidency, Donald Trump evoked the words of great athletes who, win or lose, have no regrets in the end. “We didn’t leave anything on the field,” he said. The Trump-led administration and many of his surrogates fought every day for four years, intending always to win but never deterred by setbacks, rarely discouraged by an unrelenting and corrupt media, its feet on the necks of every Trumpian initiative.

President Trump often warned us that we might get tired of winning, yet never was that a possibility because the victories were never certain and, always, hard fought. And, ultimately, ignored by Trump loathing newspapers and cable channels.

Before the sun set on January 20, 2021, many of those victories that lifted America from the brink of mediocrity, unleashed our economy and our natural urge to innovate, will have been undone by the newly inaugurated 46th President. He has pledged to sign 17 executive orders, each carefully worded to overturn the will of Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda.

This is just the beginning of the emergence of an American political ruling class that is more radical, more driven by Socialist impulses than anything we’ve ever seen. Senile Joe Biden will read the teleprompter but the game plan will be carried out in the shadows.

So, now what? What do we do to keep alive Trump’s spirit? We, as conservatives and Republicans, could do what we almost always do, which is not to fight but to abide, mark time and wait for the next fundraising and door knocking cycles.

Or, we could try a better approach and determine how we summon the bold unity seen in Washington two weeks ago, on January 6, and then re-define how we fight for God and country. Our own party accused President Trump and thousands of American voters of fomenting mob violence in D.C . It was the path of least resistance but cowardly just the same.

Despite what spineless, status quo champion Mitch McConnell insists, the extreme fringe group that orchestrated a breach of the U.S. Capitol, shattering a few windows and frightening our snowflake lawmakers, had nothing to do with Trump’s speeches, or the fighting spirit displayed by fellow citizens who assembled to promote patriotism and unity. In time, those bad actors will be held accountable for a young patriot who was shot to death by a Capitol Hill policeman, and one of his fellow officers who later died after sustaining trauma. These incidents notwithstanding, rising up in Washington was the right thing to do, the only place to be as we found our nation at a dire crossroads.

Meanwhile, Sen. McConnell dismisses you and I as white supremacists, “a mob” that soaks up like a sponge whatever marching orders are dog whistled in our direction. Even the assembled National Guard was thrown under the bus for being too, you know, white and patriotic.

We always will choose to leave violence, destruction and cop hating to Black Lives Matter anarchists and their Marxist leadership. But we have an opportunity to recalibrate our energy and direct it to winning the communications war that Trump fought so well before Twitter decided to go Beijing on him.

How do we pick ourselves upon from the carnage of a manipulated election? First, we never forget that none of this happens absent the Wuhan Virus. We recommit to shining a light of constant scrutiny on the media, beginning with The Pilot, and verbally pummeling any of its ilk who trample the truth. We leverage every new social media platform. We use “old fashioned emails” to friends and, yes, fence-sitters to direct folks to commentary and information, which ultimately is what empowers us. We need hundreds (not two or three) in our ranks doing this, week in and week out. We need young Republicans leading these efforts.

On this, the 40th anniversary of the inauguration of our 40th President, Ronald Reagan, we fix our gaze once again on our shining city on a hill.

To keep it shining, we ramp up our scrutiny of those we have elected, from local bodies to state legislators, to our members of the U.S. Congress. We take a zero-tolerance stance against Republicans who prove to be lightweights or unreliable. We actively recruit new blood from within a blossoming force of young conservatives, such as newly elected Rep. Madison Cawthorn, 25, of western North Carolina.

As we face the grim early days of a revived Obama-era radical Leftist regime, we have no choice but to remind, relentlessly, each and every Republican public servant of the one thing Americans never had to ask President Trump to remember: You work for us. Now, go fight for us.

The content of this post reflects exclusively the opinion of its author.

Body (politic) shaming

By Steve Woodward

The Pilot, a newspaper, sometimes, persists in allowing miserable William Shaw to write gloom-and-doom columns appearing on its op-ed pages. Shaw’s keyboard must be by now nearly drowning in a steady stream of his spittle as he shrieks and flails while hunched over an IBM Selectric, ever true to his ongoing campaign to attempt to diminish a President and the Presidency of the United States.

A recent submission contends that those who dare to support, or even tolerate, President Donald Trump believe that a sinister “deep state” conspires to destroy or remove Trump. Shaw pooh-poohs these deep state influences. Yet, toward the end of his December 7 column Shaw laments that Trump offends the “body politic” that, asserts Shaw, defines a stable United States. I think it’s also known as the establishment, and “the Swamp”.

In other words, you are right, Bill. (First time for everything). The deep state, aka, the body politic, is indeed threatened by the Trump presidency because it disrupts conventional “equilibrium” and “scuttles democratic norms” imposed by the ruling elite, quoting the words of the expert you cited. To which I say, amen, and pass another helping of the Schiff-Nadler impeachment charade, which will damage Democrats for years to come.

Meanwhile, our nation is thriving as Shaw’s wrists ache from wringing. He contends Trump’s style is scuttling the status quo. You mean that glorious stagnant Obama-era economy for which the Left pines? In our scuttled state of chaos the U.S. finally has a robust economy, unprecedented calm and dramatically fewer illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico southern border, advancing trade negotiations with China, Canada and Mexico, historically low unemployment rates and historically high monthly job creation and wage gains. Many investors believe the success of Trump’s negotiators in lifting the cloud of a so-called trade war with China opens the floodgates to an even longer run of gains on the trading floors.

If there really is a deep state, why have the assaults on the Trump presidency been carried out far removed from murky shadows, with the media cheering? These assaults actually flourished in full view. Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff and the FBI’s leadership (ex-director James Comey) lied about the validity of the “Steele Dossier” and its role in securing a FISA warrant to spy on Trump surrogate Carter Page in 2016. The so-called dossier was opposition research underwritten by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, not by shadowy operatives. It was commissioned in the full light of day. Christopher Steele could not wait to run to the press. Last week, Inspector General Michael Horowitz released his long awaited report. It vindicates Republican Congressman Devin Nunes, who went public in February 2018 with proof that FISA application “materials” omitted relevant information and relied almost entirely on a discredited Steele dossier. Even The Washington Post begrudgingly acknowledges Nunes was onto something back then.

Lastly, there is Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation of Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia to compromise our 2016 elections. This could not have been a higher profile spectacle (because it was all the corrupt media had left to bring Trump down), especially after Mueller’s team concluded that said collusion never happened. The Horowitz report further reveals that law enforcement and intelligence communities went after Trump with brazen zeal.

Back here in the Sandhills, we can only imagine what Shaw’s next dire missive will contain. We hope Pilot editors will clean up some of the whoppers Shaw floated in the December 7 piece. Including: the Mueller report concludes that Trump obstructed justice; Trump is a racist because he supports immigration enforcement, and reacted improperly to “Charlottesville” (refuted more times than all of the lies about Trump, combined); Trump’s White House is a “hive of feuding factions”; Trump “tampered” with our electoral system; and Trump’s is a “shadow” foreign policy.

Like the Steele Dossier, riveting, and completely false.