Ronald Reagan – RESOLVE

Partisan or patriot?

By Steve Woodward

British prime minister Neville Chamberlain holds a most dubious distinction as a failed leader derailed by diplomatic appeasement.

In his quest to prevent World War II in 1938, Chamberlain attempted to cut a deal with a rising German political figure, Adolf Hitler. Chamberlain pursued appeasement despite writings and speeches by Hitler that failed to hide his lust for war and the creation of a German empire, and even after Hitler’s forced annexation of Austria in March 1938.

Chamberlain proclaimed that he achieved “peace for our time” when he returned from meetings with Hitler and other European heads of state after signing the Munich Agreement in September 1938. By early 1939, Hitler’s Germany began it rampage across the continent, trampling the pages of the agreement under foot.

Hitler proceeded to do precisely what so many had warned Chamberlain about. World War II soon became inevitable.

Comparing contemporary leaders or nations to Hitler and the Third Reich typically is ill-advised because he was no mere tyrant. He was a murderous monster. Ask Donald Trump, who is neither but is often portrayed as Hitler-in-waiting by the fear mongering Left.

But there is a parallel between Chamberlain and his underestimation of Hitler happening before our eyes in 2024. There certainly is nothing Hitleresque about Trump, the MAGA movement, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or a corrupt corporate media. The parallel lies in the underestimation by Republicans and so-called independents of who these people are, and their insistence that we must “tone down the rhetoric” and “end the polarization”.

Columnist John Hood of the John Locke Foundation – a constitutional government research institute – laments the nation’s political partisan divide in a recent, oddly timed column amid the final countdown to election day 2024.

“I do indeed believe in bridging the partisan divide,” Hood writes. “For one thing, our discourse has become coarse, often even revolting.”

You don’t say, Mr. Hood? If we could only reason with Islamic jihadists. If we could somehow empathize with virulent antisemites parading in our streets and disrupting universities in defense of an Iran-backed terror plot that killed 1,200 innocents in Israel on October 7. 2023. If we could embrace the measured temperament of, say, Neville Chamberlain.

He prattles on: “Understand that others probably see things differently from you not because they are evil or stupid, but because they possess a different set of facts, experiences, assumptions and values.”

The partisan divide Hood laments is not, as he would have us believe, a drifting to extremes on both sides. Arguably, conservatives remain steadfast in defending our core principles in the spirit of William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Meanwhile, since the improbably ascension of Obama beginning 20 years ago, the Left has not merely drifted but sprinted further away from any pretense of “leaning” Left of center.

Hood seems to have missed numerous glaring examples, so let’s refresh his murky memory.

They were more measured, at first, in their dismissive contempt for conservative Republicans and their Christian tendencies. Barack Obama mocked us during a private event for “clinging to guns and religion”. Hillary Clinton scoffed, also behind closed doors, about a “basket of deplorables”. Then along came Trump in 2016. Gloves came off. The media concocted Russian collusion. Democrats in Congress pursued Trump’s impeachment on baseless grounds. And lusting for Trump’s demise, the Left seized upon a manageable virus unleashed by their Chinese ally, to impose formerly unimaginable tyranny, locking down cities and leveraging a well-orchestrated “health crisis” to hijack an election in 2020.

The emergence of a Biden regime has turned ordinary Americans into January 6 political prisoners. It has ushered in an era of lawfare in an effort, futile as it turns out, to diminish or even imprison Trump. It has normalized crime and homeland insecurity by deliberately allowing untold millions of illegal immigrants to surge across the U.S-Mexico border.

It has brought us to a place where Hillary Clinton, no longer behind closed doors, is calling for the imprisonment of Americans for exercising a right to free speech. And to a place where vice president Kamala Harris is installed without a single vote having been cast as her party’s presidential nominee, platforming a campaign that defends abortion, ignores the economic realities crushing the American people and brazenly mocks those who dare express their Christian faith.

During a rally in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Harris denounced two college students who in defiance of her threats to nationalize abortion shouted, “Christ is king”. She shot back: “You guys are at the wrong rally.”

Only a deranged atheist would be “triggered” by the mention of Jesus Christ. Is this a “polarizing” moment, Mr. Hood?

The strongest indicator that the era of naïve partisanship is over, and that it has been usurped by an understanding that we stand at a crossroads of distinct choice – good vs. evil, America First vs. America in managed decline – is proven by the very public denunciation of the latter by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard and, most recently, Democrat hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman.

Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, not only openly endorses a second Trump presidency. He outlines 33 policies embraced by the Obama-Biden-Harris that mirror what America’s most “aggressive adversaries would likely implement if they wanted to destroy America from within and had the ability to take control of our leadership.”

A review of Ackman’s concerns refutes the flimsy narrative advanced by Hood that we just need to mind our manners and we’ll all be sharing an ideological hot tub before we know it.

In fact, Mr. Hood, I would warn that it is dangerous, and intellectually dishonest, to lump evil and stupid together when exposing the agenda of the Left. The Left is inherently Godless and, thus, evil to its core, but stupid? Certainly not. Dismantling a nation and eroding its values, its culture, requires vast intellect, actually. The term “evil genius” applies. Utterly despicable, compassionless and arrogant, the George Soros-Klaus Schwab-Barack Obama deep state overlords do not want for intellect or resolve.

Thus, opposing them is not merely a partisan choice. It is duty.

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.

Here we are

By Steve Woodward

In our upside down world, a Pinehurst resident last week unfurled and mounted a “BIDEN President” flag inconspicuously, almost out of view. For a few days it literally was hanging upside down, difficult to decipher, as if Joe Biden himself might have done the job.

Another Pinehurst resident said she admired thematic yard signs your humble author plants in his front yard, conspicuously, in full view of a busy road. They suggest highly controversial ideas. Socialism Distancing. Unmask Tyranny. Dethrone King Cooper. She was offered one but declined, fearing it would provoke property damage. Her words.

4 July.5 The most upside down moment came last Saturday after a joyous parade on Independence Day through the heart of the Village of Pinehurst, organized after Mayor John Strickland predictably cancelled the annual parade operated by local government. In its place was the “oh really, just watch us” July 4th parade brought to life by our Moore County Republican Women and their many supporters. There were classic convertibles, red pickups, golf carts, a vintage Jeep, signs, flags, blaring music from car audio systems, and proud marchers armed with copies of the U.S. Constitution, not sledge hammers and bricks. So very right side up.

The parade was brief but exhilarating. It attracted a photographer from The Pilot. A news report and photos were posted later Saturday on The Pilot‘s Facebook page. Reaction was swift. Of the many upside down laments and criticisms aimed at our rogue parade, one man captured the award for best encapsulating the misery that defines today’s Left. He posted a one-word comment about the parade. “Yuck.”

Many of us hear that word in our heads as we open our eyes each morning to face another day of across-the-board hysteria. The Left has mounted an overwhelming campaign, years in the making, to tear apart our nation. The Wuhan Virus was perhaps not expected but easy enough to exploit on a dime to crater a robust Trump-era economy and, as a silver lining, restrict worship and foment government dependency. Quite a trifecta.

So, too, the death under (white) police arrest of a (black) Minneapolis man a couple of months later. Perfect storm. An easily stoked health crisis on a parallel track with an eruption of violence to decry “systemic racism.” And a bonus: If you oppose wearing a mask in crowds, just become an anarchist. Masks not required.

Any denunciation of race-baiting by pointing to systemic freedom, systemic prosperity or systemic innovation, is taboo. Do not even dare to suggest that all lives matter. The latter will earn you a “I’m a Racist” tee shirt.

As expected, corrupt media cheerleaders finally arrived at the moment when every case and every death tied to the Wuhan Virus — which time will tell include false cases and falsely attributed deaths — is blamed on President Donald Trump. (So, to be clear, he colluded with China, not Russia?) Then along came nationwide Marxist-led Black Lives Matter uprisings intersecting with traditional Independence Day celebrations. The media took its cue and echoed the words of Marxism’s highly paid spokesman, Colin Kaepernick. A celebration of American Independence is a celebration of “white supremacy”. Americans must re-think the Fourth of July. While wearing masks and fearing one another’s next sneeze.

But the collapse of our nation is not, and cannot be, inevitable. Because that was the essence of President Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech, the Left predictably denounced it. “Divisive and dark” read the headlines. Let’s hope so. Why would we seek unity with college indoctrinated, white guilt infused zombies who would erase our history, one monument at a time? And they won’t stop with physical destruction. The primary targets are religion, law enforcement and free enterprise. And the Washington Redskins.

Patriotic Americans have quoted adoringly, and for generations, President Ronald Reagan’s characterizations of the United States. “A shining City on a Hill.” “The last, best hope for man on Earth.” In 2020, we will find out if these words are destined to ring hollow, or if individuals are willing to fight to sustain them, not with weapons, not with parades, not with yard signs but with relentless determination to get out the vote and win elections, from Trump-Pence and Congress, to the courts and statehouses.

At the conclusion of Saturday’s parade, a military veteran who resides among us climbed atop a pickup truck to read, word for word, the Declaration of Independence. Dozens gathered around to listen. The final sentence reminds us today what we must be willing to do. “With a firm reliance of the protection on divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Many founders lost their lives and their fortunes, but not one his honor.

Reagan also said that “our’s is a rendezvous with destiny.” Here we are.

Bad, really bad

By Steve Woodward

Our self-appointed intellectuals become inarticulate in the face of the unpredictable.

“We are asking the American public to work with us to prepare in the expectation that this (coronavirus outbreak) could be bad,” said Nancy Messonnier during a press conference on February 25. Messonnier is the Center for Disease Control’s director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

“I’ve got a feeling (emphasis added),” writes Peggy Noonan in her weekly column for The Wall Street Journal, “the coronavirus is going to be bad, that it will have a big impact on America, more than we imagine, and therefore on its politics.”

As former Obama enabler and ex-Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel once observed, “We can’t let a crisis go to waste.” This is classic Sal Alinsky (Rules for Radicals) thinking. If it takes a global virus to bring into lockstep the masses, so be it. Embrace it. Encourage despair.

We can presume that Ms. Messonnier has a duty to project a “bad” scenario, but what a choice of words. She and the CDC might have moderated this dire outlook by saying that the United States is prepared to minimize the spread and severity of the virus which, no doubt, it is. That seems less “bad”.

Certainly a CDC director carries more credibility than Noonan in the Journal citing her “feeling” that we are all doomed. From her hermetically sealed fortress in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Noonan gets to the heart of her premise deep into the column. I doubt many made it that far.

Trump Closeup2 “If you want to talk about what could make a progressive (Bernie Sanders, of course) win the presidency it couldn’t be a better constellation than this: an epidemic, a economic downturn, a broad sense of public anxiety, and an incumbent (Donald Trump) looking small.”

The elite ruling class have condensed it to this: Virus bad; Trump really bad. A New York Times op-ed column came right out and said it, Trumpvirus. It was then repeated in a one-liner in the WSJ column by the former Reagan speechwriter, Noonan: “It couldn’t be a better constellation.” Translation: we will take as much collateral damage from a runaway (we hope) virus if it kills the Trump presidency. If David Brooks is the New York Times’ fake conservative, he is getting a run for his money from Noonan in the WSJ, the Mother Superior of the Republican establishment. Her former boss, anti-establishment President Reagan, surely is frowning from the heavens.

But we do not have Reagan in 2020. What we do have is a uniquely equipped iconoclast to guide us through Corona-gate. Trump already has been condemned by the corrupt media as completely ill-prepared to address our nation’s response to the presumed epidemic. It’s convenient. Yet it dismisses America’s tradition of resolve. We have turned back or faced down every dire inevitability the world has placed at our feet. Tyranny. Plague. Depression. Military attack. Energy dependence. HIV. Terrorism on our shores. Deep recession. Extreme weather. And, lately, we’ve faced the next challenge, revolution within our political system, the coming of age of the Deep State.

The Deep State loves viruses and disruption; it thrives on chaos, fear. Consider this chilling conclusion in a headline in The Washington Free Beacon: “The only predictable fallout of this coronavirus? Partisanship.”

Matthew Continetti, writing for the Beacon: “The pundits are having difficulty settling on a historical analogy for the COVID-19 coronavirus. Will the spread of the disease be President Trump’s Katrina or his financial crisis? Now that it is interested in coronavirus, a familiar pattern will set in. Data will be publicized without the slightest sense of proportion. … Speculation will be paraded as fact. And every conceivable negative outcome, from infections to deaths to plunging stock values, from reasonable and warranted travel bans to unanticipated diplomatic and economic fallout, will be related back to the president in an effort to damage his reelection.”

In this five-minute clip on YouTube, Dr. Drew Pinsky condemns the left (media) for absolutely salivating. Or is it celebrating?

The takeaway is that Pinsky, a board certified doctor of internal medicine, contends if we must have hysteria let it be driven by other data. “Let me frame it this way: we have in the United States 24 million cases of flu-like illness, 180,000 hospitalizations, 16,000 dead from influenza,” Pinsky said on the streaming news show Daily Blast Live. “Why is that not being reported? Why isn’t the message: get your flu shot?”

The people in the trenches, trying to understand the degrees to which COVID-19 is “bad”, are experts. The people hoarding air time are not experts. They are shameless politicians like Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) who want to throw breathtaking sums of money (that we do not have) at the badness.

“Schumer asked for $8 billion,” Pinsky said. “My response is, hey man we (have) got a homeless problem in Southern California and in Denver, would you please give us some of that $8 billion and forget about the coronavirus?”

Which has me wondering how terribly Peggy Noonan and the ruling elites must feel about the nation’s homeless crisis. Not bad enough, I’m guessing.

Freedom, on the brink

By Steve Woodward

The question arose without provocation: “Is it true that we are supposed to be the best country?”

It was posed by a middle school teen-ager with whom I spend time as a mentor. He lives in poverty among three younger siblings. He has been homeless. He is often hungry. But he is cheerful and inquisitive, conversant and funny. And despite having little reason to be optimistic, and despite the strong likelihood he never has been told by a teacher or any other adult about American exceptionalism, the young man’s intuition is that he is the citizen of a remarkable country, the best one.

Given this unexpected opportunity, this “teachable moment”, I needed to deliver a quick answer, something that would resonate within his impressionable mind.

We are the most free country, I said first. No other country comes close. We are a country where anything is possible, where dreams come true every day. I might have added to this, I might have embellished further, maybe by citing a rags-to-riches story. But I also wanted to impress upon him that dreams come true because work is rewarded and opportunities to work are plentiful.

It no longer is a reasonable assumption that kids are aware that being an American is a blessing and a privilege. The narratives tell them we are a nation born of racist slave owners, who left an indelible stain; that capitalism is rigged and excludes almost everyone, and, worse, is the principal cause of climate change; that our military tortures the innocent and kills indiscriminately; and that our immigration policies are inhumane because our borders are not open.

We know the educational environment is increasingly hostile toward free speech, debate, Christianity, and toward our nation’s founding principles. Rarely a week goes by during which we fail to learn of another example of manufactured outrage or political correctness gone wild on a campus. North Carolina State recently eliminated Good Friday from its university calendar, despite enormous backlash.

In our backyard, a few teachers at The O’Neal School in Southern Pines walked out during a January speech by black civil rights legend Clarence Henderson, an avowed conservative Republican and supporter of President Trump.

These snowflake teachers apparently never considered how their decision will be interpreted by their students, but the big take away is that disrespecting American icons is OK if you disagree with them ideologically. Is O’Neal suspending these teachers or is it reprimanding the ones who did not walk out?

My mentee is in seventh grade at Southern Middle School. I ask almost every time we get together about his classes and teachers. He mentioned learning about World War I, and about Germany’s Adolf Hitler. What he remembers about Hitler is that he wore a funny mustache because the ends of it were damaged while Hitler wore a gas mask. (Actually, historians write that Hitler cropped his mustache to accommodate wearing a gas mask). There was no mention by the teenager that Hitler ordered the slaughter of millions of Jews, leaving me to wonder if this is excluded from the textbook.

This lone conversation reinforced why I mentor. It’s not my job to take his mind off his dire living conditions, his hunger and his uncertainty, although I hope I do. It is my job to focus his mind on his future, on where paths before him can lead, on why he needs to make smart decisions, and on why there is eternal hope because God loves him and because he dwells in a land that is free and prosperous.

President Reagan reminded us that freedom is but one generation removed from extinction, and that the tenants of what make us free must be rigorously handed down to future generations. He said, “We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream.”

Mentoring is one of the best opportunities an American adult can seize upon to counter the tide of anti-Americanism, anti-religion and anti-capitalism driven by the sinister and mentally unstable radical left, by educators, the media and the entertainment industry.

The teenager who sits to my right as we drive along is remarkably sunny, polite and articulate. But our nation is increasingly plagued by unhappy, disrespectful, mumbling teens. The why is disheartening but, perhaps, not irreversible.

“The reason so many young people are depressed, unhappy, and angry,” writes radio talk host and columnist Dennis Prager, “is the left has told them that God and Judeo-Christian religions are nonsense; their country is largely evil; their past is deplorable; and their future is hopeless.”

Nancy Pelosi rips in half a story of America’s comeback on national television. And why? Because she and her compliant radical army on the left would rather nurture hungry, deprived teens pouring across our Southern border, leaving desperate teens in Moore County to languish under the oppressive boot heel of government subsidies, which guarantee to keep them right where they are.