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.

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.

Censored

By Steve Woodward

This post is comprised of two Letters to the Editor submitted to The Pilot. To date, they have not been published despite their timely subject matter.

Written August 24, 2020

How many times an hour does mainstream media breathlessly remind us about the deadly coronavirus? Every chance it gets, with an emphasis on “cases”, any one of which might prove to be, you guessed it, deadly, and could indicate a new wave of positives. “Could” and “might” are vital armaments in virus weaponization and the war on common sense.

Perhaps if we paid serious attention to what else is actually deadly we’d recognize that Dr. Anthony Fauci would not have the market on fear mongering cornered. Have we seen these headlines very often? Ever?

Deadly Black Lives Matter Marxists fuel gun violence in Louisville, New York, Portland, Seattle.

Deadly Chicago weekend: five killed, 61 shot. 

Deadly Sanctuary Cities see surge in crime, murders, disease spread.

Deadly Planned Parenthood performed record 345,000-plus abortions during 2017-18.

Attacks on police officers on the rise nationwide with often deadly outcomes. 

Potentially deadly side effects of depression amid virus mounting.

A drug with 60-year record touted by President Trump, hydroxychloroquine, could be deadly. Virus vaccine expected to be approved in months, 100% safe, should be mandatory.

President Obama endures media firestorm as deadly 2009-10 H1N1 pandemic claims lives of at least 540 children in U.S.

As vice president, Biden supported Obama’s refusal to secure Benghazi compound resulting in deadly consequences on September 11, 2012.

These are just a few of the many headlines rarely written or remembered. What this year’s hysteria is rooted in is a presumption of absolute safety to which remarkably large numbers of us seemingly adhere. But the reality is this planet of ours is a killing machine both owed to nature’s fury and man’s evil. Cowering at home with layers of masks and barrels of hand sanitizer cannot protect anyone from his destiny.

*************

Written July 13, 2020

With my wife and mother, I worshipped inside the historic walls of The Village Chapel in Pinehurst on July 12. It is one of very few area churches exhibiting faith and courage by re-opening. 

What does this say about our culture? I believe it says that religious persecution is escalating. Amid virus hysteria, clergy and church elders should denounce government-imposed bans on in-person worship. Instead, they cower and comply even while disingenuously paying lip service to divine provenance during Facebook Live “services”.

Pushing back against tyrannical government figures requires gathering on Sundays in the presence of God to call upon him to embolden Americans and fill us with the spirit of our founders. A classic hymn contains these words: “Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before.”

If Christians are afraid to march through the doors of a church, the battles ahead will be mismatches. These battles will come. They are raging in American streets. Monuments are toppled without consequence. Businesses are looted in the name of racial inequality. Masked citizens meanwhile hide in shadows, washing their hands of responsibility.

What will believers do when religious statues and churches are targeted, as surely they will be? Why? Young Americans are emerging from universities as trained Marxists, God despising, undeterred by societal norms. 

In July, a Catholic church in Ocala, Fla., was set ablaze during mass. The perpetrator, 24, drove his vehicle inside and used gasoline to fuel a fire. He said he is on a mission. 

And he is not alone. Has a lifetime of worship and sermonizing prepared American believers to oppose our persecutors, both soft tyrants and violent militants? Or must we acknowledge that the freedom for which generations fought and died is defenseless against anarchists and a politicized virus?

Heroes

By Steve Woodward

A powerful message was delivered from the pulpit of The Village Chapel on Sunday last by Rev. John Jacobs. Citizens of a nation founded and thriving under God should contemplate what is expected of us.

“We’re on a journey of faith; a hero’s quest. Because, regardless of our own inadequacies, I believe God really sees us as heroes. And that’s what this world needs — real heroes. Real heroes like (those) we’ve been witnessing as first responders to the storms in Louisiana, the fires in California, and those responding to the anarchy unleashed in the streets of our cities. Real heroes, willing to step outside of their comfortable and safe sanctuaries. Real heroes with the courage to hope and overcome, not ignoring reality but imagining a better reality. Heroes for Christ, who may be ignored and ridiculed by this world but exalted in the Kingdom of Heaven.”

With our nation at a crossroads as consequential as any to which we have arrived in our past, efforts less than heroic, untethered to courage, will find us falling short and losing our country to the radical Left and to a once unimaginable tide of Marxism.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board advises that defiant Americans should stand down in the cities where anarchy has been unleashed, and Rev. Jacobs describes it accurately by using that word. This is not organic upheaval, or run of the mill “unrest”. These are armies unleashing fury with no regard for collateral damage such as a sitting U.S. Senator and his wife.

It is patriotic to form watercraft parades on lakes, rivers and coastal waterways, and these gatherings of banner waving Americans are inspiring. But this is not heroism. It is on the other hand heroic to assemble on the streets of Chicago, Kenosha, Wis., Oakland, Philadelphia and Portland, Ore., to resist the Black Lives Matter anarchists, paid soldiers led by invisible commanders.  It is heroism, not vigilantism, that will cause ordinary Americans to rise up in support of overwhelmed police officers and to protect business owners, churches and sacred monuments. Heroes contemplate victory, never failure.

The furious mobs have demonstrated in a few places that they soon might turn their wrath on suburban neighborhoods, where the people the mobs despise most tend to live. The heroes in these places, like the couple defending their private property in suburban St. Louis (Patricia and Mark McCloskey), will confront the unruly anarchists and stand their ground, at any cost. We know intuitively that unionized cops are soft targets compared to rural, everyday folks who carry two forms of ID at all times, a drivers license and a gun permit.

It is heroism that compels teachers to return to classrooms to fulfill their obligations and to spare children far reaching psychological damage caused by unconstitutional lockdowns imposed by politically motivated Democrat governors, mayors and city council members. It is heroism that will inspire parents to demand that students are in class five days a week, knowing that hysterical, fear mongering friends and neighbors may rebuke them, may actually accuse them of not taking seriously enough the Wuhan Virus.

It is heroism that keeps bar and restaurant owners going in the face of insurmountable odds. Just earlier, the governor of New Jersey finally green lighted the re-opening of restaurants for sit-down dining, but he’s no hero. They will be limited to 25% capacity (compared to 50% in North Carolina and most states), which means for many it will make zero economic sense to re-open at all. But these owners will fight to keep the lights on, to keep their employees from enduring joblessness and to give their communities a glimmer of hope.

“Inevitably,” an August 31 Journal editorial observes, “average citizens will move to defend themselves if elected officials won’t protect them. The proper place to do that is at the ballot box, however, not in the streets with guns.”

This presumes that ballot boxes will be widely available (states such as Oregon are leveraging virus hysteria to remove them). But more curiously the Journal seems to miscalculate the American spirit, which already has been under assault for months by those who believe we must act as sheep to ensure 100% “safety”.

Many average citizens are, indeed, sheep. But there are heroes all around us inspired by the average citizens who founded our nation and risked life and treasure, who ignored warnings to return to their “proper place” as subjects.

Real heroes are imperfect, deeply flawed people most of the time. But God continues to stick with them, cheering them on to be heroic when their time comes. We know this to be a proven phenomenon. We have seen a bombastic, iconoclast New York business mogul, warts and all, forsake comfort and sanctuary to become our President. We know that if all others shrink from their hero’s quest, there will be one still standing in the White House.