Two years later

By Steve Woodward

While generally skeptical about so-called resolutions prompted by one month bleeding into another, I nonetheless resolve to torment hypocrites and Marxists (Democrats) as never before in 2023.

What other choice do we have? Anthony Fauci is retiring but his legacy — gain-of-function, fear, masking, boosters — is not going away. In fact, it is going to places heretofore uncontemplated. Vaccinated sheep (citizens) we are told now are more vulnerable to upcoming “variants” of the Wuhan virus. And pay no attention to vaccinated healthy young adults becoming ill or dying “suddenly”. 

The blank canvas that is 2023 should not be frittered away at the hands of status quo Republicans. The battle in the U.S. House of Representatives to name its speaker reinforces a pressing need to deflect establishment forces. Our Founding Fathers did not create their framework to limit conflict within a party; they envisioned a battlefield upon which bold ideas and deep passion would overwhelm hypocrisy and political fraudsters. 

Were we to summon a fraction of the determination that drove the Founders just think what we might accomplish. Locally, we would create a coalition to insure that a drag show never would darken our community again. We would direct our school board to eradicate gender grooming and race theory from public education. And we would challenge our county commissioners to marginalize the county board of health — over which it presides — so that it never again intrudes on public education by recommending school closures, masking and subjecting children to experimental mRNA injections.

But we also must stand resolute against purveyors of revisionist history as we approach the second anniversary of the unity rally of January 6 in Washington, where your correspondent traveled to chronicle what would unfold. We know many brothers and sisters who came and went without so much as raising their voices an octave, while raising objections that D.C. government chose to limit rest facilities apparently in an effort to disperse the “mobs” of seniors, families and young Republicans. The choice was clear: urination or defend the nation. 

Apart from the planted, scripted disrupters who raged into the Capital two years ago, those who merely showed up are now, two years on, still sobered by what our nation looked like after the crowds went home and the Biden Administration ascended. Where we are in 2023 affirms that our motivation to assemble in Washington on that fateful January day in 2021 was prescient.

To the extent that a few hundred people swelled into the Capitol we now see how that modest demonstration pales in comparison to the trampling and burning down of societal norms in the aftermath. We might ask, where was the outrage on that January afternoon amid news that the lone fatality was an unarmed military veteran (Ashli Babbitt) who was gunned down in cold blood by a Capitol police officer? Why does January 6 merit a “commission”? Where are the commissions denouncing violence on America’s streets that, by comparison, make that citizens’ rally look like a county fair? Innocents who participated that day still rot in D.C. jail cells charged with taking selfies. But who was doing the plundering of our democracy in reality? Facebook and Twitter, of course. When will those digital accomplices be shackled and sent away?

Two years on, the Left is waging its own insurrection. Look no further than an essay I endured in a recent, Dec. 31-Jan. 1 weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal. It is worth noting that, in order to fill up the sections in weekend Journals, editors give voice to authors who would prefer to be published in The New York Times. The Journal helps them audition. 

Zachary Karabell, who is the founder of the ominously named Progress Network, wrote to praise 2022 as as year in which “far more went right … than most of us recognize”. One can only imagine from which penthouse or city brownstone the author was perched as he typed fervently to remind us that 2022 was the year “climate technology was supercharged” by $400 billion allocated through Biden’s absurd Inflation Reduction Act. (In China, the equivalent would be the Oppression Reduction Edict). 

Mr. Karabell is positively giddy in reminding readers that voter suppression laws failed (but misses the point that no such laws existed). Without a hint of irony, he claims “voters surged to the polls in (2022) despite fears (expressed only by left wing media) that laws passed in states such as Georgia and Texas would lead to voter suppression.” 

The illogical Mr. Karabell goes on in his rambling essay to praise wage gains for citizens he disparages as “workers” — up by 6% in 2022 — “that did not (emphasis added) for most of the year keep pace with inflation.” Not to worry, he writes, “inflation moderates”. Just as urban crime waves sweeping our nation moderate. Some nights are less deadly than others. 

2022 was a train wreck but, apparently, Mr. Karabell blissfully travelled on a parallel track.

The reliably moderate Gerard Baker, in his weekly Journal column, tried to ease into a new year by calling for an ideological truce. “Can we start to work to eradicate the binary mind-set that has seized our thinking about the kind of society and world we think we should live in?” Baker asks.

He answers his own question near the end of the column — as if the more he kept typing the more he was talking himself out of the premise. (As editor emeritus, Baker should impulsively have send the column back for a re-write). 

Baker continues: herein is “the great conundrum for the more skeptical among us: Advances in the lot of humanity have rarely come from calls for moderation and humility, but from true believers — zealots who convinced enough people that the choice they faced really was a binary one between good and evil.”

Citizens who endure wages ravaged by bad economic policy, and law and order dysfunction driven by the “woke”, deserve our fierce defense of their liberties, no matter the cost.

If parents with children in government run indoctrination centers (schools) must become zealots to reform the system, let them do so boldly. If mechanical ballot tabulation presents a binary choice between integrity and fraud, we must go full binary to expose the Left. If U.S. border security is de-emphasized even as Ukrainian border security is funded by an American Congress to the tune of $100 billion; if medical tyranny advanced by thinly veiled lies threatens livelihoods, mental health and the well being of healthy young adults; if we observe the normalization of transgenderism and the rejection of Judeo-Christian values in our communities; if the very foundation of American exceptionalism is crumbling under the iron boot of the Left’s Great Reset in pursuit of a one-world order; well, then what?

With grudging apologies to Mr. Baker, the task is not to eradicate a mind-set. The task is to eradicate enemies within. 

On the tee, hypocrisy

By Steve Woodward

Let me get this straight. The United States sends billions of dollars to the human rights wasteland of Saudi Arabia to import its oil, but an American professional golfer is disgraced after expressing an interest in leveraging the Saudi economy by way of a proposed Super League featuring the world’s elite golfers? 

American golf legend Phil Mickelson is being canceled as if he had been caught on video beating his wife and abusing the family pet because he suggested a certain attraction to this as yet still conceptual Saudi league, and amid his reasonable dissatisfaction with the lords of the PGA Tour. Why the indignation? Because Mickelson also acknowledged that the Saudis routinely violate human rights and murder innocent people.

Among his most vocal critics — after Mickelson’s remarks were released by the author of a forthcoming Mickelson biography — was Rory McIlroy of Ireland, a PGA Tour veteran who resides in the U.S. McIlory lashed out at his fellow competitor’s supposed nonchalance about Saudi authorities who routinely kill gay people as exposing Mickelson as “naive, selfish, egotistical and ignorant.” That about covers the character assassination spectrum.

Undoubtedly, negative reactions by McIlory and other players emboldened sponsors to drop Mickelson as if he had been exposing himself to children on a playground. KPMG. Callaway. Workday. See ya, Phil.

But who has called out McIlroy’s blatant hypocrisy? No one, apparently. In January McIlroy finished third in the Dubai Desert Classic in the United Arab Emirates, taking home north of $500,000 (excluding a hefty appearance fee, no doubt). It’s a wonder he was even willing to show up. Human Rights Watch identifies the UAE as a serial human rights abuser. The UAE has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to criticizing government officials. Homosexuality is a crime punishable by death. Against this backdrop, tour professionals nonetheless typically include a stop at the Dubai Classic on their annual schedules.

Within the ladies’ ranks, LPGAers frequently play in the annual Shanghai Classic in China, a nation ruled under the iron fist of the Chinese Communist Party. The tournament was cancelled the past two years due to health concerns in a country where the Wuhan Virus was unleashed out of a lab that exists under the guise of research. In recent weeks, Beijing played host to the Olympic Winter Games, which went on without a hint of protest by American sponsors and TV rights holder NBC. Everyone who seeks to profit from turning their backs to China’s brutality toward dissidents and rural slaves seems to rationalize the tenuous relationships with ease. 

In China’s Xinjiang province, an estimated one million Turkic Muslims are detained in interment camps. This genocide has been ongoing since 2014.

Meanwhile, how many PGA Tour millionaires strut around wearing Nike golf attire and shoes made in China in partnership with a ruthless authoritarian government that manufactures the iconic “swoosh”-branded garb using what amounts to slave labor? 

It bears repeating that Nike athletes are paid millions of dollars to wear the brand before stepping foot on a golf course, or a basketball or tennis court. On the PGA Tour alone, there are numerous top players who are not perplexed by the Nike-China conundrum. Tiger Woods, of course, was Nike’s first golf star. But today, the roster includes elite players such as Brooks Koepka, Tony Finau, Francisco Molinari and Jason Day.

Oh, and Rory “The Pious” McIlroy. A few years ago he signed a 10-year Nike contract that will pay out around $200 million. 

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.

Trump 2.0

By Steve Woodward

What I learned at the North Carolina Republican Party Convention in Greenville:

Ernie’s Sub Shop (since 1980) is legitimate, and the best alternative to the NC GOP’s offerings, which left delegates craving airline food.

The ballroom of the Greenville Hilton is a cramped and stifling venue in which conducting a convention is not advisable. It surely was designed by a radical Lefty because it divides people and limits their ability to be heard.

President Donald Trump is reflective but not defeated six months after his inexplicable “loss”, and no longer opposes Joe Bidden as a “sleepy” adversary but as an enemy of our nation’s core values.

His Saturday night (June 5) address to dehydrated convention delegates and donors was, in many ways, vintage Trump. Our “45″ chided the media (which was assembled en masse), China (and its clear role in unleashing the Wuhan virus), and the Biden administration’s already collapsing economy and stature around the world.

What Trump did not do to any significant degree is belabor Biden’s obvious physical and mental limitations, other than mentioning Biden’s talent at falling “up” the stairs to the door of Air Force One. He pointed to the debacle caused by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s deceit, which fueled Wuhan virus hysteria. He acknowledged that he made a huge “bet” when directing the federal government to underwrite the launch of Operation Warp Speed, which ultimately delivered on his promise of virus vaccines in record time by sidestepping normal Food and Drug Administration testing. 

Those like me who were at the White House ellipse on January 6, shivering in bitter cold, and in the Greenville Convention Center on June 5 shivering under blasting air conditioning, could not have escaped the conclusion that Trump has bounced back from the November election outcome more so than many of us. 

That is reason enough to enter the road to 2022 and beyond rejuvenated and determined. The man who remains the heart and soul of the Republican Party is counting on that. (Not to mention the inspiration we can draw from South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who spoke with the eloquence of a leader and the common sense of a rancher during her June 5 convention luncheon appearance).

As demonstrated in Greenville, even if Trump never again runs for elected office, the sheer force of his personality will assist state parties in raising millions of dollars to support Republican campaigns. NC GOP chairman Michael Whatley informed delegates that Trump’s presence guaranteed that last Saturday’s fundraiser would reap the largest collection in party history. By four times, in fact.

In the unlikely event that Trump decides not to run for President in 2024, he will have positioned the Republican Party’s conservatives to rise up in defiance of the Socialist tsunami sweeping upon our shores. As our culture crumbles, constitutional rights slip away, religious freedoms evaporate, inflation soars and economic growth stagnates, we must look to the Trump example. We stand firm. We don’t back down. We elect candidates who execute on their promises from day one. We make America great again. Again.

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.