Unemployment – RESOLVE

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.

The seduction

By Steve Woodward

She normally might have worn a beaming smile while walking alongside her Mom on their way to the Carolina Hotel parking lot. But a darling little girl, perhaps all of three or four, was instead holding her breath with a hand over her mouth. This was her “mask”. She appeared to be genuinely afraid as I passed by. Mom was wearing an actual mask.

We can assume that there are two schools of thought among young, woke parents about children and masks. One, the Wuhan Virus will kill my child if she is not masked in public. Or, two, wearing a mask signals that you care about others and are obedient and respectful toward authority.

8A59950C-705F-4F9E-A556-4D55E42D86CD copy — A Moore County Citizens for Freedom member, July 25.

Snowflake parenting is threatening to impose on our society a future generation so fragile the flakes will not form in the first place. They’ll be as delicate as raindrops. Maybe it was inevitable but virus hysteria will guarantee it, and it will not end with this crisis. The presumption of absolute safety, revealed to be far more prevalent than we knew, likely will find children wearing masks out of habit, lest a head cold or bout of flu looms.

In a matter of months the Left and its compliant media have cast over our nation a cloud of absolutism. We are absolutely obligated to be fearful of a virus with an overwhelmingly high recovery rate. We are absolutely a nation founded under white supremacy and irredeemable to this day, and absolutely the epicenter of systemic racism worldwide.

Law and order is inherently a racist desire. Tyranny, on the other hand, is salvation. As long as our tyrant mayors and governors adopt separate standards for rioters, looters, vandals and police assassins, of course. What is not absolute are standards of the Left. Their standards are applied only when convenient.

Many of us are asking, how did this happen? How, in a few months’ time, did a health crisis infect core values, courage and decency? How did radical left Marxists so dramatically rise out of the shadows to leverage race to pursue impure outcomes? How did so many elected leaders fail to lead in order to allow deliberate destruction of private property, historically significant monuments and religious symbols? How did we arrive at a place when pastors and priests willingly locked the doors to our houses of worship?

A pastor of a church in White Lake, N.C., Rev. Cameron McGill, addressed many of these questions in a recent sunrise, lakeside video, which you are urged to watch and share (it runs just nine minutes). Click here. Skip ahead to the 1:45 mark to hear the essence of McGill’s message.

He quotes II Timothy 3:13 as the principal explanation for the rapid deterioration of our culture: “But evil men and impostors will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.”

McGill explains that Americans ripe for being deceived have been seduced. Throughout history, when evil has prevailed and derailed entire societies, it has done so through seduction. Socialism is seduction in its most glaring form. Seduction is how sin prevails despite the efforts of many to be “good people”. Seduction explains why socialist dictators easily murdered tens of millions of innocent people in the 20th century alone (Hitler, Stalin, Mao). Marxism is rooted in seduction. How else do we explain throngs of college educated white Americans swarming the streets of cities such as Portland, Ore., where destruction and police baiting has gone on unabated for two months?

Perhaps where seduction is most dangerously imposed is when we set aside common sense because “experts” are telling us to be guided by science and data, regardless of whether the numbers are accurate or reliable. Health experts, empowered by governors, seduced millions into accepting that crushing the economy, putting people out of work, closing churches and schools and turning neighbor against neighbor is all worth it to keep us safe. The promise of safety is perhaps the ultimate seduction.

We now know that there are many in our midst who will yield everything to feel safe. Even if it deprives them of a sweet little girl’s smile.

Stay safe, Mr. Columbus

By Steve Woodward

The next time you walk past a statue honoring a historic figure, you might consider uttering a phrase now very much in vogue: Stay safe. Seems an odd thing to say to one as courageous as Christopher Columbus but, suddenly, statues are almost as endangered as city storefronts and American flags. Portraits and plaques, you’re next.

Destroying private property and erasing American history are part of Antifa’s far left, two-pronged assault strategy, with plenty of backup from Democrat mayors, governors and their fellow radicals in Congress. A mob in Birmingham, Ala., was struggling to tear down a Confederate Soldiers and Sailors monument when none other than the city’s Democrat mayor showed up to help them finish the job.

Meanwhile, how about the corporate virtue signaling? Perhaps the day soon will come when all of the images on grocery store packaging will be masked, just in case someone decides the Keebler elves are offensive to short people. Will Col. Sanders be transitioning to gray or beige suits? Or maybe the solution is East German-era generic shelf stocking. There will be an aisle on which every box is labeled RICE; another where your choices are SYRUP or SYRUP.

And no more choosing between Mattel’s Barbie and Ken. This just in: Ken is Barbie. Woke.

Such crass chuckling will get your house burned to the ground in 2020. But what honest person can deny needing a break from the unrelenting madness sweeping our besieged nation?

It would all be laugh out loud hilarious if it was not so dangerous. Conservative author and former Republican Presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan published in 2011 a book entitled “Suicide of a Superpower: Will American Survive to 2025?” He wrote, “America will be gone” in a few decades. “In its place will arise a country unrecognizable to our parents.”

His question targeting 2025 now appears prophetic. Remember how mainstream media shrieked when, during an earlier round of statue toppling a few years ago, President Donald Trump remarked that monuments to Washington and Jefferson would be next? That will never happen, said these keen cultural observers. Don’t be ridiculous, Orange Man.

Sadly, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have both gone down with a thud in Portland, Ore. Jefferson soon will disappear in Decatur, Ga., and New York City Hall. A Washington statue in Chicago was vandalized amid calls for its removal. (How about removing the Democrats who preside, week after week, over black versus black violence in the streets?)

Columbus has not been spared. He was torn from a pedestal in St. Paul, Minn. He was beheaded in Boston. And submerged in a lake in Richmond, Va.

The destruction is not limited to the famous. Three plaques honoring confederate soldiers have been removed from the University of Alabama’s campus library. A monument commemorating more than 1,600 confederate soldiers who died in Civil War prisoner camps controlled by the Union army is coming down in Indianapolis.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ordered the removal of portraits of four former Speakers to wrap up her week. The corrupt media will not mention that all four are Democrats who defended slavery. So what took so long, Nance? Howell Cobb of Georgia was born on a plantation and became a raging secessionist. James Orr of South Carolina was a member of a three-person commission sent to Washington in 1861 to negotiate a truce with President James Buchanan to avert civil war. Before they left town, artillery fire was tearing apart Fort Sumter in the Charleston Harbor. The war had begun.

The chapters of American history represented by these many suddenly repulsive monuments and portraits across our land have been in place, in many cases, for a century or more. The rage that suddenly casts them as unbearable and offensive drips with hypocrisy. But if virtually everything is, as the mobs insist, blatantly racist, from Washington, Jefferson, Columbus, Robert E. Lee, and anyone who ever wore a Confederate uniform or raised the Confederacy’s flag, where does it end? The next growing movement is the renaming of every building ever dedicated to honor a person’s memory.

If this folly absolutely must happen to quell vandalism and violence, might we suggest starting with the Russell Senate office building. Richard B. Russell, Jr., was a lifelong Democrat who was Governor of Georgia and a U.S. Senator for nearly four decades. He was twice a candidate for President (1948 and ’52). He opposed civil rights legislation at every turn, and led a Southern boycott of the 1964 Democrat National Convention to protest the signing into law of the Civil Rights Act by President Lyndon Johnson.

If not the Russell building, then what? A suggestion floating around is to name it the Hiram Revels building. Revels, a Republican, was our nation’s first black U.S. Senator (1870), representing Mississippi, although he was born a free man in Fayetteville, N.C. He spent much of his adult life as a minister, following in the footsteps of his father. Revels surely would have applauded the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

He paved the way forward as the Republican Party emerged as the anti-slavery, civil rights party. In fact, the 1964 Act never would have made it to Johnson’s desk without 80 percent-plus support by Republicans in the House and Senate.

Generational hypocrisy

By Steve Woodward

The Left rejects the United States of America as founded.

It would confiscate and ban firearms owned by law abiding citizens. But it does not reject the use of knives, bricks, rocks, flames fueled by chemical agents and spray paint in the hands of lawless citizens.

It is calling for police departments to be defunded by state governments. But it resists calls to defund Planned Parenthood abortion on demand, which annually culls the black population by the tens of thousands.

The Left is fine with killing and wounding law enforcement officers. The Left is unmoved by weekly deaths of young black and Hispanic men who are murdered openly, on the streets, by fellow young black and Hispanic men. The Left ignores white people who are improperly detained by law enforcement, white and black, and, sometimes, killed, deliberately or unintentionally.

The Left rejects school choice for children of impoverished black families, preferring they attend underperforming public schools, from which they are likely to drop out.

The Left decries “systemic racism” in 2020. Before that, it was 1964. 1968. 1992. 2008. 2014. Black Lives Matter. But they only matter, apparently, when a moment in time says they matter. The rest of the time, black lives are shackled by the soft tyranny of low expectations and social justice programs imposed on those lives by, guess who? The Left.

Few civil rights warriors possess stronger truth radar than North Carolina native Clarence Henderson. In 1960, he and other young black men sat down at a white-only lunch counter in Greensboro. They changed the world. Nothing was set on fire. Nobody died. They sat down. Before the end of the decade federal legislation passed to begin the slow unraveling of segregation. The Left is unimpressed. Why did it not happen in the 1600s when slaves arrived on the shores of a future land mass called America? Why did it take so long? Ask Democrats, who defended slavery in the 1860s, and formed the Ku Klux Klan around the same time to oppose Republican Reconstruction-era policies.

“As someone who made an impact during the (’60s) Civil Rights era, I know that strong, peaceful protests can make a difference,” writes Henderson. “We never damaged property or encouraged any type of riotous actions.”

The men who are complicit in the alleged murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis will remain, perhaps forever, a mystery to a majority of Americans because we go about our lives without a trace of contempt toward “people of color”. We worship together. We work together. We volunteer together. What is not mysterious is why one man’s senseless death has sparked violence, property destruction and orchestrated outrage which our streets have not see in more than a half century.

One, it is an election year and the Left despises President Donald Trump. So there is a strong exploitation motive. Two, widespread riots, mostly violent not mostly peaceful, carried out by Antifa and other global threats to civilization, conveniently divert attention from generational black poverty, lawlessness and unemployment.

Observe where the deepest unrest lies. In cities controlled by Democrats and the Left for decades. The worst kind of racism is subtle, and the Left owns it. A friend from college days who has devoted 20+ years serving Los Angeles homeless through a major organization should be angry at the neglect of California’s Democrat establishment which today finds areas overrun by homeless. But instead he laments in an email to donors “decades of generations being denied their basic rights, access to quality education, equal pay and opportunity.” But no mention of Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, Jerry Brown or other long entrenched Democrats who have been quite content to let the crisis escalate knowing they’d be re-elected for life.

Where are we two weeks into this? The Left is calling for what President Barack Obama promised 12 years ago as the nation’s first president of color, a transformational change. It did not happen under our black president and his black Attorney General, Eric Holder. How will it happen now? Perhaps if we just allow property destruction to go on long enough. On our side of the “aisle”, pathetically, there is pandering. Hollow, boilerplate outrage.

A Republican N.C. congressman who I choose not to embarrass calls for “important and needed conversations regarding race and equality” without saying who is doing the talking. He says we should “learn from one another” and “bridge the divides”. And, the worst cliche of all: “Let’s get to work.”

Here’s an idea. Let’s denounce the Left for cheering our country toward anarchy. Let’s engage more National Guard and U.S. military in the streets to restore order. And let’s stop accepting false narratives. Let’s promote facts and reality in 21st century America.

Writes Hans Bader, a civil rights attorney, in a recent post to CNSNews.com: “Resist calls from prominent Democrats to ‘defund the police.’ Police save many lives in the black community by arresting dangerous people. Black people are much more likely to be killed by an ordinary criminal than by a police officer. Peter Kirsanow, a black civil-rights commissioner, says that in 2015, ‘a cop was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was likely to be killed by a cop’.”

In other words, let’s defund the Left, defund Antifa and heavily fund leaders like Clarence Henderson who are not invested in false narratives.

The long game

By Steve Woodward

It is impossible to understand what religious persecution feels like until it comes home to a free land. It feels surreal. Worshipping inside the four walls of a church this past Sunday with a small gathering of Christians marked the first time I have experienced this horrible feeling. We were where we were not supposed to be, doing what we were not supposed to do in the company of others — praying, singing, contemplating scripture.

“Stay at home,” decreed North Carolina Democrat tyrant and Governor Roy Cooper back in March, joining governors across the nation imposing mass shutdowns to slow the spread of the Wuhan Virus. Cooper’s order specifically prohibits gathering for religious services in churches, or for that matter, anywhere. Dutifully, the churches closed and adopted streaming video services, excluding those most in need of their church community, the ones without internet or the know-how to use a device to access it.

There was so much outrage about businesses that were forcibly closed, hospital procedures that were deemed unnecessary and the suspension of education inside classrooms that the trampling of a Constitutional right to assemble and worship God was all but overlooked. This should never have happened. Churches should have been granted the freedom to make their own decisions about how to conduct services amid virus hysteria, using the same formula that determines how many people can enter a grocery store.

We know the left has poisoned higher education and K-12 education. We know the corporate-owned media has been coopted and is corrupt and compliant. We know voting integrity is increasingly at risk as the left becomes ever more brash about rigging elections. We know the courts have been packed with activist judges to render the will of the American voter meaningless (see NC voter ID lawsuits). And now, sadly, we must acknowledge that clergy and denominational governing bodies apparently have been similarly hijacked. Where was the outrage when Cooper abruptly banned church services? There was none expressed by the church where I am a member.

Thankfully, along came one pastor who stood up, opened the doors of his church and exercised his rights as a U.S. citizen.

This came in stark contrast to John Nagy’s Sunday column in The Pilot. The virus is “everywhere,” he wrote, failing to specify his source, scientific or otherwise, behind this declaration. Nagy’s was a tone of doom, of resignation that North Carolinians should not expect to live the lives we knew only a few weeks ago. Ever again. I sensed an underlying motive for writing it. This is what they’ve always hoped for in America on the left. Less freedom. More governance by edict. More social shaming of anyone who fails to comply with orders, no matter how extreme.

These ambitions were forecast as long ago as 1963 when a member of the U.S. House of Representatives placed into the Congressional Record the 45 goals of communism derived from a book recently published at the time, entitled “The Naked Communist”. Read the list here. It is clear the left has played the long game. More than a half century later the unthinkable goals they articulated are being achieved, one by one.

If we are being honest with ourselves, we must acknowledge, as Americans and as Republicans, and as North Carolinians, the Wuhan Virus appears increasingly to have spread across our world deliberately with a lot of collateral damage but one target, the United States. The U.S. economy, our health care system, our food supply, President Donald Trump, our Constitutional freedom, religious and speech freedom specifically (who will soon forget a Raleigh police officer announcing that protests are “non-essential” activities under Cooper’s iron boot orders?), and anything else the virus can disrupt along the way. Note the surge of nodding heads as the State Board of Elections turns up the volume on the necessity of 100% mail-in voting this fall. For our safety, of course.

The Wuhan Virus is exacting a sad but hardly unprecedented human toll. The broader death toll remains to be seen. The left is counting on historic carnage. God empowers us to win the war now being waged outside of labs working on vaccines, the war on liberty. Let us pray we have the courage to leverage that power so that churches, like some American businesses, do not close their doors forever.