Are happy days here again? This issue of our print magazine, with a beautiful cover by resident cartoonist Yogi Love, will share lots of evidence to support that contention. Indeed, in so many ways, from inflation, to crime, to immigration, and on and on, there’s good news. And yet…
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My introduction will be the fly in this joyful ointment. Senior Editor and my podcast co-host Scott McKay calls me Eeyore. We have two years of podcast conversations of me seeing the worst. I apologize to you, loyal viewers, but I have a bad feeling that I can’t shake. I had planned to write this when the theme of the magazine was chosen over a month ago. The events of recent weeks have confirmed my unease.
Two days ago, at the time of this writing, conservative activist and college speaker icon Charlie Kirk was assassinated. One bullet. One clean shot. His life was needlessly snuffed out by a radicalized young man, born to proud, middle-class parents. By all accounts, the shooter came from a good family. They turned him in, after all. One can hardly fathom the grief and despair they felt in doing so. They turned their son in, knowing he will be punished with a death sentence. Thus two families were utterly ruined by a communistic toxic brain virus implanted in thousands of Americans. Charlie Kirk was gently, kindly, and bravely fighting the virus with words, and he was curing young people left and right. He was murdered for his trouble.
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Only a week before Charlie’s gruesomely broadcasted killing, a young Ukrainian immigrant, Iryna Zarutska, was stabbed to death by a repeat violent offender on public transportation in North Carolina. She bled out, terrified and alone, in front of train passengers.
Underneath the surface of economic betterment and the herculean efforts of the Trump administration to root out the rot, it’s clear that the body politic has a metastasized cancer that threatens the life of the republic. Time is short.
Thousands of Americans rejoiced at Charlie’s death. This systemic psychopathy is horrendous to behold. One flippant girl said to her dad on camera, thinking her empathetic father was the problem, “What do I care that this bad person is dead?”
Charlie Kirk by Bill Wilson for The American Spectator
TV commentators also expressed sympathy for the killer of Iryna Zarutska, with CNN’s Van Jones saying, “[W]e don’t know how to deal with people who are hurting in the way this man was hurting.”
The following passage from the book of Isaiah comes to mind:
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! (Isaiah 5:20, New International Version)
The backdrop for this murderous rage isn’t malnutrition, hunger, or the deprivations of war. The people fomenting the violence are living, by nearly any historical measure, decadent lives. They are overfed, psychologically indulged, technologically sophisticated, and materially rich. Most have families who love them. And yet, simmering rage and grievous resentment infect their minds and their actions. The violence within is spilling over and they kill with callous disregard, while their compatriots cheer them on — uploading TikToks of themselves grinning with glee — so confident are they that they’re right, justified, and, worse, that everyone agrees with them.
The faces of the murderers are not sad or regretful. They’re not ashamed. They’re confident and defiant.
There will be more targeted killings of conservatives. The killers believe they’re killing “fascists” and feel entirely justified in doing so.
Remember COVID? Remember how nearly half of Democrats were willing to take children away from their parents if the parents weren’t vaccinated? Remember how leftists imposed mandates — in workplaces ranging from the military and government to hospitals and private businesses — requiring employees to submit to an untested vaccine or be fired? Even so-called conservatives and libertarians made the argument that Americans did have a choice — it was their choice not to have a job. Those in power hated anyone who refused to comply, and, if someone died, they shrugged and took pleasure in it.
This anti-American, anti-Christian malady is not new. It is not isolated. It is not exclusive to young, disturbed trans kids.
We have a nation of rich, spoiled, aggrieved people. Teachers — from preschool instructors to college professors — along with the media and Democrat leadership have encouraged this wrath and inculcated young minds with communist propaganda disguised as DEI. Leftist organizations, including Open Society Foundations, Tides, Ford, and the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as funders like George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Reid Hoffman, have helped shape and mold these disaffected people.
Antifa is now militarized, organized, and present in every state. Black Lives Matter destroyed cities, and now their founders live in luxury. SSRI-addled aging hippies, looking to recreate their halcyon youth, fuel this insanity — bowing to BLM, protesting government firings, and parading around in pink pussy hats. The whole of the Left — from the Democrat Party, which is increasingly overtly socialist (hello, Mamdani), to the militarized activist wing — is insane. Most have been diagnosed with mental disorders and are medicated. It’s not helping.
America is also now home to millions of unassimilated illegal and legal aliens. The Trump administration has been heroically expelling the criminal element, and illegal immigration has largely been halted. But what to do about the legal immigrants who, rather than become Americans, cling to their own ideologies and refuse to assimilate?
The Biden administration — the third term of Obama — did incalculable damage. The scope and breadth of it is overwhelming. Tens of thousands of children who entered the country illegally and unaccompanied did not show up for their court dates. Many were found as sex slaves and indentured servants “working off” their trip to America.
Democrats were importing slaves. Read that sentence again.
How do you combat the minds that believe this is acceptable? This is a spiritual problem with heinous real-world implications.
The first thing a doctor must do when a patient is sick is prevent death. The Trump administration is going after root causes, but it must also dismantle and stop Antifa, as well as go after its associated organizations and funders, immediately. Just as there are thousands of criminal illegal immigrants and thousands of hardcore criminals in major cities, there are brainwashed Antifa militants who have instigated violence, committed violent acts themselves, and been let go by the Democrats in power. These psychopaths need to be rounded up, tried federally, and put in prison. And their funders need to be rounded up and tried under RICO laws.
We face domestic enemies who hate America and everything she stands for. Charlie Kirk embodied these values: Christian, married, a devoted father, a defender of free speech, and a promoter of American values. He was killed because he was those things.
America cannot survive if this metastasizing rot is not stopped and removed. Here’s the thing: The cancer has spread for so long, and so much of the body is affected, that the body will inevitably be harmed in the process. It cannot escape damage. Too much healthy tissue has already been lost to the disease. What will remain after this surgery will be scarred, misshapen, less mobile, less energetic, and exhausted. Already, many on the right fret about civil liberties. They’re right to worry. But what has been occurring is not freedom. American citizens have cowered before these woke, DEI, communist bullies, and now they see Catholic children, a refugee, and Charlie Kirk murdered. They see that words cannot combat this violence.
The alternative to dealing with this demon is death.
I don’t think the center Right grasps the implications of this. While conservative influencers fight over the legacy of what Charlie Kirk built and inveigh that they will continue his courageous work on college campuses, they risk ultimate failure because they are only addressing those who share the fundamental belief in free speech and the power of persuasive words. While the Right has succeeded in winning thousands of hearts and minds — as shown by the worldwide outpouring of grief and solidarity in the wake of Charlie’s death — many on the left reject this premise entirely. They believe that hurt feelings and what they perceive as “mean words” deserve violence and death. If you disagree with me, they reason, you hate me, and you deserve to die.
When Charlie Kirk is talking and the political opposition is shooting, civil authorities who are unwilling to deal with the terrorist cells producing these killers are no different from Redcoats standing in careful formation, flummoxed by motivated Americans using guerilla tactics they dismiss as “uncivilized.” Tut-tut, how dare you?
The enemies of Western civilization are uncivilized, godless heathens. Accept this. Do not pretend that the demon-possessed can be reasoned with or persuaded by words.
Majorie Taylor-Greene has proposed a national divorce — she concludes that the two worldviews of the Left and the Right cannot coexist and so need to be separated. But how could this be done? Our country is utterly intermingled. We are one body, for better or worse. The heinous violence on the left will not be stopped with words alone.
A demonic spirit is at work. The corruption affects the minds and actions of these killers. When Jesus met the demon-possessed, he talked to them, but then he acted, casting the demons out and sending them into pigs at their own request. The demons promptly drove the pigs over the cliff to their deaths. They want their hosts to die. To them, death is more meaningful than life.
In journal entries posted on YouTube, the Minnesota church assassin expressed regret over his decision to transition, anger at his mom for not approving of his life choices, and, ultimately, resentment at the truth: His mom had been right. Rather than admit his mistake and change his life, he chose the path of Judas: betrayal and murder, and then suicide.
Charlie Kirk’s killer had his whole life ahead of him. All good things were within his reach. He is smart, good-looking, and utterly nihilistic. Killing Charlie Kirk gave his life meaning. Rotting in jail or death by firing squad is preferable to making a life.
The enemy determines the battlefield, and they are using bullets. They have been entreated to talk, and some respond to grace with murder. To be clear, I am not seeking vigilantes or street justice, but those will come if Republicans and the president who leads them do not take these dangerous Antifa elements seriously. Rather, it is time to fully grasp that the America that the America First voters seek will not come through persuasion alone, but through elected leadership and the power of the state to impose that vision and crush violence. The Left came close to achieving total domination, and Trump’s election does not mean they have given up. Now, instead of creating CHAZ units in Portland, some are carrying out target assassinations.
But it is risible that the American people, seeking relief, will likely get none from the people they elected because those leaders lack the internal fortitude.
Reflect on this passage from Jeremiah, chapter 6:
“From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practice deceit. They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace. Are they ashamed of their detestable conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush.” (Jeremiah 6:13–15, NIV)
What will happen if the sickness of progressive ideology is allowed to advance unchecked? We don’t have to wonder. Nearly every Protestant denomination has been hollowed out from within by cultural Marxists. The churches convulsed internally, and a small but dedicated minority took them over, filled them with heresy, and destroyed them in the name of gay marriage and women preachers.
Ultimately, America has a spiritual problem. It started as a Christian nation, giving glory to God and standing firm in her convictions, and a good half of the nation remains Christian today. Charlie glorified Christ in word and deed. He fought for Trump’s election, believing that Trump would use his divinely given power to steer the country back onto a healthy path.
Where Charlie was naive is that he believed persuading people toward liberal values would be enough — that this would mean conservatives in positions of authority would be willing to use the power of the government to stop the violence of the radical Left. There are limits to this approach. Jesus had to actively cast out the demons for the bodies to heal (Matthew 8:28).
Our elected leadership must get down to the business of casting out. It is what the people voted for. This, for a time, is going to escalate social pain, but it is necessary to heal America. We must also acknowledge that America will not remain the same. It will be harmed in the process, but it will live.
Without this sort of reckoning, America is lost.
So while there is good news all around, it’s delusional to ignore the poison within. Cultural Marxists are destroying the vestiges of what made America great. And if the movement’s violent elements are not stopped by the government, in an official capacity, the country will eventually be in civil war because average Americans have far more courage of their convictions than their elected officials.
Before concluding, it’s also worth noting that the FBI did not catch Charlie Kirk’s killer. The FBI — who sat in Catholic churches and perhaps still does, who entrapped hapless rednecks to manufacture a kidnapping plot, and who sent their khaki-clad minions marching around to intimate being right-wing goofballs — could not find a killer sitting in his parents’ home. This is concerning. Is it incompetence? Is it malice? Or are the remaining agents still loyal to their Marxist masters rather than the American people?
Targeting Antifa, arresting lawbreakers, and destroying their funding mechanism: This is what MAGA voted for. Will President Donald Trump deliver? If he doesn’t, I fear that America will get a true tyrant, or that the American people will take matters into their own hands.
In the meantime, the solution is to prepare one’s heart. To pray. To seek God’s face. To see clearly and not pretend. In times like these, when seeing is so difficult, that alone is an act of courage.
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