Ever Bold, Never Brash

By Charlie Johnston

Covington, Louisiana – Matt Gaetz would not have been my choice for Attorney General. If I wanted to take a blowtorch to the place and the bulldoze the rubble so it could never target honest Americans for disagreeing with the government narrative, he is the perfect guy to send. Maybe Gaetz would have been my choice, after all. Donald Trump just thought of it before I did. The false lawfare accusations launched against him by Merrick Garland and Nancy Pelosi are a badge of honor, as far as I’m concerned. My issue with him was potentially blowing up the House to take out his personal enemy, Speaker Kevin McCarthy. But that “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” attitude is just what we need right now.

A pattern is emerging with Trump’s picks, particularly heading agencies that have chosen to be enforcers of leftist regime narratives. Trump Is choosing nominees who have previously been personally victimized by these agencies to head them. That means he won’t have to prod these department heads into action, He may, in fact, occasionally have to restrain them. Tulsi Gabbard will head the agency that put her on a terrorist watch list for endorsing Trump. Gaetz was the victim of manufactured lawfare at a time he was effectively criticizing the DOJ and the Dems lawfare games. Pete Hegseth was publicly mocked and ridiculed by woke generals for his book criticizing (and proposing how to reorganize) woke military leadership. Robert Kennedy Jr. has been the target of ire from the medical establishment for decades. Now he will head the Dept. of Health and Human Services. (By the way, did you know that, for all the ridicule Kennedy received for positing that vaccines might cause autism, the CDC conceded in 2022 that they have never done a study testing that proposition – so they simply don’t know. They were not basing their ridicule on science, but just on the principle of ‘shut up.’) I like where this is all going.

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We may be on the verge of a major new era dawning in America. That is a big leap to make from one election – and I am not given to such extravagant presumption on the basis of a mere election. But there are several major trends that have converged, even crashed, together in this outcome. Not to mention that it was comprehensive. Almost every county in the country got redder than it was two and four years ago. That suggests an entirely new trajectory rather than an anomaly.

I have said for some time that the rules are changing – and that that will become apparent very suddenly. The puff-n-stuff pretense, the condescension, the nagging, the raw malice, the using others as a mere shelf from which to launch your own ambitions were all going to collapse abruptly as a means of gaining and attaining power. Genuine altruism, authenticity, honor, integrity, and humility were going to make a powerful comeback as the attributes in which people would vest their collective confidence. I think we may have crossed the initial border into that new territory. But first we must completely conquer the malicious orcs who brought us to this pass in hopes of ruling us.

Just like clockwork, the left has trotted out a wilted woman to claim that Matt Gaetz had sex with her when she was 17 – and one to accuse Pete Hegseth of…something. They apparently are going to try to Kavanaugh every conservative who threatens them now. I don’t think much of anyone will pay attention anymore. That sad playbook has been trotted out way too often. (And why are the women the left trots out almost always such pathetic goobers? Most would struggle to get a date – and I suspect they are trying to vicariously relive their teens as hot, young, and happening in their own imaginations…kind of like the overzealous Little League parent who couldn’t catch a fly ball when he was young trying to make his poor, bedraggled kid into the second coming of Ted Williams.) The shrieks of outrage from the denizens of Washington and media establishments are falling on deaf ears as well. The people who foisted Karine whatever her name is on us as the greatest press secretary ever and that guy in a dress as head of HHS and the other guy in a dress who was also a luggage thief to be in charge of nuclear waste have pretty much burned their credibility to a smoking hulk when it comes to lecturing us on who is qualified and who isn’t. We all know that, instead of four more years of the media explaining that every bad thing that happens was all Trump’s fault will give way to four years of the same idiot media explaining that all the good things that happen are just the Biden policies finally kicking in. And their ratings will continue to tank. We’re done with that clown car. I have no doubt that the gutter press will still be shrieking and cursing us as the last of them sink beneath the waves of public opprobrium they have summoned but, hey, to coin a phrase, we’re not going back.

Experts without expertise are not cool anymore. The old establishment Republican David Brooks recently posited in Atlantic Magazine that the meritocracy we set up isn’t working.  He got it completely wrong. The meritocracy we tried to set up in the late 40’s and 50’s isn’t working because it isn’t a meritocracy. It is just a credentials factory. A degree from Harvard in 1965 meant something serious. A degree from Harvard today is little more than a participation trophy with gold foil embossed.

A lot of people have woken up to the reality that the godless woke left is comprised by a bunch of men without chests who have been gaslighting us all along. With all of the screeching from the leftist media, Democrats, and RINO’s, more are waking up each day. Going back to the usual playbook when the curtain has been decisively pulled back only cements the realization that these are a bunch of lying grifters, rogues and scalawags. I think the “woke” movement is a dead man walking – and fitfully tearing itself to bits as it lumbers on to its final demise.

The American Spectator’s insightful Scott McKay thinks we are headed to a major realignment, as well. I agree with his piece with a few caveats. I would add the election of Andrew Jackson as a sea change, as well – a populism that shifted political power away from Virginia and New England to the burgeoning western part of the country (remember that, at the time, Tennessee, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois et al WERE the western part of the country). Often, before such a major realignment, there are foreshocks. For example, the foreshock of the administrative state came with Woodrow Wilson’s presidency. Wilson hated American democracy and was convinced the country should be ruled by experts. He didn’t make much headway, but the idea was injected into the body politic. Fifteen years later Franklin Roosevelt began making Wilson’s dream into reality. At the time, most credentialed experts actually did have expertise. The needs of World War II, then the repatriation of American soldiers back into the economy after the war made that model an opportune fit for the times. Lyndon Johnson brought the first serious convulsion into the model by vastly expanding the field of public life dominated by government with his Great Society programs. Barack Obama completely deranged it with his vision of a utopian (actually dystopian) government directing every aspect of citizens’ lives – and at a time where experts only occasionally had expertise and were entirely focused on amassing power. From that point, it was just a matter of time before all the shaking, sparking and convulsions left it a shattered heap.

From that standpoint, Ronald Reagan’s presidency was both a return to normalcy and a foreshock of the movement away from the administrative state. The tea party movement and Trump’s first presidency were later foreshocks, signaling a longing for the abject rejection of the bureaucratic deep state (just another term for the administrative state that highlights the sinister character it took on as it expanded and fought to dominate everyone.) The return of Trump after the comical disaster and overreach of the Joe Biden years (only comical if you didn’t have to live it) may well signal the beginning of reclamation of sovereignty to the people. Government by consent of the governed, rather than by decree of the men without chests. The only thing that could derail it now is if Trump did not work assiduously and innovatively to accomplish what he promised.

Oh, the Deep State will throw serious obstacles in the way in their frantic effort to survive. Biden’s authorization of the use of long-range American missiles by Ukraine is a pathetic, cynical, effort to inflame that war before Trump takes office. But the curtain has been pulled back decisively. I doubt we folksies are going to buy into intentional deep state sabotage for political advantage any longer.

There is a lesson here. Whatever system you start with, ambitious men of low character, glib tongues, and no honor will learn to game it to their advantage, masking what they are doing to you by piously claiming they are doing it for you. The price of liberty is, indeed, eternal vigilance.

For now, the American people are reclaiming their sovereignty.

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I am a devotee of Our Lady of America. She first appeared to Sr. Mary Ephrem (nee Mildred Neuzil) on Sept. 26, 1956 (exactly seven months after I was born). A friend of this site, Dan Lynch, is the most prolific promoter of her messages.

Our Lady of America emphasizes purity, the preeminence of the family – with its pure, self-sacrificial love – as the foundational organizational principle of a Godly culture, and the indwelling of the Trinity. She speaks of the need of American youth to lead the world to renewal in God. That matches up so well with what I am convinced of: that America must lead the world deep renewal of faith…That we in the New World, who were first evangelized from the Old World, must re-evangelize the Old World…for it is through faith, family and freedom that a healthy Western Civilization will rise anew. There is no substitute. The path ahead is a lot more difficult, even brutal, one than that gentle advocacy intimates. Wars, strife, and violence lie before us. But if, in devotion to Our Lady we strive to be pure, mortifying ourselves with our many failures, we will walk safely through the valley of death, to return the world to life and love.

I have nightmares sometimes of being a child in the womb, desperately trying to dodge the abortionist’s knife. I sometimes have to walk away and weep when I hear someone say, “love is love,” reducing love to their preferred sexual stimulation. I see all the shrieking misery in the world and want to shout that they are bringing it on themselves, but few hear. This generation has a great and weighty task assigned to it: to lead the world back to God; to convey the circular deception of woke ideology to the volcano with its author – the satan, himself – and toss it in to never afflict our world again.

With the election, particularly if it truly is the beginning of the recovery of the sovereignty of the people, we have taken a good first step to fit us for our task. But a nation in which the majority think killing a baby for their convenience is a matter of moral indifference at best, and a human right at worst, is not yet fit for the task before us. We must not go back to the indolence and presumption that led us to the very precipice of having to fight a new revolutionary war to secure basic liberty before we could even begin to consider our great task. God has given us a great gift, a head start, a little push to get us going.

Truly, there are great battles ahead. Without neglecting the battles that must be fought, we must become great and tireless evangelists. May the light of Christ shine with simple clarity through us, with great brilliance and power, drawing people away from that which destroys and back to that which brings life, light, and laughter. Let us change the world by changing ourselves. The joy of Christ is infectious. May we each become the primary carriers of that infection, remembering always that a gloomy saint is not much of a saint, at all. Let us go forth to all the world. God has entrusted this great task to this generation. Let’s get to it.

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I was saddened to hear that a wonderful Catholic broadcaster and friend in the Berkshires, Maryanne Santelli, passed last summer. Whenever I was with her I got an abundance of laughter and prayer. When my car broke down a few years ago near Stockbridge, Massachusetts, it was Maryanne who volunteered to drive me around so we could get a meeting together. Glory, she was a delight! I will miss her.

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Please pray for Dennis Prager, the great Jewish conservative columnist and founder of PragerU. He suffered a serious back injury last week and, by all reports, will have a long recovery. He has been a real champion of straight-forward common sense. His marvelous PragerU clips (rarely longer than 5 minutes) take profound, complex subjects and make them easily understandable. He has been a mainstay in keeping those of our youth who will hear grounded. Pray that he will recover entirely and have many years of good work ahead of him.

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As we get into the holidays (I’m glad to be able to say that: when I was young everyone knew we were talking about the great Christian holidays when we said that. The woke left used the phrase to try to stop references to Christmas. I am sick of them stealing our perfectly good phrases and trying to weaponize them against us. Let’s take them back.) I ask again that those of you who can, remember us at CORAC in your donations. We need it…and we will keep fighting and expanding the good fight together. Give what you can when you can, but if you can manage a little before the end of the month, that would be good!

Meantime, Happy Holidays! I hope all of you have a gay, old time! (There – took two perfectly good expressions back from the wokesters in a single bound!)

If communication goes out for any length of time, meet outside your local Church at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Tell friends at Church now in case you can’t then. CORAC teams will be out looking for people to gather in and work with.

Find me on Twitter at @JohnstonPilgrim

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