By Charlie Johnston
I spent most of my life in various parts of the often-frozen northern states of Illinois and Colorado. Right now, I am housebound in Texas…not out of any infirmity, but because we had a decent ice and snowstorm outside. I chuckle because, objectively, what we got (about an inch and a half of snow covering at least an inch, maybe two, of ice) would be considered a moderate nuisance among my Yankee peers. (I have never made any bones about being a Yankee – but because of my roots in Alabama and, lesser known, Texas, I always tell Southerners that yeah, I’m a Yankee, but I’m kind of a southern-fried Yankee. Always gets a good laugh. I learned to talk in Birmingham, Alabama. When I went to first grade (no kindergarten for me) all my friends teased me constantly over my thick southern accent. In the summer between first and second grades, I decided that, by gum, I was going to teach myself how to talk Yankee – and I did. That, I suppose, is when I first became bilingual.)
Fellow Yankees may chuckle at the panic that hits the south whenever a mild snow or freeze hits, but it really is different down here. For one thing, the houses do not have the thick insulation that northern homes do. For another, most have never even heard of double-paned windows, much less know why they are important to keep the cold at bay. There is no equipment for plowing snow…and salt is for your French fries. No matter how much you heat your house, the cold radiates in from the windows and the walls. When I’m walking barefoot upstairs, it feels normal – but do it downstairs where the floors are directly above the ground and you might as well be walking barefoot on a frozen pond. Trying to drive in this is like driving on a hockey rink that has just been cleared by the Zamboni for extra slickness. Give it a week and a half and Texans will probably think 75 degrees is cold again…but for now both Texans – and any Yankee visitors – are best advised to hunker down indoors.
I’m in the process of establishing dual residency in Colorado and Texas – and I will vote in Texas. The Colorado situation has been thoroughly corrupted by all mail-in voting, which is ripe for easy fraud. I think the Colorado judiciary is the most corrupted in the nation – which is saying something with New York and California in the mix. But in Colorado, they put Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters in prison for exposing vote fraud…and the bloody state Supreme Court tried to throw Trump off the ballot – with no actual legal predicate, whatsoever. If the state Supreme Court Justices are that stupid and venial, imagine what the rest of the state is like. I’m not just going off of these high-profile cases. I have consulted in some civil cases you never heard of there. In one, an idiot court ordered a plaintiff to pay the legal fees of a defendant who admitted to the what she was accused of. Absolutely flabbergasting…but politically the liberal judge liked the position of the defendant and wanted to stick it to the otherwise successful plaintiff, so the court decided the law be damned. The Colorado Legislature is the most ignorant, feckless, and pretentious of any I have seen up close.
From the start, I did NOTHING politically in Colorado. I wanted it to be my bedroom and where I could rest up. I had gotten big enough in Illinois that I couldn’t go to a convenience store without three people asking me for favors. I wanted to be left alone in Colorado. Of course, I have religious reasons for maintaining my presence there, too. They actually are my primary reason for staying tied to that politically rapidly degenerating state.
From outside, Texas seems to be a really solid state – and its people are solid. It is a red state with a purple legislature. My vote can make a difference in Texas. I have my doubts it even gets counted once I mail it in in Colorado. (No, they don’t know how you vote in a specific election, but once it arrives in the mailbox, a “rogue” clerk can easily look up what primaries you vote in – and dump, say, one in ten votes that come from Republicans. I want a very strong America – and I think a very strong Texas is vital to having a strong America long-term. Plus, my Dad was stationed at the old Kelly Air Base in San Antonio (now subsumed by Lackland Air Base) when Mom got pregnant with me…so I’m actually a native Texan. I never thought I’d say it, but I’ll be glad when I can tell my friends up north that the temperature today was 85…the LOW temperature.
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A lot of ink is being spilled and a lot of pixels being spread about the insurrection happening in Minnesota. Things have calmed down since Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey agreed to cooperate with President Trump. I don’t know whether it is a real calming or just the quiet before an even greater storm.
What I do know is that the left is attempting a color revolution like the CIA has used to overturn many foreign governments. That is bad – but it is a good sign. Other than open civil war, it is their last desperate effort to pull victory from the ashes of their ongoing, fiery defeat.
I have been saying for over a year that the power of evil is broken. It cannot win a contested battle any longer. The only way it can prevail is if ordinary people give up and forfeit the victory that is otherwise ours. If you rip the roof off a warehouse full of vampires at high noon, they wil not quietly die: they will hiss, screech, and try to bite anyone they can. If you are intimidated into putting the roof back on to calm the chaos, some may survive and you are right back where you started. The power of evil is broken, but it never goes quietly into the dark night of its own elimination.
Though there are legitimate questions of strategy and tactics on how to finish the screeching madness of leftist authoritarians, such as whether to contain them to blue states or whether to arrest and jail them wherever they attack under the color of “protest,” the only fundamental question is whether we will stay the course or give up to stop the chaos. If we stay the course, we win. If we shrink away in hopes the chaos will go away, we will enter a great and new dark ages.
The Trump administration seems determined to stay the course. The criticism I have seen of him on the right has been over which tactics are best, not whether to stay the course. Of course, there is always the bleating from the surrender caucus of some Republicans to back off in the futile hope of getting back to “normal” – a state this country has not been in since I was in my thirties. Trump is solid. The midterm elections will largely determine whether the people of this country still have the fortitude to be there with him. We have the gift of New York City and the State of Virginia in which, after Democrats whispered sweet nothings in the voters’ ears, they promptly got to work bankrupting and brutalizing those voters after being given power. That ought to help remind people of what the actual stakes are.
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I was embarrassed last week as Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) made her bid to displace Mazie Hirono (D-HI) as the dumbest member of the Senate in the hearing with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Some critics say that Rubio made her look like a fool. I say she did all the heavy lifting, herself, in that effort.
I say I was embarrassed because I did most of my political work in Illinois. I was a very big dog in that state for a time. One hates to see their home state brought so low.
In the late 90’s, after over 80 years where a conservative could not get more than 30% of the vote in a statewide Republican Primary, being an actual conservative became the preferred position for Republican state primaries. I was the architect of that shift – and was universally recognized as having been so. But there was a flaw. Illinois does not have runoffs if no candidate wins 50% plus one in a primary.
Conservatives have many virtues, but have some big flaws, as well. Besides often being overly doctrinaire and making the perfect the enemy of the good, a lot of minor conservatives are convinced they can be “the guy.” I knew that squishy Republicans were eventually going to figure that out – and start uniting behind one candidate while encouraging numerous conservatives to run. During the ’98 and 2000 cycles I tried to convince the legislature to mandate runoff elections. I failed. Sadly, I probably helped moderates figure out the strategy that would ultimately undo both conservatives AND Republicans in the state. By ’02, it was well under way. That year, squishy Republicans, mainly in the State Senate, encouraged multiple conservatives to run in the Republican primary and saw how effective dividing the conservative vote was – and how susceptible to flattery many conservatives were. By 2012, the squishes were actually quietly funding minor conservative statewide candidates and the party was over. Illinois elected the most liberal Republican Senator, Mark Kirk, it ever had. Kirk was a guy who, as a Republican Congressman, labored to make Chicago the national center for embryonic stem cell research and abortion. (He had the full support of Arizona Senator John McCain in this – which is why, despite McCain’s pro-life lip service, I could never support him).
Squish Republican idiots celebrated their great “victory” in finally beating back the conservative ascendancy. What they were too thick to know was that, in so doing, they also doomed themselves. Conservatives often beat Democrats. Once Democrats beat back conservatives, they train their sights on Republican squishes. It was morbidly funny to me to watch Illinois RINOs, once it dawned on them that they had signed their own death warrants, start frantically trying to pretend they were conservatives – the very people they had spent a decade trying to eliminate from the party – in an effort to get some traction again. And now we have replaced Republican midwits, who are merely venial, with Democrat nitwits who are mortally stupid.
Tammy Duckworth first defeated a friend of mine, Congressman Peter Roskam, from what was once the key Republican bastion of DuPage County, as the acidic strategy of the “moderate” Republicans started eating away at so much of the Republican base. (Less than 30 years ago, every statewide official in Illinois was Republican. The moderates completely killed that – and now Illinois is almost as deep blue as California.) When Duckworth beat Roskam, I sadly shook my head that it was the entirely predictable result of the Republican establishment purging conservatives from the party. I did not expect Duckworth to later run for – and win – a Senate seat. She just did not have any intellectual heft. But she is a woman who was wounded in combat, which she reminds people of every time she says something dumb – which is quite often. She never tells them she got the wound as a result of ignoring an order not to go into a spot until it was better secured and backed up. Man, I used to deal with a MUCH better class of Democrats than the shrieking loonies they have now.
It occurred to me earlier this year that, for all the hooting and hollering, the leftists are destroying themselves in slow motion. The most dangerous challenge we face is not from those loons, but from red state RINO’s who are busily trying to dismantle the party and the country in order to prop up their own jobs and contracts. That is why I took on a Texas State Rep race to unseat a Republican squish. What outsiders don’t know is that, though Texas is genuinely a red state, it has a VERY purple legislature. I personally think America is vital to the future of the world – and that Texas is vital to a strong America, so I signed on. It amuses me that much of the Republican establishment here has turned its fire on the race I am running. It suddenly morphed into the equivalent of a statewide race as the establishment realized what an existential threat it is to their efforts to keep the jobs and contracts rolling to them while ignoring the people they are supposed to serve. I am seeing the same tactics the Illinois Republican establishment used to wipe out actual conservatives in Illinois. While I ultimately lost that battle, I pray to win this one as I believe a whole lot, nationally and even globally, is hinging on it. We’ll see.
One weird thing about Texas is that many of the most liberal groups give themselves conservative sounding names. The two biggest funders leading the attack here are the Texas Defense PAC, which is almost entirely funded by the Sands Casino and the American Federation for Children, run by a San Francisco billionaire who is focused on climate change activism. I remember when I went to Cubs games when I was young, purveyors of scorecards would shout, “Get your scorecard. You can’t tell who the players are without a scorecard.” Sheesh…in Texas you need a lot more than a scorecard to know who the players are. But this is the main front I am on in the battle for Western Civilization right now.
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In the end, we will have a religious revival in America or we will see the end of America. After ousting God from the public square, leftists also ousted meaning from their lives. A lot of their shrieking madness is just a desperate attempt to imbue meaning into political vessels that are far too leaky to hold it. The emptier it proves itself to be, the more they shriek, hoping to make up in volume and madness what they lack in satisfaction and meaning.
St. Augustine spoke of a God-shaped hole in our hearts. “We were made for you, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You,” he noted. So many people are trying to fill that hole with the dirt of petty ideologies and narratives – and just get angrier and crazier because nothing gives them rest. It is a signal triumph of the devil that he convinced so many people that the one thing they must not try to fill that hole with is the one thing that would actually fill it: God. This is the Storm, my friends, the definitive battle between good and evil. St. Michael the Archangel, defend us!
I am going to close this missive from the Texas Tundra with a marvelous new reflection – and warning – from one of my favorite Bishops, Bishop Emeritus Joseph Strickland. Bishop Strickland has been steadfast and steady. If you have not yet followed him at his website, pillarsoffaith.net, you really should. He is a great and true sign of hope out there. I think he has a much larger role than almost anyone yet suspects in the coming revival of the Catholic Hierarchy. As another friend, Bishop Rene Gracida is wont to say, “May his tribe increase.”
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 X at @JohnstonPilgrim
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