3 Things Republicans Need To Do Between Now And November To Win The Midterms

From The Federalist.com (Jan. 28):

The Republican majority in the U.S. Congress may be at risk in the 2026 midterm elections. This is hard to believe, given recent approval polling on the Democrat Party. Last month, reputable Quinnipiac pollsters reported congressional Democrats hit a record low job approval of 18 percent, with 73 percent disapproval — the worst since tracking began in 2009.

Still, the Republican majorities in the Senate and particularly the House are at risk in the upcoming midterm elections if the base of the Republican Party is not motivated to vote. Historically, the president’s party generally loses seats in the midterms, particularly in the House. If this happens, the reform agenda of the Trump administration would be constrained, if not derailed. President Donald Trump says he will campaign this year for Republican candidates, but more importantly he needs to do several things to get out the vote, protect his agenda,  and even increase the Republican congressional majority.

Most important, Trump needs to deliver on three major unfinished initiatives: First, fix the integrity of our national elections by mandating voter IDs, one-day vote casting and counting, and replacing digital voting machines with paper ballots. Second, make sure public officials and powerful private-sector figures who have committed felonies are visibly and successfully prosecuted in the next few months. Third, use all legal tools and precedents to arrest and prosecute perpetrators of mass felony crimes and reestablish law and order in blue cities and states that are experiencing urban lawlessness and industrial-scale fraud.

Fixing the Integrity of U.S. Elections

The fundamental reason why election integrity is of paramount importance is that the whole basis of the United States is the sovereignty of the people. It is the DNA of America. The legitimacy and moral authority of the country come only from the people, who express their preferences for their local, state, and national government officials through free and fair elections. When there is vote fraud and election irregularities, the moral authority of government is compromised, causing the people to disrespect and distrust their own government.

The moral authority of United States is also critical in maintaining regional and world order and peace. There are times when the most crucial factor in prevailing against corrupt regimes and dictatorial foreign governments is the moral authority of the United States. When the U.S. loses it moral authority, as it did during the Biden administration, its deterrent power is compromised and foreign adversaries are emboldened.

Prosecuting Felonies

One function of our law enforcement and justice system is to punish lawbreakers. However, the more important function of law enforcement is the deterrence of other lawbreakers and the prevention of escalating crime.

What has most greased the skids of America’s decline toward the ways of banana republics is the emergence and acceptance of two-tiered justice and attendant cronyism and political corruption.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the pass given to the Clintons, and particularly former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who destroyed, concealed, and covered up records and documents on paper and digital devices with the intent to impede or obstruct the investigation of a matter about which she was subpoenaed and under investigation by the U.S. Congress. Hillary’s crimes were felonies, punishable by fines and imprisonment up to 20 years, according to 18 U.S. Code 1519. Then FBI Director James Comey let Clinton off with no sanction or penalty.

In the last year of Barack Obama’s first presidential term, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton failed to respond to the militant insurrection at the U.S. embassy’s diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that resulted in the death of four Americans, including then U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens. In fact, Clinton succeeded in deflecting accountability, failure, and penalty by sending then-Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice to promote and repeat a fabricated story of causality for the Benghazi humiliation and tragedy on all the major TV network Sunday talk shows.

When Trump succeeded in the 2016 upset presidential election against favored candidate Clinton, a cabal to undermine President-Elect Trump was organized by Obama. Included in that cabal were the FBI’s Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, DNI Director James Clapper, and National Security Advisor Rice. It could be argued that this unthinkably bold seditious act was undertaken by these very people because of the legacy of prior unaccountability and the two-tiered justice system that had become the norm.

Restoring Law and Order in American Cities

The modern sanctuary city movement to provide safe haven to illegal immigrants began in the 1980s during the surge of  Central American refugees into the U.S.

According to radical left training manuals from the Conference on Alternative State and Local Policies in the late 1970s and 1980s, there was an agenda to radicalize city and state government to transform America. The radicalization of targeted “blue” cities and states dovetailed with the sanctuary city movement. And today there are about 20 large cities and 13 states that have adopted sanctuary status with policies, laws, and regulations that impede enforcement of federal law and federal immigration laws in particular.

In addition to huge sums of money funding radical political change at the state and city levels, over the last few decades radicalized state and city government leaders have increasingly embraced defunding the police and been corrupted through public funding kickbacks. They have also become increasingly militant in using their authority to violate, obstruct, and defy the enforcement of federal immigration laws.

The pent-up frustration with unaccountability for questionable elections, seditious high crimes by the political class against the American people, and the radicalization and breakdown of law and order in a growing number of cities demoralizes American citizens. Trump needs to make sure these three areas are dealt with promptly and decisively to ensure that America remains an independent constitutional republic.

Failure to deliver in visible ways on these three problem areas would surely demoralize the Republican base and depress voter turnout and put Republican congressional majorities at risk.  A Democrat majority in the House would not only derail the Trump agenda but would lead to impeachment 3.0 and conditions that would threaten the integrity and continuity of the United States. [source]

Good advice.  Hopefully, the Republicans will take the advice and stop being the Washington Generals to the Dems.

Trade Victory

From Bill O’Reilly.com (Feb. 3):

Big win for the world as the Trump administration solidifies a trade deal with India. That country will stop buying Russian oil, which will hurt Putin, and start purchasing US and Venezuelan oil.

Unless Jeffrey Epstein once bought US oil, chances are you will hear little about the trade victory with India. It’s almost like the Marx Brothers are in charge of the American press these days: “Hello, I must be going.”

The media is locked in on ICE and Epstein in order to continue damaging Trump with the midterm election later this year.

The absolute focus of the vast majority of media reporting is to assure a democratic victory. That’s it.

In a way, it’s kind of shocking, the abdication of any journalistic fairness.

In fact, the horrid cliché comes to mind: it is what it is.

But it shouldn’t be. [source]

Another win!  And if it helps stops the Russia-Ukraine war, even better.

How the Church Has Been Good for Women… and Other Ways It Is “Essential”

From Breakpoint.org (Aug. 9, 2022):

Throughout Church history, church attendance and overall religiosity have been higher among women than among men. That seems to be changing, especially for younger generations. According to new data, the long-existent church gender gap, which shows up in both religious affiliation and church attendance, has now flipped.

However, the headline is not that more men are connecting with the Church. The story is that more women are disconnecting from the Church.

A number of factors have contributed to this demographic shift, not least of which are recent scandals of sexual impropriety and abusive leadership among prominent pastors and Christian leaders. Also, education and ethnicity seem to play a significant role in the religious identification of millennial women. “Among white respondents,” a recent Christianity Today article summarized, “women are 9 percentage points more likely to say that they have no religious affiliation compared to white men,” but “there’s no real difference in the share of male and female nones among Black, Asian, and other racial groups.”

Another factor, Dr. Abigail Favale argues in a new book The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory, is the rising influence of feminist thought, what she calls “the gender paradigm” in evangelical circles. Or as a colleague recently put it, describing the deconstruction process of a few of her friends, “It’s all about ‘resisting the patriarchy.” That kind of language points to the paradigm which Dr. Favale once herself subscribed. She now believes it to be incompatible with a Christian understanding of male and female, sex, and gender.

Even so, the feminist paradigm has quite successfully framed Christianity and the Church as misogynist, patriarchal, and harmful for women. The same paradigm idealistically reframes pagan religions and cultures as being pro-woman, at least until Christianity gained prominence. This narrative, however, doesn’t match the historical realities.

First, in contrast to ancient paganism, monotheism provided women with more freedom than polytheistic religions with goddesses did. In cultures dominated by the latter, women were limited to roles performed by the goddesses, and not always all of them. In fact, the “role” designated for many women by pagan religion was temple prostitute, a tool of men’s worship.

In ancient Rome, women were permitted to engage in business, but their primary role was in the household. Men had public roles, but women engaged in domestic work were subservient to their father or husband. As in other historical periods, elite women had more options. However, the vast majority of women were seen as not much better than slaves.

Twelve was the legal age for girls to marry in Rome. If not married by 20, women were generally marginalized. Though divorce was available to both men and women, husbands caused most divorces since women rarely had other financial means. Ex-wives and widows were often left destitute.

In contrast, Christianity saw women as the spiritual and moral equal of men. Women and men shared the same created dignity, the same problem (sin), and the same solution, Jesus. As result, women in the Christian community had a higher status and more freedom than women in the broader Roman world.

The Christian rejection of divorce and sexual double standards, and its insistence on strict monogamy reflected this. Further, women were given more choice about whom and whether to marry and tended to marry later than their Roman counterparts. While widows were encouraged to remarry, the Church provided aid for those who did not or could not.

The Church also rejected abortion and infanticide as murder, meaning that women were not subjected to dangerous surgical procedures, and girls were not “discarded.” Thus, there were proportionately more women in the Christian community than in Roman society as a whole.

Because of Christian attitudes and behavior toward women, more women converted to Christianity than men, and many men who converted did so under the influence of their wives. Eventually, Christianity transformed the status of women in the Roman world. Unfortunately, as Greek ideas were adopted within the Church, elements of pagan misogyny were as well. For example, some Church fathers placed blame for the Fall entirely on Eve and ignored the Apostle Paul’s putting the blame on Adam.

Nonetheless, Christianity did more to improve the status of women than any other historical force. Even today, as the Gospel spreads around the Global South, the status and freedoms enjoyed by women are being raised. The treatment of women is just one example of how the Church has been an essential force for good in the world.

There are others, even in an age that often labels the Church “non-essential.” Don’t buy it. [source]

Weimar America

From AM Greatness.com (Dec. 4, 2023):

Something eerie, something creepy, is happening in the world—and now in America as well. The dark mood is brought on by elite universities, the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion industry, and massive immigration from illiberal nations and anti-Enlightenment societies.

At Hillcrest High School in Queens, New York, hundreds of students rioted on news that a single teacher in her private social media account had expressed support for Israel. Waving Palestinian flags, and screaming violent threats, the student mob rioted, destroyed school property, sought the teacher out and tried to crash into her classroom—before she was saved from violence by other teachers and an eventual police arrival.

The subtext was that the overwhelmingly minority students (whose school is ranked academically near the bottom among New York City schools) were acculturated to the racist reality that as the “oppressed” they were exempt from any punishment for hunting down their own teacher. As a Jewish (and thus white) “oppressive” supporter of Israel, she was reduced to, in the words an enthusiastic commenter on a Tik Tok video of the riot, a “cracker ass bitch.” And so the student pack tracked her down as if they were hunting an animal. The old Nazi youth gangs tried to kill Jews because they were not considered “white;” our new Nazis hunt them down because they allege that they are. The common denominator between the 1930s and 2023 is an unhinged hatred of Jews.

Hundreds of such incidents are now occurring on a daily basis—as the country is leaving its Weimar phase and heading at warp speed into normalizing Jew-hatred and worse. Instructors singled out Jewish students in classes at UC Davis and Stanford. Pro-Hamas students ripped down posters, swarmed public buildings, and disrupted traffic.

A pro-Israeli demonstrator in Los Angeles was hit on the head and killed by a pro-Palestinian university professor.

Jewish students were trapped in a Cooper Union university library surrounded by pro-Hamas demonstrators. At MIT, Jewish students were warned to keep away from particular areas of the campus deemed dangerous for them.

What would happen to a university president who warned black or Latino students to keep clear of areas where she could not guarantee their safety from other students?

A bankrupt media deserves much of the blame. They daily broadcast Hamas’s suspect casualty figures, as if that terrorist organization has ever been capable of speaking the truth.

The Western news regurgitated “500 dead at a Gaza hospital,” due to a supposedly deliberate Israel bombing. In fact, the hospital parking lot was hit by an errant Islamic Jihad missile intended to kill civilians in Israel.

No matter—few reporters apologized for spreading Hamas-fed misinformation, despite the previous Hamas lies that they never harmed civilians, that tunnels were not beneath hospital grounds, that they did not murder 1,200 Israelis; or their lies that Hamas gunmen do not rape, when they engaged in mass rape on October 7.

The media normalizes Hamas’s atrocities by treating it as if it were an ordinary government, not a murderous terrorist clique that decapitates civilians, takes children as hostages, and mutilates those it slaughters. That the terrorist organization has kidnapped at least ten American citizens and killed perhaps another 31 is lost on the “journalists,” many of them Americans who could care less about the fate of their fellow citizens.

The media fixates on the Israeli response to mass murder, but rarely the mass murder of 1,200 Israeli civilians that prompted the current war. During ceasefires do Israeli terrorists drive into Gaza cities, and shoot and kill innocent civilians—and then brag, as did Hamas recently, that such murdering will only increase? [read more]

Another interesting (and possibly unnerving) essay by VDH.

The Revivalist Manifesto Is a Blueprint for America

From Duggan Flanakin on Townhall.com (July 9, 2022):

Last October when I had lunch in Baton Rouge with Scott McKay, the first of his op-eds championing an American revivalism had just appeared in The American Spectator. There, he had proclaimed that Bush Republicanism was effectively dead, that “conservatism” had been quite unsuccessful at conserving anything, and that Trump was a John the Baptist figure who had set the table for the coming revival.

My appetite for Scott’s vision grew rapidly as he published a follow-up article a month later. Since there was little left of the Founders’ vision left to “conserve,” it was time, he said, to move from passive, defense-minded conservatism to an activist, offense-minded revivalism.

“We need,” he admonished us, “to push back against the incompetence and treason which have encroached upon our liberty and prosperity, and we need a reflowering of the cultural, economic, and political patrimony our forebears gave us.”

Reviving the American spirit, and the American nation, he suggested, should rest on four major tenets. First, too much government makes stealing easier than earning a living, as government power is both corrupt and self-protective. Second, government is representative not of the people but of the interests with access; thus, revivalism should shore up civil society to revitalize long-dormant self-functioning communities.

Third, as we cede more power to government, it corrodes nearly every institution in our culture. Revivalists, therefore, must foster creation of an effusive culture not subject to government control or intervention, one that replaces the greatly decayed educational, entertainment, and informational (media) institutions.

Finally, McKay said, revivalists must stop allowing abuses by corporatist oligarchs (whose power is akin to that of government) and bring forth a new anti-corporate capitalism that can bring prosperity across the board. Stop defending low tax rates for monopolistic corporatists who exercise their wealth and power in support of their government partners. [read more]

A great blueprint for saving the country.

UChicago scientists discover way to make quantum states last 10,000 times longer

From UCChicago.edu (Aug. 13, 2020):

If we can harness it, quantum technology promises fantastic new possibilities. But first, scientists need to coax quantum systems to stay yoked for longer than a few millionths of a second.

A team of scientists at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering announced the discovery of a simple modification that allows quantum systems to stay operational—or “coherent”—10,000 times longer than before. Though the scientists tested their technique on a particular class of quantum systems called solid-state qubits, they think it should be applicable to many other kinds of quantum systems and could thus revolutionize quantum communication, computing and sensing.

The study was published Aug. 13 in Science.

“This breakthrough lays the groundwork for exciting new avenues of research in quantum science,” said study lead author David Awschalom, the Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering, senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange. “The broad applicability of this discovery, coupled with a remarkably simple implementation, allows this robust coherence to impact many aspects of quantum engineering. It enables new research opportunities previously thought impractical.”

Down at the level of atoms, the world operates according to the rules of quantum mechanics—very different from what we see around us in our daily lives. These different rules could translate into technology like virtually unhackable networks or extremely powerful computers; the U.S. Department of Energy released a blueprint for the future quantum internet in an event at UChicago on July 23. But fundamental engineering challenges remain: Quantum states need an extremely quiet, stable space to operate, as they are easily disturbed by background noise coming from vibrations, temperature changes or stray electromagnetic fields.

Thus, scientists try to find ways to keep the system coherent as long as possible. One common approach is physically isolating the system from the noisy surroundings, but this can be unwieldy and complex. Another technique involves making all of the materials as pure as possible, which can be costly. The scientists at UChicago took a different tack.

“With this approach, we don’t try to eliminate noise in the surroundings; instead, we “trick” the system into thinking it doesn’t experience the noise,” said postdoctoral researcher Kevin Miao, the first author of the paper.

In tandem with the usual electromagnetic pulses used to control quantum systems, the team applied an additional continuous alternating magnetic field. By precisely tuning this field, the scientists could rapidly rotate the electron spins and allow the system to “tune out” the rest of the noise.

……

“This approach creates a pathway to scalability,” said Awschalom. “It should make storing quantum information in electron spin practical. Extended storage times will enable more complex operations in quantum computers and allow quantum information transmitted from spin-based devices to travel longer distances in networks.” [read more]

Acceleration: The Next Dangerous Stage

From Glenn Beck.com (Jan. 26):

For a long time, we treated political violence like a weather event: rare, localized, tragic--then over. But law enforcement and researchers have been warning for years about a mindset that is different from normal extremism. It's not "I want my side to win."

It's "I want the system to break."

This mindset has a name: accelerationism.

This is exactly what is happening in Minnesota right now. It's moved beyond peaceful protest; it's even moved beyond "mostly" peaceful protest. Things have begun to accelerate.

"Accelerationism"--right or left--has a recognizable logic. It is a rising ideology that believes society is corrupt beyond repair. Institutions are illegitimate. Chaos is a tool. Violence is an accelerant. That's not a theory. That is an observable ideological pattern across multiple movements and decades. The key change in the last several years is this: it's more connected than it used to be. It is not necessarily more disciplined It is not necessarily bigger in raw numbers. But it is more connected--more quickly mobilized--more capable of spreading tactics, targets, and narratives. Accelerationism is going mainstream. That changes the risk profile.

The second fact: The line between "protest" and "insurgent behavior" is being tested,

Protest is protected. Even loud, offensive protests that make you furious.

But there's a line that every stable society must defend, or it ceases to be stable. That line is crossed when groups begin to coordinate to obstruct lawful operations as a strategy. not an accident. They track or identify government personnel for intimidation. They build parallel communications networks specially designed to evade accountability. They justify targeting state actors as morally necessary.

Those are not theoretical markers. They are historically recognizable markers. When those behaviors appear. the question is no longer. "Is this a demonstration?" The question becomes: "Is someone trying to build veto power over law enforcement through fear?" Because once a movement believes it can control outcomes by making enforcement too costly--too dangerous--too politically 1'adioactive-then law becomes optional. And when law becomes optional, the next step is not persuasion. It's escalation.

The third fact: Cities become laboratories when enforcement is inconsistent

This is the part that's hard to say out loud, because it sounds like an insult to the city. It isn't. It's sociology. When you have an environment with deep political polarization. high distrust of institutions, uneven prosecution, activist ecosystems with strong NGO infrastructure. and a constant media feedback loop, those conditions don't automatically produce violence. But they do produce something else. They produce repeated stress tests. It is not "one riot." It is not "one clash." It is a series of probes. How fast can we mobilize?

What are police allowed to do?

Will prosecutors follow through?

Will federal authority pull back if we make it ugly enough?

Can we create martyrs?

Can we flood the zone with a narrative before facts catch up?

That is what "laboratory" means: not that everyone is guilty. but that the environment is ideal for testing the boundaries of the state. If the state responds with either overreach which manufactures recruits) or paralysis (which manufactures militias), then you have a recipe for replication. [read more]

Scary.  What did Van Jones say? Top down--bottom up--inside out. Is that what's happening now in Wisconsin?