Huntsville, Alabama – If you have been paying attention to the news the last week you know that Atlanta has blown, Memphis is getting ready to blow, and another mass public shooting happened at a dance studio in Monterey Park, a suburb of Los Angeles. While describing all Anitfa and BLM-led burning, looting, rape and murder sessions as “mostly peaceful,” the media continues in its forlorn quest for its great white whale – a MAGA perpetrator of such an atrocity. Pity for them: it is always a leftist loon or an ignored mental patient (they are rapidly becoming the same thing – only the leftists are mouthier and, occasionally, twitchier).

Every time the left offers the same prescription: ban guns. Let’s see, the left’s plan for addressing the rising tide of violence in America is, A) release violent criminals on to the streets almost immediately after they are arrested to commit more mayhem, B) ignore all actual signs and overt warnings of potentially violent or terroristic behavior so as not to offend anyone, C) disarm potential victims so they have no chance of fighting back, D) defund the police so there is little or no help to be had there – and on the rare occasion when there is make sure it is too late. Yeah, it is as thoughtfully and carefully constructed as the rest of the left’s “plans.”

Alas, we will have many more mass shootings before the year is out. It is not because of the availability of guns. Shoot, almost everyone in Switzerland is armed and it is a very polite society. Rather, it is a symptom of the terrible spiritual battle we are in. For several generations we have taught that life is cheap. Why, then, should we be surprised that people on the margins treat it so cheaply? Can the surviving children of pro-abortion parents believe that they are loved for their very selves? They know that they are merely random survivors of the brutal gauntlet the womb has become. What room is there for individuality when the government-media complex tells you precisely what you can and cannot do and believe? When you need not care for yourself; just leave it to the government – but it comes at the price of any sense of transcendent meaning. The multitude of woke minions among us are shrouded by deep despair; the quiet desperation that once marked the aborted generations has erupted into screaming desperation. They are so frantically miserable and so frantically determined to blame anyone who is not miserable for the anguish that rips and claws them like a famished wolf. We have spent several generations making our culture into the paradigm of a dystopian novel – and now the piper comes to collect his due.

The left will probably get their dream of a right-wing shooter before the year is out. They desperately need it as justification to crack down on everyone and take full authoritarian control of society. Though mental instability is common among the left, I know that it chews at some in our own ranks at the margins. They will get their man. Their shock will come when, if that mentally unstable person confines himself to shooting at our tormenters – government toadies, the media, public health authorities and such – few people will much care. They will not rise in righteous anger to crown our aspiring leftist overseers into absolute power. Why would we reward those who have brought us to this pass with consummate power? We, a once proud and free people, have been badgered, bullied, harassed and coerced too long and too hard to react with anything but relief when our tormenters are tormented and the beatings are paused for even just a short time.

We don’t say it too loudly, but we have noticed that England disarmed their populace for safety – and now British police cannot be bothered with hundreds and thousands of young girls being sex-trafficked by mostly Muslim grooming gangs – because they are too busy arresting people for dissenting posts on social media and praying silently in the vicinity of an abortion clinic. We have noticed that the formerly free countries of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, after being disarmed, are now authoritarian states where no one is safe – and the government, itself, is the predominant violent criminal enterprise.

Leftists have always been overly enamored of titles and credentials. They figure that if they manage to land one or both (MUCH easier than taking the time and effort to develop actual competence or skill) everyone must do what they say, even when their commands bring disaster at every turn. It is unfortunate for all of us that they have so little actual knowledge of history and what sustained bullying incompetence brings (though that ignorance is what sustains their malevolent dream of imperious rule). What bullying incompetence brings is not absolute authority, but the breakdown of authority altogether when the backlash from the bullied begins in earnest.

Winston Churchill once cheekily observed that Americans always do the right thing – but only after trying everything else first. We have tried just about everything else – and the ruling class has interpreted Americans’ restraint as timidity. Everywhere I go in the country, people tell me about the preparations they have made for when things fall apart. Yes, it happens at meetings, but it is also happening to people I just bump into in stores and coffee shops. People are not preparing to knuckle under: they are preparing to go into siege. The flashy things that happen now; the shootings, the lawlessness, the revelations of vast corruption, are the tremors preceding a great convulsion in the body politic. That could take the form of an ugly and brutal civil war. From the beginning, I conceived CORAC as a primary means for a better, gentler way of renewal.

First, a look at how I think the year is likely to play out. The chaos will ramp up as federal impotence does the same. Oh the feds will posture and strut, trying to make themselves seem big and bad, but every dying institution tries to make itself look biggest in its death throes, replacing calm competence with shrieking commands as it perishes. The chaos will be widespread and growing, but I do not think this is the year when it all comes apart. That, I think, is reserved for early 2024 as a consequence of this year’s chaos (but keep in mind that timing is the weakest link in my history of following social trends to their logical end). As the feds continue offensive overreach to try to cement their power, there will be more than a few violent skirmishes.

Before the summer is out, everyone will be shocked when Ukraine is so utterly gutted that it may cease to exist on the map for a time. (For my Ukranian friends, be not dismayed: it will only be for a time. The truth is that Russia does not want the problems that would come from ruling Ukraine, other than those parts, such as Crimea and the Donbass, that have been historically Russian in the first place). The shock will come as everyone realizes that the confident assurances that Ukraine is winning have been a pack of lies, borne of wishful establishment thinking rather than hard analysis. The world will erupt into wars almost everywhere. Europe has castrated itself. It is no longer capable of sustained self-defense against threats from without or from within. China will likely invade Taiwan in a desperate effort to forestall the growing discontent within its existing borders and the likely collapse of its economy. Russia will devote itself to breaking up NATO, which resolutely refused to build a new paradigm based on the substantially changed circumstances from the end of the cold war – and insisted on menacing Russia and surrounding it. In the end, Russia will not need to expend much effort as NATO is busily immolating itself from within. Sub-Saharan Africa and South America will not get safer but will, by comparison to the rest of the world aflame, become some of the safest spots on the globe.

Naturally, with this global bedlam, combined with national chaos, many will fear invasion of the United States. There is little to be concerned about there. The aspiring tyrants around the globe do not want to contend with an America that is heavily armed in every rural outpost: they just want America out of the fight. Our leftist overlords have already degraded our military might enough that it is doubtful America’s intervention anywhere would be decisive. Thanks to Obama, Biden and company, hostile powers can already say, “mission accomplished,” on that score.

Meantime, states around the country are already conducting dress rehearsals for either implicit or explicit independence from the federal government – and in some cases, their own ruling cliques. In deep blue Illinois, 80 of the 102 county sheriffs in the state have vowed they will NOT enforce the state’s recently adopted gun ban – and that vow was before a state judge issued a restraining order against its enforcement. Florida routinely refuses to enforce crackpot federal initiatives. The founders original federalism may prove a bulwark against the worst sort of violence that afflicts a society as it unravels. This will not prevent deep blue states from collapsing from their own internal contradictions along with the federal government, but it will give safe haven for many Americans.

CORAC was designed not to treat the federal government as the enemy, but as the irrelevancy it is making of itself. The primary idea was to give people the means and tools to work with each other and thrive in good times and in bad. The feds think people must do what they say. They don’t realize people will find other organizing principles when the necessity arises and the need is clear. The feds think they can force everyone into a government digital currency so they can more minutely control them. They don’t realize that people, under duress, will find methods to exchange value that do not involve the government. Shoot, for the last decade of the old Soviet Union, the black market was the second biggest sector of its economy. If you give good, competent counsel you gain a lot of influence. If you try to control everyone’s lives, you end by losing any influence at all.

We have been trying to fix a system that is irrevocably broken for a very long time. We have terrible challenges ahead but, paradoxically, as more and more people opt out of the existing system they are going to find, even amidst the convulsions, that things can actually work for the good of all. There will be joy. The reality is that, even as the government-media complex constantly spews hate and division, most people in America are decent folks who want to get along with each other.

The mounting dysfunctions that are upon us are mere tremors before the great quake. Most tremble before the destruction involved. Yes, there is destruction – but it is of an old order that has ceased to work for its citizens because it is too busy trying to rule them. Godless people need to find some meaning in their lives, I suppose. But they are looking for love in all the wrong places. What I see before me are the birthing pangs of a newly invigorated healthy and glorious culture under God. And oh, what a joy to be alive and active as God renews the face and faith of the world! And you are invited to help by doing the little you can right in front of you.

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We just finished taping a podcast with Tom Brejcha, the founder of the Thomas More Society, perhaps the premier legal civil rights foundation in the country. They are the volunteer lawyers for David Daleiden’s civil suits and for Mark Houck, the father who was arrested in an armed raid by the feds for sidewalk counseling outside an abortion clinic. We will routinely be doing two podcasts a month this year, one with an intriguing guest and another responding to questions submitted by readers. To get your question in for consideration for the next podcast, email seven7questions@gmail.com.

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I will speak this Saturday, January 28, at 2 pm Eastern Time in Charleston, South Carolina. This one will be a lot of fun because it will also include a demonstration of ham radio equipment by Larry Westcott and a presentation on self-defense and sustainability by Kirby Bowling. It will be at 620C Windermere Blvd., Charleston, SC. Hope to see you there!

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 @Charlie62394802