Shawnee, Kansas – Time for a couple of reality checks…

First, the victory for pro-abortionists in conservative Ohio – by 13 points no less – means that pro-abortion politics is, indeed, driving turnout for the left. But it is not driving turnout from the right. The question is, “Why?”

Let’s start with the fact that Republicans are the very archetype of the uncertain trumpet since the overturning of Roe v Wade. Their message is, “We think that killing babies is kind of bad, but we don’t want to alienate any womyn, but killing babies and selling their body parts is kind of icky, but we don’t want to make anyone mad at us. Mainly, we just don’t want any trouble, okay?” Isn’t that a great rallying cry for one of the foundational moral issues of our time?

Meantime, the left calls any restriction at all on abortion a “ban,” insists that no one in America ever gets a late-term abortion even though screaming that restricting it even to the first two trimesters is a ban. Why would the left be so passionate about keeping it legal for the entire term of pregnancy if no one gets one in the third trimester anyway? How can they simultaneously scream that anyone who says that some women in the country are getting late-term abortions are “conspiracy theorists” while also any attempts to ban those types of abortion that they say no one is getting are a crime against humanity? Why are there at least 10 abortion clinics in the country that specialize and profit from those late-term abortions they say no one ever gets? Why do 6 states and D.C. guarantee abortion up until birth? (With Ohio’s vote on this, it may now be 7). Most importantly, why do Republicans never vigorously point out these contradictions or challenge the heart-rending fan fiction that abortion advocates peddle to sell their wares? For that matter, why have most national pro-life groups failed to point out those contradictions or vigorously challenge that heart-rending fan fiction?

If a great battle is to be engaged and one side does not bother to show up, their strength is irrelevant. You have to show up to have a chance of winning. It seems to me that neither conservative Republicans nor national pro-life organizations have much bothered to show up for this stage of the battle for life, so it does not surprise me that the pro-abortion forces have seized the narrative and swept the field. This will, undoubtedly, offend some of my friends in the national pro-life movement who are busy soothing themselves that these things take time and ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day.’ That’s true – but time’s a-wasting and Rome wouldn’t have been built at all if no one took the field. So here is a plan of battle that goes beyond the current ‘we don’t want any trouble’ approach.

First, clearly and firmly state the principle for supporting life. If we are going permit the disposal of babies in the womb, we had best be sure that babies before birth are not human life. If they are, abortion becomes the precedent for making other carve-outs for the more powerful to dispose of the less powerful. The Venn diagram of the positions of the Church and science on the humanity of the unborn is a solid circle.

When a disorder has become culturally predominant, it is difficult to weed out. But we CAN quickly weed out where it is used simply for convenience – or as a seemingly easy solution to a difficult problem. That, frankly, constitutes the overwhelming majority of abortions.

Allowing abortion to stand when we all KNOW with certainty that the fetus is fully human in an early stage of development is a formula for ending liberty altogether. Why not allow parents to kill children if they get in a financial pinch? Several “bio-ethicists” have already advocated for the legalization of outright infanticide. What about older folks who have become a burden on their adult children? In countries that allow for euthanasia, the “right” to die has quickly become the “duty” to die – and “unrequested” assisted suicide has become a chillingly large category of such deaths. Why not eliminate poverty with an AR-15? Put all guns in the hands of government only and that could well become the case as some people became too much of a burden on a government that wants to spend somewhere else.

People can say, “That would never happen,” but when you lay the philosophical groundwork for and normalize dysfunction, it always does happen soon enough. When we advocate for the life of the unborn we also advocate for the life of all, including advocates of abortion – though they are too myopic to see it.

Second, let no false assertion by abortion advocates go unchallenged. The left makes all sort of ridiculous claims that common logic disproves without any further research. But if those assertions are allowed to stand without challenge, the uninformed come to believe them as truth. A currently popular claim is that NO ONE EVER gets an abortion at eight or nine months…that it just doesn’t happen. Why then, do six states and D.C. allow abortion up to birth? Why do abortion advocates scream bloody murder at any attempt to enact any restrictions? Why are there at least 10 clinics in the country that SPECIALIZE in late-term abortion?

Abortion advocates like to call any restriction a “ban.” A restriction is NOT a ban, and the advocates must be called out on it EVERY time. They say that forbidding abortion after 15 weeks is an abortion ban. It is NOT a ban on abortion, but a restriction on when abortion can occur. Show how radical – and how dishonest – they are. Every time.

Congress has the entire archive of the undercover videos CMP director David Daleiden took of abortion advocates at their conferences. Though federal judge William Orrick put an actual ban on releasing some of those videos, that ban does not apply to Congress. It can release any or all of the videos at any time. Those videos already in the public domain show hideous, gruesome behavior – as abortionists laugh at detached eyeballs rolling around and being careful not to get cut by pieces of skull, and how to cut the baby up so as to be able to sell his organs afterward.

I have read many depositions over the decades. The one that still often haunts me is when an abortionist was speaking of what happened with an abortion target that was born alive. Asked what happened then, she said it was sent to procurement. To her (minimal) credit, she started crying as she realized what she was saying. The way that baby died was that its beating heart was cut from its living chest – for “procurement,” don’t you know?

The left loves to use heart-rending cases to justify all abortions, cases that even they boast consist of only a fraction of a hundredth percent of all abortions. Would any normal, rational person use cases of genuine self-defense to try to justify allowing all people to commit murder at random under all circumstances? The very idea is absurd (except, perhaps, to Soros DA’s). Yet this is exactly what abortion advocates are playing at. When they come up with their tear-jerkers, why not push them, EVERY TIME, that if we carve out an exception for such cases, will you support banning abortion after the baby’s heart has begun beating?

Of course, the abortion advocates are radical and lie seamlessly to push their cause. They love to speak of ectopic pregnancies and such, when they well know that in all cases where the mother’s life is genuinely in danger, it is fully legal, if fully tragic, to abort the child – and has been since the founding of the republic. Calling them out every time will not stop them from lying constantly, but it will highlight just how radical and savage they are.

Abortion is not just an abstraction. A real baby is killed and a real woman is psychically wounded…every time. There are rare times when that is the only option (to save the life of the mother) but we better be very circumspect about what circumstances for taking innocent human life are justified…and the abortion industry needs to be forced to come up with better justifications than that one class of people ought to have arbitrary life or death power over another class of innocent people as a matter of “right.” Yeah…Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and early American plantation owners tried that one.

Third, national pro-life groups ought to become a statistical clearing house for public officials, not instead of what they are doing but in addition to. The abortion industry uses the captive Guttmacher Institute to issue statistics. That institute actually does produce some useful information. It just carefully avoids discussing those stats and data that cut against the abortion industry. Every time an abortionist claims that there are no late-term abortions, Congressmen and other public officials ought to be able to pull out their citations about how many late-term abortion facilities there are, where they are, how many late-term abortions are committed each year, all the relevant fully-sourced data to refute the nonsense claims. When an abortionist cites a heart-rending case to justify all abortions, the official ought to be able to easily pull up the stats about how many of those type situations there are – and then press for agreement to carve out an exception for such circumstances in exchange for a heartbeat restriction.

When an Elizabeth Warren and Planned Parenthood go on Jihad to try to ban crisis pregnancy centers, it would be useful to be able to show how many there are in the country, the help they give during pregnancy and for years after the baby is born, that they get no tax money while Planned Parenthood gets millions. It would help to establish that abortionists are NOT trying to protect the rights of women, but trying to muscle out any threat to their profit center.

None of this will change the mendacity of abortion advocates – but it WILL change the narrative. Right now, it is almost uncontested that pro-abortion advocates are supporting the rights of women. If pro-lifers won’t make the case, why should the uninformed believe otherwise? I know that national pro-life organizations and pro-life officials already have the tools they need to make the case effectively. Instead of acting as advocates, though, they have been acting as incompetent, bungling “strategists. I have been listening since last spring to assurances that they are going to get it done, they are just waiting for the right “timing.”

Hey guys, I don’t know that we would have won Ohio if we had actually used our most effective tools – and put them in the hands of the wonderful, committed people on the ground who worked hard with almost no help from national organizations. Not trying nearly guaranteed that loss – and a constitutional proviso, as Ohio chose, is right hard to root out.

The time is now. So saddle up and get to it. God help me, the next major pro-life advocate who tells me “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” to justify their own pathetic inaction is going to get slapped.

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Another thing that infuriated me after Tuesday’s election was the editorial columns saying it wasn’t as bad as it looked. It wasn’t: it was worse. For crying out loud, our opposition has destroyed our economy, put the world on the verge of global war, is supporting savage terrorists, wants to groom and mutilate our kids…and we can’t even manage to fight them to a draw? How bad does it have to get before you concede it is every bit as bad as it looks? Have we all become Ronna McDaniel?

I know modern Democrats are become predatory. Chiding them for it is akin to chiding a crocodile for eating a calf. But the Republicans are supposed to be the guardians of sanity and Constitutional safeguards. I blame them for being the weakest guardians of public safety since Barney Fife.

The entire chain of custody to preserve ballot integrity has been destroyed everywhere in the country. Democrats say cheating does not happen (except in Democratic primaries where three are in process of being overturned because of cheating. Absurd that the Democrat position is that they would cheat and stuff each other but would NEVER do it to Republicans). The question is, under the current rules, could it happen? Of course…and if it could, you better believe it does. The whole Democrat blathering about vote suppression has never been about access to voting, but about ripping apart the safeguards guaranteeing the integrity of elections.

Now we know that voting machines are NOT firewalled from the Internet and so can have vote tallies bowdlerized. We automatically register tons of people who have not asked and made no effort to register to vote. That practice creates a ton of blank ballots that, if the “voter” does not use, are available for malicious characters to use to cheat. We use the mail for much, if not yet all, voting. The old system required you to vote in person on a single day. You gave the ballot in a sleeve to protect the secrecy of your ballot to an election judge, who dropped it into a box that was only opened after the polls were closed before observers from both parties who then watched the count. That was a simple system that offered tight security because of the careful chain of custody. There is NO chain of custody with mail-in ballots.

Colorado shifted to all mail-in ballots in 2013 – and the state has moved from a swing state to solidly blue since then. We had a school board election last week. My housemate asked me, since the envelope we had to return our ballots in had our name and identifying numbers, what would prevent the courthouse from identifying who normally votes conservative and just tossing their envelopes without ever even looking at the ballots. There is nothing to prevent that other than the assertions of Democrat elections officials – the party that gave you the Chicago precinct captain.

Do Republicans win some races? Of course. The late Mayor Daley of Chicago once tossed a precinct captain for delivering 100% of the vote. Daley knew you can’t make it too obvious…just make sure you keep control and treat your domesticated opposition well so they don’t raise a stink.

If you get into a poker game in a strange town and find out the game is fixed, you will not recover your losses by concentrating harder. So what have Republicans done to bolster ballot integrity since 2020? Except for Florida, next to nothing. (There is a proposal in Kansas to demand prior notarization of any ballot received by mail in order for it to be counted. That would help, but we’re dealing with a flood of fraud here, not a trickle). Republicans pretending that our elections are still on the square when they clearly are not are pathetic dweebs and losers. Get serious about ballot integrity or prepare for many more shocking losses.

Of course, I think the country is going to come apart before we get to the 2024 general election. But I’ll tell you what: I will NOT be looking to the people that sat on their hands and gave nothing but lip service as the country was being ripped apart to lead anything in the rebuilding of a healthy society. Most Democrat officials belong in jail. Most Republican officials should be ashamed to show their faces and permanently barred from holding any position of public trust.

Of course, the fact-checkers of the Deep State Media will tell you this is fake news. But those fact checkers are the children of their father, the first fact-checker: the snake in the Garden of Eden.

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A clever meme says that, “If I had a dollar for every gender there is, I would have two dollars and a bunch of counterfeits.”

Last week, Pope Francis approved a decree that transgenders can licitly receive baptism and stand as godparents and official witnesses at Catholic weddings.

Might I suggest that the lay members of any Diocese which supports this (NOT infallible) decree start using Monopoly money for their contribution envelopes? We’ll see how tolerant of counterfeits the Pope and such Bishops are when it is their ox, rather than Christ and the Magisterium’s, that is being gored.

Sadly, Pope Francis also ousted Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas this morning. The Pope gave no reason for the dismissal, but it has been expected since early last summer. Bp. Strickland is an orthodox prelate who believes that Christ’s commands from Scripture as collated in the Magisterium are not up for debate. I will have more to say about this next week. This is not the end of Bp. Strickland’s influence in the larger Church, but the beginning. I told you a few weeks ago that it was game time.

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Hat tip to my old colleague, Dan Proft, for the title of this article. He used a version of it in his campaign for governor in 2010. Though he did not prevail, I told him at the time that, had he won, he would be the “funnest governor ever!” Proft now works primarily in media as a talk show host for WIND Radio in Chicago, a commentator for the Salem Radio Network, and podcaster for American Greatness.

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Shawnee, Kansas was established near both the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails with a Shawnee Indian Mission. During the Civil War it was sacked by the infamous confederate raider, William Quantrill and burned to the ground. It did not, after rising from the ashes, rename itself Phoenix. Once, when I was preparing to go to Shawnee, a fellow asked me if I was going to Shawnee or to Shawnee Mission. There is no Shawnee Mission in Kansas, There are two neighboring towns, Shawnee and Mission. The confusion comes because this is one of the very rare places in the US where one zip code encompasses portions of both towns. Some printed material referring to that zip code say Shawnee Mission. It would be less confusing if they said Shawnee-Mission.

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