You can do things quickly or you can do things solidly. Rare it is that you can do both. Joe Biden and his team came into power under the shadow of a dubious election of uncertain integrity. The left immediately took the “We have the power!!!” route and started doing all manner of things that they wanted, but the country recoiled from. They acted quickly. Before the inauguration, the Capitol was surrounded by barricades and razor wire to keep uppity citizens out. And so came the inevitable backlash. Personally, I think it is going to be a long time before Democrats ever hold power again.
One would think from that lesson that conservatives would be prudent instead of demanding that we get everything we want, everywhere we want, right now! The “We have the power!!!” method is prelude to destruction rather than prelude to greatness. Patience, grasshopper!
Last week the Supreme Court slapped down the universal injunctions that activist judges were using to cosplay as president and try to stop the administration from exercising executive power that is Constitutionally denied the judiciary. Donald Trump accomplished his aim without triggering a Constitutional Showdown with the judiciary and without performative, but impotent efforts to impeach the judicial activists. Meantime, because of the outrageous nonsense of these activists in black robes, everyone (including their buddies) could see why it was necessary to clip their wings. Instead of a patchwork fight, we got a permanent solution – and the activists, by their gleeful overreach, helped us get there.
The thing that has bothered me most after Trump’s return to office is how many conservatives insist on doing their Veruca Salt (from Willy Wonka) imitation: They want what they want when they want it and they want it NOW! Besides the bratty entitlement involved, if they get it the way they want it it can be as quickly and easily dismantled as the depredations of the Biden administration are being torn down now. Do it steady and do it right. That is how you go about bearing fruit that will last.
I have come to have a great deal of trust in Trump and his team’s judgment. Out of early chaos (and still quite a bit being staged by the performative left) is emerging new order – and a consensus that traditional American norms are a better way to live than constant meltdowns over fringe issues.
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Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote perhaps the most unhinged, idiotic, opinion in dissent of the Supreme Court’s decision to rein in the obstruction of universal injunctions ever to come out of the Court. It ridiculed the very idea of law, the Constitution, and ordered liberty, arguing for whatever feels right in the moment. At bottom, it was a screed seeking to do away with the concept of law permanently. (Jackson would, undoubtedly, have made a prosecutor George Soros would have given two thumbs up).
It was so bad that, in the majority decision, author Amy Coney Barrett delivered Jackson a withering slapdown that was more brutal than that delivered to leftwing activist district judges. All the justices in the majority concurred with the slapdown. Even Jackson’s fellow liberals, Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, are keeping their distance from this dissent – that reads like the passionate emotings of a flat earther on meth.
Make no mistake: this is about slowly and steadily re-establishing the norms that make for healthy discourse in a healthy society. For a very long time leftists have loudly championed insanities that no healthy culture would waste five minutes on. We are bringing back shaming to people who seriously insist on a reality more absurd than a Salvador Dali painting. (Impressionism and absurdity in art can be a profound thing. I love Dali. But it has no place in public discussion of weighty matters). Officials who abuse their authority and try to usurp authority they don’t have are being slapped down – and having chunks of the authority they do have taken away from them. It is a massive project, kind of like bringing order back to a yard that has been left untended for a decade. But the trajectory we are now on is towards order and peace.
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A lot of commentators jumped the gun when the Supreme Court refused to hear several cases on gun rights this session. They got mad when Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the court will hear a major gun case in the next couple of sessions, thinking the court was just kicking the can down the road. That is not the case – and now the Civil Rights division of the Justice Dept. has tipped its hand on what the Supreme Court is waiting for. It has issued an amicus brief on the Barnett vs Illinois case, currently awaiting appeal, urging the Supreme Court to take it up as soon as possible.
Why are all eyes focused on this case, now? Before getting into that, I should note that Federal District Court Judge Stephen McGlynn, who issued the original order, is a very close friend of long standing.
Most cases the Supreme Court could have taken up covered just a few aspects of the issue, if they even covered more than one. Even a favorable judgment on gun owners’ rights would have left a ton of loopholes for blue states to exploit. The Barnett ruling covers the issue from soup to nuts, including some issues that pro-gun rights advocates hadn’t brought up. (You may have to temporarily disable your VPN to see that last link). If the Supreme Court takes up this case and gives a favorable ruling, it will be very difficult for blue states and other gun grabbers to find loopholes to exploit. That means the cycle of the Court ruling in favor of the Constitution every few years – and activists finding new ways to get around the intent of the Court’s ruling will largely come to an end.
I’m weird. I read an unusually large number of court rulings. McGlynn and I are very particular not to discuss any details of any case he is hearing while he is hearing it. On this one, he sent me the pdf of the ruling hours after it had been publicly filed. I was stunned. Yeah, at 168 pages it can seem daunting, but it is simultaneously the most concise and the most comprehensive ruling on an issue I have ever read. Not only that, it has literary merit, to boot. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has been slow to act on this one, I think, because they know what a comprehensive poison pill it is to all the leftist pretensions. The amicus brief from the Justice Dept. will, undoubtedly, help move things along.
Of course, we all tend to think the best of our friends. But my friends know that I only give a specific compliment when it is fully deserved. McGlynn’s ruling on this case cuts through decades of noise and, I think, reveals him to be one of the finest, most comprehensive legal minds in the country right now. Take it with a grain of salt, if you must, but read the ruling and you will be hard-pressed to disagree with me.
After the Supreme Court takes this case up and rules on it, the left is going to have to find other things to constantly harp on and play games with. Their game plan has long been to disarm innocent victims while letting predators go to terrorize our communities. Disarming victims is a dumb way to fight crime – and the Supreme Court is going to soon have a means of underlining that point.
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The media and the discredited public health establishment is gearing up for a new wave of attacks on the miracle drug, Ivermectin. They will lose. Too many people on their own side have now used it to overcome Covid, other viruses, and the depredations brought on by their ineffective and dangerous “cures.” (I strongly encourage you to read the last link: Jeff Childers writes in an engaging style and you will come out very knowledgeable about what is going on.)
Trump is using an incredibly effective three-step process to suck the little remaining credibility out of anti-American media and officials. First, he announces something bold (that he has actually carefully vetted). The media and leftist officials then raucously explain very publicly and contemptuously how stupid he is and the deadly damaging effects that will follow from his bold announcement. He lets them rant for a while (I think he even secretly encourages it). Then he turns out to be very publicly and decisively right. It’s a good thing the price of eggs has fallen so dramatically. Otherwise, the media’s bill for the egg they keep constantly on their faces would rival the judgments they have had to pay for libeling Trump.
This keeps playing out VERY publicly. The media wants it so, for they are utterly convinced, like Wile E. Coyote with the Roadrunner, that this time they have surely gotten him. Do not underestimate how very many people, even of a somewhat rational liberal persuasion are asking themselves every day, “Can’t these people in the media get anything right?” Those lunatics who have degenerated into Stage 4 Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) are helping the process along by making it difficult for the most moderately left talking head to be reasonable without being shrieked at.
Of course, ratings in the establishment media continue their precipitous collapse – with no corresponding bouts of embarrassed humility by the supposed “newspeople.” They are as smug as ever. Some, such as at the New York Times, when they are exposed as catastrophically and laughably wrong, just come up with new lies that are equally transparent and easily disproven. Honestly, if the media were deliberately trying to destroy all vestiges of their credibility, I cannot think of anything they would be doing differently.
We need a genuinely independent press. Those who have made themselves into the Communications Dept. of the lunatic left are not it. This truly is unsustainable. Right now, a lot of people are gravitating to social media to get their news. That is a relief valve, but it has its own limitations. And bubbles. I think we are about to see a genuine collapse in the news industry, opening up a vacuum that, surely, some actors who are committed to actual journalism rather than activism will exploit. Don’t be surprised if, a year from now, you randomly see the staff of CNN, MSNBC, et. al. on street corners with signs saying, “Will rant for food.”
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The biggest threat to American prosperity and revival right now is Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. Though exactly the opposite has happened, he is obstinate in his insistence that reciprocal tariffs will trigger massive inflation. That means he insists on keeping interest rates high.
With the massive interest we now pay on the massive national debt, keeping interest rates high at a time of general prosperity serves to continue to increase the national debt – because we have to use those dollars to service the debt rather than do something productive or useful. A reduction by a point or two, which would be much more appropriate to our economy, would have a massive impact on reducing deficits. If Powell remains obstinate, I do not see how Trump fails to replace him early. Our economy depends on it.
I have come to think that, in this area, Trump is genuinely a genius. This country and its politicians have used financial gimmicks for so long to make things look better than they are that we are addicted – and systemically, the economy is in the greatest peril I think it ever has been since the early days of the Republic. The only way to avoid catastrophic economic collapse is to dramatically boost productivity, bringing hard manufacturing back to the land en masse, and making full use of our abundant energy sources. Everything Trump is doing is designed to do just that. His critics reveal every day to people who know something serious about economics that they are utter economic illiterates. Thankfully, they are revealing it to ordinary people wholesale now, too. We are a long way from being out of the woods, and we retrace our steps with the left and its “experts” fighting us every step of the way. But I am beginning to think we have a genuine chance.
Nine years ago, a woman at a talk I gave in Las Vegas, said she believed “Donald Trump was God’s plan for America.” I drily retorted that, “Well, God can do anything, so it’s possible. But if that is God’s plan, I have to say I think it is the dumbest plan He ever had.” I have long since repented and apologized to God. It strikes me that, over his lifetime, Trump has had a lot of characteristics in common with King David. Now I find myself wondering if maybe Trump, too, is a “man after God’s own heart.”
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It is striking to note, for all the sturm und drang involved, that the secular world is healing faster than the spiritual culture. But it is not sustainable. Much of the ills that attend us are because of our embrace, over the last century, of good as evil and evil as good.
Sex trafficking and child exploitation have reached such catastrophic levels because we have casually redefined love, a self-sacrificial commitment, to mean whatever form of lust floats your boat. At the heart of it all is that, when you start treating people as things to be exploited for social credit or private gain, you start spiritually dying and your culture starts degenerating into chaos.
John Adams said, over two centuries ago, that, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He was right, of course. We need a great revival in our Churches, in our hearts, and in our homes, that we may become a people capable of both exercising the rights and carrying out the duties of a free people under God. There is no policy that will accomplish that. It can only be a turning of hearts back to God. The most important thing any of us can do is to give witness to the Gospel to everyone who encounters us, to show them that they can have a life and a hope – and that it will not come through shrieking and complaining.
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Just a couple of weeks left until our national CORAC Conference. You’ve still got a week to sign up. I hope to see you there – where you will meet examples of the sort of Courage Under Fire we are all going to need to live to move our culture from darkness into light.
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
The Corps of Renewal and Charity (CORAC)
18208 Preston Rd., Ste. D9-552
Dallas, Texas 75252
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