Monthly Archives: April 2023

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Daily Broadside | Shooting Other People Seems To Be The Rage

I trust you had a wonderful Easter Sunday. I took the full day off, meaning that I didn’t have a post for yesterday. No worries, though. Evil takes no holiday.

Officials with the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department in Kentucky confirmed Monday that five people died following “reports of an active aggressor” near a bank.

Police Chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel identified the shooter as Connor Sturgeon, who was one of the five deceased.

Louisville Deputy Chief Paul Humphrey told reporters that four died and eight were injured, including one officer, with various injuries. Officials later said that five people died.

“We believe this is a lone gunman involved in this that did have a connection to the bank. We’re trying to establish what that connection was to the business, but it appears he was a previous employee,” Humphrey said.

Nine people, including two police officers, were treated for injuries from the shooting, University of Louisville Hospital spokeswoman Heather Fountaine said in an email. One of the officers was in critical condition, she said. At least three patients had been discharged.

The killer live-streamed his rampage. It’s possible that what we have here is a former employee of the bank exacting vengeance for some perceived slight. The New York Post reports that:

Sturgeon worked as a summer intern for the bank for three consecutive years, eventually joining as a commercial development professional in 2021 and a full-time associate and portfolio banker last year, according to his LinkedIn account.

[…]

Sturgeon had been told he was going to be fired from the bank, according to CNN, who also reported he had left a note for his parents and a friend saying he was going to shoot up the bank.

I wouldn’t make too much of it at this point in the investigation, but several commentators have pointed out his apparent support of the Pronoun Extremists by listing his pronouns in his bio.

The shooter was also a star athlete in high school who sustained multiple concussions.

Sturgeon was an all-round athlete, playing basketball, football and running track at school, according to an old classmate.

The classmate, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Daily Beast Sturgeon wore a helmet while playing due to multiple concussions he suffered while playing football.

Of course, Resident Brandon aired his grievances after the shooting, blaming the killing on the gun rather than on an mentally-troubled young man.

“How many more Americans must die before Republicans in Congress will act to protect our communities?” he added. “It’s long past time that we require safe storage of firearms. Require background checks for all gun sales. Eliminate gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability. We can and must do these things now.”

Neither safe storage, background checks, or “gun manufacturer’s immunity from liability” would have stopped the shooter yesterday. The shooter gave no indication whatsoever that he was capable of, or even harbored thoughts of, mass murder. So the Left’s precious “red flag laws” wouldn’t have stopped him either.

This latest shooting comes on the heels of the killing of six people, including three children, at a Christian school in Tennessee two weeks ago, which seems to be in some sort of cover-up mode. The shooter in that case died, too.

Our country is devolving into chaos, the opposite of order. If you haven’t purchased a firearm yet, I really, seriously, not kiddingly implore you to buy one and learn how to shoot it before it’s too late. And if you haven’t bought ammo recently, there’s no time like the present to stock up.

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Daily Broadside | Jesus Didn’t Condemn You But Offered A Way Out

Today is Good Friday, the day we remember on which Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was put to death on a cross to pay the penalty for sin on behalf of all mankind. For Christians this is a day for sober reflection on our personal contribution to the sin of the world and the great love that motivated God the Father to send his Son on a mission to rescue us from our natural state of condemnation.

16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. 

—John 3:16-18

Many people have gotten the impression that Jesus came to send people to hell; that he stands above us pointing an angry finger that threatens us with condemnation if we do not “repent and believe.” The truth is very different. The Bible says that we already exist in a state of condemnation; it’s our natural state of being. To “stand condemned” means we have already been found guilty — guilty of sin against God.

It’s not like Jesus came into a world that existed in a neutral state, neither judged nor unjudged, and then handed out red cards (condemned) and white cards (not condemned) based on how we responded to him. The Bible says all of us were already holding red cards.

Jesus came, offering to give us white cards for our red cards. Note that we weren’t allowed to drop our red cards on the floor in order to take his white card. We had to give him our red card, which he keeps, in exchange for his white card. He took our condemnation on himself.

To use another metaphor, we’re born separated from God and doomed to die separated from God unless we grasp the life ring tossed to us as we tread water on the open sea. The life ring is Jesus, who tells us that if we believe in him, we are no longer doomed to destruction.

It’s a remarkable thing to contemplate on Good Friday: the sinless Son of God willingly abandoned the comforts of his position to become human for the express purpose of securing our freedom from the consequences of condemnation.

5 In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

6 Who, being in very nature God,
    did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
7 rather, he made himself nothing
    by taking the very nature of a servant,
    being made in human likeness.
8 And being found in appearance as a man,
    he humbled himself
    by becoming obedient to death—
        even death on a cross!

—Philippians 2:5-8

May Good Friday find you contemplating your rescue, and may you have a wonderful Easter as we celebrate Jesus’ victory over sin and death.

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Daily Broadside | There’s No Going Back Now, Only Going Forward

Now that we’ve gone full Stalinist (or Maoist; at this point, who’s to say which we resemble more?), we need to be thinking about the ramifications. This has been a long time in coming, developing quite slowly over the last 80 years, accelerating in the last 15, and now hitting full velocity.

Half our population, including the illegal foreigners who now live in the shadows, do not believe in the U.S. Constitution, the rule of law, or in America’s greatness. That also includes the Democrats as a party, along with RINOs, NeverTrumpers, and UniParty members. It includes the majority of our institutions, including universities, media, law, politics, entertainment, medicine and, unfortunately, a significant number of churches.

America as founded is gone. The skeleton, the framework, is there. But it’s either demonized as hopelessly racist or colonialist, or thrown over the shoulder as an accessory to convey some kind of status that can neutralize any criticism.

I’ve resisted wanting to admit that this is no longer the country I grew up in. The ground has shifted beneath my feet and moved so far to the Left that I would now be labeled a “right-wing extremist.” I’m nothing of the sort, of course. I’m an evangelical conservative Christian who cherishes our God-given rights and believes in personal responsibility, a moral obligation toward others, earning what you have, and enjoying the fruits of your hard work.

Since we now live under a nascent police state regime that is trying to consolidate its power and has taken the extraordinary step of indicting, arresting and charging a former U.S. president — and DECLARED PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE who, by all accounts, is the leading figure of the political opposition — with 34 felonies but with no crimes listed, you can bet that it won’t stop there. If they are brazen enough to do this with Donald J. Trump, what’s to stop them from doing the same to a sitting Senator or Congressman? What’s to stop them from going after high-profile opinion leaders? Or little guys like me?

Or you?

I’ll tell you what will stop them: nothing.

Note the pattern. They spied on Trump as he campaigned. They unmasked members of his team. They accused him of colluding with Russia while he was in office. They accused him of a quid pro quo phone call with his Ukrainian peer. The soulless speaker of the House ripped up his State of the Union speech on national TV. They impeached him, twice. They rioted. They threatened. And now they’ve finally, finally, figured out a way to twist some NDA payments into federal crimes and have arrested and charged the man.

They now have to try him, with his next appearance in court on DECEMBER 4 — eight months from now and just before 2024 primary elections. Think that’s coincidence? If they get a conviction (nothing is impossible in our new state of affairs) Trump becomes the first U.S. president to go to jail. If they don’t get a conviction, the next step in the continuum is … terrible to contemplate, but four past presidents have endured it.

Then they’ll come for you.

Here’s our choice as Robert Spencer sees it:

There has never before been a presidential candidate under indictment, and Democrats appear to be banking on the proposition that most Americans are still unaware that the old republic has passed away, and that the criminal might not be the one who is indicted, but the one doing the indicting. That would explain why Alvin Bragg appears to be cheerfully indifferent to the appearance of conducting a corrupt, politicized prosecution designed to take out the chief opponent of the ruling regime.

Trump himself has often said it: “They’re not after me, they’re after you. I’m just in the way.” The legal persecution of Donald Trump is a prelude to what this authoritarian regime plans to unleash upon law-abiding Americans if they dare to dissent from its sinister agenda. The feds have already sent this message by sending a SWAT team to arrest a peaceful pro-life activist, Mark Houck. Trump is the big prize, but his arrest is intended primarily to send a new message to the American people: fall in line, or else. And so, for the sake of the flickering light of freedom here and around the world, we must not comply.

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A Personal Note
I write five days a week on personal time because it’s one way I can contribute to strengthening the resolve of Christians, conservatives and other like-minded compatriots in the face of unprecedented division in our country. I would like to eventually do more. If you like what you’re reading and think others would benefit from it, please consider regularly sharing and commenting on my posts. Also invite your friends to subscribe. They can do that right on the home page. Thanks for reading! — Dave

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Daily Broadside | Trump Indicted; Will Somebody Make it Stop?

Yesterday we crossed another Rubicon, this time one that can never be undone. For the first time in 247 years, a U.S. president has been arrested and charged with criminal wrongdoing. No, it wasn’t Joe Biden, who has lied about his financial arrangements involving Ukraine, Russia, China and his son Hunter; neither was it Barack Hussein Obama (currently serving his third term behind the scenes) who was involved in the plot to undermine president Donald J. Trump’s term.

No, the president charged with a crime was Donald J. Trump.

When I saw that photo, I had one of those nauseous “watershed moment” feelings in my gut. This has really happened. A George Soros-backed District Attorney campaigned on a promise to indict Trump, rummaged through the gutters looking for something, anything, that he could use, and landed on 34 felony charges of “falsifying business records related to alleged hush-money payments made ahead of the 2016 presidential campaign.”

The indictment‘s charges just repeat the same charge for different checks the Trump Family Revocable Trust wrote to lawyer Michael Cohen from February 2017 to December 2017. They’re saying that the checks were written to Cohen for legal services but were “intended” for something else, i.e. paying off the prostitute.

The indictment will revolve around hush money payments paid at the end of the 2016 election cycle to adult entertainer and Trump fling Stormy Daniels and, possibly, a former Playboy Playmate, Karen McDougal. Bragg revived what was known inside the Manhattan District Attorney’s office as the “zombie investigation” into the hush money payments. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance, declined to seek an indictment on this matter. 

The theory of the case goes as follows. Trump made the hush money payments through his fixer, Michael Cohen, and reported the expense as “legal fees.” In fact, Bragg will allege, these were in-kind donations from Trump to his own presidential campaign. This distinction is important because New York state law deems the falsification of business records to be a misdemeanor unless that falsification is meant to conceal another crime. In this case, the documented fraud was perpetrated to conceal a violation of campaign finance law. 

If this is, in fact, Bragg’s case against Trump, then it’s paper-thin. Many campaign finance law experts say it’s unclear whether hush money would be an in-kind contribution to a political campaign, since Trump himself has said he made the payments to spare his family from embarrassment—not to win the 2016 election. 

These trumped up charges are pure political persecution and election interference on the part of Bragg. He’s a tool of the Left.

We would shake our heads and scoff in disbelief when we’d hear about countries where members of the political opposition were arrested under false pretenses. “That would never happen here,” we’d say to ourselves.

With the arrest of Donald Trump, we’ve entered into a new era of country’s history. The kind of corruption we’ve long believed was limited to third-world countries has made it to the Land of the Free. Thanks to Alvin Bragg’s precedent, prosecutors are now emboldened to misuse their power to punish political rivals with fabricated charges. Worse yet, roughly half the country condones it because they care more about punishing Trump than the rule of law or blind justice.

This, even though the statute of limitations has run out; even though the feds knew there was no case to be made (and declined to try); even though it’s dubious that Bragg is authorized to enforce federal laws; even though this is obviously prosecutorial abuse of discretion.

It’s no use wondering how close we are to being a communist third world banana republic. We’re there.

I cite this in order to make this point: In my wildest dreams, I never imagined what I was studying would ever apply to the United States of America, the freest country in world history.

I assumed that communism was, for various reasons, something that happened elsewhere — most obviously, Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia and North Korea.

What were those various reasons? One was the absence of freedom in the history of those countries. Another was that all those countries were, with the exception of Cuba, outside of Western civilization.

All these years later, I see that I was wrong. Communism — or if you will, left-wing fascism and totalitarianism — is coming to America and Canada, and (a bit more gradually) to Australia and New Zealand.

Incredibly — or maybe not so incredibly — more than two hundred years of unprecedented and unrivaled liberty and commitment to Judeo-Christian values and reason, and all the unparalleled achievements of Western civilization, have come to mean nothing to about half of the American people and to virtually every one of its major institutions.

Don’t take it from me.

“America is back, baby!” is a farce under Brandon. “America” as founded is dead and will probably never be back.

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Daily Broadside | The Best Solution is the One that Seems Impossible

One of the men I read pretty regularly is Doug Wilson who blogs at Blog & Mablog. He had a post late in March that I wanted to circle back to because he has a way incisively getting to the point about what is going on in our culture from a (Reformed) Christian point of view.

The post, titled That Acrid Taste of Damnation, looks at what is happening across the country and says that it’s no longer about politics, but about wickedness. Let me quote one full section for you, but I encourage you to go read the the whole thing.

America’s Inchoate and Disintegrating Soul

This is what damnation tastes like. It is not the full damnation itself, but rather just one drop from the bottle, applied to the tip of the tongue. That acrid taste seems like it could never go away, and yet there is a full bottle of it left. There will always be a full bottle left.

It tastes like spitting loss, biting regret, venomous hatred, curdled resentment, dishonest blame shifting, and devouring lust, and all of it curved back on itself. To use Augustine’s phrase—incurvatus in se—it is like a snake biting its tail. Actually, it is not like a snake biting its tail; it is a snake biting its tail.

Instead of the soul turned outward toward God, the twisted soul bends back in upon itself. The idea is to believe in oneself, to reach deep down within one’s own heart, and there to discover a treasury of infinite riches. So goes the lie. But what we have discovered instead is that we have become a vacuous people with hollow souls, empty minds, and grasping hands.

Thinking ourselves to be urbane sophisticates, cosmopolitan, savvy in the ways of the world, we have discovered instead that the human souls that we once had are coming apart in our hands. They are in tatters, and pieces are all over the floor. When we try to pick up one piece, we drop other pieces, and all of them continue to tear and come apart. Not only so, but just as we buy our jeans pre-ripped these days, so also we try to treat our souls the same way—we try to introduce the artificial destruction early on. Christian parents send their fresh little girls off to a government school so that some bureaucratic flunky can start grooming her into taking hormone blockers, and then cutting off her breasts.

If you are reading this, and you are one of those who has been surgically torn apart by such lies, and you are still miserable, that misery has to do with your relationship to the God you are still rejecting. Your misery has nothing to do with the fact that some people in the red states disapprove of what you have done. They cut off your breasts in San Francisco, and you are not spiritually empty because somebody in Tulsa disapproves. You feel spiritually empty because you are spiritually empty, and Oklahoma has little or nothing to do with it. Not only so, but the surgeon who did this awful thing to you is spiritually empty as well, and the medical profession certified him is as hollow as a jug. Looking to them for answers is like drinking from the dry and broken cisterns of ancient Israel, the ones that were dry in Jeremiah’s day.

“Thinking ourselves to be urbane sophisticates, cosmopolitan, savvy in the ways of the world, we have discovered instead that the human souls that we once had are coming apart in our hands.” I can summarize this whole sentence into one word when it comes to what I’ve been describing so often in my observations and critique of the powers-that-be: soulless.

As in callous, heartless, cold, calculating, and cruel.

Name me any politician on the Left these days, and I think “soulless.” There are some on the Right, too, but they’re a minority. Whichever side of the aisle they are on, they don’t care about fairness, lawfulness, truth or those they harm with their insane policies. They care only about themselves and their power.

No one is really “soulless.” We all have a soul. But our souls are sick and unresponsive to what is right and good. So what is the solution?

When you are mired in sin, as America currently is, there is no option other than repentance. That repentance does not extricate us from the bog we have created, but it is the one thing required of us by the only One who can extricate us. The twin summons of the gospel consists of these two imperatives—repent and believe.

When I’ve said that there is only one way back from the coming confrontation, I’m wrong. One is to strenuously object; the other is to repent and believe. Where I am sure to ruffle some feathers is when I say that perhaps it will take both repenting and believing, and strenuously objecting.

The best case scenario is that we and our countrymen (and those living here illegally) come to their senses and repent before it’s too late. We must pray that the Spirit of God does that work.

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Daily Broadside | Being Led to the Slaughter Like a Herd of Cattle

I don’t know if it was my irrefutable logic, my stature as an unknown public servant, or my shameless good looks, but my access to Twitter was restored some time over the weekend. No notice, no explanation, no apology. I just clicked over to read something and ᗒ poof! ᗕ there I was, embraced once again in the land of 280 characters.

I had no confidence in being reinstated. Now that I am, I wonder why. My guess: the algorithm that swept Twitter for offending rule breakers took down every tweet it found, and then the Twitter Censorship Bureau went into clean-up mode, taking complaints about locked accounts one at a time. Or, maybe I just lucked out and got a more conservative reviewer.

Whatever the case, I now wonder if I’m on a “watch” list. I’ve been identified as a potential troublemaker, so maybe next time my good looks won’t be enough. In the meantime, it will be easier to write about the lunacy in our country if I can link to and quote Twitter posts.

So the big news this week is Trump’s indictment in Manhattan.

Former President Donald Trump’s unprecedented indictment has surged into the limelight and fueled public debate over whether this case is legitimate and shows no one is above the law or amounts to a political hack job meant to thwart Trump’s chances in the 2024 presidential election.

Expectations are that Trump will be arraigned at some point in the coming week, with a spokesperson for the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg saying in a statement that it’s now coordinating with Trump’s attorneys the former president’s surrender.

The Left’s maniacal obsession with Trump strikes me as Ahab obsessing over Moby Dick for crippling him. Trump interfered with the Left’s destruction of the United States, an unforgiveable sin and, even though they managed to keep him out of office in 2020, he’s still a threat to them and their agenda. The case that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg is trying to make is weak on the merits.

Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr has criticized the indictment, calling it a “disgrace” and a “political hit job.”

In an interview at the National Review Institute Ideas Summit, Barr said he saw the case against Trump as prosecutorial abuse and as “pathetically weak.”

“Judging from the news reports … it’s the archetypal abuse of the prosecutorial function to engage in a political hit job, and it’s a disgrace,” Barr said when asked to comment on the case.

Barr said that Bragg appears to have ginned up a technical misdemeanor into a felony, adding that this was something that federal prosecutors chose not to prosecute as a campaign violation.

This is lawfare in the service of a political agenda. Not only does “the statute of limitations bar the alleged charges” but “the case is based on a faulty legal theory.”

Trump asks a good question: “How much more are American patriots expected to take?” This is what I alluded to in my post on Friday.

What is happening is that the goons who run the Left are pushing the Right toward desperation. Desperate people will take desperate measures. Let’s hope we have time to turn things around before we get to that point.

I’m not one to advocate for violence or rebellion, but we are now being forced into the cattle race by lawlessness, lies, double standards and persecution, all enabled by the money our government takes from us in the form of “taxes” and uses to turn the instruments of political power against us. The goal is to take total control over us by eliminating as much of our freedom and independence as possible, promising us that if we only trust them, we will be safe and cared for by the government.

There is coming a moment when American patriots will have to make a decision. Will we passively go to the slaughter that’s coming, or will we object? It will have to happen before the head gate closes on our necks. It will be of last resort, when all other options fail.