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January 6, 2024

Can you be counted on?  That is the question we quietly ask others.  It is the question good people ask themselves.  And I suspect that it is a question the Almighty will pose when we stand before Him to be judged.  

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It is a question that has nothing to do with intelligence or talent.  It is a question that has nothing to do with one’s ancestry or station in life.  Yet it is the most important question when danger comes, time is short, and everything is on the line.  When you say, “I will hold this position,” can others put their lives in your hands?  When you give someone your word, do you treat it as a solemn duty?  When you make God a promise, can He count on you?

That’s the test for integrity, and it is a test that most people fail.  That’s because being a person of integrity requires choosing tough and sometimes lonely roads.  It requires the honesty and discipline to admit when you have done wrong.  It requires moral resolve.  And all these traits are in short supply today.

There are a thousand different ways in life to seek honors, and there is no shortage of honors out there waiting to be won.  There is only one way to live a life with honor — by being a person of character, strength, and commitment.  Doing so requires walking a thin line while almost everyone else veers far from principle’s path.  Seeking to behave virtuously in a world that mocks virtue is not easy.  Living honorably is its own precious reward.

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Why do I bring this up?  Because 2024 is not only going to be a tumultuous year but also a year when the wheat is separated from the chaff.  Each of us will be tested, and each of us will be given the opportunity to prove our mettle.  

With two regional wars already raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, China’s Xi promising an invasion of Taiwan, and a not-so-secret globalist plot to resettle millions of military-aged illegal aliens into the United States, the geopolitical cauldron is boiling over.  With the U.S. government’s deficit spending, money-printing, and “green energy”-induced inflation spiking the cost of necessities at home while America’s foreign adversaries rapidly decouple from the dollar, we are one match strike away from the whole financial tinderbox going up in smoke.  With Democrats moving from mail-in-ballot fraud to outright removing Trump from ballots (as well as imprisoning his voters), the justice system’s self-immolation could incinerate what’s left of due process and the rule of law.  2024’s fortune cookie might as well read, “Only those who seek shelter and hide will see ’25.”

How we respond to these chaotic events will define both our lives and the life of our country.  When disaster strikes, can you keep a calm head?  Will you do everything you can to safeguard your family, friends, and community?  Will you dig down deep with steely nerve?  Can you be counted on when it matters most?

It has never been more important for people of integrity to lead, and in the trying times that lie ahead, there will be a public desperation for such leaders.  How do I know?  Because, with a few notable exceptions who are already being mercilessly persecuted today, America’s entire leadership class lacks honor.  

After years of shamelessly defending the wealthy and powerful from what it routinely denigrated as “baseless conspiracy theories,” the mainstream media have finally been forced to admit that two separate sex scandals (one involving Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking operation and another involving a Beltway prostitution ring — both probably honeypot goldmines for foreign intelligence services) substantiate long-running claims that America’s “ruling class” has a predilection for pedophilia.  After failing to defend Jewish students from on-campus attacks following Hamas’s October 7 slaughter of Israeli innocents and failing to truthfully defend her academic record as one befitting for the president of the country’s oldest university, Harvard’s Claudine Gay still refuses to take responsibility for her own actions and instead blames her ouster on “racial animus.”  After spending the last three years discharging servicemembers for refusing experimental “vaccines,” promoting men in skirts, stigmatizing conservative troops as “extremists,” and insisting that “white supremacy” and “climate change” are existential threats, the Pentagon has proven itself so full of horse manure that nobody wants to get near its stench. 

While the whole world knows Joe Biden is suffering from dementia, the U.S. press corps never says a word.  While roughly half the country believes his 2020 election “victory” depended on electoral fraud, and with evidence of that fraud piling up for three years, the press corps refuses to ask hard questions.  When hundreds of thousands of unarmed, patriotic Americans show up to exercise their First Amendment rights to protest for free and fair elections on January 6, 2021, however, the press corps can’t stop talking about an imaginary “insurrection.”  Today’s journalist class is filled with liars and frauds who have no time to speak truth to power because they are too busy manipulating the public and protecting the powerful.