Once upon a time, there was a coronavirus.  Actually, there were several coronaviruses.  The CDC lists 229E, NL63, OC43, and HKU1.  It goes on to note that they are generally mild respiratory viruses that rarely cause serious illnesses.  They are...drum roll, please...common cold viruses.

Over the last twenty years, we've been threatened with panic porn about three other coronaviruses: MERS, SARS, and COVID-19.  MERS and SARS appeared to be really bad actors, but instead of the infectious holocaust the Feds predicted, they bombed out.  SARS killed 11% of its victims but is known to have infected only 8,649 people.  MERS was a bit worse, killing 35% of its victims, but as of 2021, there were only 2,600 total cases.  At this point, our attention might wander to Zika and Ebola.  Wild-eyed acolytes of the CDC shouted that these new plagues would destroy civilization as we knew it.  Instead, they made profits for Anthony Fauci as he rented out his patent on Remdesivir.  But it didn't work on Ebola.

Then, the story goes, Fauci used our tax money to pay for the Wuhan Institute of Virology to make a bigger, badder coronavirus.  This one could not be allowed to be a nothing.  It had to be catastrophic so that his medicine would be prescribed for everyone.  And a vaccine constructed with his help would also be pleasantly beneficial for his wallet.

We live in an age of unbelief.  The foundations of American life are eroding.  America is entering an uncharted, revolutionary time.  We are no longer the America of our founders or even the America that existed twenty years ago.  We are in trouble, and a cataclysm of ominous events may soon overwhelm us.  We need a national spiritual revival. 
  
Two seminal revival movements were such game-changing events in American history that historians were compelled to call them Great Awakenings.  The First Great Awakening in the mid-1700s created the moral climate for the Declaration of Independence and the founding of a new country, conceived in liberty, that would truly become a light to the nations. 

The Second Great Awakening in the mid-1800s was even more potent and culminated with Abraham Lincoln and the abolition of slavery.  As a result of this movement, the United States has liberated more people economically, politically, and spiritually than any other nation in history.

The problems of America today cannot be solved by politicians or our broken culture.  We need another Great Awakening on a scale and resolve equal to the first two.  There are some hopeful signs this may be happening. 

"The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened."

The pages of the Bible are a testament to the downfall of those who plot wicked plans, providing a guidepost for our own battles: "Do the right thing, and risk the consequences."  Because, in the end, righteousness prevails.  When we were children, bullies would throw sticks and stones and call us names.  Today, some of those bullies grew up into "Deep Staters" who brand our truth as conspiracy theories and their lies as truth.  As Isaiah warned, "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" (Isaiah 5:20).

Intimidation: Goliath, the Philistine giant, was a colossal embodiment of intimidation.  Against him, the Israelites felt powerless.  But with faith as his guide, David overcame.  Today, we grapple with the "Giant of the Deep State," an insidious, unseen force that operates behind the curtains, manipulating political structures.  These unelected puppet masters, who wield undue influence, can seem overwhelming, yet we are reminded: "The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?  The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?" (Psalm 27:1).  With God, even the mightiest, most covert enemies like Satan and his Deep State accomplices can be vanquished.

Arrogance: Haman's story is emblematic of the consequences of unchecked arrogance.  His malicious designs against the Jews were foiled by Esther and Mordecai, leading to his own destruction.  Proverbs 16:18 observes, "Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall."

Seduction and brazenness: Jezebel and her prophets of Baal epitomized seduction and brazenness, drawing Israel away from God.  But God's enduring plan saw through their machinations.  As it was in 1 Kings 18:39, "The Lord, He is God!  The Lord, He is God!"

In the time of Nehemiah, as the Israelites endeavored to rebuild their city's walls, they faced adversaries in Sanballat and Tobiah.  Yet Nehemiah remained resolute.  The people built the wall with one hand and defended with the other, illustrating that perseverance and faith can overcome any opposition.

Today's world seems rife with insurmountable challenges.  But when we embrace our "spiritual" sight over our "natural" eyes, we perceive the greater cosmic battle.  As the Bible reassures, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" (Philippians 4:13).

Echoing biblical teachings, John F. Kennedy once remarked, "The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened."  We must stand unwaveringly against any evil, no matter its form.

 Gerald McGlothlin

"Public opinion in the country is everything" - Abraham Lincoln.

In 1887, eminent thinker Wallace F. Campbell, writing in The North American Review, introduced the often-used term of today: The Court of Public Opinion.

As cataloged by the Library of Congress, Campbell wrote:

"It is commonly supposed that courts, juries, and counsel constitute the proper tribunal ordained by the people for the trial of alleged criminals. It has remained for the author of the "Court of Public Opinion" to assume that such is not the case, and that the machinery of justice exists merely for the purpose of automatically registering the prejudiced decision of a self-constituted tribunal ... a trial court whose judgment is infallible, and from whose decision no appeal lies, is a very unsafe tribunal for the people of this country to adopt."

Campbell may well have had the wisdom to envision what could happen 136 years later - and be talking about President Biden's and the Left's relentless campaign to send former president Trump to jail. Attorney General Merrick Garland and his aggressive prosecutor Jack Smith are expending all federal resources to build a case that, under the right circumstances of a biased jury and a sympathetic bench, could result in a judgment that might appear infallible, as Campbell said. But the eminent thinker warns that such an outcome would be hard for voters to embrace.

Indeed, the proceedings in the classified documents case are well underway. Judge Cannon has already set a trial date of May 2024, just six months before the next U.S. presidential election. Some conservatives complained that such a date is too dangerous for President Trump. What if he is found guilty of at least one charge? Democrats could not contain their glee. Running against a "criminal" would be the surest way to return President Biden to a second term.

But the Democrats could be miscalculating big time.

In roughly the past fifty years, the term “continuity of government” has been used with increased frequency describing how the United States of America, a constitutional republican system of government, contains internal mechanisms to protect the executive branch in the event of crisis, attack or disruption of leadership by adversaries.

The term ‘continuity of government‘ became much more common in the aftermath of 9-11-01 and the thunder shock of an al-Qaeda inspired terrorist attack in New York and Washington DC.

Within the very brief discussion period that led up to the 10-26-01 Patriot Act [pdf here], literally a structural reform of the entire domestic terrorist apparatus that created the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA), a bill only debated for a few weeks, the baseline was the enhanced ‘continuity of government‘ in the event of an emergency.

As we have exhaustively outlined on these pages, the outcome of the Patriot Act was to create a system where every American was now viewed by our federal government through the prism of the citizen being a potential terrorist threat.  The federal government aligned all of our institutions and systems accordingly.

DHS was created to monitor American behavior, the TSA was created to scan American travelers, and the FBI was enhanced with resources to conduct surveillance despite our Fourth Amendment protections within our Constitution.  Instead of the U.S. Govt protecting U.S. citizens from foreign threats, the Patriot Act changed the mission of government to protect itself from potential citizen threats.

In essence, We the People became the suspects, and all of the constitutional viewpoints within the FBI and Dept of Justice were modified to create monitoring systems.

Who is the emperor?  The cabal that is prepared to do anything, no matter how unconstitutional, no matter how evil, to destroy Donald Trump.  That would be Merrick Garland, Christopher Wray, and Jack Smith.  Of course, this trio of thugs has many cohorts willing to do its dirty work.

What kind of dirty work?  The kind that has made judges, the mainstream media, and most members of Congress fear being canceled.  The left's method of coercion is well known.  Cross us, and your career is over.  Read Alan Dershowitz's book, Get Trump.  The elites who believe they are uniquely entitled to run the country will cancel you, harass you, ruin you by any means necessary.  They will go after anyone who dares to deviate from their party line.

American culture has become a cesspool of abject cowardice.  And by design, now that the elites — our stable of Ivy League legacy grads who grew up knowing they would run the world without having to really know anything — are in charge.  We are living in a dystopia of their making.  It's all about leverage; everyone has some kind of leverage on everyone else, so people do what they are told.

That is how Jeffrey Epstein got away with his obscene abuse of young girls trafficked for the pleasure of his rich pals for decades.  Think Sound of Freedom and the fact that the U.S. is the number-one consumer of child porn and abuse.  Why does the left fear this film?  Hmmm.

Modern warfare has evolved into what is now termed Fifth Generation Warfare (5GW).

Even the leftist wonks at Wikipedia have summarized the evolution of warfare fairly well, in re-stating the generations of warfare concepts developed by military analysts and historians including William S. Lind, Terry Terriff, and Robert Steele:

• First-generation warfare refers to ancient and post-classical battles fought with massed manpower, using phalanx, line, and column tactics with uniformed soldiers governed by the state. This generation came to an end around the mid-nineteenth century due to rapid improvements in the range, accuracy, and rate-of-fire of many weapon systems.

• Second-generation warfare refers to industrial warfare, evolving after the invention of the rifled musket and breech-loading weapons and continuing through the development of the machine gun and indirect fire. This generation predates the widespread effective use of motorised vehicles in battle and combined arms. The term second generation warfare was created by the U.S. military in 1989.

• Third-generation warfare focuses on using late modern technology-derived tactics of leveraging speed, stealth, and surprise to bypass the enemy’s lines and collapse their forces from the rear. Essentially, this was the end of linear warfare on a tactical level, with units seeking not simply to meet each other face-to-face but to outmaneuver each other to gain the greatest advantage. Armoured units, military aircraft, and airborne forces began to play an increasingly critical role in operations, with the development of strategies such as Blitzkrieg and deep operation.

• Fourth-generation warfare as presented by Lind et al. is characterized by a post-modern return to decentralized forms of warfare, blurring of the lines between war and politics, combatants, and civilians due to states’ loss of their near-monopoly on combat forces, returning to modes of conflict common in pre-modern times. Guerrilla groups, private military contractors, and paramilitary organisations play a prominent role in fourth-generation warfare.

• Fifth-generation warfare is conducted primarily through non-kinetic military action, such as social engineering, misinformation, and cyberattacks, along with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and fully autonomous systems.

To my way of thinking, Fifth Generation warfare centers around Information and  denial of information. That could include: intelligence, counterintelligence, propaganda, civil affairs, psychological warfare, C4CI, lawfare, targeted harassment, and war as an extension of politics, i.e. political dirty tricks or outright political warfare.

Thousands of Americans were severely punished for bravely resisting the Covid psyop.

If you were one of those people who always diligently wore an ineffective mask, got the experimental vaccine and boosters, or performatively practiced social distancing, you really owe an apology to those who stood up for civil liberties during Covid and must commit to being smarter and braver in the future. 

The Covid years mark what was arguably the greatest encroachment on personal freedom and bodily autonomy in the history of our country. The government decimated the American economy by forcibly closing businesses. It enacted unethical and anti-science mask mandates and government employee vaccine mandates, even though the Covid shots do not prevent people from spreading or contracting the virus. 

Many counties and cities made life for the unvaccinated as uncomfortable as possible, with some prohibiting them from dining in restaurants and going to the gym or entertainment venues. Meanwhile, private businesses and schools had their own social distancing, vaccine, and mask requirements, with even many churches bending the knee. 

It was at least somewhat reasonable to wear a mask or social distance at the very beginning of Covid because there were so many unknowns about the virus. Yet the insanity lasted for years, well after it was clear the response to the virus was causing more harm than good and studies showed the lockdowns were futile, cloth masks were not effective, and the vaccine was causing serious injuries.  

Abraham Lincoln at the height of the Civil War was asked if he thought the Lord was on his side. Lincoln responded, "My concern is not whether God is on our side, but whether we are on God's side."

God’s blessing of America, like many things God does, is a partnership arrangement.

For those who love our country and all for which it stands, when called to pledge our allegiance – we stand, we remove our hats, we silence our conversation. We place our hands over our hearts and we promise yet again our loyalty – as we should – to the essential intangible qualities of a free land entrusted to our care by God Almighty.

Regardless of the polarizing strains of identity politics that some promote, the vast majority of Americans still hold to the reality that we are "One Nation Under God," and that, as our Declaration of Independence states, we are "...endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights... among them, Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." 

A minute or two with the headlines of any newspaper, or the first two minutes of any news channel, are enough to tell us that we need something beyond ourselves to help us. Whatever we are doing on our own, is doing little, if anything to stem the tide of cultural divisiveness, racial disharmony, pervasive political corruption and unceasing violence. We need something beyond ourselves – to help us, to save us – to bless us.

Lots to complain about, and my friends are doing a lot of that.  This article brings the complaint to a point. The author argues persuasively about the reason Republican's won't prevail in the ESG debate.  We agree on many issues; however, I would only disagree on the outcome, because it is still in process.  ESG has a principle; it's wrong, it's destructive, but they sure believe in it.  Republicans today lack the unifying principle on which our party was formed.

I would condense this reason into "the Republican party lacks the unifying principle and the understanding of the principle."

For instance, the Christian Right are all about abortion, the Never Trumps are about Never Trump, the MAGA guys are into Only Trump.  The big-gov R's are into using government to enrich themselves and their shareholders.  They all lack the principle.  The left unifies under an evil banner, and the right eats its young.

Rural America is vital to the survival of this nation.  It matters not only for the food and natural resources it produces, but as a source of inspiration, and indeed the best hope for the recovery of our constitutional republic.

The 2020 presidential election results map clearly shows that a conservative stronghold exists in most rural parts of the country, especially in the South, Midwest, and many Rocky Mountain states.  Rural America is not the hinterland of New York City or coastal California.  And yet mainstream media have largely ignored the vision and insights of rural communities for decades. 

How the Founders envisioned the future of America still matters.  Many of the leading Founders believed in a rooted lifestyle based on land ownership and saw the republic as a mosaic of individual families pursuing happiness as moral, capable, and independent-minded citizens.  Owning land was once a dream that most Americans sought to achieve, and the driving force behind it was the need to be independent from the control of others.  Jefferson, Washington, Adams, and Madison, farmers all, and all currently vilified, would have been appalled at the degree to which Americans have now forsaken the cardinal lesson of rural life: the need to be self-sufficient.  From the voices of Big Tech, large corporations, wayward governments, and the modern consumer culture, Americans are told what to think, buy, and believe. 

But it wasn't always this way. What happened?

Since Jack Smith and his prosecutors dropped a multicount federal indictment against President Trump, multiple grounds have surfaced warranting dismissal of the embarrassing prosecutorial sideshow in South Florida. 

Already, Smith’s indictment faces multiple legal challenges.

The Presidential Records Act, the big red elephant in the room ignored by Smith, at 44 USC §2205 (3), gives a former president unrestrained access to the presidential records which he declares to be his and gives his designated agents also access to such records.  Yes, the National Archives can take control of those records, after consultation with the former President, and any disagreement on the designation of a record is to be resolved by a United States District Court in a civil proceeding, not a criminal prosecution.

But the Presidential Records Act simply does not create an exception prohibiting the former President’s access to records marked as secret, classified, or confidential. Under the Presidential Records Act, Trump, even as a former president, has all the access he wants to all his presidential records, even those which may have been classified, and may give such access to his designated agents.  End of story.

The Espionage Act, even if it controlled over the Presidential Records Act, which it does not, does not apply to records that have been declassified by a president, who has an absolute right to declassify any document he wants. This is Trump's secondary argument against the “Espionage Act” charges, that he in fact declassified all documents in his possession before leaving Washington. But Trump doesn’t even need that argument, because the Presidential Records Act (PRA) trumps the Espionage Act on the topic of classified materials. Trump can take and designate what he wants, classified or not -- and give designated agents access to records - classified or not.  Plus, the notion of Trump spying for a foreign power -- the original heart of the purpose of the Espionage Act -- is beyond ludicrous.

Since Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis officially jumped into the 2024 GOP presidential primary, the Republican Twittersphere has devolved into a giant cluster of insanity.

Take a trip to your favorite right-wing account, and you’re likely to find an untold number of tweets trashing either former President Donald Trump or DeSantis, accompanied by a lengthy explanation of why his or her preferred candidate will be the one to take down Joe Biden in the 2024 general election. The back-and-forth between Trump and DeSantis supporters — which continued into Memorial Day, a day when we’re supposed to honor those who have paid the ultimate price for our freedoms — has largely lacked any real substance. The insults thrown around have become so petty and personal, it feels like watching an episode of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians.”

While it’s completely understandable to be on the lookout for a potential nominee given Biden’s disastrous presidency thus far, overzealously focusing on a primary we won’t be voting in until February, at the earliest, distracts from current issues and plays into Democrats’ hands. There will be plenty of time between now and then to decide who becomes the 2024 GOP presidential candidate. But that time is not right now.

At this given moment, we have highly-politicized U.S. intel agencies targeting conservatives and protecting Democrats, federal departments and left-wing nonprofits interfering in our elections, an establishment trying to drag us into World War III, major corporations glorifying gender dysphoria, so-called “red” states acting like blue states, leftists indoctrinating and “trans-ing” children, a Congress spending taxpayer money like drunken Marxists, a wide open southern border, Democrats attempting to destroy the Supreme Court, an inflated economy, and a dying military.

We are now enduring the usual competing ads from another primary election.  A trend has developed in Republican primaries that sees candidates call each other "RINOs" (Republicans in Name Only).  An incumbent GOP candidate insists that his challenger is a RINO.  The challenger says the same thing about the incumbent.  Republicans argue over who are the "real" RINOs.  These accusations appear in local races as much as congressional and Senate contests.  Even the RINOs appear to oppose the RINOs. 

Some commenters implore both sides to stop using this term because it is easy to make and impossible to prove.  But is it really impossible? 

Only some of the accusing candidates are lying.  RINOs do appear in many races and sometimes win.  They stop key legislation or join with Democrats to create oppressive new levels of government bureaucracy.  They repeat Democrat talking points. They denounce conservative elected officials while providing momentum for Democrat efforts to derail conservative initiatives.  It takes only two or three RINOs to derail a bill or nomination when a legislative body is held by a slim majority.  Their presence at all levels of government demoralizes the Republican base and depresses GOP voter turnout.  Many GOP voters have simply given up because GOP officials appear to carry out the same policies that the base has voted against.

But should we give up?  Not if we understand certain RINO characteristics that make it easier to identify them before we vote.  No one characteristic is always decisive by itself.

Nothing is judged more severely by our culture today than assertions of biblical male and female absolutes. It may be possible that we are in the final progression of God giving our culture up to first “sexual impurity” then “shameful lusts” and finally a “depraved mind”. And throughout all of this, true human sexuality has been the prime target. The enemy turns everything on its head, evil is good, good is evil, and truth is exchanged for a lie.

This exchange is found most deeply in the attack on human sexuality, for it strikes us at our core. God designed the human being as male and female, created for a relationship, and each with unique purposes. And yet, this forms the focus of our current controversies. Ponder how many of our burning issues are rooted in a contrary view of God’s design: pornography, abortion, adultery and unmarried sex, homosexuality, lesbianism, LGBTQIA+, transgenderism, pansexuality, personal pronouns, gender dysphoria and identity, etc. Additionally, we have human sexuality issues that are being used as political and social hammers such as male toxicity, #MeToo, ERA, pay equality, gender roles and quotas, glass ceilings, harassment and so on. Human sexuality is at the core of all of this, and nothing seems to provoke a more visceral hostility.

But we must stay true to the Word of God, or we are lost in a fickle sea of emotions and power struggles for control and significance.  Of the critical forces aligning themselves in our culture today, this may well be the most perilous of all, for when we mess with man’s fundamental design, everything becomes radically skewed.

Every one of the treasonous bastards you see in this photo (except Christopher Steele) took an oath of office as a United States federal employee. If you are unaware, here is the oath everyone of them knowingly signed and should be held accountable for violating.

The oath
“I, { name }, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

Who takes the oath?
This oath of office for federal employees applies to all people involved with the federal government except for the President (the office has its own oath). So, Supreme Court justices, members of the House of Representatives the Senate, and even the Vice President all take the same oath. Furthermore, all civilian employees and government officials take the same oath prescribed by the constitution as the military (differs only in that it includes allegiance to the chain of command). No more and no less.

Let’s break it down a little...

In the news recently was St. George Mayor Michele Randall’s new policy to stop allowing the public to present spoken comments at city council meetings. Balancing the public’s right to be heard with the government’s ability to do its job is a delicate task.

It begs the question, can Local government entities limit public comments at their public meetings? After reviewing Mayor Randall’s reasoning, I am not sure she will be successful with her edict. But different elected officials handle this situation differently.

A couple of years ago, the Weber County Commissioners answered that question with pizazz. According to them you see, it depends on the definition of the meeting room you are confronting the public in. This may sound silly but last year the Weber County Commission changed the definition of their meeting room in order to legally limit public comments they felt were keeping them from doing the people’s business. The change, which essentially limited public comment, was deemed constitutional and supported by our County Attorney.** How could this be possible?​

Imagine someone told you that in the run-up to a U.S. presidential election, the FBI tried to undermine a candidate at the behest of the opposing campaign by cooking up a false narrative of collusion with Moscow.

And let’s say this conspiracy implicated not just the FBI but also the White House, Justice Department, and CIA — and that nearly the entire corporate press went along with it, gleefully spreading the false narrative that this candidate was a Russian agent, running story after story of fabricated nonsense in a coordinated effort to ensure the opposing candidate won.

In normal times, you’d scoff at such an outlandish story, dismiss it as the plot of some half-baked Tom Clancy novel. That could never happen in America, you’d say, where we have free and fair elections, the rule of law, and so on. And anyway, the media would never allow it to happen. They’d be too invested in exposing the conspiracy and claiming, rightly, a Watergate-type story of their very own.

But you’d be wrong. All of that really happened in 2016, recounted in all its jaw-dropping detail in Special Counsel John Durham’s 306-page report, released Monday after nearly four years in the making. The big takeaway from the report is that the Obama-era FBI launched a full investigation of the Trump campaign, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, in the summer of 2016 despite having zero evidence of any collusion between Trump and Russia.

Whether they know it or not, most local political parties have a great deal of power. Almost all of the people we vote for have been selected and, where allowed by law, endorsed by a local political party. Most of the people who are appointed to boards and commissions in your county have also been approved by local political parties. In most places, these local political parties determine who runs our communities. However, when local political parties do not exercise their real power, the void is filled by special interests. 

One of the principal roles a political party has, at least in theory, is assuring the public that its candidates have been screened in some valuable way. Anyone can put her name on a ballot, but what do we know about her? Can we know if she is competent, decent, sane? If she has been approved by a party, people have met her, worked with her, asked her questions. The question is, does a political party have a responsibility to choose candidates who are ethical? Or, to put it the other way, what is the responsibility of a political party when someone it chooses acts unethically, not in a minor way, but in a serious way?

Several years ago, a nearby state's Republican party chair chose not to run for re-election, and his stated reason for this decision was,  “I’m tired of those who are obsessed with seeing conspiracies around every corner and who have terribly misguided notions of what the role of the state party is." He also felt these "nuts," as he called them, had lost the party too many elections.

The chair's concern is not about ethics, of course, but about the competence and sanity of selected candidates. Although he seems more concerned about losing elections, he at least seems willing to resign rather than misuse his prestige to support candidates he feels are unfit for office.

​My old Grandpa said to me, “Son, there comes a time in every man’s life when he stops bustin’ knuckles and starts bustin’ caps and usually it’s when he becomes too old to take a whipping.

I don’t carry a gun to kill people; I carry a gun to keep from being killed.

I don’t carry a gun because I’m evil; I carry a gun because I have lived long enough to see the evil in the World.

I don’t carry a gun because I hate the government; I carry a gun because I understand the limitations of government.

I don’t carry a gun because I’m angry; I carry a gun so that I don’t have to spend the rest of my life hating myself for failing to be prepared.

I don’t carry a gun because I want to shoot someone; I carry a gun because I want to die at a ripe old age in my bed and not on a sidewalk somewhere tomorrow afternoon.

I don’t carry a gun to make me feel like a man; I carry a gun because men know how to take care of themselves and the ones they love.

I don’t carry a gun because I feel inadequate; I carry a gun because unarmed and facing three armed thugs, I am inadequate.

I don’t carry a gun because I love it; I carry a gun because I love life and the people who make it meaningful to me.

Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata. So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first principles of the conservative persuasion are derived from what leading conservative writers and public men have professed during the past two centuries. After some introductory remarks on this general theme, I will proceed to list ten such conservative principles.

Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word “conservative” as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.

The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.

In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy “change is the means of our preservation.”) A people’s historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers. But of course there is more to the conservative persuasion than this general attitude.

April 22, 2023 – Orem, Utah

I arrived at Convention 2 ½ hours early to get credentialed and help distribute flyers providing information and promoting certain desired outcomes to the arriving delegates. I was shocked when I was told, after allowing my drivers license to be scanned, I wasn’t in the database as a delegate, so I was sent to the HELP DESK. After rounding the corner, I stood in a line for 20 minutes before I made the desk. Once there, I waited for another 10 minutes and was told there was no one from my county to help me. Eventually I was led away from the HELP DESK to a dark corner where my county secretary was waiting to help. I was eventually found on the database (thank you Weber Party Secretary) and issued my credentials (unfortunately, because of the delay, I was unable to fulfill my earlier volunteer commitments). There are ~5,000 delegates in the whole state, a relatively small database to manage. When I made this observation, I was told by a nice woman, sorry, I am a volunteer. I understood her frustration and reminded her, as a delegate, I was a volunteer as well.

Once in the Convention Hall, I found a seat in my county’s designated section. I was not surprised to find my county’s section as far from the stage as possible (see photo at top). As long as I have been involved with the Party, my county’s designated section has always been as far from the stage (and microphones) as possible. I have reasons to believe why this is true but will save that discussion for another time.

Upon arriving, I immediately tried to locate the microphones. My repeated questions to the convention authorities, regarding where the delegates can speak, were received with blank stares. Eventually I was told there would be 4 microphones, two in the middle of the Convention Hall and two in the back (near our county section). I was ecstatic as I planned on getting to that microphone on a couple of occasions.