Opinion
Featured Image
 Canonone1777 (Nash Long) / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0 (cropped)

December 24, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — As a child growing up just outside the Washington, D.C. Beltway during the 1960s–1970s, my greatest fear was that one day I would see a brilliant flash of white light followed by a thunderous explosion, and then look up to see a hideous mushroom cloud rising over the nation’s capital.

Back then, it never would have occurred to me that the biggest threat to our nation would come not from a foreign enemy reaching our shores, but from within — from fellow Americans who hold great power in politics, in mainstream media, in academia, and on Wall Street.

I never would have dreamed that a great battle to save our nation would be waged in my own backyard and require my participation. Yet this is my reality, and yours.

This is a Christmas like no other in the United States because religious freedom is under heavy, sustained attack; the consciences of Christians are being trampled underfoot; and the public square where we once enjoyed the free exchange of ideas and freedom of association has been shut down. Social media seek to erase not only our connections, but  our existence.

An eldely man who presents himself as “Catholic” can’t wait to take over the White House so he can squash the Little Sisters of the Poor; make the killing of babies in their mothers’ wombs up until the moment of brith as commonplace as possible; enable the Frankensteinian medical and surgical sexual transitioning of children’s bodies; amplify the grand pretension of “gay marriage,” where sodomy is elevated to equality with conjugal love; wrench the economy away from Main Street America; and establish an America where those who dare not wear a face mask or submit to an untested vaccine are social outcasts if not criminals, as are those who want to worship and fellowship at church.

If Joe Biden becomes president, we will have traded the most pro-life president in the history of the United States for the most pro-death president ever to be seated in the Oval Office. Policy changes will be dramatic.

This great fraud stands in the wings, claiming to want to “Build Back Better,” but in reality, he wants to “Weaken and Control,” delivering unimagined power to his cronies and by extension to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which seeks to obliterate the American way of life in general and religion in particular.

George Will, in a 2011 commentary, explained the struggle to define and control America’s vision and spirit, identifying the source of the battle among the increasingly Marxist Democratic Party, statist Republicans, and the rest of America:

The American Creed’s values are liberal, as that term was understood until liberalism succumbed to 20th-century statism. The values, expressing the 18th century’s preoccupation with defending liberty against government, are … “individualistic, democratic, egalitarian, and hence basically anti-government and anti-authority.” The various values “unite in imposing limits on power and on the institutions of government. The essence of constitutionalism is the restraint of governmental power through fundamental law.”

What made the American Revolution a novel event was that Americans did not declare independence because their religion, ethnicity, language or culture made them incompatible with the British. Rather, it was a political act based on explicit principles. So in America more than in Europe, nationalism is … “intellectualized”: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Who holds them? Americans. Who are Americans? Those who hold those truths to be self-evident.

“The distinctive aspect of the American Creed is its anti-government character. Opposition to power and suspicion of government as the most dangerous embodiment of power are the central themes of American political thought.”

“The distinctive aspect of the American Creed is its anti-government character,” and so it is precisely this that the statists and Marxist have purposed to extract from our American DNA.  

This is what hangs in the balance: whether we have faith in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the great success of the American experiment and instead submit to ill-liberal intellectual elites who believe they can engineer our lives better than we can plan and live them ourselves.

Catholics had better wake up to the truth: no help will come from Rome or from our bishops. Most are pawns of the global elites in this existential battle, and the handful who aren’t will likely become martyrs.

We are all activists now

The ill-liberal intellectual elites adhere to an ideology, a way of life, and a vision for a future that is already upon us, which is anathema to America and American Exceptionalism. Our ill-liberal intellectual elites are the enemy, the clear and present danger staring us in the face, expecting us to accept the fate they have planned for us.

What will save us from the “Great Reset” they have initiated? A multitude of engaged, commonsense, grassroot Americans actively participating in our communities, in elections, in government; who rise to the occasion as citizen-activists, citizen-journalists, citizen-politicians, citizen-leaders who will not sleep until sanity is restored to Washington, every State House, and every City Hall in this nation.

Thomas Jefferson said, “No government can continue good, but under the control of the people” and “The people are the only sure reliance for the preservation of liberty.”

Our country needs you and me to stand for moral sanity amid a nation whose identity and morals are rapidly deteriorating. If left unchecked, soon our nation will be foreign to us, resembling nothing that our founders envisioned, nothing that once made this nation a shining city on a hill. 

If the exceptional nature of America is allowed to crumble and be swept aside, all of humanity will suffer the rise of harsher and harsher forms of tyranny — and freedom, liberty and prosperity will be distant memories.

Actor Jim Caviezel recently delivered a powerful recitation of the climax of Ronald Reagan’s 1964 “Rendezvous with Destiny” speech. The actor paraphrased a few lines to more accurately describe the battle we are now in.  He concluded:

My fellow Americans, you and I have a rendezvous with destiny.  We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

We’re at war now with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind from its long climb from the swamp to the stars.  And it’s been said that if we lose this war, and in so doing lose this great way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent it from happening.

Well I think it’s high time now we ask ourselves if we still even know the freedoms that were intended for us by our founding fathers.  Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom exists not to do what you like, but having the right to do what you ought.

My brothers and sisters, set yourselves apart from this corrupt generation.  Be saints.  You were not made to fit in.  You were born to stand out.  And in the words of Ronald Reagan, ‘Evil is powerless if the good are unafraid.’

God bless you, and God bless America.

We have received our marching orders. We are all activists now.