Ms-Misty

ts eliot wrote these lines at the end of “The Hollow Men”:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I keep thinking of those words when I read what is happening in Norway. A public prosecutor has ruled that openly celebrating the October 7 massacre—calls for the rape, murder, and systematic killing of Jews—can be treated as ordinary political speech.

@LizaRosen0000 has been sounding the alarm, and I understand why she is grieved. It is hard to watch a society slowly lose the will to name evil while still calling it freedom.

Even so, God remains great. He is the same God who has blessed nations in the past when they turned back to Him, who has preserved His people Israel through every generation, and who is still able to open blind eyes and soften hard hearts.

Lord,
have mercy on Norway and on the wider West.

Open the eyes of leaders and ordinary people who have grown numb.

Give them the courage to protect the innocent and to stop shielding those who call for the destruction of Israel and of Jewish communities.

Comfort the Jewish people who feel the old hatred rising again; surround them with safety and peace.

Soften the hearts of those who have been taught to hate, and bring them to repentance.

Strengthen the ones who still know the difference between speech and incitement.

Break the spirit of the hollow men and replace the whimper of surrender with a quiet return to truth and mercy.

In Jesus’ name, Amen 🙏🏻

I would absolutely love to see this happen. 🥴🤪😂

Was it intentional, or was it ineptitude?

Thune @LeaderJohnThune was McConnell’s whip before he took the gavel, beating Cornyn twenty-nine to twenty-four in a closed back room while Rick Scott @SenRickScott, the president’s answer, got knocked out before lunch.

That was the tell. The conference chose the past over the man who won them the White House twice.

Thune then spent two years proving why.

He would not kill the filibuster for the SAVE America Act, Trump’s top priority.

He would not scrap blue slips to unclog the judicial pipeline. Result: fifty-six judges confirmed this term against eighty-three by the same point in twenty seventeen.

Not a scheduling hiccup.

A deliberate throttle.

Cornyn @JohnCornyn is the revenge arc.

Trump backed Paxton.

Cornyn lost by twenty-seven points.

Then, as a lame duck with nothing left to lose, he held Todd Blanche’s attorney general nomination hostage over an IRS settlement. Petty to the end.

Tillis would not even show up for a primary. He quit, and North Carolina went to Roy Cooper.

McConnell voted no on Hegseth, no on Kennedy, no on Gabbard, on the floor, in public, while collecting a pension the voters never authorized for obstruction.

Now seven senators want to delay the leadership election for what Jim Banks called a rank conversation. McCormick, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, Rick Scott, John Kennedy, Ted Budd, and Banks. They had two years to have that conversation.

They chose vacations instead.

These were not victims of a bad map.

They were the map.

Timid, transactional, and allergic to a real fight.

The voters did not reject Trump’s agenda.

They rejected the men who buried it.

How many RINOs will remain in 2027?

Murkowski for sure, Thune if the conference is still asleep, and a handful of establishment holdovers who never faced a real primary. And what will it take to get rid of them?

Primary challenges in 2028, not another round of closed-door leadership votes.

“A republic, if you can keep it.” — Benjamin Franklin

The United States was designed as a constitutional republic, not a pure democracy.

The Founders feared majority tyranny over minority rights. They built filters—representation, separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, and a written Constitution with enumerated powers—so temporary passions could not erase enduring rights.

James Madison put it plainly in Federalist No. 10: a pure democracy (where citizens assemble and govern in person) has no cure for the mischiefs of faction.

A republic (where representation takes place) opens a better prospect.

Representation refines public views, and a larger territory makes it harder for any single faction to dominate.

Pure democracies, he noted, had always been turbulent, short-lived, and hostile to personal security and property rights.
Article IV, Section 4 guarantees every state a republican form of government.

Rights are not up for a simple majority vote. The structure exists so that 51 percent cannot cancel speech, religion, property, due process, or arms.

People need to learn this difference if they want meaningful discussions instead of brawls over Trump hatred, antisemitism, or domestic issues like the inflation hangover from the Biden years and the lasting effects of COVID policies.

A republic protects liberty by design. A pure democracy does not.

Keeping it requires knowing the distinction.

Jordan Peterson @jordanbpeterson told Dave Rubin @RubinReport that we have a moral obligation to have hope, faith, and courage.

Not because the outcome is guaranteed, but because despair is a choice you make against your own conscience.

The Serenity Prayer names the same duty: grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

Hope is what keeps you from quitting when the list of things you can’t change gets long.

Faith is what tells you the list isn’t the whole story.

Courage is what makes you act anyway.