MAY 15, 2016

On this date, the VMI Keydets defeated the United States army at the Battle of New Market in 1864.  The defeat for the United States was so humiliating that commanding Major General Franz Sigel was relieved and replaced by Major General David Hunter (an even more incompetent General, and worse, a butcher and barbarian).

The battle was truly remarkable. A mere 4,000 Confederate soldiers defeated the larger United States Army, consisting of 6,300 professionally trained and equipped soldiers. Of that 4,000, 250 were VMI students (average age of 18, some as young as 15 years old).

In the early afternoon, the 51st and the 30th Virginia Infantry Divisions retreated in the face of a Union artillery barrage. Commanding General Breckinridge reluctantly ordered the VMI Keydets to fill the gap, and halt the Union advance.

These were military students. They had never been in combat before. They had poor rations, and had marched 77 miles from Lexington, double time, many of the students without shoes.

Sixty (60) Keydets died in that battle. But the Corps filled the gap, repulsed the Union attack, and allowed the Confederates to prevail. This victory enabled local farmers to gather and transport much needed food rations to General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, which was then outside of Richmond, at Cold Harbor.

The VMI Keydets fought bravely at New Market, and were a credit to, not just their Corps, but also the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the Confederate military forces. This was celebrated annually, right up until the “Summer of George Floyd”, and Governor Coonman (D. Va.). Governor Coonman appointed as VMI Superintendent Major General Cedric Wins, who immediately began “disappearing” VMI’s rich history, including the legacy of “Stonewall Jackson”. The American Taliban stopped the reenactments, and “contextualized” the telling of the Battle of New Market. It was a sad moment, dishonoring the memory of the fallen.

While the Battle of New Market will not be reenacted today, the Corps will assemble on campus in front of a monument titled “Virginia Mourning Her Dead”. The names of the fallen will be read, and Taps will be played. God Bless Those Brave Souls who fought for their home.

ALSO on this day, in 2005, Grace Hollandsworth Koontz was baptized, on Pentecost, at St. Paul’s (K Street), in Washington, D.C. It was a glorious day, and we were so Blessed to be there, having our daughter dedicated to The Lord, surrounded by our parish priests and friends. After Church, English threw a lovely celebration lunch at The City Tavern Club in Georgetown. Fr. Barnett instructed me at the time to never forget this date, and event. I never have.

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Today we are enjoying brunch with the Barnetts. Then we attend Baccalaureate Services. And we shall enjoy dinner with Holland and 1 of her friends. I cannot wait for a cold, crisp, martini.

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America Needs a New Class of Leaders

Division is also opportunity.

BY:          J.B. Shurk, The American Thinker (March 8, 2026).

In the United States — and the civilizational “West” more broadly — we are a society divided by slogans, propaganda, and social media memes.  It is an unfortunate part of our present reality that we no longer engage in honest “public debate.”  We haven’t done so for a very long time.  

The Founding Fathers wrote essays and pamphlets and delivered hours-long speeches during which they articulated the reasons for their beliefs.  We get pink-hatted people — who may or may not identify as women — “shouting their abortions.”  We get automatons screaming, “Black lives matter,” “Free Palestine,” “Trump is Hitler,” “Hands off Iran,” and whatever other mindless chants billionaire-funded NGOs churn out.  

If you approach people yelling these things and ask them why they believe what they believe, they have no idea.  They can’t explain why “all human lives,” more generally, shouldn’t matter just as much as those with dark skin.  They don’t know anything about Israel’s ancient history, the United Kingdom and France’s colonial carving of the Middle East, the Soviet Union’s promotion of a “Palestinian” identity to cause the United States and its allies problems during the Cold War, any of the multitude of ways that the international community has broken its promises to the Israeli government for the last century, or how the United Nations has spent most of its existence targeting Israel for alleged “human rights” abuses while ignoring unspeakable evils committed by far too many regimes in power today.  They can’t explain why illegal aliens are breaking into America if “Trump is Hitler” or why the president’s determination to protect American citizens from foreign nationals by paying for those foreigners’ return to their own countries is somehow equivalent to Nazi atrocities that included the mass murder of six million Jews and millions of Soviets, Poles, Romani, disabled people, and other so-called “undesirables.”  They don’t have any idea why Iran’s theocratic tyrants and Islamic terrorists deserve to be protected when those tyrants and terrorists have killed, maimed, and kidnapped Americans, Europeans, and Jews around the world for nearly fifty years.  

Our ancestors benefited from Thomas Paine’s polemical pamphlets in favor of American independence.  They listened to Sam Adams’s fiery arguments for revolution.  They attended church services where they heard political exhortations from learned men delivering passionate sermons.  They read newspaper editorials and political essays aloud while drinking ale in local taverns.  Common people heard and debated uncommon ideas that birthed a new nation and altered the historic trajectory of the world.  

We, on the other hand, get hypocrites such as Senator Chuck Schumer, who was last year telling Americans that President Trump was “chickening out” on holding Iran’s Islamic regime accountable for nuclear saber-rattling before telling Americans this year that Trump has no business holding Iran’s Islamic regime accountable for its nuclear saber-rattling.  We get Democrats calling federal law enforcement agents “Trump’s Gestapo” because those agents put their lives on the line arresting criminal illegal aliens — including murderers, rapists, and other violent felons.  We get apocalyptic doomsayers such as Al Gore and Barack Obama who have told us that the “science” of “climate change” is “settled,” even though nothing those frauds have predicted has ever come true.  We get public school teachers indoctrinating students with ridiculously false ideas, such as (1) biological sex isn’t real; (2) the January 6, 2021 protest for election integrity was worse than the 9/11 Islamic terror attacks, the Pearl Harbor attack, and the Civil War all wrapped up together; (3) Muslims built America; and (4) America has never been more racist, fascist, or authoritarian than it is today.  We get a left-wing corporate news media establishment pushing the ludicrous argument that requiring voter identification (a basic electoral safeguard enforced around the world) is both racist and an impossible burden for legal voters to surmount (even though Americans must present valid ID to board planes, buy liquor, and enter government buildings).  

Notice that these sources of misinformation never advance anything that remotely resembles a rational argument.  Democrats don’t explain why they used to consider Iran a major national security threat but no longer do.  They don’t explain why it’s perfectly reasonable to attack federal law enforcement officers arresting criminal illegal aliens, even though they’ve spent five years calling the January 6 election protest an unacceptable “attack” on cops.  Barack Obama and other wealthy “global warming” fanatics can’t explain why they own expensive beachfront homes if those homes will soon be under water.  Democrats can’t explain why it’s too difficult for their voters to get photo IDs, or why boys should undress in girls’ locker rooms, or why white men are a “viral disease,” or why all of their political opponents are “racist, fascist Nazis.”  

All of these false statements are simply represented as undisputed “facts” that cannot be questioned.  As a kind of “political correctness” tripwire meant to ensure that these false ideas are never questioned, Democrats further insist that anyone asking questions must be a “racist, fascist Nazi,” too.  Rational argument no longer exists.  In its place, Democrats give us name-calling, self-censorship, circular reasoning, and empty tautology.

America is very divided today.  For most of its two-hundred-and-fifty-year history, though, America has been divided.  It was birthed in revolution.  It survived numerous attacks from foreign powers while still in its infancy.  It grew up through radical social change, profound technological innovation, and endless waves of immigration.  It has gone to war against itself, and it has gone to war against the world.  It has endured hardships that have destroyed other nations.  Nevertheless, its people have persevered, united, settled the wild frontier, built a continent, and prospered.  We look over our shoulders and applaud American achievement without reflecting on our near escapes from American disaster.

Division does not signal disaster.  Division is also opportunity.  When societies are forced to confront great change, some wilt, while others rise to the occasion.  America has been blessed with rare resilience.  Our nation is unique in human history because it is predicated on the still revolutionary principle that legitimate political power originates with the people.  We do not look to kings to tell us what we may or may not do.  As our rights come directly from God, aristocrats just get in the way.  Our institutions matter not because they are invested with power over us, but rather because we have lent those institutions some of our inherent powers so that they can properly defend our inherent rights.  Neither presidents nor congresses nor corporations can grant us what is already ours.

It is with this understanding of our natural rights in mind that I encourage everyone to protect those rights personally.  Read, learn, debate, and most importantly don’t give up just because giving up is in fashion these days.  This country has been through far worse and survived.  People who tell you that this is the end for America have a vested interest in seeing America end.  Those stubborn enough to resist will ensure that our country lives.

To be sure, we deserve more than slogans, propaganda, and memes.  We deserve civic leaders who can speak in complete sentences.  We deserve members of Congress who can introduce cogent arguments — supported by salient facts and not calumnies, falsehoods, or red herrings.  We deserve a new generation of leaders who remind us of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Sam Adams, and George Washington.  Perhaps they already move among us.

Do not mistake division for disease.  Division is the engine that often spawns greatness.  What we require is discernment.  We require wisdom.  We require courage.  We require leadership.  We require renewed faith in God’s grace.  These are not always in abundant supply.  But they are very American things.

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Progressives do not really believe in freedom

They push faith in government, not God

BY:          Robert Knight, The Washington Times (May 3, 2026).

The left is all about freedom of choice — unless you make a choice they don’t like. Then they bring down the full power of the government on you.

Try being parents in a liberal state who don’t want their son Johnny turned into Susie behind their backs. They just might lose custody, as has happened in some places.

Nearly half the states — those governed by Democratic quacks such as Minnesota’s Tim Walz — have criminalized counseling aimed at helping minors overcome unwanted LGBTQ feelings.

On March 31, the U.S. Supreme Court restored some sanity by striking down Colorado’s “conversion therapy” ban as violating a Christian counselor’s First Amendment rights.

In California, the liberal state government ordered crisis pregnancy centers to place ads directing clients to abortion clinics. The Supreme Court stopped this assault in its Becerra ruling in 2022.

Another case in point is New Jersey’s attempt to bully a crisis pregnancy chain by forcing it to reveal its donors. Thankfully, the Supreme Court put the kibosh on the plan, ruling 9-0 on Wednesday that First Choice Women’s Resource Centers has a First Amendment right to sue the state.

New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin, a liberal Democrat, had ordered First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, a chain of five crisis pregnancy centers, to turn over its donor list. He demanded names, phone numbers and addresses of the people who had given money to the facilities, which provide ultrasounds, diapers and other baby needs, along with counseling.

First Choice refused the demand, and for good reason. When Democrats obtain lists, they use them to target and punish donors.

In 2008, after California voters approved a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman, contributors to the Prop. 8 campaign were harassed after their names, addresses and donation amounts were posted on Google Maps. Some people were vilely harangued, and others lost their jobs.

Brendan Eich, founder of the Mozilla Firefox web browser, was ousted by his own liberal board in 2014 after it learned that he had donated six years earlier to the Proposition 8 campaign.

This kind of retaliation is why the Supreme Court later ruled in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta in 2021 that charities and nonprofits have a First Amendment right to not disclose their donors to the government.

Even earlier, in 1958, the Supreme Court ruled in NAACP v. Alabama that people have the right to anonymously support and associate with organizations. Otherwise, the Democratic-spawned Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups could harass them.

The liberal urge to override individual rights in the name of centralized progress came into vogue in the early 20th century, along with the eugenics movement. Anchored by atheism, progressivism is utterly incompatible with the Declaration of Independence, as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas recently explained in a clear-as-crystal essay in The Wall Street Journal.

The Declaration says that “unalienable rights” come from God, not flawed men. Progressivism is a steady march toward a Godless, collectivist future, wrapped in good intentions. By rejecting God and relying instead on government as the source of all rights, progressivism paved the way for “the most awful century the world has ever seen,” Mr. Thomas wrote. “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao all were intertwined with the rise of progressivism, and all were opposed to the natural rights on which our Declaration was based.”

In the 1910s, progressivism was embraced by Woodrow Wilson’s Democratic Party, which resegregated the military, drafted Jim Crow laws and glorified the Klan. After Republicans voted in higher percentages than Democrats to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Democrats under President Johnson concocted the “Great Society.”

This grand, liberal welfare scheme almost immediately reversed all the considerable gains made by Black Americans. Marriage-based families gave way to single-parent households dependent on the welfare state. Once-stable communities fell into urban decay, drug dealers and gangs.

Still, liberals were fat and happy. They had hooked enough people in their “free stuff” army to guarantee generational voting success.

Today’s liberals are still at it, encouraging dependency and faith in government, not God. This includes wolves in sheep’s clothing, such as U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico in Texas and Gov. Andy Beshear in Kentucky. Like former President Barack Obama, the two Democrats twist the Bible to justify abortion, LGBTQ activism and redistribution of income.

Getting back to the New Jersey case, it exemplifies the cultural chasm in our country. One side sees life and marriage as sacred; the other, based on moral relativism, thinks it’s all negotiable.

Like other crisis pregnancy charities, New Jersey’s First Choice chain is an alternative to abortion. Mr. Platkin, a “rising star” in the Democratic Party according to NewJersey.com, implausibly insists that he just wants to make sure that women aren’t misled into believing that the centers also provide abortions. A gentleman, riding to the rescue.

Mr. Platkin hasn’t demanded donor lists from Planned Parenthood and other abortionists, but then, why should he? He worked with them to target First Choice. They are making millions of dollars doing the devil’s work of killing unborn babies and then donating some of that money back to Democrats.

It’s the angels at First Choice whom Mr. Platkin was hoping to put out of business. Trying to save babies’ lives and help women avoid possible injuries and lifelong regret is their passion.

As Adam West in the old TV version of “Batman” would say, “What criminals!”

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Heads, Democrats Win. Tails, Voters Lose.

BY:          Amy Curtis

“The voters had spoken!”

That’s been the refrain from prominent Democrats across the country in the wake of the Virginia Supreme Court overturning the state’s illegal, unconstitutional redistricting referendum. And it’s amazing to watch. So much so, I have to wonder if that wasn’t the game plan all along.

Throughout the redistricting process, the Democrats demanded that the Virginia Supreme Court not rule on the measure’s constitutionality until after it went to voters. In fact, here’s what the ruling said about the issue (emphasis added):

“It is fair to ask whether we could have or should have reviewed the constitutionality of the proposed amendment prior to it being presented to the voters. But it is not a question the Commonwealth should ask. Throughout this litigation, the Commonwealth has insisted that we cannot lawfully decide this case prior to the referendum. In its motion for a stay in this case, the Commonwealth argued that longstanding Virginia precedent, Scott v. James, was ‘virtually indistinguishable’ from this case and that it clearly held  that ‘courts cannot interfere to stop any of the proceedings while this permanent law is in the process of being made.'”

Huh.

Keep in mind, the process was wholly illegal and unconstitutional from the get-go. Virginia laws is clear and strict, outlining a mult-step process for passing constitutional amendments. This includes provisions that require an amendment to pass the General Assembly twice, in separate legislative sessions, and a minimum 90-day posting requirement before any vote. Democrats disregarded all of this. Instead, they pushed the version through a special session on October 31, 2025. By that point, more than one million ballots had been cast in the House elections.

It seems, according to reports, Democrats knew this was illegal, too, and warned Governor Spanberger as such behind the scenes.

“But the Virginia Supreme Court determined not that the map was illegal, the process of trying to change the constitution was done illegally,” Guy Benson said. “This was an unlawful process.”

“Earlier in the week, there was a Democratic operative who went on his podcast, and he revealed that internally there’s been a lot of angry sniping and recriminations within Democratic circles in Virginia because Governor Spanberger’s team — remember she campaigned saying she wasn’t going to do this … her team reportedly told the Legislature, the Democrats leading the Legislature, don’t do this. It is going to be susceptible to a legal challenge. We don’t think this is going to be legal, and they plowed forward anyway, and they did it illegally.”

Whoops. And they nuked any remaining hope Spanberger may have had of higher office, but that’s a topic for another time.

What Virginia reveals is a scary truth about the so-called defenders of democracy. They don’t believe in democracy. They believe in winning, and they assumed — despite the blatant illegality of this referendum — that either the Democrat-appointed Supreme Court would go along with their scheme or they’d scream about it thwarting the will of the voters.

It’s the classic, “Heads we win, tails you lose” scenario.

And here’s more proof the Democrats do not care about the will of the voters unless it suits their agenda. 

In 2008, California voters approved Proposition 8 by a margin of 52.24 percent to 47.76 percent — a margin larger than the Virginia referendum, by the way. In 1994, voters also passed Proposition 187, which barred illegal aliens from accessing public social services.

Both of those were overturned by the courts and Democrats applauded. In fact, many states voted similarly including Alaska, Hawaii, Nebraska, Oregon, Colorado, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. Despite that, the Democrats went to the courts and the will of the people was overturned in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015.

Californians also voted overwhelmingly for Proposition 36, which would toughen laws and penalties for crimes like shoplifting. Instead of respecting the will of the people, California Democrats — led by Gavin Newsom — have simply refused to fund the measure, rendering it moot. He did the same thing with Proposition 66, which would have streamlined and sped up the death penalty process. In that same election, voters rejected Proposition 62, which would have abolished the death penalty. Despite the clear will of the people, Gavin Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions, halting them indefinitely.

The biggest example of this, of course, is the 2024 presidential election. 77 million Americans voted for President Trump. He won both the Electoral College and the popular vote. And while the Electoral College is the only vote that matters, the Democrats have always held the popular vote as an example of a mandate.

Except when a Republican does it.

Over the past two years, Democrats have instead — once again — tried to thwart the will of the people by going to court and blocking President Trump’s agenda. The agenda he was elected to enact, mind you.

We, of course, are not a democracy but a republic. That being said, there are democratic votes and, if you pay attention, a clear pattern emerges: when Democrats lose a democratic vote, they turn to the courts to get their way. And when the courts rule against them, they hide behind the “will of the voters” to try to push their agenda.

It’s as transparent as it cynical.

GFK