The vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end.
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We will not forget … our Constitution, and we will not forget our God.
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With my actions today, we will end the Green New Deal, and we will revoke the electric vehicle mandate…
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I will end the practice of catch and release. And I will send troops to the southern border to repel the disastrous invasion of our country.
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After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I also will sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.
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Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.
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Under my leadership, we will restore fair, equal, and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.
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And we are going to bring law and order back to our cities.
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This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life. We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.
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As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.
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This week, I will reinstate any service members who were unjustly expelled from our military for objecting to the COVID vaccine mandate with full back pay.
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When, since the turn of the millennium, has anyone heard such a sustained and frontal repudiation of the sacred articles of progressive orthodoxy from a world leader (with the exception, perhaps, of Giorgia Meloni, Victor Orban, or the “authoritarian” Vladimir Putin)?
For social conservatives, believers in freedom of opinion and speech, and adherents of equal and impartial justice—all of whom have been diabolized, legally harassed, and politically banished to the wilderness for the past two decades—the 47th President’s inaugural address should have uplifted the spirit like the ethereal descants of Allegri’s Miserere.
Trump, of course, is no Demosthenes. His addiction to the superlative (“like never before”; “the best [fill in the blank] that it has ever been”) grates on the ear like fingernails drawn across a blackboard: even more so in that he repeats such hyperbolic affirmations ad nauseam—often several times in succession as the coda to the same sentence—and with the inevitable soporific effect.
But at least he foregoes the obligatory genealogy of aspirants to political office these days, who all seem to have grown up as the children of immigrant minorities in a single room shack; and he only rarely resorts to the vaporous clichés about “joy,” “hope,” and “change” that have blighted political discourse since the Obama years.
By contrast, his inaugural address consisted in a formulary of pragmatic proclamations of what he intends to do, in language of such prosaic clarity and bracing disambiguation that, by comparison to the banal generalities of the political rodomontade we have become used to, it had the eruptive force of revelation.
Trump admittedly soared lamely on the wings of a hackneyed allusion in declaring his presidency “a new golden age,” but only once descended into rhetorical cleverness (and it really was clever when you parse it carefully) with his promise of “a revolution of common sense,” a phrase that comes close enough to the metaphysical poets’ definition of wit as the “yoking together of heterogeneous ideas”; and indeed, in its conjunction of opposites, it is not unworthy of some of the paradoxes of Chesterton himself.
Indeed, it was, if anything by today’s standards of political bombast, an understatement. In the form of the perennial moral and civilizational norms that the revolutionaries of the woke autocracy have systematically overthrown, common sense has been tossed out the window, and it has taken someone as unphilosophical as Trump to realize that it will require a counter-revolution to restore it.
Thus, to the Democrats sitting ad sinistram behind him—the conventional position of the damned in the medieval iconography of the Last Judgment, as I can hardly resist pointing out—Trump’s serial denunciations of the moral and social perversities of progressive orthodoxy must have carried the sting of the negative commandments of the Decalogue. Thou shalt not persecute thy political enemies. Thou shalt not indoctrinate and sexually mutilate thy children. It is an historically rare pleasure to see Democrats denied their customary, exclusive privilege of accusation, and watch them squirm rather than smirk for once.
The resistance, of course, will be fierce. Note that “resistance” is the self-aggrandizing term the Trump-deranged have chosen in order to identify themselves with the heroic World War II Underground, and at the same time confirm their idée fixe that Trump is Hitler.
Nor is it by any means assured that Trump will overcome it. His staff has already failed in allowing him to walk blithely into an ambush in Washington’s Episcopal Cathedral, just two days after his triumphant inaugural address. The Left incessantly dismisses as illegitimate the expression of religious (i.e., Christian) beliefs in the political arena. But it counts upon the evangelization of its postmodernist ideology from the pulpits of practically every Christian denomination with the exception of traditional Catholics and Evangelicals.
The so-called “separation of Church and state” has by now been exposed as a blatant fiction, especially since today’s progressive clerisy has effectively become the Established Church throughout the West, with its dogmas (the unfettered right to abortion, the obligation of parents and teachers to “affirm” ”self-identified gender” and the resultant trans butchery), all safeguarded by state censorship and human rights tribunals that are the modern iterations of the heresy trials of the late Middle Ages.
“Bishop” Budde’s sermon was decidedly not something “like never before”; it contained the sort of leftist boilerplate that she is on record as having merchandized for years. That the LGBT Terror “fears for their lives” is a stretcher beyond any of Trump’s wildest exaggerations. As for fearing for one’s life, our merciful homilist has employed the same trope as Biden’s (lesbian) press secretary, when she affected that “the trans community” is “under attack right now,” just a few days after Audrey Hale, a self-identified “male,” murdered six innocent victims, including three nine-year-old children, in a Nashville Christian elementary school in March of 2023. (“His” transgender manifesto continues to be covered up by the authorities.)
The ersatz “fear” of Budde, like the narcissistic displays of lachrymosity we have already seen on social media from such Hollywood celebrities as Selena Gomez, is the bathos of bad performance art. In Trump’s previous four years in office, no gays or trans-sexuals were rounded up, nor in modern memory have posses of transphobes marauded through the streets of America.
In fact, both Christians and non-Christians alike who dare to criticize the LGBT agenda are in far greater peril these days than those who practice and promote it. If anyone has reason to fear the proverbial midnight knock at the door, it is conservative Christians like pro-life activist Mark Houck, whose home and family were subject to a traumatizing dawn raid by an armed FBI swat team ordered by the Biden DOJ during which he was arrested and charged for protecting his son from a physical attack by a so-called “reproductive health escort” outside a Pennsylvania abortion mill.
In any case, sermons are by definition supposed to be based on Scripture or Christian tradition, and one can find nothing in either that evinces anguish over the plight of the alphabet people—unless Budde is invoking an ironical reinterpretation of the account in Genesis of God’s judgment against Sodom. We know that Jesus broke bread with Pharisees, publicans, and prostitutes, but there is no record in the Gospels of his having celebrated Pride Month. And he leaves the misgendered completely out of the Beatitudes. But then there is also nothing in either Scripture or tradition that permits women to be priests in the first place.