Perhaps the tide has finally started to turn. Those in elite circles are beginning to acknowledge the damaging impact of America’s Covid policy on our children.

In Tuesday’s New York Times, there was a story headlined “Covid has created a crisis for American children.” The San Diego Union-Tribune ran a piece titled “How school counselors are helping children cope during covid.”

On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” commentator Jan Crawford noted kids would be, quote “paying for our generation’s decisions the rest of their lives,” unquote.

Note how these views were not treated as out of the mainstream.

Has the omicron variant finally penetrated even the secluded blue enclaves where elite journalists and their families dwell? Or do they realize Americans are done with Covid?

This reckoning is long overdue. Our children have paid dearly for adult fears. It’s time to give them a normal life back.

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Wang Huning is the most dangerous man you have probably never heard of, which is why I counseled readers of my Washington Post column to pray for him. Wang is, along with China’s President Xi Jinping, a member of the seven-member committee from which all power and directives flow in the People’s Republic of China. He’s also regarded as the author of the crucial policy pronouncements not just of Xi but of Xi’s two immediate predecessors.  Imagine a Henry Kissinger who served as architect of national security policy in the United States for more than two decades and then looked to be in the same position for the next decade or more. That’s Wang.

And that’s why Americans and Westerners generally need to become acquainted with Wang and his world view, which—in quick summary—is that the West is diseased and crumbling, and that China needs better and new core values. Facile agreement with Wang does not help the West regain its footing. A focus on what made the West great —common purpose-built around “mere Christianity”— would serve us well and might serve China, indeed.

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In 1973 the United States took a terrible turn, obliged to do so by a radical decision of a majority of nine unelected justices as the late Justice Scalia would come to call the long Standing majority on the Supreme Court that dictated Roe v Wade and the disfigured 50 years of case law on abortion that has followed. 

2022 is the year in which the Court can declare its error, abandon its shadow made-up Constitution on so-called reproductive rights and return to the real Constitution—the one that is silent on abortion and under which state legislatures have the authority to pass laws, or not, on the question of when life begins and who can choose to end it.

Neither conservatives nor liberals will be fully happy in a restored and correct Constitutional order, one that sees Roe v Wade and Casey reversed,  but the country and its commitment to the rule of law will be much the better for it if 2022 reverses the profound error of 1973.

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The year of Our Lord, 2022, begins with plenty of unknowns and an unknowable number of what Donald Rumsfeld famously called “unknown unknowns.” Will inflation continue to rise? Will the pandemic finally retreat from the headlines? Who will push harder, Joe Biden or Joe Manchin? How will the Supreme Court rule in the big abortion case from Mississippi? Will the birthrate recover? Who will win the big sports titles? Will anyone show up for the Beijing Olympics?

In the Unites States, the midterm elections will dominate all other political considerations. Until then, every politician on the ballot will be looking for votes every waking minute. Expect more robocalls. 

Here is one absolutely certain prediction for the year ahead: There will be weather. 

In any event, the coming year presents an opportunity for families to love together, for children to mark yet another inch or two (or more) of growth, for churches to share the gospel, and for the press to push new headlines. Don’t miss it. 

Happy New Year to you and yours. 

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Well, 2021 is going into the history books. It began with a contested election, then an inauguration, and then months of political turmoil. President Biden ran as a moderate but took a swerve to the left. 

President Trump was impeached—again—and left office in the aftermath of an infamous insurrection at the Capital. 

Identity politics was on full display as Biden celebrated such milestones as the nation’s “first transgender assistant secretary of health.” But voters pushed back in Virginia, where parents rejected critical race theory and, after being told to go home, actually went to the polls and elected a Republican governor. 

Hurricanes and tornadoes did their damage, and the COVID pandemic introduced frustrated Americans to the Greek alphabet. Delta… Omicron… There were tragedies, like the condo falling in Florida. 

Perhaps as a coping mechanism, Americans evidently spent a lot of time watching animal videos. 

The supply chain was disrupted and the brothers Cuomo were ejected. 

The birth rate fell and inflation rose.

It was quite a year, and now it’s over. On to 2022. 

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End-of-year resolutions should be doable. One that must be done is to embrace a national resolve —one crossing from right to left— to focus on the existential challenge to the West that is now out in the open in the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese Communist Party has thrown off the happy talk, suppressed Hong Kong, embraced genocide, threatens Taiwan. It makes no apologies for the virus it unleashed on the world. It’s not on a second Long March. It’s on a forced march towards hegemony.

Dealing with this is possible but it requires rapid and resolute agreement on the threat within the United States and not just among Republicans. Both parties have to agree and if it means rejecting isolationist or defeatist extremes in both parties, so be it. We do not have a lot of time vis a vis the CCP. 2022 has to be a year of recommitment to American national security, a bipartisan recommitment.

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It seems elite media outlets in America have finally recognized the futility of zero-COVID policies in China. Beijing has imposed new regional lockdowns as the Omicron variant threatens to spread rapidly, hoping to save their upcoming Olympics. Both CNBC and CNN remarked on how ineffective such policies have proven in the past.

Perhaps American media should take note. Joe Biden promised to “shut down the virus,” a promise that has led to mandates and measures that are as increasingly authoritarian as they are futile.

Scientists have warned for months that we will not get rid of COVID. Instead, we need to accept its long-term endemic presence and get back to normal life. That means continuing to encourage vaccines, accounting appropriately for natural immunity, ensuring supply of new therapeutics and widespread access to testing—and putting an end to emergency mindsets.

We have the tools necessary to live with endemic COVID.

It is long past time to put aside panic and live with it as a free people.

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Chuck Schumer clearly has not learned any lessons from the collapse of the Build Back Better Bill. With inflation raging and Democrats losing a slew of elections last month, Joe Manchin spent the last several weeks making it clear that he would not support Joe Biden’s vast climate change legislation. As he told one interviewer, rather than negotiate with him, Schumer and the White House only tried badgering him into supporting their radical vision.

After Manchin emphatically declared his opposition to the BBB, Schumer then declared that he’d hold a vote on it anyway when Congress returns after the holidays. Not only that, but Schumer promised votes on Democrats’ bill federalizing elections that failed in May and on eliminating the filibuster, all of which Manchin and other Senate Democrats have opposed. It would be a tour of Schumer’s greatest defeats.

He has set expectations far above what Democrats can deliver and has demonstrated just how radical Biden’s party has become.

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Given the powerful and connected people associated with Jeffrey Epstein, the FBI had to know its conduct of the Epstein case would be under a microscope even before the strange circumstances surrounding his death.

Now in the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, it’s come out that the FBI allowed crucial evidence from Epstein’s safe to go missing after Bureau raided his house.

After they raided his house, FBI agents left CDs found in Epstein’s safe behind, as they lacked the necessary warrants. But strangely, the FBI left no agent behind to guard the evidence. So not surprisingly, when they returned, the evidence was gone. Eventually CDs were brought back—but no one can confirm they were the ones originally found in the safe.

The whole episode reeks to high heaven. Too many Americans already suspect the FBI has simply become personal protection for the powerful. This will only deepen growing suspicions that our once-great Bureau has become rotten with corruption.

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Most of you know about Handel’s Messiah—perhaps the most popular and enduring work of George Frideric Handel. But few remember Charles Jennens—who wrote and conceived of the idea of the oratorio, the “Messiah.” Performances are more rare this year as a result of the pandemic, but the oratorio is still performed thousands of times worldwide at Christmas.

Jennens wrote the libretto—the text—of the “Messiah,” tying together the Bible’s central story: God’s salvation of His people through the work of the Messiah.
He used the very words of the Bible for his text. His purpose was to remind the audience of the truth and power of the story of salvation—and thus his attention on the birth of Christ.

Handel put the words to majestic music in just 21 days.

“For Unto Us a Child is Born.” That is the prophet’s declaration. That is God’s great gift to us at Christmas.

Merry Christmas from the Salem Media Group.

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