Sudden Darkness

We were in the path of that crazy storm that swept through Houston Thursday evening, May 16^th. We had been walking the dog, and had stopped to talk with a neighbor for a while, taking more time than we’d planned. So I suggested we cut the walk short, head back through the park, and on home, instead of our full couple of miles.

Downed tree limbs were everywhere. We escaped even that damage.
Our big oak tree had been trimmed with air flow in mind, and it stayed intact.

We were on the home stretch when our phones both got the emergency notice: tornado warning. Take shelter. It was overcast but not scary looking around us. Sometimes when there are tornado conditions, the sky and air around us starts to look green. This didn’t seem that unusual. We stopped at the mailbox and got home, but we didn’t hurry.

After we got home, Mr. Spherical Model wanted to show me the system he’d just set up that morning for the tomato vines, in the back yard. About a minute after we got inside, the storm hit. Strong winds, sudden darkness. It was crazy.

We took a minute, right there at the back door, to pray for protection.

The lights went out.

Plastic business signs did not fare well. This Sonic got hit twice; right in front,
and then, around the corner theirs was the only one take out.

I wasn’t feeling any panic. Usually when there’s a warning, I feel like sheltering in the tiny half bath, the windowless room you’re supposed to seek. I didn’t really feel the need, maybe because we’ve been through so many warnings over the years and really never saw anything. Well, we did see plenty in hurricanes Rita, Ike, and Harvey. But that was wind and water, not swirling wind. And there was a tornado warning up at Political Sphere’s house a few years ago, while we were visiting, so we ended up with the kids in their center bathroom. I was kind of worried that day, maybe because I didn’t feel the security of my own home.

Anyway, this latest storm didn’t appear swirling either; winds appeared horizontal straight, mostly, with some hard gusts along with a lot of strong steady wind, more like a hurricane. In the back yard, the wind was going north. It pushed our grill off the deck. It wasn’t a rolling grill; it was on a wooden frame (we inherited this as is from a neighbor when they were moving). The whole thing was picked up and dumped. We may recover it fully useful eventually, but we haven’t worked on that yet.

In the front yard later, we found branches from our neighbor to the north. So the wind must have been spinning—to be heading south in front of the house while heading north in the back. Probably there was swirling right over us that we couldn’t perceive.

Fallen power polls contributed to the power outages.

We have a large shed in back, and it was fine. As were the tomatoes, probably because of the new system to string them up, which gave them support. There was another small shed at the corner of the house, for a few standing tools and such. It got lifted up and moved a couple of feet, still upright.

Later, talking with neighbors, we learned that the house across the street from us had a metal shed in back that was lifted up over the back fence and landed two houses down, completely crushed.

A tree went down a half block away. And at first I thought, luckily it didn’t land on their roof. But then I saw it had landed on their car. Ouch! Later I learned that it landed on their three cars. Super ouch!

Mostly that’s the kind of damage we saw. Limbs and branches down in yards. Some fences down. A neighbor on the corner lost quite a few roof shingles, and another one in the neighborhood had blue tarps on their roof when we drove past after a couple of days.

The aftermath felt similar to after Hurricane Ike, but without the water damage. There was rain with this storm, but it was so brief, it wasn’t the multiple inches of rain we can get in a tropical storm or just a bad rainy day. This storm probably lasted only ten minutes. Maybe it was longer, but it seemed to pass surprisingly quickly. Like a tornado. Which, it turns out it was.

They’re calling it a derecho, which is an inland hurricane. We had winds up to 100 miles per hour here, with some gusts up to 110. And there were a couple of tornados that touched down, further northwest from here. Whatever whirled past us was more strong horizontal wind, with some hooking.

It’s unclear to me what hit downtown Houston. But it blew out skyscraper windows, raining debris all over the streets. I’ve only seen news photos; we haven’t ventured downtown.

Two views of Wells Fargo Plaza, downtown Houston,
screenshots from Instagram reel, found on Facebook 

The real challenge has been the loss of power. The power went out about 6:00 PM Thursday.

I had been about make dinner. We have a gas stove, so fortunately I’ve been able to cook. (Yet another reason not to let the Biden administration outlaw gas stoves.)

We’ve had a generator since Ike, when we were without power for eight days. My husband set it up Friday morning, to maintain our fridge and freezer mostly. We can also recharge phones and other devices. My phone is old, so it loses a charge pretty quick.

Fences were frequent casualties.

It’s very inconvenient to get email on my phone (because of the setup to categorize and save emails on my computer). And we have no internet. So I didn’t see emails until Saturday afternoon, when Mr. Spherical Model set up a temporary hot spot, giving me just enough time to download. I wasn’t able to send any.

Our internet company estimated we would get service back Thursday or so; I wonder if they’ll refund us a quarter of our monthly bill.

CenterPoint Energy, who is doing all the repairs, was cautious about giving estimates. Original counts were about half a million customers without power in downtown Houston, and another 300,000 or so in the Hwy 290 corridor, which includes us. There are some other areas as well: Katy (directly west of Houston, southwest from here), Fairfield and Tomball (both further north and west from here), and some south and south east areas. All told, over a million customers lost power.

We cheered whenever we saw these trucks.
That meant restored power is on the way.

Friday I was planning on grocery shopping, so we were inconveniently low on a lot of things. We tried Kroger first, the one a mile down the road. We were surprised to find it open. But it was nonperishables only. We were able to get a few fruits and vegetables, but not my normal supply.

Hurray for more utility workers!

This was a week for larger shopping at Sam’s Club. I didn’t think we’d find much. But from a little below Hwy 290 the traffic lights were working, and a Starbucks was open. They had power. Crossing 290, it was like nothing had happened. So we got our shopping done there almost as usual.

More fences down.

Saturday afternoon we ventured out further, to get an idea of what had happened where. Power was a bit further south, toward us then. We drove up toward Willowbrook Mall; after our zone of power outage, the world was going on as if nothing had happened. No plant debris in the roads. No demolished business signs. We went into the mall and walked around to get air conditioned for a bit.

Then we went further toward town on 290, exiting before the 610 loop. (Houston is laid out with circles and spokes. The inner circle is the 610 loop; Beltway 8 is the circle outside of that. 290 is one of the spokes, passing through the circles toward downtown.) I got the impression that there was this path—west to east, probably from Waller and Cypress, straight over us, and on into downtown. That main path was maybe five miles wide from north to south. The debris told you where that was. And the power outages also told the story—although pockets are getting their power back. The extensive area without power related to the transmission towers that got toppled.

Some areas seemed t get all the types of damage.

On Sunday church was canceled. Our building actually got power Saturday night, but so many people in the congregation didn’t have power, getting to church was going to be a challenge. I understand they turned our church parking lot into a station to give out water and ice.

Our church parking lot became a water and ice center.
Photo from Facebook

We did a little church meeting with a friend. Then we took our dog for a drive further out 290 and back through neighborhoods. We saw the transmission towers that were knocked over. I heard there was a demolished house in Towne Lake or Bridgeland area, but we didn’t see that. Mostly it was the debris like we saw near us. Unlike a hurricane, where an entire area is affected, this was oddly limited to that swath that we happened to be in the middle of.

I left town for the Republican Party of Texas Convention on Monday (temporary committees are underway). So I’m in air conditioning now. Mr. Spherical Model stayed home and maintained the generator, and took care of the dog.

Entrance to the exhibit hall for the RPT Convention, which
gets fully underway on Thursday. Monday through Wednesday
are the temporary committee hearings.

Our power was restored Tuesday evening between 7:00 and 8:00. That was five full days, plus an hour or two.

One of the things I thought, during the ordeal, was how instantaneously everything can change. This was a long time without power—but we were 8 days without power after Ike. It was rough sleeping when we couldn’t get the house under 84 degrees. It’s hard to plan, and cook, and clean. Everything takes thought, nothing automatic.

And then there’s work. When much of what you produce is digital—and you can’t even see it, let alone make progress on it, that’s a reminder of how different our lives are than when pioneers settled here.

I also was thinking about that scripture in Revelation that says Babylon will fall in a day. It would take more than a 5-10-mile swath. But the destructive power of nature can be very sudden and swift.

A podcaster talking on last days mentioned our storm, noting that it was at Pentecost, when the Spirit came as a mighty wind. Significant for our day? I don’t know. Maybe we ought to take just about everything as a sign or reminder that we need to depend on the Lord in all things, and not wait to turn to Him sometime later, when we get around to it. Because, you never know when the lights might go out on the world as we know it. And we will want to know where to turn for Light.

How’s That New School Board Doing?

This past Monday, May 6, was a monthly school board meeting here in Cy-Fair Independent School District, northwest of Houston. This is the board we worked so hard to flip from all seven moderate-to-liberal board members to six conservative and one liberal; it took two election cycles. At the same time, the previous (liberal) superintendent retired. We were very concerned about the timing—getting the new hire before the new board had a say. But the process allowed for input from the new board, who were all, along with the old board, in favor of our new superintendent.

Business with all the new people has been underway since January, so this is early, but it’s a good time to look at how things are going. There are two areas we’ll look at today: budget and curriculum.

Budget

The biggest issue right now is related to funding. You might call it a crisis—which obviously wasn’t created by this new board and superintendent, but it’s incumbent upon them to fix it. School districts are required by law to balance their budgets. The deadline for setting the next year’s budget is June 30, just a month away as far as school board meetings go, so that’s why this is a big, urgent issue.

from the budget presentation at the May 6 CFISD School Board Meeting,
screenshot from here

I’m trying to grasp the full narrative of the budget shortfall, which is significant. There was grant money because of the pandemic that has been available since 2020, and it runs out with this school year—and is not available for the 2024-2025 school year. That’s a sizable drop in funding. Add to that inflation since Biden took office that skews any budget based on historical expenditures. There has also been a drop in students attending since the pandemic shutdown, which affects school funding, which is based on students in seats. And there is some growth to the district as well, which is in population and could be on the verge of adding a new school; I find this confusing based on the previous sentence. But I’m still processing the details.

For the past couple of months there has been a committee looking for possible budget solutions, which included requesting much input from the community. We’ll get to more detail later, but the controversial solutions have been related to staffing decreases, which, at the suggestion of principals mainly, includes no longer having school librarians on some 50 or 92 campuses.

There will be no layoffs. Let me repeat, the staff decreases being suggested are using attrition and reassignments, not layoffs.

Nevertheless, there’s an army of the usual faces (the enemies of our new board) and their new recruits forming new organizations, on top of old ones, insisting we need librarians in schools. These people are not offering budget solutions, only blame and haranguing rhetoric.

This school board meeting lasted over five hours. (I did not go. I spaced out watching the livestream over the two following days.) Because this is near school year end, there were awards and recognitions that took up nearly the first two hours. Then came the brief board comments (3-5 minutes from each of the seven still takes a chunk of time). Then comes Citizen Participation. One innovation of our new board is to put Citizen Participation near the top of the agenda, rather than at the end, which we believed with the previous board was intended to get people to give up and leave before they could speak. So I’m not complaining about the placement of these public comments. Anyway, that is when people are allowed to speak (by signing up online ahead of time) on any subject without regard to what is on the agenda. Because of the high number, each speaker was limited to one minute.

The public can also comment (again, by signing up ahead of time) on topics related to agenda items. Since the big agenda item was the budget, many people (and some of the same people again) spoke during this segment. Most of these—including a fair number of students reading words fed to them or written for them—talked about the need for librarians and libraries. No solutions were offered.

It was 3 ½ hours into the meeting, after over an hour of public comment against firing librarians (none of which will be fired) that we got to a staff presentation on the budget, followed by a clear and coherent explanation of the situation and the proposals, from our new superintendent, Dr. Doug Killian. If only we’d heard from him first, most of the public complaints would have been moot.

An interesting detail he noted was that, by the time he was speaking, most of the audience had left; they spoke but didn’t want to hear anything else. I’ll get to his presentation in a moment.

CFISD School Board Meeting May 6, 2024. Left is toward the beginning of the meeting; 
right is during Dr. Killian's presentation on the budget. Both are screenshots from here.

One more difference I’ve noticed with this new board is that Citizen Participation is allowed to call out board members by name, and other speakers and community members. That was taboo with the last board, and the legal counsel shut them down immediately just for mentioning a name. I asked our board president about it in an email; he didn’t comment on it being different, but he noted that it’s a free speech issue and something we’re just going to have to tolerate. But it’s definitely uncomfortable. And at some point it may be grounds for a slander lawsuit against those speakers. (They’ve spent a couple of meetings claiming that one of the board members has a “boyfriend”/bodyguard who has roughed up these speakers at various other gatherings. Every word is a lie. Most of the other accusations are ad hominem attacks: we’re all Christian nationalists, racists, homophobes, “wack-a-doos.”)

OK, so now to Dr. Killian’s budget explanation, which starts at 3:30:25 on the video.  

To start with, he tells us, “We're $138 million shy of a balanced budget, and we don't have enough fund balance to be able to make it through next year by just simply not doing anything.” This is quite a crisis to face in your first month on the job. Fortunately, school finance is his specialty. Right away a committee was formed, the Budget Reduction Advisory Committee (BRAC), to come up with both cuts and additional revenue sources. And he went over several of these. Among these are staff reductions. So far the plan covers $58.6 million in deficit reduction.

Here are Dr. Killian’s main points concerning staff cuts, to contradict media and social media claims:

·        No staff are being laid off. The lower numbers of employees will come from attrition, and not filling currently open positions, but restructuring employees to fill those positions. Some positions are being eliminated, and the people in those positions will be given other positions with comparable pay. Preference will be given to keep employees at the same location; when that isn’t possible, they will be offered opportunities at other campuses.

·        The board and superintendent did neither come up with the suggestion of eliminating school librarians nor encourage that. The principals and their staffs determined what their campuses could most easily do without—even though we’d all rather not do without; those principals chose to eliminate librarians.

·        No school libraries will be closed. District librarians will handle book checkout and other librarian duties. (It appears to me that those whose positions were not let go by their principals will be handling multiple schools, rather than only one.)

Dr. Killian gave us some really useful information about the Limited Optional Homestead Exemption (LOHE). As I understand it, this is in addition to the state property tax homestead exemption, and relates to property taxation received by the school district. Not all (in fact, probably not most) school districts offer this tax break. This was passed, locally, back in 1983. There were a lot of expenses we didn’t have back then, such as campus police for safety and security—which, since shooting at Santa Fe and Uvaldi schools here in Texas, everyone agrees is essential. There are rules requiring certain staffing for special education, bilingual education, and more coming from the federal government, which they only partially fund. And inflation has affected that greatly. And there is greater need, as we try to make up for learning losses due to the pandemic shutdown.

from the budget presentation at the CFISD School Board Meeting, May 6, 2024,
screenshot from here

Here's part of that discussion:

This local optional homestead exemption is not a penalty in state aid. We have elected as a school district to reduce our local collections by $63 million, and that's coming to roost. And that is really a local issue. Not every district in the state actually funds a local optional homestead exemption, and that comes right off the top of our local taxes.

So, when you go to the commissioner and say, “Fund the local optional homestead exemption,” you're asking them to give us more money than what they give other people. So I'm doing that politely.

If I’m understanding correctly, Dr. Killian has been aware of an obscure law allowing us to ask for a temporary 50% funding of our LOHE. That is underway. And then, he’s working with legislators, along with other districts that offer the LOHE, to get full funding for the LOHE in the upcoming legislative session. But the temporary relief now looks like a strong possibility.

Near the end of the meeting, one of the board members asked whether this LOHE opportunity had been there in past years but not accessed, and the answer was yes. And that is one of many reasons we are pleased to have him as our new superintendent.

There were other deficit-reducing plans on the table as well. One was to limit bussing to danger zones and areas beyond 1 mile or 2 miles, depending on student grade levels, with an anticipated budget reduction of $4.7 million. While some people tried to fearmonger that they were considering eliminating practically all bussing, that was never the case. Here’s the chart they showed:

from the budget presentation at the CFISD School Board Meeting, May 6, 2024,
screenshot from here

Curriculum

Around 10:30 PM, in a meeting that had begun at 6:00 PM, there was an agenda item related to accepting state-approved curriculum. Board member Dr. Natalie Blasingame proposed an amendment that allowed accepting the curriculum with a list of chapters removed. (Most textbooks are electronic now, accessed on Chromebooks; making certain chapters unavailable is easily doable.) There wasn’t a lot of discussion here. No audience members spoke. But board member Julie Hinaman was in a panic to stop this from happening. She insisted that we hadn’t had time to look at the chapters—even though this item had been postponed from the last meeting for further study, and others clearly used that time to study. Hinaman said we ought to defer to our experts, who approved this curriculum, failing to note that local districts can and ought to make local decisions, and this was one of the very reasons the community enthusiastically flipped the school board. She insisted that we might be failing to meet TEKS—the materials tested on the statewide standardized annual tests. It was clarified that we were allowed to use or create other materials to meet any standards that are missed—and in fact we already do that, because no textbook covers all the TEKS.

The materials in question are related to some controversial topics. KHOU did a story on it, listing for us the chapters to be removed (these were on the big screen in the room, but hard to get as a screenshot, so thanks to KHOU for the list): 

Biology course textbook (Texas, Miller & Levine Experience Biology by Savvas Learning Company)

·        Investigation 13: The challenge of diseases (includes discussion about vaccinations)

·        Investigation 16: human impact on the biosphere

Environmental Science: Sustaining Your World, Texas Edition

·        Chapters 5: Species Interactions, Ecological Succession, and Population Control

·        Chapter 7: Saving Species & Ecosystem Services

Earth Systems, Texas Edition

·        Chapters 2: Earth Systems & Cycles

·        Chapter 6: Mineral & Energy Resources

·        Chapter 21: Climate & Climate Change

Principles of Education & Training course – Teaching

·        Chapter 7: School & Society

·        Chapter 12: Teaching Diverse Learners

·        Chapter 15: Technology for Instruction

·        Chapter 18: The Challenges of Teaching

Health Science Theories textbook – DHO Health Science

·        Chapter 8: Human Growth & Development

·        Chapter 10: Cultural Diversity

There’s a hue and cry coming from the opposition that this is a “diverse” district, and the board is required to listen to them as parents, and not just those Christian extremists who give them campaign money. (Ha! If only I’d had money and not just time to donate to them!) But school board elections matter, and even more parents have spoken in a way that counts. If there are topics a “pro-diverse” parent feels their child is missing, they are free to supplement. What these actual extremists don’t get to do is indoctrinate all the kids, regardless of their parents’ will, and then say those parents can just un-indoctrinate their kids after the fact.

Board member Julie Hinaman, the only holdover from the previous board, was outmatched. She has, since the meeting, gone to social media to cry foul. She should have been informed ahead of time, she says. She fails to remember in social media, even though she mentioned it at the meeting, that the issue was postponed since the last meeting so the board could study the curriculum before accepting it, which others clearly did. Now she wants it two ways at once: there isn’t time to see which chapters and what content is being left out, so we should just accept the experts and approve their original recommendation.

She could have asked more specifics about the chapters to be deleted. Board member Justin Ray, in an effort to allay any fears or any sense that things were being hidden, asked Dr. Blasingame for some clarification on materials being left out. Dr. Blasingame mentioned a biology extension chapter related to vaccines was not necessary for TEKS. And then she covered some earth systems that included depopulation, and an agenda out of the UN, and a perspective that humans are bad. Ray agreed that those were controversial topics. Board member Todd LeCompte agreed that he wouldn’t want anything about depopulation to be taught.

In other words, there’s some indoctrination going on, which is exactly what we voted in this board to prevent. And we thank them for this first, important step.

Hinaman didn’t ask for those details. I think she didn’t, because the more open and detailed the board is about the indoctrination, the more parents agree with them—despite what the loud cohort screams. She claims that Dr. Blasingame stated the revisions were a result of a board subcommittee—but review of the video shows no such statement. She only said these materials were brought up as concerning across the state and within the district. Hinaman accused the board of vetting Dr. Blasingame’s proposed amendment, because it was available on the screen; in other words, Dr. Blasingame was prepared enough to hand out copies of her proposal to board members and had sent an electronic copy to the secretary handling the large screen, as would be expected for an amendment of this type in a typical public meeting. Somehow, to Hinaman, that is backroom dealing. Hinaman, in her online screed, says,

“Last year, it was library books. Last month, it was librarians. This week, it was Science. What next? Social studies? History? Ethics?”

screenshot from Julie Hinaman's social media,
I accessed it here, in a private group that may not be accessible

How terrible of us to not willingly submit to the indoctrination! Who do we think we are?

Note that Hinaman has an influential position on TASB (Texas Association of School Boards). People from around the state are calling for legislation to disallow association with TASB, because of the woke indoctrination problem. Association can be curtailed at the school district level; I hope Cy-Fair ISD makes that happen.

You can assume that the loud cohort will scream again, at the next board meeting, and the one after that…. Tolerating their tantrums is going to be one of the costs of standing up to them in order to stop allowing them to indoctrinate our kids.

So, they will go on saying anyone in favor of school choice is trying to defund public schools and destroy them. And they will go on saying anyone who wants porn removed from school libraries is a pearl-clutching book banner. And they will go on lying about school librarians being fired, and will claim removing indoctrination from textbooks is censorship—or whatever the next thing is that comes up.

It will be loud and uncomfortable, and often ugly. But I’m proud to say I helped get this board elected, and I’m very pleased to see how very capable our new superintendent is. As a report card at the end of their very first semester, I’d say they’re getting very good marks. (Except for that one; maybe we'll get her voted out in the next election.)

We’re Living Under Tyranny. Now What?

I follow Michael Yon on Locals.com. Wednesday he linked to this article—and the associated links, which first brought it to my attention: “DEEP STATE COUP: Intel Agencies Spied On, Withheld Information From President Trump, CIA Official Admits” by Jamie White, for Infowars.

In it there is a link to this James O’Keefe tweet on X, which includes a 27-minute video. This is undercover video of a CIA contractor (he shows his badge, so he’s not just making up a story to impress a girl—although he does seem to be trying to impress the girl; note, there seem to be two time periods or places; in one he wears a button shirt and jacket; in the other he wears a casual zipped jacket). He admits that the CIA, NSA, et al., surveilled Trump—before and during his presidency, which we have known for a while now, but also that they are still spying on him, and his family members and associates. That’s pretty egregious, but not particularly surprising, since we already knew they had done that, and the new regime isn’t likely to be too ethical for such stunts.

Amjad Fseisi, screenshot from OMG Media undercover video

What is new in what the guy, Amjad Fseisi, reveals is that they withheld intelligence from Trump both when he was president-elect and as president. Amjad claims the reason is that they feared Trump would leak the information—to Putin, because of course they knew he was both stupid and a puppet of Putin.

Except, of course, we know he was not in cahoots with Putin, or Russia in general. That was a hoax, the lie for which was bought and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC. And that fact was known (and likely approved of) by Obama, and known by Biden.

Amjad claims this withholding of information from the president was carried out during Trump’s presidency by CIA head Mike Pompeo and former CIA director Gina Haspel.

The CIA could not have been under any illusions that the trumped-up (sorry, accidental pun) charge of Russian collusion was true—because they could see the sources for it. That means that any pretense of withholding the intelligence from the duly elected president was not done to protect the country from a treasonous president; it was done because those attempting to thwart the duly elected president were willing to commit treason to do so.

Let me repeat that: purposely withholding intelligence from the sitting president is treason. It is staging a coup—usurping authority, insurrecting you might say. Yet another example of: If they’re accusing you of it, it’s because they’re doing it.

I’ve heard rumors off and on that Mike Pompeo might be on the Dark Side. (It’s “May the 4^th Be with You Day, incidentally, which you’ll know if you’ve scrolled through Facebook today.) I’m disappointed to have corroboration added to that rumor.

I can’t say we know all the facts. This guy, Amjad Fseisi, is either lying about Russian collusion—after the evidence has come out about the whole hoax—or he doesn’t know. If he doesn’t know, is that willful blindness or stupidity? He’s trying to impress a girl. I’m sure he doesn’t want to admit that he, by association, was in on breaking the law by withholding intelligence from the president; he would need to play the hero and say they were protecting the country from this traitor who somehow got elected president, and maybe he hoped the girl didn’t listen to the news and know better.

Amjad Fseisi lets the girl examine his green badge,
screenshot from OMG Media undercover video

Maybe a CIA operative ought not to be giving away secrets—such as his connection to US intelligence, flashing badge to prove it—to a girl he wasn’t married to and had permission to share that information with. I’ve told this story about my dad (a brief paragraph in this post): 

My dad was in the OSS in WWII; he didn’t drink either. And in the testing phase, weeding people out, they had to maintain a character during a cocktail party. He passed the test, because his mind remained clear, and he was able to stay in character. Of those weeded out, it was because the alcohol lowered their inhibitions, and they gave themselves away.

Maybe someone stupid enough to do that after a couple of cocktails is a whole lot more dangerous to US intelligence than any duly elected president.

Except, maybe for the one we have. Although duly elected is probably not a modifier we can use for the current White House resident.

Some years ago I wrote a piece called “You Might Be Living Under Tyranny If…” in two parts: here and here.  This was March 15 and 17 of 2013, just into the second Obama term. There has been a great deal more tyranny happening since then. In fact, by comparison to the current regime, the Obama tyranny seemed almost like the good old days, where we had hope of voting another way and getting out from under the tyranny before it was too late.

The narrative against Trump has been, he’s going to be an authoritarian dictator. So, in their panicked fear (the minions and blind followers), they will do anything—including supporting an authoritarian dictator—to prevent Trump’s authoritarianism from coming to pass.

What are some of the concerns of living under a tyrannical dictator?

·        He might silence free speech.

o   Trump didn’t, but Biden regime does.

·        He might target his political opponents using color of law (lawsuits on spurious charges, often called lawfare).

o   Trump didn’t, but Biden regime does. The J6ers number in the hundreds. Charges against Trump number almost into the hundreds. And what if Trump is elected again? They’ll call it targeting political opponents, if he follows through on holding actual treasonous lawbreakers accountable.

·        He might control their money.

o   Trump didn’t—in fact, the economy flourished, in a stunning recovery from Obama’s “managed decline.” That is, until the pandemic temporarily shut down the economy in an election year. Even so, it was recovering—until Biden took office. Biden inflation, particularly on food and necessary expenses, has been astounding. And the Biden regime is trying to move us into centralized digital currency—so they have complete control over your ability to receive and spend money. (See Revelation 13:17.)

·        He might divide people and cause them to hate segments of the society.

o   Trump didn’t, although he did seem to divide people into those who hated him (as well as his supporters) and those who didn’t. They often accused him of racism, but then when you listened to what he had said instead of what his enemies claimed he said, the accusations were unfounded. Biden, as Obama before him, has been intentionally divisive, with a particular hatred for anyone who doesn’t easily submit to his tyranny.

·        He might endanger the country for his own personal gain.

o   Trump didn’t. But Biden has been doing that his entire political career. And there is mounting evidence of his influence peddling—most notably in Ukraine and China, but also other countries. In a country that wasn’t run by an authoritarian dictator, such treason would be prosecuted instead of covered up.

We could continue this list, unfortunately.

A comment online yesterday reminded me of the Russian defector Yuri Bezmenov, and I re-watched his interview from 1984.  Toward the end, he gives four stages of moving a society from free to communist:

·        Demoralization:     about 25 years

o   He means not just discouraging, but removing morals as a guide and stabilizing force. He says this is already done to the US by 1984.

·        Destabilization:      about 2-5 years

o   Defense and Economy already, he says. I’d say we’d only seen whispers of that in 1984. If it’s 2-5 years, we are living those.

·        Crisis:                        only up to 6 weeks.

o   We’ve had a few already. The pandemic was one. The riots of 2020 were another. They tried to say J6 was a crisis (but there were no weapons, no killing except for police killing two unarmed citizens, both women); they claim, however, that it was the worst attack since the Civil War, ignoring Pearl Harbor and 9/11 where sizable numbers of Americans were killed, so that rings hollow. They have opened our border, inviting enemies to enter—to create a crisis? They are fomenting campus protesters right now, but people are losing patience with that. They keep claiming climate change is a crisis, but people are losing patience with that fearmongering as well. I expect them to come up with something else this year, ahead of the election.

·        Normalization:        may last indefinitely.

o   That is their euphemism for reigning in bloody tyranny forever. It’s usually a generation or two before another regime can overthrow them, after people can’t tolerate the misery any longer and would rather die than submit any longer. But it’s very hard not to get just another tyrant as a replacement.

Yuri Bezmenov in 1984 interview, screenshot from here

        

Bezmenov warns us, “United States is in the state of war—undeclared total war—against the basic principles and foundations of this system.”  We’re at war with the communist system. He says,

You have literally several years to live on. Unless the United States wake up, the time bomb is ticking. With every second the disaster is coming closer and closer. And, unlike myself, you will have nowhere to defect to…. This is it. This is the last country of freedom and possibility.

Remember, this is in 1984 that he’s saying this. He said we were already at the demoralization stage, meaning that truth and morals no longer matter. You can present evidence, and it will not wake people up, because they do not value truth.

The interview host, G. Edward Griffin, asks, “OK, what do we do?”

Bezmenov answers,

There must be a very strong effort to educate people in a spirit of patriotism, number one. And number two, to explain to them the real danger of socialist, communist—whatever—welfare state, Big Brother government. If people will fail to grasp the impending danger of that development, nothing can ever help United States. You may kiss goodbye to your freedom, including freedoms to homosexuals, to a prison inmate—all this freedom will vanish, evaporating in five seconds, including your precious lives.

He adds another piece of advice:

At least part of the United States population is convinced that the danger is real. They have to force their government—and I’m not talking about sending letters, signing petitions, and all this beautiful, noble activity; I’m talking about forcing the United States government to stop aiding communism, because there is no other problem more burning and urgent than to stop the Soviet military industrial complex from destroying whatever is left of the free world. And it is very easy to do: no credits, no technology, no money, no political or diplomatic recognitions, and of course not such idiocy as grain deals to USSR. The Soviet people, 270 millions of Soviets, will be eternally grateful to you, if you stop aiding a bunch of murderers who sit now in Kremlin and who President Andropov respectfully calls government.

Back in the day, President Ronald Reagan seemed to understand the existential threat. His philosophy was, “We win. They lose.” It was a cold war, rather than a kinetic war, but it took its toll. We did win, shortly after Reagan left office. The Soviet Union ceased to exist as such. And that was a reprieve from impending doom.

But that doesn’t mean the enemy is giving up—and I mean the real, entire enemy, not a single nation or leader. The “dragon” of Revelation13 is relentless. And the drive for communism/socialism—a good simile for the beast rising up out of the sea in that same chapter—isn’t done yet. In fact, maybe the apparent defeat of communism (and/or Nazism) in the last century, which has revived again in our current century, is that one of the sea beast’s heads that was wounded as if dead but the deadly wound was healed (verse 3). It works as a metaphor for now at least.

Bezmenov lists just four stages of changing a society from freedom to tyranny/communism. But there’s a list of 45 incremental steps you probably ought to read. These were collected into Cleon Skousen’s The Naked Communist, and were read into the Congressional Record in 1963. Some of them were person or place specific and may not seem currently relevant, but most are what we have witnessed.

45 aims of Communism, image found here

The thing about calling something communist is that it limits the idea to that box. What we’re really talking about is tyranny—what in the Spherical Model we call southern hemisphere, the opposite of freedom. And down there we also get poverty and savagery (the economic and social sphere’s, in addition to the political sphere).

Bezmenov is probably right that we need to force our government to do what it should—which is well beyond relations with Russia. But his list of things to do are not enough for the worldwide corruption and collusion we have now.

The ultimate solution, when things are this dire, is for the Second Coming. (“Hosanna!” means “come and rescue.”) But for us, while we’re waiting, we must fight in the war we are in. As the ancient Captain Moroni wrote on a cloak (Alma 46:12), as a rallying flag in time of war:

In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children.

Those are what we fight for: our beliefs, our freedoms, and our families. As much as possible, we fight by speaking truth and living civilized lives despite the savagery surrounding us. Sometimes here we summarize the Ten Commandments as honoring God, life, family, truth, and property rights. If we, and everyone we can influence, will live such lives, that would win the battle—or at least puts us on the winning side. May the victory come soon!