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The Bible resonates across the ages, always having something to say to us no matter what may have changed in the world as a whole. It’s as true in 2025 as it ever has been.

So, we’ll contemplate the events of the past year or so through the lens of this passage from Matthew: “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

We begin with that human colossus overshadowing the entire globe: Donald Trump. We all know the story, even as it transmutes into legend, something that will be told, retold, analyzed, disparaged, and rekindled for generations to come.

Even as he reached out to his opposition, Trump, during his first term, was interfered with to an extent never before witnessed in a presidential administration. Taking advice from Chris Christie, of all people, keeping on Christopher Wray and Mark Milley, hiring establishment backstabbers like William Barr—it gained him nothing. He was assailed, undercut, and betrayed on all sides—and yet he still succeeded in fulfilling much of his agenda.

They cheated him out of his rightfully earned second term in 2020, secure in the knowledge that nobody would ever figure it out. Then came the impeachments—two of them one after the other, as if they were aware, deep down, that one couldn’t possibly work. Followed by a slew of bogus lawsuits that should even now result in disbarments and unbenchings across the country.

Image by AI.

They assured themselves that they’d buried the boogieman deep at the crossroads. They were mistaken.

All the same, they must have been delighted when he ran again in ‘24, meaning that the GOP had nobody capable of taking his place (no surprise there). They’d beaten him once. They had humiliated and disgraced him, tarnished his name, and threatened his family. They could do it again.

That worked out well. The American Left, the media, and the Deep State blew it as completely as anyone has ever blown anything. Blew it through overconfidence, ineptness, and sheer demented inability to grasp the reality they were facing. They tossed all their cards over the cliff edge and then jumped after them, laughing all the way down. The July coup, the Harris time-bomb, the Walz selection, the attempt to run an aging call girl as a racial messiah… all of it wasted effort, all of it leading to the inevitable conclusion.

All the while, Trump campaigned like a man possessed, running a schedule that would have broken most men half his age. Sitting before corrupt, vindictive Democrat judges in the morning, then hopping a plane to host a rally in the afternoon—and doing it over and over again, day after day, week after week. Nothing slowed him down, not even an assassin’s bullet.

This is the class of event that we’re too close to for proper judgment. It was years after Midway before anybody grasped what that victory meant. It was a decade after Apollo XI before we began to understand what had been thrown away. The same is true here. We may not live long enough to see the final outcome of what transpired this year.

The Dems, needless to say, will never get it, which is as it should be.

We turn now to Ukraine. The bully-worshippers who bow down to a KGB agent who uses nerve gas and radioisotopes against his critics should probably sit this one out. Ukraine is a fragment of a former empire that has spent decades trying to find its feet—and failing.

In the strictest sense, Putin wasn’t wrong. No sane military analysis would see Ukraine as anything but a basket case state that was just aching to be snatched up by the first comer. Putin didn’t even call it a “war.” No—it was a “special military operation.” It would take about three days.

It’s clear that Putin was thinking in terms of Crete, 1941. There, the German Luftwaffe flew in Ju-52 transports packed with troops to Maleme airfield, many of them actually crash-landing on the runway. These took control of the field thanks to a British commander who pulled his troops out to “regroup” them (have to make sure those boots are properly shined, pip-pip). Within hours, the Germans had landed thousands of troops, and the Brits were finished.

Putin tried the same thing, sending in a large transport stuffed with Spetnaz special forces to take over Kyiv’s airport. But that plane was shot down, killing hundreds of Russia’s finest troops. The rest of the Ilyushins never showed up. The tank columns were caught in an unseasonable Rasputitsa, and here we are, going on three years later. As classic an example of asymmetric warfare as you are likely to find.

The Ukrainians, out of necessity, revolutionized warfare with the use of cheap drones to negate much more advanced and expensive weapons. Putin’s military was exposed as essentially a massive hoax, his “18,000 tanks in storage” suddenly turning into piles of rust and broken parts. He lost most of his Black Sea fleet to a country without a Navy. Putin was, in the end, forced to turn to Russia’s traditional “strategy” (to stretch the term to its utmost limits): wasting troops by the thousands to gain a few hundred yards of ground.

Even if Ukraine were to surrender today, it would still be a Russian failure. Putin has succeeded in awakening a somnolent NATO, encouraging much greater spending on armaments, wrecking the ruble, destroying Russia’s credit, ramming the BRICs alliance onto the rocks, and not least, losing something on the order of 750,000 men.

As for the putative reason for the war in the first place—to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO—both Sweden and Finland have joined the alliance after generations (centuries, in Sweden’s case)—of neutrality. So now Putin has one of the most technologically adept and the most ferocious peoples in Europe lined up against him. Well done, Vlad.

Now, if they could only learn to keep their hands out of the till.

We turn to Israel. A little over a year ago, Israel was mired in one of the worst situations of its short lifetime. Iran’s long-term plans were coming to fruition. Israel was surrounded by enemies, including the effective and well-armed terror groups, Hamas and Hezb’allah. Russia had established military bases less than an hour’s flight from Israel’s borders. The Houthis, armed by Iran, were prepared to cut off the Red Sea. Israeli-Arab conciliation through the Abraham Accords, mediated by Donald Trump, lay in a state of limbo. Iran was drawing ever closer to unveiling a working nuclear weapon. Anti-Semitism was surging worldwide, triggered by Western-based Islamist groups and encouraged by the likes of Barry Obama, Jimmy Carter, Roger Waters, and the Congressional Squad. The Biden administration had blatantly and openly betrayed the Jewish state on all possible levels.

And today? Well…if the Jews aren’t actually God’s chosen people, they’ll do until one comes along. It can be safely said that the situation has not been so much reversed as turned inside out and then run through a Klein bottle.

Hamas has been constricted to one single neighborhood, where it is relentlessly being attritted. Hezb’allah has been decapitated in one of the most brilliant covert espionage operations on record. Iran’s air defenses have been shattered, and it now awaits the inevitable crushing of its nuclear sites. Syria has collapsed, with much of its military weaponry and supplies destroyed by Israel and the U.S., while the Russian naval task forces based there have taken to their heels.

So the first have become last. Trump was supposed to act as an object lesson to any who would defy the Dem/Soros/BlackRock leviathan. Ukraine was supposed to vanish like the morning dew. Israel was to be subject to the Second Holocaust while the world shook its head and sighed.

The last have become first. We stand on the verge of a new age with infinite promise and wrenching terrors that may, in fact, lead to those “broad, sunlit uplands” that we were promised so many years ago. The key now is to keep it going. We need to study how all this was done in order to ensure it continues being done.

(Two suggestions: Curtail the “Reach across the aisle” types infesting the GOP—farewell, Mitt—and cease to respond to media efforts at promoting hysteria like the drone hoax and the H-1B tantrums. I’ve always understood MAGA to be comprised of adults. Let’s start acting like it.)

Above all, we need to learn how to keep our chin up, how not to lose faith, how to take a bullet and come up fighting, and how to come out on top when all seems lost.

And at last, because it is apt, because it is righteous, because it is true, we will end with another quote from the book on which our civilization is based:

“The race does not always go to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but time and chance happeneth to them all.”