October 07, 2023; a day that will live—to borrow from FDR—in infamy. We live in a very different time than the 1940s. It’s a time when a minor riot at the Capitol, likely provoked by government operatives, a riot that ended peacefully in a few hours when the “insurrectionists” left of their own accord, has been sanctimoniously proclaimed “worse than Pearl Harbor,” which was an actual act of war that killed more than 2400 Americans and wounded 1000 others.  

It was an insurrection that came within millimeters of overturning the US government, despite not a single “insurrectionist” carrying a gun, and despite the Capitol Police inviting them in, amicably chatting with them, even escorting and showing them around as they snapped photos of the statuary and themselves. It was an insurrection where numerous politicians like Kamala Harris and AOC claimed they were in imminent, deadly danger aand barely escaped with their lives, despite Harris being at DNC Headquarters and AOC being in an entirely different building, neither of which were ever occupied, or threatened.

It was an insurrection where Congress, temporarily displaced, finished its business after the insurrectionists left without burning anything down, killing anyone, or taking hostages. The Insurrectionists, particularly Ashley Babbitt, weren’t so lucky.

It was an insurrection where, as we’ve recently learned, General Mark Milley and the Acting Defense Secretary disobeyed President Trump’s order to send enough troops to the Capitol in advance to ensure a peaceful event. Prior to the insurrection that wasn’t, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the DC Mayor also refused offers of troops, like Milley and other disobedient public servants, they were worried about the “optics” of troops—with guns!-- at the Capitol.

Those optics worries vanished when thousands of troops, for months, surrounded the Capitol after the insurrection.  Passersby asking troops why they were there and what they were doing were universally told: “we have no idea.”

And it was an insurrection whereafter the Department of Justice, for the first time in history, relentlessly pursues a former President, making up a Stalinist variety of "crimes" in a variety of places, employing “novel legal theories.” Translation: unsupportable legal bullshit they made up, allowed to run wild by corrupt, leftist judges.

In such a nation, a nation of narratives/lies where our President has been suffering from dementia for years, and where the Vice President, apparently not suffering from dementia is no more capable, is it any wonder we lack anything approaching a national, moral compass?

The October 7, 2023 attack on Israel should have been a universal wake-up call, an alarm proclaiming: “civilization’s foundations have crumbled; morality has fallen.” People around the world should have been horrified, if for no reason other than understanding if that attack was not absolutely condemned and all that participated exterminated, the Jews are only the first to be wantonly slaughtered. That kind of evil waits its chance to kill everyone and anyone. Civilized mankind should have demanded all responsible, and their deranged ideologies, be wiped from existence.

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But that was not, is not, the reaction. In America and cities around the world, cities and universities are hotbeds of Islamist rage. Many Jews, even in Israel, ally themselves with the monsters sworn to kill them. Vile Islamists serve in the Congress. The President and vice president give lip service to supporting Israel, while doing their best to pressure Israel to let Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and every other intractable enemy live, rearm, and slaughter Jews until none survive. Kamala Harris is particularly careful to thread that infernal needle lest she lose the votes of Michigan Islamists.

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How can this be possible? How can a nation dedicated, as Abraham Lincoln said, to the proposition that all men are created equal abide this kind of inhumanity, this abject evil?

We abide it, because far too many, living lives of relative safety have the luxury to reject universal truths: God is the source of goodness, truth, mercy and grace. Satan is the author of evil and lies. 

Modern, institutionalized, evil resides largely in Communism and Islamism, and Islamism, with the collusion of our feckless leaders, now threatens to plunge us into a third World War. Yet we fund it, and idiotically try to negotiate with an ideology sworn to our destruction, a political faith whose adherents are taught to lie to infidels. Both ideologies rely on “useful idiots,” the weak minded, self-destructive and malicious willing to help evil destroy good.

To be sure, we fail when we refuse to admit evil exists, but we fail most when we fail to embrace the lesson attributed to Edmund Burke (among others):

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

A year after October 7, 2023, the outcome of that eternal battle remains in doubt and the thin veneer of civilization becomes ever thinner.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.