Want to convey the stakes of the upcoming election? You can know them with mathematical certainty and visceral conviction, and convince your (nonbrainwashed) friends and family what they are via two simple steps. Together, they limn the contrast between two starkly different futures, two polar opposite models of how human beings should live.

First, go see the new movie, Reagan. The great Eric Metaxas attended its premiere and told me he was “blown away.” Audiences are raving about it, while critics spew venom and squeal like stuck Gadarene pigs. While he was a sinner like the rest of us, Ronald Reagan was also a believer, and an overwhelmingly virtuous example of the kind of human being the old, Christian-led America used to produce: honest, tolerant, principled, and deeply attached to freedom. He believed in the balanced tension of faith and reason, liberty and law, that guided America’s Founders and shaped our Constitution — a document which power-hungry leftists now are calling “dangerous” in the pages of The New York Times.

See that movie, and drag along your kids and friends, to remind them what a real Christian American is like compared to money-grubbing open-borders-loving Catholic bishops and virtue-signaling woke evangelical pastors.

The Trans Industry Is Creating Political Soldiers for the Regime

To show the other alternative we face in just two months when the election comes, read and share the appalling anti-Christian murder manifesto of the Nashville mass shooter, who was transgender. That’s a document which police and local authorities trashed the First Amendment to bury from the public, legally persecuting the heroic publisher of the Tennessee Star, who procured and published excerpts. It’s grim reading, the rantings of a deeply disturbed young woman subjected to 22 years of psychiatric malpractice at the hands of a Vanderbilt University clinic that profits from gender “transition” surgery — which knew about her homicidal fantasies but apparently never reported them, as required by law:

So #VanderbiltPsych #VandyPsych KNEW Audrey Hale, the Covenant School Shooter, was having homicidal fantasies of shooting up her school, and 1 psychiatrist even tried to have her involuntarily committed, but nothing happened. WHY?!! Why was a 22-year psych patient openly… https://t.co/5xfBmXOh8G pic.twitter.com/1hmkNDSexM

— Tennessee Bourbon (@TennesseeBourbn) September 4, 2024

I asked in a column here why secularists who favor eugenic abortions for harmless Down syndrome victims don’t follow their own sick logic and seek euthanasia for people who claim to be trans (as leftists promote it in Canada and Europe not just for the chronically ill, but the clinically depressed and traumatized victims of Islamic terrorism). Yes, it’s dirt-cheap to care compassionately for innocent, overwhelmingly happy people with an extra chromosome, compared to the elaborate steroid regime and gruesome surgeries required to match the battered body of someone diagnosed as “trans” to his or her mental delusions. But money isn’t the point. Evil is. As my column concluded:

While the average citizen might be equally unsettled by either a person with Down syndrome or one with gender dysphoria, there’s one critical difference between them. The former is simply a person who has been born with some physical and intellectual challenges. There’s nothing sexy or kinky about him, he’s simply somewhat disabled. Seems like he might be a “burden” to his parents, or the taxpayer. (Though in fact he’s a genuine bargain compared to the impact of a transgender person on insurance rates.)

The transgender person, however, is a sexual transgressor. He’s doing outrageous and kinky things that violate the Natural Law (whatever his culpability). If we condemn or reject his sins, what would that mean for us? For our own sins, the ugly stuff in our past or our Internet history? Libertines argue that rejecting transgender claims is only the “thin end of the wedge,” which will quickly be followed by bans on abortion, pornography, and other Natural Law violations.

And a lot of people are attached to those, much more than they are to innocent, harmless people who just got born with an extra chromosome.

But there’s something even darker going on, which the secret manifesto of the woman who slaughtered children at a church reminds us: Even more than deluded Black Lives Matter or Antifa rioters, the trans activist is the perfect political soldier for our elites:

• Deeply alienated from his own physical being which he thinks God botched;
• Convinced that all human culture through every century until Bruce Jenner appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair in drag has been a conspiracy of sexual oppression;
• Dependent on pricey, mood-altering chemicals and ghoulish surgeries that profit Big Pharma and greedy hospitals.

The disgruntled “trans” person has been primed for violence and rage, aimed at Christians and conservatives. Usually that just means aggressive activism and physical intimidation. But train up enough unhinged people like Audrey Hale, and really appalling acts of violence will inevitably happen. Those can then be weaponized as pretexts for disarming honest citizens to stop “gun violence.”

Darren Beattie wrote a brilliant essay comparing the surgically mutilated, now sexless victims of “trans” treatment (most are not just sterile, but incapable of sexual pleasure, for life) to the often-castrated janissaries who persecuted Christians on behalf of the tyrannical Ottoman sultans. Read it, and weep.

Then maybe go see Reagan again to lift your spirits.

City Sued for Banning Any Criticism of Government by Citizens

No, this isn’t a city in North Korea or even Britain. It’s a city in America. As Worldnetdaily reports:

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has filed a lawsuit against the city of Surprise, Arizona, and several officials after the mayor decided his policy of not allowing residents to offer any criticism of city officials overruled the U.S. Constitution at council meetings.

WND reported earlier when Mayor Skip Hall ordered resident Rebekah Massie arrested for her speech during a portion of a government meeting set aside for residents’ concerns.

She was opposed to a city decision to give its lawyer even more money.

Outrageous: Mayor of @AZSurprise has a resident arrested (in front of her 10-year-old daughter) for criticizing officials. At 2:30, Mayor @skiphall2 warns her from “attacking the city attorney personally” and orders police to remove her. Appalling disregard for First Amendment. pic.twitter.com/03ZJNtFr5o

— Adam Steinbaugh (@adamsteinbaugh) August 23, 2024

Will They Let Trump Enter the White House Alive?

Such questions don’t sound so crazy as they used to, in the wake of the absolute reckless abandon the Secret Service and FBI showed when they let a shooter come within millimeters of blowing Donald Trump’s head open on live television. Now Gateway Pundit reports on a brilliant economist and former tech mogul, Eric Weinstein, warning that Western intelligence agencies (remember that Britain’s MI-5 helped create the Russia collusion hoax) might very well do whatever it takes to stop a victorious Donald Trump from taking office:

I think we don’t understand why the censorship is behaving the way it is. We don’t understand why it’s in the shadows. We don’t understand why our news is acting in a bizarre fashion. So let’s just set the stage, given that that was in February. Um — there is something that I think Mike Benz has just referred to as the Rules-Based International Order. It’s an interlocking series of agreements, tacit understandings, explicit understandings, clandestine understandings about how the most important structures keep the world free of war and keep markets open. And there has been a system in place, whether understood explicitly or behind the scenes or implicitly, that says that the purpose of the two American parties is to prune the field of populist candidates so that whatever two candidates exist in a face-off are both acceptable to that world order.

Go read the rest.

Ken Paxton Fights Election Fraud

Texas’s heroic MAGA Attorney General Ken Paxton, after surviving a concocted impeachment by Bush dynasty operatives, is now fighting election fraud as fiercely as he did in 2020, as the Austin Statesman-American reports:

Bexar County commissioners approved a nearly $400,000 plan Tuesday to mail voter registration forms to unregistered county residents, setting them up for a likely legal fight against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton after he warned that he would sue over the initiative.

On Monday night, hours before the commissioners’ vote, Paxton threatened to take the county to court if it went forward with the plan. He argued that the state Election Code does not explicitly grant local governments the authority to send forms to voters who haven’t requested them, and that mail applications could entice felons and other ineligible people to register.

If more Republicans acted like Ken Paxton, more of them would get falsely impeached. But we also might have honest elections.

Along The Stream

Don’t miss the incisive Raymond Ibrahim on the eerie, surprising parallels between the dishonest tactics of the secular left and those of aggressive, intolerant Islam.

Later today, read Jules Gomes on how many Orthodox Christian churches resisted the COVID panic, and Caesar’s demands that public worship be suspended as “nonessential” while casinos and abortion clinics continued to do business.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 10 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.