Happy Independence Day, everyone!
Question of the day: Since the main reason for Americans declaring independence was taxation to pay for foreign wars, why do we stand for it now?
I have been @spencerpratt. I won on Election Night by 2,900 votes to become the 1st Republican Clark County (NV) Commissioner in 16 years. Five days later, I lost by 336 votes after hundreds of unpostmarked ballots were counted. So glad we're voting to require voter ID in Nevada!
🚨BREAKING: The United States government has sent official condolences to the family of Henry Nowak and the people of the United Kingdom
The US cares more than Keir Starmer.
I’m the only one who is not remotely disturbed by the Democrat fraud unfolding in the Los Angeles mayor’s race. And why? Because I knew to a certainty that statistically impossible cheating would take place AGAIN. I said it, I was right, and I’m done with it.
America is lost.
58 years ago today, Robert F. Kennedy's assassination was the first act of Palestinian terrorism on American soil.
Sirhan Sirhan’s diary made his motive crystal clear: ‘RFK must die' due to his support for israel. Sirhan chose the 1st anniversary of the Six Day War to kill RFK.
When you say I have to accept “the Nicene Creed” to be Christian, could you be more specific?
Do you mean the creed produced in A.D. 325 at a council convened by the Roman emperor Constantine, who was trying to settle the Arian controversy and preserve unity in his empire?
Or do you mean the version most Christians actually recite today, which comes from A.D. 381, when another Roman emperor, Theodosius I, convened the First Council of Constantinople to settle further disputes and more fully define the doctrine of the Holy Spirit?
Because that seems like a pretty important distinction.
One was created under Constantine, a Roman emperor with no priesthood authority, whose interest in Christianity was inseparable from his interest in imperial stability.
The other was expanded under Theodosius, another Roman emperor who used state power to enforce religious uniformity.
And somehow I’m supposed to believe that my faith in Jesus Christ is invalid unless I accept the theological conclusions of emperor-sponsored councils held centuries after Christ and His apostles?
You are free to trust those councils, led by rulers of the same empire that crucified Christ.
But please stop pretending that your post-biblical, politically entangled, imperial committee language is simply “biblical truth.”
And stop acting like you have the authority to decide who is and is not Christian based on a person’s willingness to pledge allegiance to Rome’s preferred definition of the Divine.
To you, it's just a Cracker Barrel parking lot. To me, it's where I gave my life to Jesus Christ.
I was 21 years old. I was working at the Cracker Barrel in Tallahassee after some of the worst years of my life. I'd made mistakes. Real ones.
I grew up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, raised by a mom who worked hard and didn't accept excuses. But I made decisions that should have ended my story before it ever really started. By the grace of God, they didn't. But every day, I was carrying them.
One afternoon, a church group came into the restaurant, just back from a revival. I served them their meals like I served any other table. But something happened while I was serving them. I can't fully explain it to you. The Lord spoke to me. He said, “Stop running from Me.”
It knocked me back.
I went to find the table, and they were all gone. I could see through their windows that they were getting on their bus, and I knew deep down that if I let them drive away, I was going to keep running. So I went outside. The last woman, just as she was stepping onto the bus, turned to me and asked, “Are you okay?”
I told her, “No ma’am, I’m not okay.” I told her the Lord was telling me to stop running.
That whole bus emptied out, stood with me in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel in Tallahassee, Florida, and prayed over me right there.
I gave my life to Christ that day. Right there.
I still get emotional about it. Because I know what I was before that moment, and I know what He's done since. He gave me a wife who shares my faith. He gave me three sons. He gave me a career, a community, a calling I never would have dared to ask for. He took a kid from Crown Heights who’d run out of chances and gave him a life that doesn't make sense apart from grace.
People ask me sometimes why I talk about it. Why I bring up the parking lot. Why I don't just keep that part private and let folks see the polished version.
I'll tell you why.
Because there's a young man out there right now — maybe in Tallahassee, maybe in Tampa, maybe in Miami, maybe in a small town in the Panhandle — who thinks his story is already over. Who thinks the mistakes he's made disqualify him from the life he could have had. Who thinks God doesn't want anything to do with somebody like him.
I'm here to tell him: that's a lie.
In life, you're not who you are at the lowest point. You're who you choose to become after.
The Lord met me in a Cracker Barrel parking lot. He'll meet you wherever you are.
You just have to stop running.
If she had numbers showing her winning she would have said it. In California it’s “legal” to take empty ballots that are scattered around the state and return them filled out in unsecured boxes. No civilized country in the world allows this type of cheating.
Elder Jeffrey R. Holland delivered the best explanation of how The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints deviates from traditional Christianity and returns to the doctrine taught by Jesus Christ himself.
“If one says we are not Christians because we do not hold a fourth- or fifth-century view of the Godhead, then what of those first Christian Saints, many of whom were eyewitnesses of the living Christ, who did not hold such a view either?”
This is a must-watch today:
“…ours is not a ‘generalized Christianity.’ Being neither Catholic nor Protestant, we are, rather, a restored church, the restored New Testament Church. Thus, our origins and our authority go back before the time of councils, creeds, and iconography.” - Jeffrey R. Holland
“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.”
– Thomas Sowell
This shows the best of this FBI when on Tuesday, June 2nd, a subject Anthony Scott Searles-Harris in Bakersfield, California barricaded himself in the Kern County Superintendent of Schools office armed with explosives and took ten innocent people hostage.
Immediately, FBI jumped into action mobilizing resources, including launching our CIRG Hostage Rescue Team – FBI’s elite tier 1 tactical unit – who flew across the country in the middle of the night preparing for a high-risk, life-saving mission. FBI Sacramento, FBI Los Angeles, and our teams across the country utilized more than 150 additional FBI personnel including SWAT, crises negotiators, Special Agent Bomb Technicians, and more.
After an intense nearly 15-hour negotiation, FBI HRT teams successfully breached the building around 4:30am local time, neutralized the subject, and safely recovered all hostages unharmed. This was simply outstanding work by the men and women of the FBI with our partners at the Bakersfield Police Department who executed the mission brilliantly and saved at least 10 lives in a situation that could’ve turned dire.