Life Matters - April 15, 2026
"We know you're in Minneapolis; you're with O'Keefe and his Nazis. You're in a white Ford, license plate --------- from Florida. You have one hour to leave or you're dead. So said a text message to the driver of a vehicle transporting James O'Keefe sometime during the uprising against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials this past January and February. OK, I understand that some accuse Mr. O'Keefe of selectively editing videos in order to damage liberal causes...though Wikipedia is in flux and their extensive 'explaining" of O'Keefe has the same flavor to me as Left-wing 'fact-checks'. I'm not here to judge O'Keefe either way although I do respect his stated goal to investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, waste, fraud, and misconduct in both public and private institutions. The fact that he used guile to set up access to information through interviews offended some on the liberal left even while they support the last administration's (Biden) use of social media private enterprise for government surveillance and censoring tactics. Rules for thee but not for me. Suffice it to say that if the censoring, the death threats, the violent protestings with destruction of property could be pinned on conservative causes, the Left would not hesitate to flood the airwaves with such titillating information.
Wikipedia also 'informs' us that the George Floyd demonstrations were 'mostly peaceful' and gives us an overview of the gains made in police accountability. But they do report 3 nights of heavy rioting that resulted in 500 million in damages to 1,500 properties, 604 arrests, 164 instances of arson, and 2 riot-related deaths from May 27, 2020 to May 29, 2020 in Minneapolis alone. Al Overview reports that there were 2 billion dollars worth of insurance claims nationwide.
In the night of June 2, 2020 a black police officer, David Dorn, was killed in St. Louis, Missouri during Floyd riots when he tried stopping a looter (also black) taking what they wanted from a store they had violently broken into. The looter shot and killed David Dorn. Dorn's name soon disappeared from the public discourse. In the meantime the name George Floyd became a synonym for 'police brutality. Make sense? Yea, I didn't think so.
In all, according to another report, 19 people died nationwide, by various means, at George Floyd riots. That's right, 19 people died because one felonious black man, high on drugs, died at the hands of the police officer he was resisting. Make sense? Yea, me neither.
On September 10th 2025 an assassin's bullet slammed into Charlie Kirk's neck, killing him. Charlie Kirk was on a college campus - Utah Valley University - in Utah doing what he did so well; answering questions and discussing current events with college students through the lens of his faith. A college student asked a question about how many transgender mass shooters there were. Charlie answered the question. (mass shooters have been disproportionately transgender in recent years) Former Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who was at the event with his family when Charlie was shot, told Fox News that Kirk also spoke of his faith before he died.
"I want his wife and the country to know that the last question he took, the last thing he talked about to the people in Utah - thousands of people who wanted to come hear him - is that his message was one of the love of Jesus Christ, of his belief in prayer, and he talked about that from the heart, Mr. Chaffetz told the media outlet.
In the turbulent aftermath of Charlie Kirk's killing a calm appeared amidst the stormy negative opinions about Charlie Kirk and negativity about those who blamed his death on Left-wing rhetoric. The calm was in grieving the loss of a spiritual champion - the Christian communities of America drew together in grieving the martyrdom of one of their own - the loss of one who spread Truth as a calming spirit across American campuses. After Kirk's death, in the midst of griet, revival and joy arose out of the ashes of mourning. Truth was calming and lovely to those accepting it but stirred up animosity in those rejecting Truth.
And herein is the dichotomy caused by Truth; is it not? That it will calm and steady those accepting it while at the same time causing inner, if not outer, violence and erratic behavior in those who refuse to accept realities that Truth exposes.
Making enemies of their Muslim neighbors when attacked by a world superpower may have given the erratic mullahs of Iran a temporary feeling of strength but as they face the real world they come face to face with a day of reckoning. The U.S. military has moved to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, to sweep it in search of sea mines, then eventually open it to tankers transporting oil to countries that have become dependent on the Strait for energy consumption.
The Iranian mullahs still have an option; voluntarily give up their pursuit of nuclear weapons and keep the Strait open to international traffic as agreed to by international law. Or, to face consequences. Those consequences are as yet unseen but they hang over Iran as a menacing cloud of even more destruction.
There are those who cheered the death of Charlie Kirk. There are those who denounced and accused Israel of 'genocide' against Palestine. Now there are those who accuse President Trump of 'genocide' against iran. These same people ignore crucial facts. They ignore the fact of liberal-left violence, including but not limited to, killings, death threats, and impeding officers enforcing the law. They ignore the fact that Mr. Kirk was good at persuading through discourse and dialogue while his dialogueless accused killer was a left-persuaded and left-confused young man with a transgender live-in roommate. They ignore the facts about Floyd's drugs and counterfeit money, the fact of black on black crime, of David Dorn being a black officer killed by a black thief. They ignore the facts about terrorist rockets - thousands of them in the past few years - being shot at Israel out of Palestine, about the massacres on October 7h 2023, the necessity of Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system... They ignore the facts about Iran terrorizing the world through its many terrorist proxies funded by Iran. They ignore the killings of Iranian citizens, numbered in the tens of thousands, by the Iranian government, the threat of Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. Biden's influx of criminals...the list goes on..
But there is still hope...those who willingly ignore facts have also been blessed with the opportunity, if they will, to observe how Christianity lovingly and peacefully grieves. How revival and joy can emerge out of grief. The invitation to peace is still open. Jesus Lives!
Life Matters