The citizens of East Palestine, Ohio are dealing with the fallout of an environmental disaster. Three weeks ago, a train carrying toxic chemicals derailed and Norfolk Southern railroad officials decided to detonate the train’s cargo of vinyl chloride into the air, water, and soil. They called it a controlled burn. Soon, many of the town’s 4,761 residents were complaining of rashes, of children coughing, of pets growing ill.
Consciously, federal officials stayed away. The population of East Palestine is mostly white, rural and Republican, hardly target demographics for Dems. Maybe officials feared contamination — not only with toxic chemicals but also with real people and their real fears, Americans who are looking to the powerful to do the right thing.
Pete Buttigieg, the professed secretary of Transportation, made clear he did not think it his responsibility to visit. After all, he said, there are 1000 train derailments every year. Also, he added, it was former President Trump’s fault, for deregulating train safety. Not true. FEMA also wiped its hands of the place, saying it was not a federal responsibility to help clear the air because it was an act of man, not God. Also not true. This is the same FEMA that funds charity workers who meet buses of illegal migrants with disaster assistance — food, hotel rooms, rentals, legal aid, health care — the very essentials that the people in East Palestine are desperate for.
Only after now candidate Donald Trump announced plans to visit the small town did Biden send in the Environmental Protection Agency, which said it would demand reimbursement for its cleanup efforts by Norfolk Southern. And only after Trump donated water and met with residents did Buttigieg announce his own trip.
As for President Biden, he might have visited before leaving for Kyiv to offer the Ukrainian people pensions, weapons and another $500 billion of US taxpayer money. But he did not, because he is the president touting America Last, not First. He promised to stand with Ukraine “as long as it takes,” which he said would be many years. So far he has funneled $54 billion in aid, and billions more in weaponry, to their coffer. Because their border with Russia is worth bankrupting our treasury to defend.
Our border, however, is of no interest to the Biden administration or the left-wing media that applauds its anti-America policies. Crime cartels and Chinese intel agents flood the southern border, smuggling people, Fentanyl and ill intent. Establishment Republicans make no protest either, for they put business interests ahead of patriotic issues, lining their pockets with the prospect of a new cheap labor force. Millennials are skilled at virtue signalling — they are killing women’s sports in the name of transgender microaggressions and misnamed pronouns while rewriting classic children’s books by Roald Dahl by editing out adjectives — but they scoff at working — Amazon and Disney workers are protesting calls for them to return to the office.
Biden is giving away our sovereignty in other ways, too — allowing a China spy balloon free access to our skies for a week before shooting it down, negotiating a deal to give the World Health Organization authority over US pandemic policies in the future. WHO’s policies during the recent pandemic were deeply flawed — insisting vaccines and masks were safe and effective when they were neither, and accepting as truth China’s laughable assurance that the virus did not escape from its labs.
But Biden is in thrall to the Chinese — and the Ukrainians — as his extended family has amassed huge payoffs from Kyiv and Beijing during his half century of government “service.” No wonder investigative journalist Peter Schweizer titled his latest book, Caught Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win. On the cover is a photo of President Biden shaking hands Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Into the breach, amid this vacuum of leadership, comes a note of salvation.
Five days after the derailment upended lives and livelihoods in East Palestine, Ohio, students gathered for their usual morning service at 10 a.m. at Ashbury University, a small private Christian university in Wilmore, Kentucky, outside Lexington. One student got up and spontaneously confessed his flaws, and the congregation prayed for him. They have been praying ever since, attracting worshipers from almost every state in the US along with visitors from Singapore, New Zealand, Brazil, Indonesia. The college switchboard has fielded hundreds of calls, and the university has set up overflow chapels to accommodate the crowds, so far numbering 50,000.
“They just keep coming,” said college president Alison Perfater, “a young army of believers who are rising to claim Christianity as their own.” Quoting a passage from Habakkuk 1, where Lord says, ‘Look at the nations and watch, for I am doing something in your day that you wouldn’t believe if you were told,’ she added, “It’s happening. The Holy Spirit interceded for us.”
It is as if the students and their visitors are channeling the founders’ vision, understanding that government without religion is bankrupt. As John Adams wrote:
“Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
There is a long and proud history of revivals in American history — none more than the Second Great Awakening in the early 19th Century, when emotional preaching replaced the staid pronouncements of church heritage and itinerant preachers spread the popularity of Protestant religion as the nation spread West. Stressing the role of individuals in purging their own sins and those of their nation, the revival sparked important reform movements of temperance and abolition of slavery.
It is hard to know, and perhaps too hopeful, to wonder whether the awakening in Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky will spark a new revival. Already it has spread to other colleges, in Alabama and Oklahoma and elsewhere. What is clear is that government has abandoned us, forcing Americans to elsewhere for their salvation.
Hopefully it is a sign, nascent and little noticed, that perhaps our culture is ready to turn from its debauched, angry and anti-God Leninism to something akin to holiness.
Excellent article, Johanna! The environmental disaster in East Palestine highlights the true nature of the Biden regime. If you're not with the regime then they could care less about you. Time to work on our self-reliance.
Excellent post. I no longer watch television and often miss information (such as President Trump giving water away to the victims of the EPA). You've covered just about everything that I think about and when I read your bit about the Revival in Kentucky, it gave me goosebumps.