This week, we have the opportunity to do something truly radical: we can give thanks.

Thanksgiving long predates the founding of America. It’s a tradition that dates to the arrival of the Pilgrims in Plymouth. Following extreme hardship—including numerous deaths, conflict, bitter cold—a group of Christians decided not to complain against God, but to thank Him for his sustaining grace.

Over the centuries, Thanksgiving became more than an exclusively religious event. In the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln made the occasion a federal holiday, a remarkable move.

In modern America, Thanksgiving signals for many an opportunity to come together with family and friends to enjoy the goodness of life. It’s a pause on the madness and delirium of our divided times.

In a time of entitlement, chaos, and self-focus, giving thanks to God is a radical act.

Be a radical this year: eat turkey.

Laugh.

Choose gratitude

News reports came out last week that the transgender athlete Rachel McKinnon has, for the second year in a row, won the women’s bicycling championships in Manchester, England.

McKinnon is a biological male competing as a female. That has left some female athletes upset.

McKinnon pushed back in a statement we should listen to closely:

“All my medical records say, female. My doctor treats me as a female person. My racing license says female, but people who oppose my existence still want to think of me as male. So, if we want to say that I believe you’re a woman for all of society except for this massive central part that is sport, then that’s not fair.”

McKinnon has a point.

If people offer the delusion that a biological male is a female in other dimensions, it’s inconsistent to deny that same designation in sport.

We’re watching a secularizing world mired in inconsistency, and whenever that inconsistency is pointed out, it’s our responsibility to see it for what it is. But this is where Christians also have to recognize that the last thing we should hope for in this world is for the world to be even more consistently wrong.

Our capitalist system generally rewards companies for manufacturing quality products, but that’s not always true of Hollywood. The new movie “Joker” is a vile concoction about a comic book villain, but set an all-time October record by earning $234 million in its opening weekend worldwide. Some hailed the film for its bleak, desolate view of society and humanity, and its portrayal of a lonely, bullied, mentally ill protagonist achieving empowerment through murderous violence.

Jeff Yang, however, derided the movie’s exploitative nihilism as “an insidious validation of the white male resentment that helped bring President Donald Trump to Power.” He described the anti-hero as a victim “who has been crushed underfoot by the elite, dragged down by equality demanding feminists, and climbed over by upstart nonwhite and immigrant masses.”

The president’s critics blame him for a lot, but a tortured effort to connect Trump to “Joker” is as loathsome and irresponsible as the film itself.

The same Democrats who decried the Bill Clinton impeachment as a product of GOP hatred and an illicit effort to nullify the results of a presidential election have now become exactly what they accused Republicans of being.

And I mean literally the same Democrats who gave an endless defense of Clinton two decades ago: Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Jerry Nadler and then Senator Joe Biden.

But Democrats cannot guarantee Trump’s removal from office—or anything close to it.

Their combination of hypocrisy with show-me-the-man-and-I’ll-show-you-the-crime Soviet-style justice has assured only one thing:

The results—whatever the result—of the 2020 presidential election will be seen as fraudulent by half the country.

If Trump wins, Democrats will contend he did so by rigging the election.

If the Democrat wins, Trump loyalists and anti-Socialists will see it as the byproduct of four years of inquisitions.

For all their talk of protecting the integrity and legitimacy of the 2020 election, Democrats have gravely damaged both.

Dennis Prager and Civil War historian Allen Guelzo talk about failed reconstruction following the U.S. Civil War. Check out the video Guelzo put together for PragerU.

Brian Whitman and Jennifer Horn invite Tim Goeglein, vice president for External and Government Relations at Focus on the Family, to discuss his new book, American Restoration: How Faith, Family, and Personal Sacrifice Can Heal Our Nation. Goeglein will be speaking about his book at Pepperdine University on Monday, August 23rd.

For more information on the event, click here. You may also email sppevents@pepperdine.edu, or call 310.506.7490.

In the ongoing mash-up of the tragic and the trifling that is the modern news cycle, one crucial story getting far too little attention, and that’s President Trump’s effort to revive the U.S. nuclear power industry.

The nuclear fuel cycle is vital to our nation in terms of the power that nuclear energy can provide (without which there is no hope for significant reductions in carbon output) and the security guaranteed by our nuclear weapons. Yet both are imperiled by neglect.

President Trump is moving to decisively to change that. In July, he issued a memo demanding “a comprehensive review of the entire domestic nuclear supply chain.”

If people are serious about the significant slowing of carbon emissions, serious about nuclear deterrence and serious about national security in every dimension, they should be for nuclear.

In the president’s July memo, he set a deadline of 90 days for recommendations from the team entrusted with these crucial decisions.

That deadline that is approaching fast. The time to pay attention is now.