Hurricane Idalia made landfall along Florida’s Gulf Coast Big Bend region Wednesday morning. Please join Carol and me in praying for all those in Idalia’s path and for the safety of first responders.

Whether it’s earthquakes in California or tornadoes in Kansas or hurricanes in Florida, natural disasters of all kinds happen fairly regularly. They are a tragic fact of life. But we shouldn’t compound the problem with hysterical overreactions.

Sadly, virtually every media outlet, including Fox News, is promoting the “climate emergency” agenda by presenting Hurricane Idalia and every other weather event as “extreme weather” and evidence of “climate change.”

Just a few days ago, Democrats were running around with their hair on fire claiming that climate change was responsible for the fires on Maui. It wasn’t.

But every time so-called “journalists” do that, they are stoking the number one vehicle the left is using to control every aspect of our lives — what we eat, what we drive, where we live, what kind of appliances we can have, etc., etc.

While we can laugh at it, they have been pushing it in our classrooms for decades now and the research is clear: Young Americans are scared to death of the weather. Many college campuses now offer therapy sessions for students struggling with “climate anxiety.”

Then Republican Beltway consultants insist we must find ways to appeal to the youth vote. But if you don’t come up with ways to combat the indoctrination in our schools, we will continue to lose the youth vote.

Here’s a useful fact: More than 1,600 scientists, including two Nobel laureates, recently signed onto a public declaration rejecting the idea of a “climate emergency.”

But when some members of the “Stupid Party” say they don’t want to fight culture wars over what’s taught in our schools, they are delivering their own political eulogies.

The culture wars matter! (See next item.)

SOS — Save Our Schools

A controversy erupted recently in rural central Virginia when a high school student was told to remove the American flag from his pickup truck.

When pressed to explain the order, school officials claimed the flags were “distracting.” The school also issued a statement that pointed to the student code of conduct that prohibits “offensive” and “culturally divisive” images.

The safety argument might hold some merit if I had any faith that it was equally enforced. But I doubt the school would move so aggressively against BLM flags or LGBTQ Pride flags.

In Colorado Springs, Colorado, a 12 year-old student was ordered to remove a patch of the Gadsden Flag from his backpack because school officials claimed it was associated with slavery and racism.

The ignorance is unbelievable! Every school official pushing that garbage should be fired! The Gadsden Flag was created in 1775 and used during the Revolutionary War as a symbol in the fight against tyranny and oppression.

These two incidents made headlines because the students and their parents were willing to stand up and fight back. I have no doubt that similar incidents are happening every week all over the country on a host of issues, but we don’t hear them because the students and parents caved out of fear.

These outrageous incidents are further evidence of the forces that have been unleashed on society that are determined to “fundamentally transform America.”

Yes, elections are important. Our tax dollars pay for these schools!

But just as important is whether millions of Americans are willing to be uncomfortable to resist the radical left. These families in Colorado and Virginia were, and more families need to be inspired by their courage.

Desperately Seeking Answers

Gold Star families were on Capitol Hill Tuesday, again desperately seeking answers about why their sons and daughters died at the Kabul airport during Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said, “I believe the briefers gave every piece of information that they could.” Really? Is Milley willing to fire anybody over that obvious debacle?

Not surprisingly, Biden is refusing to meet with these grieving Gold Star families. But Donald Trump is meeting with them.

The American military continues to struggle with its recruiting goals and this is a big reason why.

A significant percentage of recruits come from “legacy families” — parents and grandparents who served in the military. If you lose those families because they decide that the leftist political leadership in the Pentagon is no longer trustworthy, we will have a permanent recruiting crisis, which is a major national security crisis.

Those families will not entrust their sons and daughters to left-wing ideologues who are wasting precious time and resources teaching military officers not how to win wars, but how to deal with “pregnant men,” which is insane.

Another Biden Crisis

CNN reports that the FBI is scrambling to investigate a migrant smuggling network after intelligence discovered that one of the individuals associated with the network is also affiliated with ISIS.

This is exactly what the FBI should be doing! Instead, it’s hunting down pro-life Catholics, spying on parents, censoring the truth and pushing absurd conspiracy theories, like the Russia collusion hoax, to undermine our elections. But I digress.

While this disturbing news about an ISIS-linked smuggling network made headlines, is it really news? If you have open borders, this kind of outrageous activity is predictably going to happen.

Common sense tells us not to leave the doors to our homes wide open or bad people will easily get in. So, why would we leave the “doors” to our country wide open?

This can’t be a debate just about walls and technology. It must be a debate about what is harming our security, killing our citizens and how the left is putting our country last.

By the way, the latest Rasmussen poll finds that by a 2-to-1 margin voters believe that securing our border is more important to U.S. national security than securing Ukraine’s border.

2024 Update

Several polls have been released in the wake of Trump’s fourth indictment and the first GOP presidential debate. The bottom line: Trump remains the clear frontrunner.

This week’s Morning Consult poll is unchanged from last week — Trump 58%, DeSantis 14% and Ramaswamy 10%. No other candidate received double digit support.

Meanwhile, a poll by the Atlanta Journal Constitution of Georgia GOP voters found Trump at 57%, followed by Ron DeSantis at 15%. Those figures represent a 22-point swing in Trump’s favor since the paper’s last survey in April.

The latest Emerson College national poll finds Trump leading Biden 46% to 44% in a head-to-head matchup. With Green Party candidate Cornel West in the mix, it’s Trump 44%, Biden 39% and West 4%.

A new McLaughlin poll finds Trump leading Biden 47% to 43% nationally. In key battleground states that will decide the election, Trump leads 49% to 41%.

Finally, in related news, the Wall Street Journal reports that West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin (D), rumored to be entertaining a possible third-party independent presidential bid, has been talking to major donors about raising $100 million to “mobilize the middle.”