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Fighting For Faith, Family & Freedom
Friday, November 7, 2025
To: Friends & Supporters
From: Gary Bauer
Day 292
It’s Day 292 of President Trump’s second term. No one has lost their Social Security, Medicare, or veterans’ benefits in spite of constant media and leftist lies.
Some Reflections on the Big Apple
At the end of this historic and daunting week, I woke up with a lot of angst about where our nation stands. As great as the challenges seem, it struck me how we have been here before.
It’s easy to forget, and many in the rising generation may not even know, but New York City was once the capital of the United States. I don’t mean civically or economically, as it was then and is now, but literally the seat of national government.
George Washington, whom we associate with his family home in Virginia, took the first presidential oath of office at Federal Hall in lower Manhattan in April 1789. At the conclusion of the Oath, to which Washington Irving reported, he added the phrase “so help me God,” Washington kissed the Bible on which he swore and delivered America’s first inaugural address.
Washington dedicated the nation to the God of the Bible – the God of whom there is only one. Washington proclaimed to the crowd massed in the street, “No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men more than those of the United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency.”
New York City is no longer our capital, but event after event central to our history has happened there over the centuries. Most notable, of course, is what happened blocks away from Federal Hall, where a team of radical Islamic jihadists that worship a god of death flew two jets into the twin towers.
The aftermath of their evil continues to mount. More than three thousand Americans dead in the collapse of those buildings, Flight 93 and the deadly assault on the Pentagon, the acts of terror – beheadings and torture – across the globe, the war in Iraq, Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, slaughters of Christians in Nigeria and elsewhere.
In the wake of 9-11, figures like Rabbi Jonathan Cahn reminded us of the history of God’s warnings to nations in peril. Our Founders understood how they had survived such peril at the hands of the British empire. They reaffirmed that our liberty – an ordered liberty – comes from God and not from government.
George Washington received a letter from the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, greeting his presidency and celebrating the religious liberty they now enjoyed. He famously replied, “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
Fast forward to this week where Jews in one New York neighborhood awoke to see their local Yeshiva and two other sites vandalized with swastikas. A viral video shot in Manhattan shows a Muslim speaker proclaiming about Mamdani’s victory, “We’re done hiding; this is the religion all of humanity needs.” And further, “We will not stop until Islam enters every home.” To which I respond, over my dead body.
This is not the fig tree Washington envisioned.
The question is plain: does the election of Zohran Mamdani, by a coalition of far-left neo-Marxists and radical Islamists, mean that we will only see more of these acts of terror and intimidation? Will this fanaticism spread throughout America as it intensifies against Jews in New York City?
We only have to look to Christians and Jews in Europe to see how fraught with danger is the road ahead. I’ve reported for decades about the wave of attacks on churches in Western Europe that go all but unmentioned on this side of the Atlantic.
Conditions have deteriorated to the point that city governments across Germany are cancelling Christmas celebrations in market squares over security concerns and citing the expense of keeping their people safe. Safe from whom? Almost always it’s radical Islamists the German government and their counterparts in Britain and France continue to allow to flood across their borders.
Rather than address this root cause, the governing parties in power decline to protect the liberty and community heritage of the people they are charged most to protect.
Earlier this week, the German government under Chancellor Merz issued a statement that it is time for Syrian refugees to return to their home country now that the civil war there is over. Some of the reporting suggests the Chancellor’s goal is not so much to deport non-citizens but to stave off the more conservative parties that actually will deport the Syrian migrants.
Good luck then to the Merz government, now that we have seen what happens when a serious American president tries to enforce its immigration laws.
Where do we stand then on November 7, 2025? Do we understand the urgency of the moment as we see events in New York City voting booths that would have been unimaginable a quarter century ago? Do we know what time it is?
In 2024, Donald Trump and America literally dodged a bullet and secured a national victory at the polls. Just a year later an election, in what was once our capital, has shown that to dodge a bullet is not to win a war but only to live to fight another day. Our work is cut out for us.
What Then Should We Do?
George Washington’s Inaugural and his first year in office aren’t ancient history. Two hundred and fifty years is a rivulet in the river of time. In the years since Washington’s oath of office and his commissioning of America to the hand of divine providence, we have seen many dark days.
Each time we have prevailed – thanks to that commission. Not least of which was our own Civil War, in which the proposition was put to a mortal test whether one man could own another.
At a massive cost to human life, we thankfully answered no. America responded to slavery and disunion with a Great Awakening and an affirmation of the equality of everyone under the law. The Constitution was amended, and the Union was saved.
Four score years later, our nation was stung again with an attack on the eve of another holiday – the December 7 bombardment at Pearl Harbor from a nation toward which Americans had no animus. What ensued cannot be recalled often enough – the devastation in Hawaii, the rapid defeat of France and other German neighbors, the mass killing of Jews.
How many children today know how close America came to losing the second World War? Flatfooted and under armed, we took not a single victory over the Wehrmacht for nearly a year. The outcome on D-Day was far from certain, the cost was enormous – even with a nation unified in purpose.
Fast forward once again to the present struggle – now decades along. We are free to hope that another Awakening – a revival – is underway. We can dare to hope. But the challenges are new. America is not unified on the most basic questions of right and wrong. Private virtue isn’t valued as Washington and the framers understood it.
Today one party celebrates a mayor that many of its “leaders” refused to endorse even as they refused to lift a finger to stop him. Now that mayor-elect says there is no problem too big for government to solve or too small for government to care about – but that same party cannot get a handful of votes together to open our government after 40 days of reckless damage to working Americans and their dependents.
All of this can sound bleak, but I recall it only to remind us all that we have made our way through the darkest hours before. We have risen to occasion after occasion, preserved our heritage of liberty and faith in God, and passed them on to our children.
Now is our moment to endure. To rise to this occasion, to let our children know that we understand the confusion and fear plaguing the world in which we live. And we will not fall back, we will not give up.
Tune In To Family Talk
Please tune in to Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk radio show. On today’s broadcast, I continue speaking with Pastor Gary Hamrick to discuss his groundbreaking book, Standing on the Edge of Eternity. He shares biblical insights about Revelation’s prophecies, the rise of technology in end times events, and why Christians can live with hope instead of fear.
Find station listings here. Listen online here.
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