A Sojourner Again

My response to the 2026 midterms — Election night, November 3–4, 2026

What… the… actual… f@#$?!

That was my first reaction watching tonight’s results. As the night has unfolded, that anger has settled into something heavier: grief, contempt, and the recognition that I have returned to a place I occupied before Donald Trump ever came down that escalator.

I had already lost much of my confidence in our government. I doubted our institutions, the judgment of my fellow citizens, and whether this country retained any meaningful allegiance to its founding principles.

Then came 2016.

To understand what that election meant to me, you have to understand how little hope I had left. I believed I was watching an opportunity for national restoration that I had nearly given up expecting. Against everything I had come to believe about the machinery of American politics, something broke through.

I believed I could see the Lord working through an unwitting, imperfect servant. God has never required flawless instruments.

That explains the depth of what I felt in 2016, how cheated I felt in 2020, and the relief I experienced in 2024. Those emotions reached into the very fibers of my being because I had allowed myself to hope again.

Tonight, as the sun begins setting on the Trump era, I am confronting what I believe that hope has run up against.

A people willing to hand more power to institutions they themselves describe as corrupt.

A people willing to excuse abuses when they despise the person being abused.

A people willing to gamble with freedoms they seem convinced can never truly disappear.

I Have Already Paid for Trusting the System

Over the last three years, my family’s experience has taught me something I wish I had learned without paying this price.

I assumed the courts existed to intervene when laws were ignored, abused, or misinterpreted. I expected judges and commissioners to examine the full context, recognize wrongdoing, and apply the law impartially. I believed constitutional guarantees meant something when someone actually needed them.

During my divorce, I experienced restrictions on my speech and what I understood to be the disregard of legal protections concerning custody of my son. I relied on the people entrusted with administering justice to protect my family’s rights.

I came away convinced that reliance was disastrously misplaced.

People can call that bitterness. They can tell me about appeals, procedures, judicial discretion, and safeguards. I know those words. I also know that a safeguard on paper cannot hold your child, restore lost family time, or undo years of heartache.

A government that demands I obey its laws owes me more than procedural explanations when those same laws fail to protect my family.

My mistake was believing that the institutions would recognize what was true, right, and just—and act accordingly.

That experience is part of why tonight hits the way it does. When someone tells me the system will restrain an abuse of power, I no longer hear a reassurance supported by my own experience.

I hear another request for trust.

“We Can Contain It”

The contradiction is exhausting.

We are told government is corrupt, captured, dishonest, and serving powerful interests. Then we are told the solution is to give that government greater authority over our livelihoods, businesses, speech, and daily decisions.

Apparently, everything will be different once the right people are administering it.

Trust us, bro.

I keep thinking of Doctor Octopus and his confidence that he could control the dangerous power in front of him.

“We can contain it.”

That confidence is exactly what I distrust.

The DSA’s own national program proposes public ownership of major corporations and essential industries, a new constitution, abolition of the Senate, and an executive and judiciary subordinate to Congress. These ambitions are available for anyone to read. DSA’s published program.

I take those ambitions seriously. I take seriously the possibility that a movement means what it says, intends to pursue its goals, and will use the power voters give it.

Winning the Cold War did not erase the ideology or end the organizing. The Hydra analogy comes to mind: victory is declared, confidence returns, and the danger is assumed to have passed while its adherents continue their work.

I have to respect the patience. I have nothing but contempt for our complacency.

Rights Must Survive Our Hatred

Consider the willingness to dismiss concerns about January 6 defendants because of their politics.

Jake Lang had spent nearly four years in pretrial detention by late 2024. His case included serious allegations and defense-requested delays. Those facts belong in the record. So does the extraordinary length of his confinement without a trial. Reporting on Lang’s detention and delays.

Telling me someone had lawyers or appeared before a judge does not settle whether his rights were respected.

A government can conduct proceedings and still abuse its power. A judge can sign an order that deserves to be challenged. Due process requires more than the existence of paperwork.

If your concern for someone’s rights disappears when you learn whom he voted for, your commitment to those rights is dangerously conditional.

Why should I trust such people to defend my rights when I become the person they dislike?

Wisconsin Chose Against Another Restraint

Tonight’s early reporting says Wisconsin voters rejected Question 2, which would have added an explicit constitutional prohibition on government closing places of worship or forbidding gatherings there in response to an emergency. Reported result.

To be precise, that rejection leaves the existing constitution unchanged. It does not create a new shutdown power or erase existing religious-liberty protections. Amendment text and legal effect.

But voters declined an additional, explicit restraint on government authority over worship during an emergency.

I find that deeply disturbing.

I have already learned how little comfort a constitutional guarantee provides when the officials interpreting and enforcing it fail you. I am supposed to accept existing protections as sufficient while remembering what happened when my own family depended on protections already written into law.

An emergency declaration does not make officials morally infallible. It does not make their judgment unquestionable. It certainly does not make my allegiance to God subject to their convenience.

My Kingdom Remains

I am not claiming to know God’s timetable.

I recognize a direction, and I have no reason to trust the institutions that have already failed my family to stop it.

Scripture gives me no promise that America will endure. There is no guarantee concerning the West, our prosperity, or the continued survival of this experiment. Nations rise and fall. Every knee will bow. Only God knows beforehand how those truths will unfold.

For years, I believed I might be witnessing Him heal this nation through an imperfect servant. My allegiance to God never diminished. I had come to believe renewed hope for America belonged alongside it.

Tonight, that political hope has been battered beyond recognition.

The dogs have returned to their vomit.

So I return to my position as a sojourner. My ultimate fealty belongs to the Lord. America cannot demand that I place my confidence in institutions that have failed to earn it, or applaud choices I believe are feeding freedom and self-determination into a metaphorical wood chipper.

Woe to a nation that makes its bed with serpents and entrusts the henhouse to foxes.

I believe we are choosing a road whose consequences will be terrible. I will mourn this country as a father mourns a son. You do not grieve that deeply for something you never loved.

But I belong to a greater Kingdom.

One whose foundation cannot be shaken.

One whose gates will not be prevailed against.

A Kingdom that lasts forever.

And a King who lives as long.