Dakota Beacon

Jingle Bells, Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer greet Christmas shoppers in their hustle and bustle. Excitement builds to a crescendo. But after Christmas the commotion subsides. What then? Surely, there must be more to Christmas than mere superficiality.

The Christmas story, recited over the centuries, must be told again.

The true and ancient roots of Christmas lie captured in the music of the Nativity. Regrettably, secular and commercial music has drowned out the traditional carols in the public square. Traditional carols, if played at all, are usually instrumental versions minus the words and the profound message of Christmas. Purging the Christian message from our culture becomes endemic.

Carols dating back hundreds of years present Christ’s arrival and His purpose unchanged. They sing of God the Father arriving in human form. The 18th century Latin hymn “O Come All Ye Faithful” offers a wonderful example.

With NATO’s raison d'être, the Soviets, gone, why does it still exist?

And given that our treaty obligations could draw into a (ultimately nuclear) war with the Kremlin, should we really be risking American blood defending left-wing Europe from right-wing Russia?

Early in my commentary career, I found myself debating the meaning of one of my articles in an online chat with a woman who’d read the piece. Why the argument? Well, I was mischievous, I’ll confess, and, having a little fun, didn’t tell her I was the author. Towards our interaction’s conclusion she told me, quite confidently, that I didn’t understand what the writer was trying to say! (I lack self-knowledge, I guess.)

At least, though, inherent in the exchange was the idea that original intent matters. I mention this because people today often behave as if it’s irrelevant. Just consider, for instance, the “birthright citizenship” issue, currently before the Supreme Court.

Do you know that Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan, a man who coauthored the Citizenship Clause, clearly explained what we’re all now arguing about? Read on.

As the holidays beckon some folks are grudgingly considering physical fitness in their New Years resolutions. The over-50 crowd may feel like a million bucks and want to prove it. Funny how the mind says, “I feel like a kid again” but the body says, “Give me a break!”

For all the good intentions, it is wise to ease into physical activity especially for anyone who has abstained for any length of time. Standard advice: check with a doctor and follow his or her guidance. Feeling fine and being fine are two different things. Your doctor can best assess your ability to manage physical stress.

Christmas ‘tis the season for giving! What better way to say “I love you” than with the gift of a book? As a prerequisite, a recipient should harbor a wee bit of inquisitiveness about the world around them. Suggestions to follow include books meant to broaden a person’s perspective. They are all quite readable but not at all superficial. They might resonate with bad timbre or good. Take the bad first.

Reacting to invasion (im)migration trends years ago, Ambassador Alan Keyes put it bluntly.

“We’re being colonized,” he said.

And if ever there was proof of this, and the low quality of many post-1965 newcomers—and of the lie of “diversity”—it’s a viral video posted by one Wajahat Ali.

Mr. Ali is a Pakistani-descent Muslim whose parents came to the U.S. in 1965 and lived the American dream—and an un-American scheme. That is, they served prison time in the mid-2000s for conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud and money laundering for defrauding Microsoft out of millions of dollars.

Want to hear about the 2026 and 2028 election fiascos in-the-making? Save this page for reference. Democrat activists advocate for adopting ranked choice voting (RCV) in future Democrat primaries. RCV allows voters to rank all candidates in order of preference with votes reallocated on later tabulations (without voting) until one candidate receives a majority. Working within Democrat Pary primaries provides a springboard to implement RCV nationalLY.

Such candidate elimination, re-tabulation, and redistribution of votes continue until one of the remaining candidates achieves a majority of the votes. Unfortunately, that candidate may ultimately have been the second, third, fourth, or last choice of many voters -- meaning that a candidate could win who was not the first choice of a majority of voters. This, a perversion of one-person-one-vote.

Test

Just recently I took a couple of friends to visit old hinterland haunts in upstate N.Y., places I used to visit on vacation or when house sitting. At issue are one-horse towns in rural Delaware County, which went for President Trump in last year’s election by almost 60 percent. It’s not the kind of place you’d expect to find an ex-Catholic church painted lavender-purple (pictures below) and flying the Jolly Roger “Pride” flag. But there it is, right on St. Hwy. 30 in the bucolic little Town of Roxbury, N.Y. 

It was a church I believe I might’ve attended one or twice during better days, and its sexual devolutionary transformation seemed quite scandalous. After all, the structure still looks like a church, with its stained-glass windows and a cross carved into its foundation. Interestingly, though, I didn’t find any significant news stories about it. So I did some digging.

Well, the verdict is in:  America has no talent.  And this comes directly from the horse’s mouth - the horse those Americans saw fit to elect as their President.  He should know.  

This narrative begins in March 1621 when a lone Indian approached the Pilgrim common house. A warning cry went up but it was too late. The Indian walked up the main street, entered the common house, and greeted Captain Standish -- in plain English. He requested food and beer. Having no beer, the Pilgrims offered him brandy which the Indian accepted. Even a casual observer must ask, “Where did this man learn to speak English sufficient to ask for beer, brandy, and bread?”

The Indian identified himself as Samoset, an Algonquin chief.

It’s called the “gender gap” (should be “sex gap,” really) in voting, and, boy, did it ever manifest itself Tuesday night. In fact, November 4 was a great day for the GOP.

That is, in an alternate universe in which only men vote.

You think the weather last winter and spring was memorable? Prepare for more of the same. Old Man Winter has us in his cross hairs. Gather your heavy coats, mittens, and snow shovels because the start of winter is just a few weeks away. It could be a stormy season for parts of the United States.

We last experienced a La Niña weather pattern in the spring of 2023. That La Niña officially ended in 2023 after an unusually long three-year run. Following that, the climate shifted into an El Niño or neutral phase until late 2024.

In late 2015, a new test was rolled out as an alternative to the SAT and ACT college entrance exams. It is called the Classic Learning Test (CLT) and was created to employ more rigorous academic standards and to emphasize engagement with classic texts.

Ten years later, how does the CLT fair? In this article, Dr. Gary Welton, assistant dean for institutional assessment at Grove City College, discusses a study conducted this past summer that looked at nearly seven years of test scores. He writes, “The assessment data would suggest whether it would serve as a reasonable alternative to the recognized college prep exams or would be a failed attempt to compete with the prevailing status quo.” Click below to read more and find out what the assessment data revealed.

It was an act of brutality.  One could reasonably call it government-sponsored terrorism.  

Does the law matter anymore?  

This is a legitimate question and it is directed at supposed “conservative” and “MAGA patriots”.  Because if the answer, once unreeled in real world terms is “no”, then there are no conservatives, no patriots - MAGA or otherwise.  

Here are a few lines saluting veterans on Veterans Day. They are taken from Rudyard Kipling and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Hearts of veterans everywhere will recognize the impressions, nostalgia, and emotions unique to the bonds of camaraderie of fellow service members. Enjoy.

WHAT THE NEW YORK CITY MAYORAL ELECTION REALLY MEANS FOR THE DEMOCRAT PARTY

Zohran Mamdani ran a killer campaign. Free buses that run on time? Only the most daring adventurer would be so bold! Freezing rent? That couldn’t possibly lead to freezing pipes. What about the police? Who needs ‘em? Crime is way over-reported if anything. And what the heck? Why not throw in some affordable healthcare for all? It’s a little worn around the edges but it’s a fan-favorite and it still charms the snake out of the wicker basket the same as it always did.

By 1920, there were 3,560 black physicians in America, a figure including 65 black women. While this didn’t represent “proportionality” — blacks were 10 percent of the U.S. at the time — it did constitute 2.5 percent of the total number of American physicians. Not bad in a country supposedly so “white supremacist” that blacks were surely relegated at the time to cotton-fields toil. (Black youths may want to ponder this, too, when believing they “just can’t make it” in 2025 because the “man” is keeping them down.)

Many wouldn’t guess black Americans enjoyed such success a century or more ago, indoctrinated as they are with Howard Zinn-esque revisionist history. In fact, while I was hardly a politically correct youth (we didn’t use the word “woke” back then), I myself was surprised when getting a glimpse into actual American history

We need to draw a line.  Trump thinks no laws apply to him - in this his detractors are correct.  This is one of the reasons why I personally resented his presence on the Republican ticket.  We should never have to vote for a Democrat in order to keep someone like Trump out of the White House.

So what’s it like wading into a “No Kings” protest? I can tell you because this is precisely what I did this past Saturday.

The scene was Larchmont, a tony suburb of New York City, in Westchester County. And as reporters at other such protests have already pointed out, present was an odd crowd, but not the usual odd crowd. I didn’t, for example, see any young Antifa types. Quite the opposite.

How did the United States Congress put Americans, once again, into a government shutdown? I’ll describe the situation as I understand it.

Every year the US Congress works on a federal budget for the next fiscal year. The government’s fiscal year runs from October 1 of one calendar year through September 30 of the next year. But this was not always so.

If children are raised in a corruptive environment, however, they will develop an emotional attachment to vice. And because as “the twig is bent, so grows the tree,” they will then glom on to ideologies that correspond to vice. Any wild guesses as to what such an ideology might be in our time?

This gets at the problem confronting us: We can’t make America great again if popular culture is making the world late-stage Rome again. It was Andrew Breitbart who said “Politics is downstream from culture.” But we must be mindful of a corollary: Political destruction is downstream from cultural corruption.

I went to hear Glenn Beck last evening.  He was in Grand Forks to fill in for an event scheduled with Charlie Kirk.  I was looking forward to a hard-hitting debate sort of event.  It turned out to be something different.

What do readers want to read? Something different? A bit offbeat? Unusual and maybe ever so quirky? Over the years The Passing Scene published many varied topics of interest to a variety of readers.

Last week’s topic, Bitcoin, fit that pattern. Readers certainly have heard of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. But how much do they really grasp? Or even want to know? The answer straddles a line between curiosity and no interest at all. Reducing the topic to everyday language might raise interest.

Bitcoin as a topic generated inquisitive comments that gave me the idea for a different approach to cryptocurrency, that is, factors that seldom get discussed.

What’s not to love?  Well, the problem with all of this is that had this been people’s mindset in 1776, we would be singing “God Save the King” today.  A general sense of morality is absolutely fundamental to any kind of free government by the people.  We have to be above this.

We live in fast moving and interesting times. Who would have thought a few decades ago that a challenge to the US dollar as a medium of exchange would arise? The advent of cryptocurrency has done just that. But not many folks grasp the idea of “electronic currency”. Come to think of it, what is the difference between a piece of paper on which is printed “One Dollar” backed by a verbal “promise to pay” and the idea of electrons standing for “one” of anything that people agree has value? As a neophyte in the world of cryptocurrency, what follows is what I have come to understand.

On or about 7:10 pm, Wednesday, September 17^th, a Minnesota mother and two of her children entered an otherwise empty theater and were ambushed by former comedians and assaulted for approximately ninety minutes.

Western civilization slowly slips away, and citizens barely perceive what is happening. It is not as if our civilization were stolen from under our noses but rather, citizens have failed to guard the ramparts.

Culture does not reject nihilism on impulse. Nihilism grows in a cultural Petri dish infecting one generation then another and eventually spanning a civilization. Meanwhile, we conceal from ourselves the unpleasant awareness of our culture decline.

Oswald Spengler wrote “The Decline of the West” in two volumes. Volume I was published in 1918 and volume II in 1922. This work became highly influential in early 20th-century philosophy presenting a cyclical theory of civilizations and arguing that Western civilization was in its final phase of decline.

The problem with electing a populist rather than a committed constitutionalist was illustrated this week with Attorney General Pam Bondi’s reaction to the fallout after the murder of Charlie Kirk.