For those who haven't been paying attention, a whole lot has changed over the past few years that doesn't bode the least bit well for America's future.
We've also barely survived some truly close calls which could have irreversibly flipped the country into full blown single party neo-Marxist oblivion.
Imagine if Sen. Joe Manchin from West Virginia hadn't cast a determining single vote margin to retain the filibuster rule preventing his party from granting statehood to overwhelmingly Democrat majority Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico; packing the U.S. Supreme Court with constitutionally revisionist judges; and allowing the executive branch to dictate legislative prerogatives through unchecked executive orders and regulatory mandates.
In case some of you might regard such warnings as hyperbole, take a moment to reflect on some very rapid paced changes from foundational American institutions and bedrock values.
National Sovereignty
Remember when it was just naturally assumed that America was open to legal immigrants seeking assimilation into our population and workforce yet closed by sovereign borders and security forces to those of unvetted backgrounds smuggled in by a $13 billion human trafficking and drug cartel industry?
Nearly six million known illegal immigrants have crossed our southern border since President Joe Biden took office; another estimated 1.6 million getaways have evaded apprehension; and 146 people whose names appear on terrorist watch lists were apprehended during the first ten months of this year alone, surpassing the previous 2022 record of 98 such arrests.
Equal Justice Protections
Who could have previously imagined a time when the nation's Department of Justice and FBI would conduct an armed early morning SWAT raid on a former president's private home seeking and later indicting him for retention of unspecified classified documents that he was authorized to keep ... while ignoring those found in an unsecure garage and other locations of the current office holder?
No other time in history has witnessed such blatant political weaponization of federal and district prosecutorial powers transparently intended to disqualify a leading opposition presidential candidate through endless lawfare assaults, while simultaneously turning blind eyes to far more serious allegations and evidence of highly lucrative family foreign influence peddling and tax evasion rackets potentially linked to the incumbent now under impeachment inquiry.
Freedom of Expression and Dissent
We have experienced the rapid encroachment of a free inquiry cancel culture which pejoratively brands dissent of prevailing views and mandates whereby the term "equity" supplants constitutional guarantees of "equality;" "white supremacy" is pitched as a divisive race-baiting slur; "climate change" has become religious mantra driving energy policies; and experimental COVID shots are required as conditions for government employment and promoted for low-risk children.
Public trust in objective watchdog media is justifiably at an all-time low, owing to such occurrences as FBI collaboration with social and mainstream networks in dismissing criminality evidence on Hunter Biden's "laptop from hell" as Russian disinformation; and blocking releases of consequential COVID vaccination inadequacies and side effects by renowned medical experts.
Sanctity of Parental Responsibility
Vladimir Lenin's insidious boast can no longer be ignored: "Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted; Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world."
Powerful teachers unions have been allowed to hold hostage the K-12 educations of children subject to woke ideological programs that disregard parental rights through introduction of age-inappropriate sexual materials; divisive critical race theory; and unpatriotic "1619 Project" propaganda that the United States is an oppressively racist country.
Energy and Economic Security
The left's climate premised war on fossil fuels which supply more than 80% of U.S. and world energy through rapid transitioning to so-called "green" alternatives — primarily wind and solar that provide about 3% combined — has contributed to raging inflation which imposes greatest burdens upon lowest income populations.
The brutally harsh reality is that we are going to need oil — and natural gas — for many decades, most likely centuries, because there is no current replacement source capable of fulfilling a huge supply gap or achieve a mythical "carbon-neutral" U.S. — much less global — energy balance anytime soon, or at any cost.
Global Leadership
A weak, potentially foreign bribe-compromised Biden presidency presiding over an Afghanistan-debacle discredited and woke indoctrinated military is obviously being played by China, Russia and other U.S. adversaries who take further advantages of economically suicidal Democrat energy and free spending policies.
For example, as China — which gets a pass on international carbon cutbacks — builds the equivalent of a new coal-fired plant weekly, the Biden administration pushes richly subsidized electric vehicles on already overloaded U.S. energy grids which rely upon rare earth materials mined by Chinese slave labor for batteries where they monopolize more than 80% of available world supply.
Together in 2024 we may have our last chance to reverse these trends and return America to once again become the country we so fortunately inherited from those who fought and died for freedoms and opportunities we have too often taken for granted.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.