Conservatives Must Stand, Refuse Despair Amid Political Setbacks

This piece looks at three simultaneous frustrations—a fragile Middle East ceasefire that may entrench a brutal regime, a slow-motion Los Angeles election count that exposes the risks of universal mail voting, and a Republican Senate that can’t pass an election-integrity bill—and argues from a conservative, faith-informed vantage that what feels like defeat can expose rot and force long-overdue change.

Headlines this week make it easy to slide into despair: a so-called ceasefire in the Middle East that keeps breaking, an LA mayoral contest shredding public trust as late ballots trickle in, and a Senate majority that can’t even pass a simple bill meant to protect elections. Each story looks like a loss when you read the top of the paper. Taken together they sketch something worse: institutions that no longer inspire confidence.

Let’s start with the ceasefire. After strikes that decapitated Iran’s top command structure, talk of a pause was rushed into place and has been violated repeatedly while a U.S. blockade stays active and, on Monday, the President posted that Israel and Iran were “looking to do an immediate CEASEFIRE.” A deal can be soothing in the short term but poisonous if it freezes a murderous regime’s power and preserves the Revolutionary Guard’s monopoly on violence. Conservatives should be skeptical of peace that simplifies the problem without dismantling the machinery that created it.

At the same time, the chaos around the fighting is not necessarily the worst possible outcome. A regime that looks less invincible, that has lost its aura and sees its economy squeezed, may be closer to real change than any elegant diplomatic paper would allow. The right outcome for people who hate the mullahs might look messy for a season, and any comfortable bargain that leaves them intact deserves our suspicion rather than applause.

Now consider Los Angeles, where a surprising early result suggested a genuine upset before late ballots shifted the picture. A Republican candidate briefly looked to be in a November runoff, only to be overtaken as roughly 150,000 ballots remained uncounted and one progressive candidate surged in the late returns. This is not about proving a single act of fraud; it is about a system that invites doubt by design.

When a state combines universal mail ballots, permissive harvesting, weeks of counting, and loose ID rules, it trades public trust for convenience. The predictable excuse that Democratic ballots arrive later does not explain why one challenger can outpace both the established front-runner and an incumbent in the same late tranche. The optics are corrosive, and the only real remedy is procedures that make results auditable and transparent.

That brings us to the Senate, where the party that talks loudest about election integrity failed to marshal the votes to pass the SAVE America Act. The bill went down 48-50, with moderates and the usual opposition joining to sink the measure, and leadership responding that the votes simply are not there and that he is the “clear-eyed realist.” For voters who expected action, this is a gut punch.

Public failure is painful but clarifying. A bill that never sees a floor vote hides problems. A bill that fails openly with names attached exposes who will act and who talks. Conservatives who want reform should treat that exposure as usable information; people who campaign on integrity must be held accountable in daylight, not comforted in the dark.

Faith figures into how we react, and not in a way that excuses passivity. Christians are not asked to cheer defeats or ignore corruption. We are asked to refuse despair while we name evil plainly and press for remedies. The religious perspective here is sober: we do the work of reform while believing a sovereign hand may be rearranging circumstances beyond our sight.

These three crises share a throughline: defeats that reveal something ugly and perhaps essential to reform. A premature peace can entrench tyranny, an opaque ballot system can erode trust across parties, and a party that won’t act reveals itself to voters. Sunshine on these failures is political oxygen; voters can react to clarity in ways that secrecy never allows.

So act where you can. Call out bad policy, insist on audits and transparent procedures, and press senators to match rhetoric with votes. At the same time, hold to a deeper confidence that the exposure of corruption and the discomfort of defeat can be the very pressure points reformers need to pry loose rotten systems. As Joseph said, “ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good.”

I will be discussing this on my live show today.

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