Middle East, Los Angeles, Feckless US Senate: It All Looks Bad But There’s True Hope on the Horizon

Survey the headlines on any given morning this week and the temptation toward despair practically markets itself. A Middle East ceasefire that exists mostly on paper keeps shuddering toward collapse. A Los Angeles election that looked, on Tuesday night, like a genuine populist breakthrough is being quietly subtracted away one mail tranche at a time. And the United States Senate, controlled by Republicans, cannot summon the will to pass the very bill designed to stop exactly the kind of slow-motion vanishing act now playing out in California. Three fronts, three apparent defeats, all in the same news cycle.

The believer is given a different vantage point, and it is not naive optimism. Scripture does not promise that the news will be good. It promises something far stranger and far sturdier, that the God who numbers the hairs on our heads also removes kings and raises them up, and that the very things plotted for evil are routinely the raw material He uses for good.

Joseph said as much to the brothers who sold him into slavery. The cross itself, the single greatest injustice in human history, was the means of redemption. So before the panic sets in, it is worth asking a harder question. What if these defeats are not the end of the story but the setup?

That is not a license for passivity, and it is certainly not a reason to pretend the problems are smaller than they are. It is a reason to refuse despair while we name the rot plainly and trust the One who sees the whole board.

I will be discussing this on my live show today.

Here are my notes:

A Ceasefire That Should Not Comfort Anyone

The arc of the Iran conflict has been dizzying. After February strikes that killed Ali Khamenei and gutted much of Iran’s military infrastructure, Tehran installed Khamenei’s son as successor and the region lurched toward open war before Pakistan brokered a two-week truce in April that has since been extended indefinitely and broken by both sides more than once. A U.S. blockade remains in place. On Monday, the President posted that Israel and Iran were “looking to do an immediate CEASEFIRE.”

Here is where the MAGA instinct toward peace deserves a second look. A deal is not automatically a victory. If the negotiated outcome leaves a Khamenei dynasty in place and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps still holding the levers it has held for forty years, then what has been purchased is not peace but a pause, a fresh coat of paint on the same prison. A pseudo-settlement that freezes the regime in amber would be the diplomatic equivalent of treating a tumor with a bandage.

And yet the turmoil itself, ugly as it is, may be doing what no white paper ever could. A regime whose myth of invincibility has been shattered, whose founding cleric is dead, whose economy is strangled by a blockade, is a regime whose grip is loosening. The chaos that looks like failure on cable news may be the very pressure that finally cracks the IRGC’s hold on the Iranian people. The worst thing for that long-suffering nation might be a clean deal that rescues the mullahs. The best thing might look, for now, like a mess.

The Slow-Motion Election in Los Angeles

For about a day, it appeared Los Angeles might do something genuinely surprising and send Pratt, a registered Republican who lost his home in the Palisades fire, into a November runoff against Karen Bass. Then the counting continued. By Sunday, Raman had erased a roughly 40,000-vote deficit and slipped past Pratt for second place, with something like 150,000 ballots still outstanding.

The honest case here is not that a specific fraud has been proven. That will be up to the US Attorney and the DOJ to uncover, and I’ve argued that if they can’t figure it out, then there’s something very wrong with them.

The real indictment is structural. When a state combines universal mail balloting, legal ballot harvesting, weeks-long counts, and minimal voter identification, it does not need a smoking gun to forfeit public confidence. It has built a system in which fraud could occur and in which no result can be fully trusted either way. That is the scandal, and it is bipartisan in its corrosiveness.

Even the innocent explanation strains credulity here. The standard line is that Democratic ballots simply arrive late. Fine. But Raman has been outgaining not only Pratt but Bass herself in the late tranches, pulling a disproportionate share of supposedly tardy votes relative to where she started. When the third-place finisher outruns the established frontrunner in overtime, a reasonable citizen is entitled to ask why, and to find the shrugging answers unsatisfying.

The hope buried in this mess is real. Perhaps a count this opaque finally persuades ordinary Angelenos, including Democrats who assumed the machinery worked in their favor, that a system nobody can audit is a system nobody should trust. Disillusionment is unpleasant, but it is the precondition for reform.

A Senate That Cannot Find Its Own Spine

Which brings us to Washington, where the obvious legislative answer keeps dying at the hands of the people elected to pass it. On June 4, the SAVE America Act failed again, 48-50, with Collins, Murkowski, McConnell, and Tillis joining every Democrat to sink it. The measure could not even clear a simple majority, never mind the sixty votes a filibuster demands. Thune, for his part, has reduced the whole affair to arithmetic, telling reporters the votes are not there and that he is stuck being “the clear-eyed realist.”

It is a humiliating spectacle, a party that campaigns relentlessly on election integrity and then cannot hold its own caucus together when the roll is called. Commentator Monica Crowley tied the two stories together with a bluntness the leadership lacks, writing that no one believes the Los Angeles results and that the country is “finished” unless the bill passes.

And still, the failure clarifies. A bill that quietly never reaches the floor protects no one and exposes nothing. A bill that fails in the open, with the defectors named and the math laid bare, tells voters precisely which senators talk about fraud and which ones are willing to act. Sunlight is not always pleasant, but it is rarely wasted. The fecklessness that just sank the SAVE Act has now been recorded, and an electorate that watches Los Angeles dissolve in slow motion is not likely to forget who refused to help.

We cannot wait for Republicans to “save” us, even politically, because they do not possess the will. We are to lean on God alone and do His Will alone.

What the Sovereign Sees That We Cannot

String these three together and a pattern emerges that should steady the Christian heart. The Iran deal that looked like a triumph could have entombed a tyranny. The Los Angeles defeat may be the disillusionment that finally moves the conscience of a corrupted city. The Senate’s embarrassment may be the exposure that reform requires. We are remarkably poor judges of which moments are victories and which are losses, because we read only the current page while the Author holds the whole manuscript.

Daniel, serving a pagan empire, confessed that it is God who “changeth the times and the seasons,” who “removeth kings, and setteth up kings.” Isaiah reminded a fearful people that the Lord’s thoughts are not our thoughts, nor His ways our ways, but as high as the heavens above the earth. The proper posture is neither denial nor despair. It is the strange confidence of people who have read the end of the book and know that the same hand at work in slavery, exile, and a Roman cross is not idle now.

So let the headlines do their worst. The believer’s hope was never anchored in a ceasefire, a vote tally, or a Senate roll call. As Joseph told the brothers who had betrayed him, looking back on years that must have felt like nothing but ruin, “ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good.”