Some “experts” are encouraging Americans to shun relatives of the opposite political stripe this Thanksgiving.

Some women on the left are shaving their heads and threatening sex strikes in retaliation for President Trump’s election win.

Overall, trust in America’s foundational institutions is at frightening lows.

So, while conservatives understandably feel this election saved the country from the ruin of a weaponized federal government and an open border, it’s clear one election won’t fix what ails this nation. Nor can one man.

Once we get up from our Thanksgiving tables, we’ll have our work cut out for us patching the country back together again. Otherwise, the election will have been a reprieve rather than a salvation.

The reason: nearly all the five pillars of society – government, media, education, business and family – have been corrupted or crippled over multiple generations.

Government

Government is the most acute problem, but thankfully the easiest to fix.

The political process was hijacked in 2016 when America’s intelligence and national security apparatus was cynically – and quite likely criminally – used to try to frame candidate Donald Trump as a Russian asset.

It all started as the Hillary Clinton campaign’s and Democratic National Committee’s “opposition research.” Ultimately, the Federal Election Commission fined both entities for “misreporting” expenditures that gave rise to the Steele dossier at the heart of the Russian collusion hoax.

Obama’s CIA allegedly asked America’s allies in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance to spy on 26 Trump campaign aides before the 2016 election.

Then there was the red-herring, multimillion-dollar Mueller probe of Trump for Russian ties the Obama administration knew full well was a whole-cloth lie from the aforementioned Clinton campaign and DNC.

Then there was the lawfare of 2024, attempting to bankrupt and/or imprison Trump and various associates, or keep him off the ballot.

All this doesn’t even include the legal and social media warfare on other conservatives under the Biden administration, such as the SWAT-style arrest of pro-life demonstrator Mark Houck for merely shoving a man away from his son; a stance that angry parents at school board meetings should be viewed as domestic terrorists; proven online censorship of conservatives; ominous FBI visits about social media posts; a fine, a lawsuit and threats to shut down the Christian Grand Canyon University and more. 

Oh, and an FBI memo “painted so-called certain ‘radical-traditionalist Catholics’ (RTCs) as violent extremists and proposed opportunities for the FBI to infiltrate Catholic churches as a form of ‘threat mitigation.’”

But it’s not like conservatives had any reason to fear or loathe the federal government, right?

The good news is that the incoming administration plans to take a blowtorch to the federal bureaucracy, and perhaps reform the wayward Department of Justice and FBI – as well as the Department of Homeland Security, which purposely threw open the door to all comers at the border.

“All comers,” as it turns out, included unknown numbers of criminals, such as the one that brutally murdered young jogger Laken Riley in Georgia – as well as nearly 400 known suspects on the terror watch list.

Fixing a government this corrupt and dangerous to its own citizens will take years – especially given a meager 23% of citizens trust it.

Media

Less than a third of Americans trust the mass media, and you have to wonder why that many do. Most legacy outlets have taken firm sides in politics – and, in this election cycle they weren’t just rabidly partisan, they were dishonestly so.

Indeed, when the Wall Street Journal belatedly broke the already-obvious story of Joe Biden’s mental decline in June, other media outlets immediately worked overtime to discredit the true story. Like the sycophants they are, they ran with the Democrat Party line that video of Biden’s bumbling and stumbling had been edited to make him look bad. Right.

You can even put a number to the corrupt media bias: A Media Research Center analysis just a week before the Nov. 5 election found “broadcast evening news coverage of the 2024 presidential race has been the most lopsided in history.

“Since July, ABC, CBS and NBC have treated Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris to 78 percent positive coverage, while these same networks have pummeled former Republican President Donald Trump with 85 percent negative coverage.”

Liberal stalwarts MSNBC and CNN recently finished fourth and fifth in ratings, respectively, behind Fox News, ESPN and – get this – The Hallmark Channel.

Elon Musk has toyed online with buying MSNBC, as NBCUniversal looks at spinning it off along with other cable holdings. That would be an amazing start to fixing the media, but only a start.

Perhaps the market can fix the media – but only if consumers vote with their eyeballs.

Is there another way to seek media reform? I’m all ears.

Education

Education may be the hardest fix, but the most important. If we don’t have educated, informed up-and-coming citizens with a robust understanding and appreciation for how America works and how great it is, nothing else on our to-do list will matter.

School choice is a stated priority of the incoming president, and needs to be for the entire country. The public-school monopoly/monolith has done the most, aside from the media, to create an electorate that’s out of touch with its own basic liberties and how to preserve them.

Meanwhile, higher education showed its lowest instincts this past year in allowing raging antisemitism to explode on campuses nationwide. The presidents of Harvard, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania all resigned in disgrace for it. But that’s merely the start of the fix.

The long march of racial Marxism and gender ideology through the institutions – including government, media and business – began in academia. That’s where it’s going to be toughest to uproot the insidious twin dogmas of critical race theory and DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – as well as gender ideology, which has led our young down a tortured path.

That rooting-out process has begun, happily enough – particularly in education and government. But it’s only started, and will have to continue amid fierce resistance, and the intransigence of institutions that turn more slowly than aircraft carriers.

Business

Businesses have long succumbed to leftist racial and gender ideology, but that tide is slowly turning. Walmart, so accustomed to rolling back prices, is now rolling back its misguided and divisive DEI initiatives.

The company, joining other big corporations in turning away from race-baiting initiatives, has “decided not to extend the Racial Equity Center it launched in 2020 as a five-year initiative, and will ditch the terms ‘LatinX’ and even ‘DEI’ altogether in official communications,” The New York Post reports. “It will instead focus on the term ‘belonging’ for all associates and customers.”

This work, too, has only just begun. Consumers need to stay aware and vote with their dollars.

Family

The family is under attack from woke laws and policies and curricula that promote sex changes for kids – and, unbelievably, schools that keep such things secret from parents.

State and local governments have increasingly threatened parents to bend to their youngest children’s views on gender transition – even taking the children into state custody to effect the sex change against the parents’ will.

This far-left ideology has driven a redwood-sized wedge between parents and school officials – who not only are transitioning kids without parents’ knowledge, but are consciously choosing to offer books in school and public libraries that glorify gender change.

Parents will have to be skeptical, if not suspicious, of schools and school officials who aren’t open with them about such matters.

Better yet, they should move their children to schools they can trust implicitly, such as the best religious schools near them.

Better still, if there aren’t any, they homeschool or start their own Christian school.

The battle goes on

Parents and conservatives – and many liberals and moderates who don’t even realize it – have won an invaluable reprieve in policies that erode parental rights, civil rights and public safety. But one electoral skirmish does not a battle make.

Enjoy the holidays. But know that the fight to restore the America our Founders bequeathed to us will be a long one.

And not one we can rely on someone else — other than Providence — to win.