There’s nothing like a heart attack to clarify one’s priorities. Mine was on Nov. 25 of last year, just two weeks before my self-designated “retirement” date – my 67th birthday. In the subsequent weeks I’ve devoted many hours to contemplating how I’d like to spend my remaining days on this earth, and continuing to fight the culture war is near the bottom of the list.

If I were still truly needed in that fight, I would press on as a matter of honor, but truth be told I have little more to offer these days but memories and stories from my many battles of the past. Indeed, on that frightening day in November, I felt a bit like bloodied and exhausted Capt. John Miller from the final action scene of Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” based on the real-life Battle for the Merderet Bridge in Normandy.

In God’s will and timing I was spiritually drafted into the culture war in the late 1980s just as the LGBT movement began to actually achieve its goal of cultural supremacy over Christianity in waves of increasing aggression. For more than 30 years I was one of a handful of single-issue front-line Christian activists fighting to hold back the relentless homo-fascist Wehrmacht and suffering brutal punishment for it. At the very end, after “discrimination” against homosexuality had long been made a social stigma (and in some cases a crime), and many in the conservative movement had ignominiously surrendered to so-called “gay marriage” after Obergefell v. Hodges, our forces of resistance had fallen back to our last stand: transsexualism – the “T” stage of the chronologically progressive LGBT agenda – our own “Merderet Bridge.”

When our own government – with steadily increasing passion and pressure – began endorsing and funding even the outright sexual mutilation of children during the Biden administration, it seemed like all was lost. Ultimately, as our position on that final bridge was being overrun and the metaphorical shots from my pistol ricocheted impotently off their lead tank – its armor was suddenly shattered by a bomb from an Allied aircraft roaring to the rescue. The reinforcements had arrived, just in time, in the form of President Trump’s miraculous reelection and the enthusiastic resolve of the MAGA movement to reclaim our nation.

It’s hard for me to believe, but amazingly, DEI is being quickly routed all across the battlefront like the post D-Day Allied mop-up operation rolling toward Berlin. The war is far from over, but it feels like my part in it is completed and that I’ve earned a return home to a life not defined by constant struggle, anguish and measuring “success” by how much I helped slow the LGBT juggernaut’s advance that month – if at all. The pain of being constantly suppressed and shunned as a social pariah by the gods of cancel culture for more than a quarter century is giving way to the hope that my many years of service to the pro-family cause will not have been in vain.

I first started writing for WND in September of 2012 on an occasional basis. I had always greatly respected and admired WND founder Joseph Farah back to his days running the conservative Sacramento Union newspaper and ghostwriting books for Rush Limbaugh. When without prompting on my part he publicly defended the veracity of my book “The Pink Swastika” (one of the most banned book of the 20th century) in response to critics trying to get me canceled by WND, I recognized him as a man of rare courage and integrity. After that I made WND the exclusive venue for my articles – other than my own newsletter. I only met the man in person once, a couple of years ago, when he invited me to his home and we went out to dinner with our wives. I then wrote a piece lauding him as “The Stonewall Jackson of American First Media” and his important role as the great pioneer of Christian conservative media on the internet.

I also came to respect and admire WND’s David Kupelian, one of the finest writers and clearest thinking cultural analysts I’ve ever had the pleasure to know. It was he who invited me to write a weekly column when I called to ask how I might help WND in the aftermath of Joseph’s terrible stroke. We shared our sense of outrage that while Joseph was still in a hospital bed, the Washington Post ran a cruel and malicious hit piece against him. I was one of the few people reaching out at that time who understood from personal experience just how vile the leftist media can be. I felt and still feel a very strong bond with both of these fine men. And I should include in these acknowledgments my kind and gracious WND editor Ron who always cleaned up my pieces without complaint. (Being essentially a self-trained former high-school dropout who used academic workarounds to earn my degrees, I’ve always been a stranger to style guides and the finer points of grammar.)

My mission with WND was to fight the culture war through my writing, hewing tightly to analysis of current events to augment WND’s news emphasis, although WND indulged my frequent forays into topics of my own personal interest: theology, prophecy, conspiracy theories. I occasionally had proof that my columns were being read by influencers up the food chain when some of my better original insights would appear in their own works. I always got a thrill from that.

But as of today I am retiring from WND in keeping with my larger lifestyle changes away from war and toward life as a civilian – cultivating the interests and activities of a senior citizen, and enjoying the best elements of the civilization I fought so hard to conserve: art and music, the natural beauty of God’s creation and the human works in complement to it, the many delights and diversions of grandchildren.

I’m not entirely abandoning the pro-family cause. Over the past few years, I’ve created a bookstore and stocked it with updated versions of all my culture-war books, including my magnum opus, the 620 page 6th and final edition of “The Pink Swastika,” under the title “Nazi Germany’s Dirtiest Secrets … And why they matter to America today.” These books will serve the cause in my place, as helpful resources for the many new activists rising to the challenge of restoring the natural family and sexual sanity to primacy in America. I will also write a history of the culture war – in the style of testimonial evangelism – as part of a larger autobiographical work I’ve been planning since my wild early teens.

I will write fiction, as well – which as a child I had always expected would be my future as a writer. It was strange to awaken one day as an adult to the realization I actually had become a writer by trade without having formally planned it – and stranger still to have settled so comfortably into the thousand-word essay format on political topics. Now I’ll go back and pick up the more creative literary trail I diverted from oh so long ago.

So this, my 456th column, is my final good-bye to my WND readers. I don’t have a clue how many of you there are beyond the few hundreds who have sought me out over the years to praise or chastise me for my viewpoints. If you’d like to continue reading my stuff, just let me know by email at [email protected] and I’ll add you to my list. I expect to keep writing my own newsletter till the day I die.

I wish God’s best for each and every one of you, and for his bounty and blessing to be poured out on WND as an iconic American institution that continues to honor Him.