There are some things a man does not write about until he is old enough to understand what he was given. I decided since it is Mother’s Day, I am setting the news cycle aside for a moment, because some truths are bigger than the daily fight.

I grew up as one of nine children in a small house in Middletown, Rhode Island. My father was a hard man with a soft heart, and he never asked the country for anything he had not first given it. My mother, Helen, held the center of our home together through every season of our lives. She raised nine of us, fed us, clothed us, prayed over us, taught us right from wrong, and somehow still found the energy to fight for her community. She ran for office at the local level at a time when most women her age were told to stay quiet, and she refused to. She taught us to kneel before God and to stand before no man. She taught us that we serve the country that gave us life. She taught us that strength is measured by what we carry, not by what we complain about.

When I look back at every hard day I have ever had, and there have been more than a few, I hear her voice before I hear my own. That is what a mother does. She becomes the first sound in your conscience and the last voice in your prayers.

The Founders understood something that this culture has allowed itself to mock. They understood that the Republic does not begin in the Capitol. It begins at the kitchen table. It begins with the mother who teaches her child to read the Bible before he learns to read a screen. It begins with the woman who tells her son that lying is beneath him and that running from his duty is worse than failing at it.

John Adams said the Constitution was made for a moral and religious people and would be wholly inadequate for any other. The men who built that moral and religious people were trained at home, by their mothers, long before they ever sat in a classroom or stood in a regiment.

We have spent generations laughing at that woman. Hollywood mocked her. The universities re-educated her daughters against her. The federal bureaucracy taxed her family until she had to leave the home she wanted to stay in. The technology companies took her children's attention and sold it to the highest bidder. Then the same culture that broke her down turned around and asked why our young people are anxious, fatherless, faithless, and unwilling to defend the country that raised them.

You cannot remove the mother from the Republic and expect the Republic to survive. It is that simple. It has always been that simple.

Fifth-generation warfare, the kind I have written about and warned about for years, is fought for the human mind. The terrain is the heart, the imagination, and the soul of a child. The first defender of that terrain is not a soldier. It is a mother. Every American mother who turns off the poison and reads to her child instead is defending the country. Every mother who walks her family into a church on Sunday is defending the country. Every mother who shows up at a school board meeting and refuses to sit down is defending the country. She is protecting the next generation of free citizens, and she is doing it with greater consequence than most of the officials elected to do the same job.

That is not sentimental language. It is an operational reality. The enemies of this country know it. They have studied it. They target the family because they understand that if the American family falls, the Nation falls behind it. Mothers are the front line. They have always been the front line.

I cannot write this without saying what needs to be said.

For ten years, my family carried a weight no family should ever have to carry. Ten years of investigation, of slander, of legal warfare waged by the most powerful institutions in this country against one American and the people who loved him. My wife, Lori, never broke. My sisters never broke. My daughters-in-law never broke. My mother, watching from heaven, never let me break either. If you have ever wondered what holds a man together when the full weight of a corrupt federal system is trying to crush him, I will tell you. It is not bravado. It is not press releases. It is a wife who looks you in the eye at the end of the worst day and tells you to keep going. It is the women in your life who refuse to let evil have the last word.

Everyone reading this knows a woman like that. Honor her today and every day after.

The Almighty did not make you for comfort. He made you for purpose. There is no purpose more sacred than the one He placed in your hands when He gave you a child.

Almighty God, on this Mother's Day, we thank You for the mothers of this Republic. Bless the mothers raising children in fatherless homes. Bless the mothers who buried a son or daughter in uniform. Bless the mothers who pray through the night for a child who has lost his way. Bless the mothers who walk into school board meetings shaking and walk out unbroken. Bless the mothers in heaven who still watch over us, including my own. Strengthen them, protect them, and use them, Lord, to raise up the next generation of patriots this Nation will need. In Your Holy Name we pray, Amen.

To every mother reading this, thank you. You are the reason this Republic still has a fighting chance.

Happy Mother's Day.