Every day we see the news and something deep inside should disturb us. I want you to ask yourself: Is what you’re seeing on the screen, what you’re viewing from the streets of Portland and Seattle, is that America?

Dig deep, back to the things we were taught as kids about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Remember how your heart felt on the day Apollo XI landed on the moon. Is that the same feeling you get when you see what’s happening on the streets of New York City or D.C.? Closer to home, if you’ve had the chance, can you remember thinking when your first child was born that thankfully that child would grow up in this wonderful imperfect land called the United States of America?

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This was, and still is to some of us, a land of pioneers and cowboys. A land where 300,000 men in Union blue died to make other men free. A place that produced men who saved the world twice and conquered the heavens. For some of us it is still a land that, as we recall its sacrifices and triumphs, can still draw a tear or two to our eyes. Yes, this land, this free land of plenty, this America.

But there is another place. It’s the place we see on the streets of Kenosha and Chicago. It’s what we see in the eyes of those wielding fire and weapons on those streets. It’s another America, one not borne on these shores, but in the minds of tyrants and despots from past ages to this one. It’s a place dark with blood, a land sick inside with self-hatred that manifests itself in destruction. A view of bile and bitterness that sees all the good this country has done for hundreds of millions here and countless people abroad and turns it into a story of woe and degradation. What we’re going through as a nation right now is a tale of these two Americas.

They are both imperfectly represented by two forces of power, two ideas of government, two presidential candidates. And as opposed to years in the past where one side lost, accepted it, and proceeded to take their place in a new order of things, this year the election result will not end the question for either. For when one emerges victorious, either one, the very basic ideals that drive the struggle between the two Americas will still remain.

We will not accept an America of subservience to an authoritarian socialist regime that thinks it is our lot in life to work for them. They will not accept our America of honor, duty, and country, much less will they tolerate a people who do not derive their natural rights from government, but from God.

We cannot predict the trajectory of the next stages of this conflict. But we can hear the winds of it approaching ever closer. In the time to come, and come it will, we must gird ourselves and remain true to the America we know, the America we love, to the America that is worth saving for ourselves and for generations yet unborn of free Americans.