We live in such weird times, I think most of us have pretty big mood swings when it comes to the fate of our nation. I do. I alternate between hope and positivity and pretty ugly and cynical moods these days, especially where politics is concerned.
Often there are rays of sunshine that seem to indicate a recovery and then there are days when I read about John Kerry telling the world we are going to shutter all our coal fired electrical generation plants while China leads the way in building them.
It seems to me we live in an age where we are about to begin paying for mistakes of the past...and I mean really paying for them.
But I still believe America is good, and therefore still the best hope for the freedom of mankind - even in our severely degraded state - making the price worth paying.
Progressivism has stripped all meaning from America's founding values and has effectively rendered worthless the status of being an American citizen. There was a time when we paid taxes for the privilege of being a citizen and those taxes went toward protecting the value of being a citizen - today, we are simply extorted to pay for things people want who do not value being American. In a way, we pay ransom to preserve fractions of the freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Every single aspect of the Bill of Rights is compromised, nullified or is currently under attack. From the First Amendment to the Tenth, our own government is in open violation of every single one. We have decided, in our infinite wisdom, to expose all to moral hazard by extending the rights of citizens to non-citizens and equating people who pay no taxes or own no property to people who do, eliminating the value of actually being an American citizen.
As the old saying goes, when everyone is special, no one is.
It has devolved to such a level that our elected officials, especially those from the Democrat party, openly scoff at the concerns of the citizens who pay the bills, deriding them as bigots, racists and xenophobes. If you express any concern for the decay of the country of your birth, you are immediately described as evil.
And we allowed this. At best, we have allowed a loud, vocal minority to shout us down and at worst, there is a majority of people who simply don't care.
I tried to make a point about illegal immigration the other day - that people coming to the US with no knowledge of America's history, the reasons it was founded, and the painful transformation it has endured to attempt to live up to those founding values would logically have no affection, allegiance or loyalty to her - and then I realized that this not only describes illegal immigrants but what seems to be a growing segment of young American citizens. The pro-Hamas/anti-Israel cabals at our universities and high schools prove that.
If it happened before 2008, they don’t know about it - the young Biden jock strap sniffers on Twitter/X prove that. They can't discern the difference between fact and opinion and yet they vote. The older ones hold office without even the most basic understanding of what their vote means or what their role in a constitutional government means.
The Internet promised to be the greatest tool for knowledge since the ancient library at Alexandria but instead, it gave us the ignorance of another Alexandria - Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Not to pick on Che-quita Khrushchev, but she is the poster child for such mile wide and inch deep transient knowledge that google experts and scholars possess. Che-quita is just the most prominent current example of what Ronald Reagan said - "It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so."
Comedian Flip Wilson created a famous skit about a crooked preacher who founded "The Church of What's Happenin' Now!" in which the rules were constantly bent to the benefit of the preacher's own desires. Progressivism is nothing but the post-millennium version of that church. It is a church where only now matters, where relativism and ignorance are seen as values and destruction of Western Civilization is a virtue. Righteousness is defined as compliance with the destructive progressive agenda.
But there is a difference between being righteous and self-righteous. Being righteous means being morally right or justifiable; virtuous. Righteous people are validated by immutable principles, their actions are guided by them. Being self-righteous is defined as having or characterized by a certainty, especially an unfounded one, that one is totally correct or morally superior. Self-righteous people are guided by malleable propositions, not principles and define their “principles” to justify their actions.
Where the actions of righteous people are justified by their principles, self-righteous people justify their principles through their actions. Their actions are always approved because their motives are assumed to be the purest – even when they are not.
The progressive left has become all they once professed to hate. The only way they can exist in this environment of cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy is to “other” all who are non-progressive. Everybody else is evil, a Nazi, a racist and God only knows what else. They have succumbed so much to the self-love philosophy of "Gosh darn it" Stuart Smalley (Al Franken), they have come to only worship themselves and this church will continue to attract the weak minded because absent principles or morals, progressivism promises the seduction of always being right.
The fatal flaw in this Church of Progressivism is that no moral superiority can be built on a foundation of amoral or immoral acts.
As we are witnessing at our southern border, nothing short of direct confrontation with the progressive agenda is going to work.
In 1955, William F. Buckley wrote in National Review that:
"A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it."
It's way past time to be standing athwart and yelling "Stop!"
It is time, as Elon Musk just did, to tell progressives to go f*ck themselves.
spot on...
I can only add that progressivism has been around since at least the 1930's if not sooner. From what I can see, the proponents have taken the frog in the boiling water approach.
They started small testing the waters in small towns across the country, remember urban renewal of the 60's and 70's. Getting a foot hold, little by little, introducing the pot of water, then adding in the frogs (while slowly turning up the heat). Then after several decades of more and more frogs, and the water is now boiling, only the poor frogs know no difference. They will soon either have to adopt living in the boiling water or perish.
Our time for stopping them is long past. The question now is: do we have the intestinal fortitude to do it? Do we have what our forefathers had in strength and character to give up everything for the cause? Are we prepared to fight like never before? Will we be the frogs that jump the pot of water and say no more?
It is up to the Baby Boomers, maybe Generation X and some Millennials too. And of course, we need a game plan. And one of the biggest items is to get ahold of media, local politics, and school boards. We need to stop sending our kids to the 4 year indoctrination camps called colleges. Bring about massive forms of home schooling (there is currently a major rise in this across the country). Lead our kids into trades and teach them hunting and fishing.
Take away the TV, phones, gaming consoles and tell them if they want that crap they have to earn it the way our generations did. Do we have the guts as doting parents to do that?
All of this is just the beginning as we have to do what the dems/liberals have done and proceed to reverse the course. This too will take generations to complete - but if we don't then we have given up.
There is a lot of work ahead to be done to undo what has been stolen and coerced from us. The question remains - do we have the guts to do it?
My 2 cents
hoping many more join this clarion call I've been yelling now for several years ... tell progressives to go f*ck themselves.