I'm Back!

Did you miss me? Well I’m back, and hereafter I’ll tell you why. But know, in the passage of time since my last post, my tolerance to suffer political pundits of any stripe and their antics, has decreased exponentially. As a consequence, you might find my rants more personal and biting then before. If I offend, mea culpa! 

So we begin, my opening 2021 Conservative Slants is a culmination of responses to recent affronts to my sensibilities by CCN, WSJ, PBS, DP and FOX news. A little long winded, but I wanted to set a tone in my return.

I’m Back.  Rejoining the ranks of the “deplorables”, “clinging to our guns and religion”.  We “insurrectionists”, Trump supporters who staged a “coup”, the “mob” that “stormed the Capitol”, mounting a “siege” against the “people’s house”.  How many times will we allow the left to paint us with a broad brush? When did conservatism become the enemy of the people?  How has the conservative label become a negative, whereas liberal and progressive have become something spun into a positive, a brand that has become a shiny commodity, something our youth want to acquire, to proclaim loudly, even violently, that they adhere to a set of values and principles that is antithetical to our Constitution, that will fundamentally change America?  

 

When exactly did the two parties decide to switch identities anyway?  The Democrats were once the party of the people, representing the blue-collar working class and the poor.  Now they represent Big Tech, the wealthy elite, white, college educated suburbanites and city dwellers, and they lay claim to all the supposedly disenfranchised minority groups that identify by color and sexual orientation.  They firmly believe in big government, cradle-to-grave entitlements, identity politics, and that identity should be a measure of your merit.  Republicans have come to represent the working class and the rural poor, small business and capitalism, America’s heartland where traditional values of family and religion still have value. They believe in a smaller less intrusive government, a strong military, and strong borders, and are guided by the Constitution.  They believe in meritocracy.

 

But words and symbols have been hijacked by the left and have been reserved as their own exclusive property or, worse yet, morphed into something else.  Identity politics has become the order of the day, where offending one of the protected categories carries with it the scarlet letter, a brand of one of a myriad of “-isms” and “phobes” the left have used effectively at the point of the spear to further isolate and divide.   Sexist, Misogynist, Homophobic, white supremacist, and of course the universally applicable and most damning of all: Racist.  A hangman’s noose and the word “lynching” for example, have been made the exclusive property of the black experience in this country where even a loop of rope hanging in a garage bay turned NASCAR upside down this past year in a wave of identity politics. Gender specific words such as him, her, he, she, mother, father, sister and brother have been recently banished from the floors of Congress in favor of gender-neutral terms such as parent, sibling, and the grammatically preposterous “they”.  Yes, the “party of science” believes, and more importantly wants you to believe, that there are more than two genders, and that those words are insensitive and not “inclusive”.  The Confederate flag, once thought to represent the pride of being from the south, has been branded a symbol of hate, a symbol of our racist past, and it too has been banned from state flags and personal display.  Professional sports team’s names and logos are being dropped for being racially insensitive and demeaning, leading us to impressive, awe-inspiring appelations such as The Washington Football Team. My personal favorite is when the left calls Trump and his followers Nazis, failing to recognize that Nazi is a shortened version of Nationalsozialistische , which translates to national socialist, when they themselves are proponents of a socialist state.  Hilarious. Even the very definition of “Patriot” has been linked with “nationalism” where the most common connotation used to be “devotion to the interests or culture of a particular nation-state” but has been cast aside in favor of the more negative definition, “a particular culture or ethnic group deserving of political self-determination”, which has been extrapolated into “white supremacy” and racism, now inexplicably but permanently linked to MAGA and Donald Trump’s presidency.   And let’s not forget the height of word-absurdity when Representative Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), in delivering the opening prayer on the first day of the 117th Congress, a prayer filled with Christian themes and scriptural references, waded into politically correct, all-inclusive territory by closing with “we ask it in the name of the monotheistic God, Brahma, and god known by many faiths. Amen….and AWOMAN.” What an idiot.  Amen is not a gender specific term, rather it is derived from the Latin, meaning “so be it”.  But facts never seem to get in the way of the leftist agenda.  Florida Republican Matt Gaetz sarcastically quipped: Don’t they know that gender isn’t binary? What about the 42 other genders?” Tennessee Rep Tim Burchett remarked, “This is political correctness gone way off the rails.” Now that’s an understatement.

 

And with the Democrats seizing control of the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House, expect it to get worse………a lot worse.  Already, in a profound demonstration of how to be a sore winner, Pelosi and Schumer are calling for Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from the Presidency a mere 12 days before Biden’s inauguration.  If not, they intend to proceed with, and are already preparing articles of impeachment. Republican Senators Hawley and Cruz, who challenged the Electoral College certification process on the grounds of claims of voter fraud, are being attacked by their Democrat colleagues, led by the reprehensible Delaware Senator Coons, who is calling for their resignations. It would appear that in the typical “never let a crisis go to waste” tactic first outlined by Obama advisor Rahm Emanuel, and recently repeated while discussing the coronavirus pandemic, the Democrats will be employing a scorched-earth policy of eliminating all potential obstacles to their radical agenda.  Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have all banned Trump indefinitely from their platforms, effectively silencing the President of the United States.  Even the uber-liberal ACLU has taken up the case as a violation of First Amendment rights to free speech.  When exactly did Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, two reprehensible human beings if there ever was one, become the gatekeepers and arbiters of what the President of the United States of America can say?  This should disturb everyone, regardless of what your political affiliation may be.  And as an extension, the relatively new platform Parler, which is a Twitter-like app that has marketed itself as a non-biased, free speech social media platform focused on user’s rights, has been removed from Google’s app store, followed by Apple and Amazon in suspending the app from being active on their servers.  Why?  Because Trump is using it to communicate.  When such a blatant violation of Constitutional rights occurs amidst radical calls from the left to silence Trump supporters, suggestions to prevent Trump supporters from flying or staying in hotels, calls to place restrictions on conservative talk radio, you are witnessing a descent into tyranny.  

 

Recall Saul Alinsky, the American community activist and political theorist who penned the book: Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer in 1971. He is largely credited with developing strategies for confrontation and community organizing to advance social justice.  Disturbingly, we see Rule #12 being implemented by the left today: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.  Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy.  Go after people and not institutions: people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective.  Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works).”  We are seeing this being played out to great effect against Donald Trump and conservatives in real time.  With a complicit media acting as a propaganda branch of the Democrat party, we are under attack, we are being silenced, ridiculed, isolated and in effect, cancelled.  We are indeed under siege, there is indeed an insurrection, and as our forefathers predicted, we are being overwhelmed by mob rule.  Yet is not a mob of conservative sympathizers that is a threat to the Republic.  It is the new Democrat party and their radical leftist, progressive agenda, emboldened by their success in taking back the Congress and the White House under dubious circumstances, emboldened by a complicit media and a compliant public that has swallowed their rhetoric and has forgotten the principles of the Constitution. That is why I’m back.  To shine a light on the hypocrisy that rules the current political landscape. To add my voice to the Patriots who choose to defend the Constitution from tyranny. While we still can.  

                                                             

Tom Swift