Bob Ehrlich: What the Left Is Doing Right Now Will Never End, Even if You Give In
Maybe it’s time to reacquaint ourselves with Ronald Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” speech.
The 40th president’s words sought to ensure that we would never have to teach our children what America was like “when men were free.” Mr. Reagan knew true liberty was an anomaly in human history, that despotism tends to survive despite its history of suffering and brutality.
Maybe it’s also time for Republicans to suck it up, to remind ourselves that politics is not a game of perfect (to borrow a phrase) and that even the most popular political leaders are flawed.
This thought should be kept in mind when weighing the binary decision that looms on Nov. 3.
And then maybe it’s time for millions of relatively silent Democrats who are appalled by the direction of their party to take it back, to reject the underreported devastating violence of the looters, the insanity of the “defund the police” movement and the unbridled antagonism toward America and American history.
Maybe the foregoing is simply too much to expect. I hope not. Americans are typically optimistic, especially in challenging times.
I cling to hope despite a historic pandemic and a racial divide that threatens the very underpinnings of our culture.
Think about that last observation for a second. A country that has triumphed over slavery, reconstruction, segregation and Jim Crow now faces a progressive movement that has moved far beyond the noble demands of equal rights for its citizens.
Indeed, one hears little about police training and retraining and appropriate response in minority communities these days (and nothing relating to those matters in the mainstream media).
Instead, we are subjected to anarchy and violence, brought to your town primarily by angry, young, white progressives and tolerated by Democratic mayors. These children of the well-to-do, having been well-indoctrinated on revolutionary theory on campus, now strike at the very fabric of American values.
By now, all of us should have learned to take this campaign seriously.
The stated goal of these revolutionaries is transformation, which is to be achieved through speech and thought control. Remember, these young people have been indoctrinated into the world of speech codes, trigger warnings and safe spaces — all in the interest of protecting them from opposing views.
These constructs empower the notion that contrary or unpopular opinions could be fairly outlawed, simply forbidden from public discourse because such viewpoints constitute “hate speech.”
Underpinning it all is a new “right”: the right not to be upset or inconvenienced by disagreeable speech, people or history. And so the brilliance of the Founding Fathers, the uniqueness of the Constitution, the foundational values of our Judeo-Christian heritage, the centrality of religious belief and practice, the benefits of capitalism and the beauty of liberty need to be “canceled” because human beings are flawed and so is their history.
For the riotous malcontents, the present drama does not end with the removal of statues or the adoption of revisionist history. It will never end.
Theirs is an endless list of demands, a lesson lately learned by their heretofore big-city mayor benefactors who now face a hard truth: Revolutionaries are never mollified.
Accordingly, the demands multiply, from open borders to the elimination of ICE to voting rights for illegal immigrants to a war on fossil fuels to a downsized military (“defund the Pentagon”) to confiscatory tax rates.
A compliant press, energized academy and newly woke professional sports leagues and business communities are all in. The right is seething, but currently quiet, as are centrist Democrats. Yet, at the end of the day, all this energy and activism is represented by the basement-dwelling Joe Biden.
Openly aligned against the former vice president and his enablers are Fox News, talk radio, right-leaning websites (including this one) and Donald J. Trump. And the people who watch Fox, listen to talk radio and read these websites tend to live between the coasts, work hard, attend religious services, wish their children better lives than theirs and strongly reject the out-of-control chaos infecting many of our largest cities.
Still, the election presents a perplexing problem for those who demand a return to normalcy but have decidedly mixed feelings about this president.
This is the relatively small, all-important cadre of Republicans, Democrats and independents who generally like what the president has accomplished but do not like or appreciate how he goes about his daily business. I hear from many of them. They desire an “option C,” but none is available. Hence, the aforementioned binary decision.
I, for one, choose order over chaos, law over criminality, sovereignty over open borders, capitalism over socialism, speech over silence, raw honesty over political correctness and hope over fear. Here’s hoping that 270 electoral votes will emerge with a similar calculus.
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website. If you are interested in contributing an Op-Ed to The Western Journal, you can learn about our submission guidelines and process here.
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