The Die is Cast

 

The Die is Cast

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) April 8, 2023

            When Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg turned a misdemeanor into a felony and ignored the statute of limitations, he put a match to a rich knot of pine. The fire hasn’t flamed up yet but it isn’t about to be doused.

            With the indictment of former President Trump, Bragg set in motion the Old World and eastern world system of persecution politics. He unwisely placed his personal animus for Trump before his concern for the country and the law. We can forget about the good old days of Republican President Reagan schmoozing with Democrat Speaker of the House Tip O’Neil or the dynamic duo of Jefferson and Madison. We can now expect Central America and Southeast Asia-style weaponization of law and political chaos. The chaos is building now, mainly because Trump’s case is being intentionally prolonged to interfere with the 2024 election and because today’s GOP is not the GOP of McCain and Romney. The party now has a coterie of fighters.

             Senator Schumer contributed to our persecution politics. Remember? “I want to tell you, Justices Cavanaugh and Gorsuch, you have unleashed a whirlwind and you will pay the price,” all because the two justices were pro-life. But did CNN and MSNBC play up Schumer’s flame throwing?

            Through a great civil strife, two world wars, a great depression, and conflicts abroad that took the lives of sons, husbands, and fathers, America has come. However, our still young nation now stands to lose its status as the free-est nation ever and as the strongest economic and military power in the world. Just as importantly and even more fundamentally, it is poised to lose its famed freedom of speech and its celebrated peaceful transfer of power. Television can lie, but what it’s showing us now about the treatment of almost 50% of the voters in the 2020 presidential election is no lie. It’s happening before our eyes. Donald Trump alone is not at issue. The 2020 50% is at issue as well.

            It’s not difficult to see how and why our present strife began. The chief reason is that liberals became illiberal. Until a decade ago, one could assert that the essence of liberalism was tolerance and the essence of conservatism was restraint. But liberals are no longer tolerant. Restraint is still the essence of conservatism. In fact conservatives are too restrained and always have been. We delight in restraining government and bad influences on our children, but we are not given to protests, emotional outbursts, and shameless misbehavior as liberals are. We are good at restraining our emotions. Because the die has been cast, this is about to change.

            Liberals, who never saw a protest rally, a parade, a microphone, or a camera they did not love, used to be truly liberal which is to say broadminded and accepting of different ideas. They were actually too broadminded, defining all things broadly, stretching definitions to the point of meaninglessness (think gender), and admirably being the strongest defenders of freedom of speech. It’s their unthinkable abandonment of freedom of speech that has created universities that deny platforms to conservative speakers, corporations that are run by “We are the world” internationalists, military leaders who wobble when asked about wokeness in the military, and unambiguous plans to destroy a presidential candidate they don’t like.

            Liberalism’s abandonment of free speech and of free expression generally has brought us to a dangerous point. Liberals no longer see differences of opinion as opportunity for debate. They have successfully convinced social media platforms to silence conservative opinions. Anything liberals disagree with is now dubbed “disinformation,” for instance the conservative belief that there are distinct scientific differences between men and women. Classical liberalism, along with New England pulpits, ended slavery, but classical liberalism is dead. It has been replaced with leftist efforts to silence all opposition.

            All of the above has led to the current indictment of a former president. Who seriously thinks that Alvin Bragg was acting alone and does not have the support of the entire political left? Today’s liberals, namely Democrats and their reliable media friends, intend to destroy Republicans, not just Trump. If Donald Trump is convicted, I suspect conservatives will shed a great deal of their restraint. Joe Lunchbox, Bill Plumber, and Bob Carpenter long ago surpassed the inaction of conservative elites and they have the numbers to make a difference.

            It was primarily ragtag farmers and very small businessmen who whipped the British. It will be their modern counterparts, not intellectuals, who turn us back to liberty and free speech. America is truly at a crossroads. The law has been weaponized. The time for resistance is now.