The flood of Trump-fearing American liberals sneaking across the border into Canada has intensified in the past week. The Republican presidential campaign is prompting an exodus among left-leaning Americans who fear they’ll soon be required to hunt, pray, pay taxes, and live according to the Constitution. Canadian border residents say it’s not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors, liberal arts majors, global-warming activists, and “green” energy proponents crossing their fields at night.
“I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn,” said southern Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota. “He was cold, exhausted and hungry, and begged me for a latte and some free-range chicken. When I said I didn’t have any, he left before I even got a chance to show him my screenplay, eh?”
In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Greenfield erected higher fences, but the liberals scaled them. He then installed loudspeakers that blared Rush Limbaugh across the fields, but they just stuck their fingers in their ears and kept coming. Officials are particularly concerned about smugglers who meet liberals just south of the border, pack them into electric cars, and drive them across the border, where they are simply left to fend for themselves after the battery dies.
“A lot of these people are not prepared for our rugged conditions,” an Alberta border patrolman said. “I found one carload without a single bottle of Perrier water, or any Gemelli with shrimp and arugula. All they had was a nice little Napa Valley Cabernet and some kale chips.
When liberals are caught, they’re sent back across the border, often wailing that they fear persecution from Trump high-hairers.
Rumors are circulating about plans being made to build re-education camps where liberals will be forced to drink domestic beer, study the Constitution, and find jobs that actually contribute to the economy.
In recent days, liberals have turned to ingenious ways of crossing the border. Some have been disguised as senior citizens taking a bus trip to buy cheap Canadian prescription drugs. After catching a half-dozen young vegans in blue-hair wig disguises, Canadian immigration authorities began stopping buses and quizzing the supposed senior citizens about Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney to prove that they were alive in the ’50s.
“If they can’t identify the accordion player on The Lawrence Welk Show, we become very suspicious about their age,” an official said.
Canadian citizens have complained that the illegal immigrants are creating an organic-broccoli shortage, are buying up all the Barbara Streisand CD’s, and are overloading the internet while downloading jazzercise apps to their cell phones.
“I really feel sorry for American liberals, but the Canadian economy just can’t support them,” an Ottawa resident said. “After all, how many art-history majors does one country need?
How can people of a religion of peace end up joining a terror group when Islam isn’t about terror? It seems to me that the logic is totally absent on pretty much everything the Democrat Party, from Obama on down, has to say about this.
RUSH: By the way, a little observation here. If Hillary Clinton thinks that a little thing like Donald Trump saying there should be a moratorium on Muslims can drive Muslims to terrorism, stop and think about that. She’s out there saying that Trump is a recruitment for ISIS. He’s a recruitment for terrorists, that Donald Trump and what he says and the things he does end up being recruitment videos or messages for ISIS.
Now, stop and think of that for a second. What is she saying? She’s basically saying that Donald Trump saying there should be a moratorium on Muslims can drive them to terrorism. Well, then isn’t Trump right? I mean, if all it takes is suggesting there’s a moratorium for a while on Muslims entering the country ’til we get a handle here on who’s coming in, who’s already here, what their plans are, and if that’s gonna cause them to go join ISIS, isn’t Trump right? And isn’t Hillary an abject fool for trying to make that point?
This is another Democrat trick. Abu Ghraib, recruitment tool, all the pickets there. Club Gitmo, recruitment tool. Everything the Republicans do or say somehow is going to make ISIS members swell, is gonna cause Muslims to start joining. But then Islam’s a religion of peace. How can people of a religion of peace end up joining a terror group when Islam isn’t about terror? It seems to me that the logic is totally absent on pretty much everything the Democrat Party, from Obama on down, has to say about this. Just a little side observation there.
If you believe in God, then intellectually you cannot believe in man-made global warming. You must be either agnostic or atheistic to believe that man controls something that he can’t create.
I’ve had many people ask me, “You talk about climate change/global warming a lot. You make it clear you don’t agree, that you think it’s all a hoax, and you’re so certain, and it makes us uncomfortable.” Some people say, “Nobody’s that certain. I mean, how can you know this? I mean, there are people out there claim they’re scientists who say it’s happening, and that we’re causing it, and you tell us…? I mean, who are you? You’re not a scientist, and you’re telling us to disbelieve them all because it’s political?”
Yep.
A lot of people say, “You just can’t! Nobody can be that sure of themselves. You just can’t sit there and just automatically reject what scientists say!”
“Damn I can if I want to. If they’re Democrats — Liberal Democrats, funded by Liberal Democrats — you are bound to reject it. Your own sanity requires that you reject it if it comes from the funding of that group by the liberal Democrats or a big liberal Democrat donor, the Democrat Party, doesn’t matter. Because it’s a political issue that’s designed to get you believing you’re responsible, you must pay penance, you must acknowledge that you’re responsible, you must turn over all of this to big government to fix it. You must agree to raising taxes, carbon tax or whatever.
“Because the premise is you and the way you’re living your life are causing this destruction. And I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that.” And then I floor them. I wish I didn’t floor them. I wish what comes next did not shock people. But I tell them, “It is my devout belief in God that gives me every bit of confidence that man is not destroying — and furthermore, cannot — destroy the climate.” Then you go through all of what I consider the common-sensical ways of rejecting the premise, such as: “Have you ever noticed that the predictions are all for 30 years from now, 50 years from now, 100 years from now when people alive today will not be here to know whether they were right or wrong?
“Did you ever notice that a global warming catastrophe is never predicted for next year or next month? Have you noticed that ever since Hurricane Katrina, they’ve been hoping for more of them, so that they can use that to prove it, and there haven’t been any more? We haven’t had a major hurricane strike the country in 10 years, and yet they claim that Katrina was evidence galore of global warming?” I go through all of these things that you’ve heard for years, just the common-sensical ways of rejecting this premise.
I acknowledge the climate changes.
Everything changes. Nothing is static. Everything is dynamic.
The argument is, is Western Civilization responsible for it? That’s what the allegation is: That prosperous people, high standards of living, are responsible…for destroying the climate? Have you ever stopped to consider that charge? “If you wanted to destroy the climate, what would you do?” I ask them. “Would you go out and buy a fleet of SUVs, keep your thermostat at 60? What would you do? Like, if you really wanted to destroy the ozone layer, what would you do? I mean they’re claiming that you’re doing it, so what are you doing? What about your lifestyle is destroying the world when you go outside?”
They never have an answer for it.
They just are afraid to reject it.
They want to believe.
I mean, even some friends of mine. They want to believe in source authorities. They want to believe people are not lying to them. That’s one of the toughest things about dealing with liberalism that you run up against is people want to believe people in positions of power. They want to believe the president. Of all people, they want to believe the president. They don’t want to consider the president may be phony, a liar, a saboteur. They just don’t even want to contemplate it. But when I get into my religious belief as that is what informs me of my opposition to global warming, that’s where I learn how — I don’t know, what’s the word — irreligious people are. See, if I could go through this very briefly, I believe this a loving God. I believe in the God of creation. I believe the story of creation, as an allegorical story.
I do not believe, put very simply, that God could create human beings and not provide for them mechanisms whereby they can strive to live longer, to live happier, to live healthier. I believe in the loving God of creation that provides all of these things of beauty and substance and opportunity which permit one species, the human race, to harness as much as we can, and we are forever trying to harness more.
We were created to do so. We are as much a part of nature as any other living organism or species. We are not violating nature by using what God created in us to improve our lives, to improve the lives of as many others as we can. We have definitions of how we improve lives, standard of living, prosperity, contentment, happiness, pursuit of happiness, all of this I believe is the product of creation of a loving God, and I just can’t intellectually believe that a loving God would create such beauty and substance and opportunity, that if exploiting it — and I don’t mean in a negative sense — by examination, experimentation, by living our lives and trying to improve them, that we destroy what has been created for us. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.
I can’t come to grips intellectually with the idea that the way we live our lives — and I don’t have any doubt that the Western civilization lifestyle provides the best opportunity, the best chance for humanity on this entire planet. And yet every day I’m pummeled with the charge, with the allegation that all of us who are simply trying to provide for ourselves and our families, we’re trying to better our communities, we are trying to improve the future for our children, I just can’t accept that the process of doing all of that leads to the destruction of all that has been created for us. I don’t think we have the power. I don’t think we have the power to destroy this. Even if we nuked it, it’s still here. We are gone. Life is still here in some shape, manner or form. And the whole process will start all over again.
But we’re not talking about nukes. Nobody in the global warming movement is accusing us of global warming by using nuclear weapons. I’m using the most extreme example I can. If you really want to destroy the planet, that’s the best we could do. We don’t know how to do anything else, other than nuke everything. That’s the further advanced weaponry we’ve got. They have been used a couple of times, and the places they have been are in fine shape. They were not ultimately forever destroyed, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, plant accident. But to me the evidence is all around us and is abundant that, despite our efforts in many cases, standards of living improve.
I just have never been able to come to grips — throw the religion out, if it makes you uncomfortable. I just can’t come to grips with the idea that the only people responsible for climate change happen to be capitalistic related Western civilization industrialized countries, especially when you look at pollution and the messes that we make here and how far advanced we are in cleaning them up than in poverty stricken, poverty-ridden areas, depressed areas of the world. Where there is poverty there is pestilence and pollution and filth and misery. And where there is poverty, there is usually dictatorship or tyranny of some kind. There is socialism, communism, some sort of ism that denies the individual liberty and freedom that we in this country have.
I believe in the basic goodness of most human beings and the goodness of most human beings leads to the betterment of life for everybody. And I just can’t come to grips with doing that destroying the planet. And yet that’s what they tell us every day. Frankly, I resent it. I intellectually resent the idea that people trying to improve every aspect — we have people trying to clean up messes emit as little pollution as we can. And in a capitalistic society, people are gonna do that on their own, contrary to what critics will say. They will say that a free people living in a capitalistic system are selfish and greedy and don’t care about the messes they make, because they don’t care about other people. It takes a governing authority somewhere in a distant capital where only the people there have the correct answers of compassion and so forth. Yet when you take a look at what those people do in that distant capital you see mess after mess after mess that gets worse and worse and worse. And they continue to be the ones called on to clean up each mess that they make, and it progressively gets worse and worse and worse and we have a cycle. Create the mess, fix the mess, mess gets bigger, come in, create it because some reason they are judged to be the only ones who can fix it.
Yet people not involved in that bureaucracy, not involved in that distant capital, people living among themselves who have the authority and the power have clean neighborhoods, have clean cities, because it’s what they want, and they have the freedom and the means and the prosperity to do it. You run around the world where there’s poverty, pestilence, disease, what’s missing is the ability to clean up any of those messes because there isn’t the means, the license the prosperity, there isn’t the freedom, there isn’t the capitulation, there isn’t the know-how.
All there is in those places is the desire to get out, and where do they want to go? Right here. Somehow, some way, some reason they want to come here to the home of climate destruction? Really? The car you drive, the air that you exhale, the soft drinks that you drink, whatever you eat and consume, cars, cows farting and belching is causing climate destruction, we’re supposed to intellectually just accept it? I’m sorry, I can’t.
RUSH: I got from our official climatologist, from a little book from 1909 titled On Safari with Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt, former president United States, beloved. “Between the two of them, Theodore and Kermit slew 512 beasts including 17 lion, 11 elephant and 20 rhinoceros. The remaining animals were no doubt happy to see TR leave the plain.” This was a year-long safari. I don’t know how familiar you are with the life of Theodore Roosevelt. I don’t know when the guy slept.
I mean, the guy was in the Rough Riders in Cuba. He’s on safari in Africa. He’s running all over the world. He’s in this war and that war. He’s running museums. He’s the first environmentalist wacko. He was the president of the United States. I don’t know when he slept. And there was never any air conditioning when Teddy Roosevelt was running around doing things, like we were talking yesterday. You know what I think about, by the way, Snerdley, when I think of all those years…
It’s not that long ago. Modern air conditioning, central air conditioning for the middle class, is a 75-years-ago phenomenon. That’s how relatively new it is. Can you imagine the smells just in your ordinary average summer day? Can you imagine? Can you imagine the smells? Back then, of course, there were no roads. There was horse and buggies and horse manure was in the street. Can you imagine the smells? The environmentalist wackos today wouldn’t be able to put up with the very type of world they are trying to get us to return to.
Think back. The White House, the Civil War, Lincoln and his advisors up there. The Lincoln bedroom. Lincoln never slept in it. The Lincoln bedroom on the second floor of the White House, the residence now, was his office. When I was there, I spent the night in the Lincoln bedroom back in 1992. A friend of mine who was with me said, “Can you imagine the smells in this room in the middle of summertime with no air conditioning?” I said I had never thought of that. We fail to remember such things.
Logging the progress that we have made. Anyway, Teddy Roosevelt and his kid Kermit go on a safari in Africa for a year. They kill “512 beasts including 17 lion, 11 elephant and 20 rhinoceros. The remaining animals were no doubt happy to see TR leave the plain. After the year-long hunt, Roosevelt proceeded to England for the funeral of King Edward VII and then on to Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in ending the Russo-Japanese War.”
Theodore Roosevelt. I remember my grandfather talking about him, revered him in countless, countless ways.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: At times like this, if you do anything or are perceived to be doing anything that constitutes going against the grain of the narrative, then you can easily end up being called a reprobate or heartless or cold or mean-spirited or what have you.
Like I said yesterday, when I saw that this lion had been killed, and when I found out how and how needless it was… I love animals. I love everything about them, and I hate the needless killing of them for sport like this. This was senseless. But at the same time I’m a realist here, and I know how the whole animal rights movement has been elevated and used to advance the leftist agenda. And I realize, if you’re new to the show and you hear something like that, you think it’s crazy.
“Are you kidding me? You really? Animal rights are part of a political…?” Yes, I do. And the quicker you people who have that kind of reaction to me learn that I’m right about this, the much faster you’re going to learn the truth of things. Because everything the left does… If you know what the left and the Democrat Party is, everything they do is political. Every movement, every cause they have is a political cause designed to advance their agenda and eliminate opposition.
The whole animal rights thing has been around as long as I’ve been alive. It has as its objective the same thing global warming has, and that is to establish the need for growing and bigger government that controls more and more people because the premise is people can’t be left to run their own lives because they’re irresponsible. “Look what happens if we don’t regulate them. They’ll run out and they’ll kill innocent animals! We must have a government with a series of regulations and laws and appropriate punishment for when this happens.”
And then people say, “Yeah, yeah,” and they applaud their freedom away. They applaud their liberty away. And that’s what the leftist agenda is all about. It is predicated on the belief that you as a human being are incompetent to live your life in a way that the left, the Democrat Party, would judge to be responsible and caring and compassionate and giving. The animal rights movement is ideal for this, because there isn’t anybody that hates animals that is going to have any kind of a following.
Just like the environmental movement. Nobody wants dirty air. Nobody wants dirty water. But the way they set it up is if you oppose them, oh, you must be for dirty air. Oh, you must not have a problem with dirty water. No, I don’t like those at all. So, it’s brilliant the way they set these things up and they get… Remember what I said yesterday: Liberalism is the pursuit of the emotional. It’s much easier to build a movement and attract followers connecting to them emotionally than it is intellectually.
And conservatism, or everything else it is, is an intellectual pursuit in addition to whatever else it is. And there’s nothing intellectual, pursuit or otherwise, about liberalism. It’s all emotion. And it’s all feeling and wanting to feel good and not wanting to feel guilty. So all that’s capitalized on. So if you come along… Now we’ve got the circumstance with Cecil. They named a lion. And, by the way, I, ladies and gentlemen, am as guilty as anybody else of something.
Twenty-five years ago on this program, I explained one of the most brilliant techniques of the animal rights movement and the left, and that is… And, by the way, they didn’t need a whole lot of help because we humans do this ourselves anyway, when left to our own devices. But we humanize, particularly our pets. We treat them and think of them much as we do other people. We assign them human feelings. We assign to them human emotions and human instinct and we treat them as such.
And then when we were children, what did we do? We read books about animals, cute and cuddly, that talked and had normal human lives. We saw cartoons of the same thing. And so all animals — including the vicious predator animals that will kill you just for looking at them — are made warm and cuddly and innocent and untouchable, unapproachable. And, as I say, I myself am as guilty as anybody, because I’m writing children’s books with a talking horse that time travels.
So it’s something that is a time-honored technique. So anytime you come up with information that goes against the grain of a popular narrative… You remember, Snerdley. This had to be very early on in the program. I remember a couple of times. I think it was dolphins or porpoises. A couple of fish were caught in Canada in an ice floe, and they couldn’t get out, and it became a big story about how we were trying to help these two fish, whatever they were, get out of the trap they were in.
They might have been baby whales. I forget what it was. I remember back then people going, “It’s just a couple of fish, for crying out loud! Why are we covering this wall to wall?” Callers, they’re asking me, angry, “Why is this all over TV?” I’ll tell you why. It’s because those two fish, this is exactly what I said yesterday about Cecil the Lion. By the way, did you think Cecil knew his name was Cecil? Do you think Cecil knew he was a lion? No way. Does a fish know it’s in water? No.
Cecil didn’t know he was a lion, and he doesn’t know that he had a name or didn’t know. And, by the way, his “sidekick,” as he’s been referred to today, Jericho, doesn’t know that his name is Jericho. Well, he might react to the name, but he doesn’t know he’s a lion. All he knows is he’s got to kill something today to stay alive, which is what… If an animal kept a calendar, every day it would say “kill something and eat it.” Next day, “kill something and eat it.” In the wild.
Now, see, I’m creating enemies. I’m making them. That’s so unfair, so unfair. Then you start trying to explain that there is no equality in the animal world. And you want to talk about animal right? When you watched… Did you see the video of a… Folks, I’m not kidding about this. It’s going to make you sick. I actually saw the video, some kind of snake actually devour a whole crocodile. Was it a boa constrictor? It took a month to digest, and they had pictures of the whole alligator being digested.
Now you can bring a little kid to the video and say, “Do you want to talk the rights of the alligator here?” (Kid voice) “That mean snake! Why would the snake do that?” The snake has to eat. So here’s the news, and this is from an op-ed, March 17, 2013, New York Times. Are you ready? Wait for it. “Saving Lions By Killing Them.” See, I’m going to be hated here. I didn’t write the story. All I did was find it. It’s in the New York Times, two years ago, a little over two years ago.
It was written by Alexander Songorwa, who is the director of wildlife for the Tanzanian Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism. From the op-ed: “Odd as it may sound, American trophy hunters play a critical role in protecting wildlife in Tanzania. The millions of dollars that hunters spend to go on safari here each year help finance the game reserves, wildlife management areas and conservation efforts in our rapidly growing country. This is why we are alarmed that the United States Fish and Wildlife Service is considering listing the African lion as endangered.
“Doing so would make it illegal for American hunters to bring their trophies home. Those hunters constitute 60% of our trophy-hunting market, and losing them would be disastrous to our conservation efforts.” He didn’t say “disastrous to our economy.” “Disastrous to our conservation efforts.” So here’s an op-ed from a game-preserve warden in the New York Times two years ago: “Saving Lions By Killing Them.” Now, do you think anybody seeing that headline is going to care to understand.
They’re just going to write that off as some lunatic, odd ball weirdo. I’ve always said, “If you have a species that’s endangered and you want to save it, eat it!” (impression) “How can you say that? That’s so mean. That’s so… Oh my God, you’re really mean. You can’t possibly mean that, Mr. Limbaugh.” “Well, let me ask you, Little Johnny: Are cows on the endangered species list? Are chickens on the endangered species list?” “No. No.” “Why is that, Little Johnny? Because there’s whole bunch of gobs of them.”
“That’s right. Why are there gobs of them? Because God made it that way?” “No, there are gobs of them because they are produced, so that we can survive ourselves. We consume them. We eat them.” “It’s just so mean! It’s just so mean!” So if there is an animal that’s on the endangered species list and it’s edible, turn it loose. Make it part of a human diet and there will be more of those animals than ever. Some free-market, entrepreneur farmer will come in and start raising those animals to supply the need.
Now, I realize, talk like this is blasphemy in the era here of Cecil the Lion, but that’s what I like to do. (interruption) No, I’m not talking about eating Cecil. No, no, no. This guy’s not talking about eating lions. He’s saying hunting them creates more of them, because the game preserve needs to attract the hunters. So, the conservation people take steps to make sure that the lions in their preserve have circumstances where reproduction happens and takes place. They encourage it.
There are more lions, because there are hunters than there would otherwise be. That was the guy’s point writing the op-ed in the New York Times. It’s not to excuse this dentist. This is a whole different thing. What this dentist did — what he was led to doing, whatever the nature of the truth here is. This lion was not some place where hunting should have been taking place. That’s not the purpose this lion served. So, I’m not conflating the two, but I’m just trying to be the mayor of Realville here.
Angelo Codevilla is a renowned academic and has served as special advisor to various Senate committees. He has written a piece that actually became a book on “the ruling class,” his term to describe the Washington establishment, but it’s not limited to Washington. It really is the political establishment that compromises members of both parties, and instead of calling them the establishment, he called them “the ruling class” or “the political class.”
Steven Hayward, at Power Line, says he had gotten hold of Mr. Codevilla and asked him what he thinks of Donald Trump, and Angelo Codevilla sent back something he had written about it and published it, and this is it.
“In the land of the blind,” so goes the saying, “the one-eyed man is king.” Donald Trump leapt atop other contenders for the Republican presidential nomination when he acted on the primordial fact in American public life today, from which most of the others hide their eyes, namely: most Americans distrust, fear, are sick and tired of, the elected, appointed, and bureaucratic officials who rule over us, as well as their cronies in the corporate, media, and academic world. Trump’s attraction lies less in his words’ grace or even precision than in the extent to which Americans are searching for someone, anyone, to lead against this ruling class, that is making America less prosperous, less free, and more dangerous.
Trump’s rise reminds this class’s members that they sit atop a rumbling volcano of rejection. Republicans and Democrats hope to exorcise its explosion by telling the public that Trump’s remarks on immigration and on the character of fellow member John McCain (without bothering to try showing that he errs on substance), place him outside the boundaries of their polite society. Thus do they throw Br’er Rabbit into the proverbial briar patch. Now what? The continued rise in Trump’s poll numbers reminds all that Ross Perot – in an era that was far more tolerant of the Establishment than is ours – outdistanced both Bush 41 and Bill Clinton before self-destructing, just by speaking ill of both parties before he self destructed.
Republicans brahmins have the greater reason to fear. Whereas some three fifths of Democratic voters approve the conduct of their officials, only about one fifth of Republican voters approve what theirs do. If Americans in general are primed for revolt, Republican (and independent) voters fairly thirst for it.
Trump’s barest hints about what he opposes (never mind proposes) regarding just a few items on the public agenda have had such effect because they accord with what the public has already concluded about them. For example,Trump remarked, off the cuff, that “Mexico does not send us its best.” The public had long since decided that our ruling class’s handling of immigration (not just from Mexico) has done us harm. The ruling class – officials, corporations, etc.- booed with generalities but did not try to argue that they had improved America by their handling of immigration. The more they would argue that, the more they would lose. At least if someone more able than Trump were leading against them.
Our ruling class was sure that Trump had discredited himself by saying that John McCain, whom they treat as an icon, is not an optimal personification of heroism regardless of what suffering he endured in captivity. But they were mistaken. Because Americans are sick of celebrating victims of defeats, and naturally eager to enjoy the kind of peace that only victories can bring, Trump’s expressed preference for heroes who “don’t get captured” resonated. Trump may or may not know any of the unsavory details about McCain’s actions as a POW and, as a public official, in regard to POWs and MIAs. But it does not take much research to find out why nobody will defend him other than by trying to prevent discussion those details. Surely Republican “architect” Karl Rove, who organized South Carolina’s military vote against McCain in the 2000 primary, knows them. The families of Vietnam POWs-MIAs pour onto anyone who will listen to their bitterness at McCain’s role in denying the existence of abandoned POWs and sealing information about them. The general public can get a glimpse such things by Googling the armed forces’ newspaper Stars and Stripes, Friday June 6, 1969, or the work of Pulitzer Prize NYT reporter Sydney Schanberg.
Moreover, Americans are becoming increasingly skeptical about their celebrities’ integrity. With good reason.
McCain is just a minor example of a phenomenon that characterizes our ruling class: reputations built on lies and cover-ups, lives of myth protected by mutual forbearance, by complicitous journalists, or by records deep-sixed, including in in government archives. Ever wonder, for example, why the establishment of Martin Luther King as a national icon superior to George Washington, as the only American with his own national holiday, was accompanied by sealing government records about him for seventy five years? Because those records reflect well on him and his partisans? Sure. Countless other figures – need one mention Barack Obama? – live by images sustained by denigrating questions about their factual bases while restricting access to those bases. As they lord it over us, they live lives that cannot stand scrutiny.
The point here is simple: our ruling class has succeeded in ruling not by reason or persuasion, never mind integrity, but by occupying society’s commanding heights, by imposing itself and its ever-changing appetites on the rest of us. It has coopted or intimidated potential opponents by denying the legitimacy of opposition. Donald Trump, haplessness and clownishness notwithstanding, has shown how easily this regime may be threatened just by refusing to be intimidated.
Having failed to destroy Trump, Republicans and Democrats are left to hope that he will self-destruct as Perot did. Indeed, Trump has hardly scratched the surface and may not be able to do more than that. Yet our rulers know the list of things divide them from the American people is long. They want to avoid like the plague any and all arguments on the substance of those things. They fear the rise of an un-intimidated leader more graceful and precise than Trump, someone whose vision is fuller but who is even more passionate in championing the many resentments the voicing of just a few channeled so much support to Trump.
Here are some examples: Justice Kennedy’s majority opinions in Windsor and Obergefell preemptively accused anyone who opposed redefining marriage to include homosexuals of being “offensive,” “hateful.” Refusal to honor homosexual unions, he wrote, is not “explicable by anything except animus.” What if a statesman, speaking for the American people, were to ask what, precisely, is so honorable about anal intercourse that those who refuse to honor it should be so stigmatized? Before 1961, all 50 states criminalized anal intercourse, heterosexual as well as homosexual. Why precisely were they wrong in doing so? By what right does anyone place such questions “out of bounds”?
After a video showing officials of federally-funded Planned Parenthood taking orders for body parts of babies to be custom-slaughtered for that purpose, House Speaker John Boehner deflected demands for legislation to stop this by saying he needed more information. An unintimidated statesman might ask: Do you not know that each of these little ones’ DNA shows him or her to be an individual son or daughter of an individual mother and father? Like Lincoln, he would argue that no one has the right to exclude any other human from the human race and demand that Boehner answer why he continues to sanction so to dispose of millions of little sons and daughters?
Republicans and Democrats profit personally and through their corporate cronies by a welter of legislation and regulation by which they command what we must eat, how to shower, what medical care is proper and what is not: mandating that a third of the U.S. corn crop be turned into ethanol, restricting the use of coal, how we may use our land, etc. They justify these predatory intrusions into our lives by claiming that peculiar knowledge of science unavailable to others. They refuse to justify their scientific conclusions with the likes of us. An un-intimidated statesman, reiterating that science is reason, public reason, not pretense, would throw the notion that “science R us” back into their faces.
At increasing speed, our ruling class has created “protected classes” of Americans defined by race, sex, age, disability, origin, religion, and now homosexuality, whose members have privileges that outsider do not. By so doing, they have shattered the principle of equality – the bedrock of the rule of law. Ruling class insiders use these officious classifications to harass their socio-political opponents. An unintimidated statesman would ask: Why should not all “classes” be equally protected? Does the rule of law even admit of “classes”? Does not the 14th amendment promise “the equal protection of the laws” to all alike? He would note that when the government sets aside written law in favor of what the powerful want, it thereby absolves citizens any obligation to obey government.
Habitually, our ruling class tries to intimidate its opponents by calling them “haters” (“racists,” etc. is part of the all too familiar litany.) A statesman worthy of the title would respond that calling people such names is the very opposite of civility, never mind love. Such a leader would trump our rulers.
And then people say, “Yeah, yeah,” and they applaud their freedom away. They applaud their liberty away. And that’s what the leftist agenda is all about. It is predicated on the belief that you as a human being are incompetent to live your life in a way that the left, the Democrat Party, would judge to be responsible and caring and compassionate and giving. The animal rights movement is ideal for this, because there isn’t anybody that hates animals that is going to have any kind of a following.
Now you can bring a little kid to the video and say, “Do you want to talk the rights of the alligator here?” (Kid voice) “That mean snake! Why would the snake do that?” The snake has to eat. So here’s the news, and this is from an op-ed, March 17, 2013, New York Times. Are you ready? Wait for it. “