Five For Freedom - A Contract With America For The 21st Century

  America’s in a civil war.  Not a cocktail party war like Vietnam or Afghanistan where Americans stand around and talk about it but relatively few are personally impacted.  No, this a WWII level existential threat war where the difference between victory and defeat is literally freedom or tyranny.  One need look no farther than what Adolph Trudeau is doing in Canada right now to understand what the future holds. 

This war has been simmering for decades and most Americans didn’t even notice.  Now it’s obvious. Virtually every element of traditional American culture is being destroyed.  The left has decided that the United States is a plague on humanity and must be eliminated.

In this case the “left” consists of government, media, big tech, big business, and academia, among others.

Here’s a short list of their targets…    

Turning schools into leftist Indoctrination centers

Government control of your neighborhood

Open borders

Money / Driver’s licenses / Voting for illegals

Legalizing crime / No bail  

Encouraging / Empowering homelessness

2^nd Amendment

Censorship

Gender reimagining

Control over your body

Free exercise of religion

Peaceably assemble

Men having babies

Banking

Climate Change

CRT

Government spying on citizens

Girl’s sports

And of course, most problematic of all is their successful coup d'état.

With that and more, do we still live in a free country?  Obviously not.

Which brings us back to war.  Ask yourself, if someone declared war on America, what more might they do in victory? Other than killing you or turning you into slaves, what more is there?

Some argue we’re not in a war, citing polls that show a majority of Americans don’t like those leftist positions.  That’s accurate, but it doesn’t matter. The majority doesn’t count. The people who “count”, the opinion makers, those in academia, media, high tech, etc are the hardcore leftists behind all of this, and as we all know, the squeaky wheel gets the oil.

Americans have traditionally been ambivalent about government. For most politics was something to be endured every four years and after the election life got back to normal.

But no longer.  If you were a Teddy Roosevelt partisan or a fan of Truman or IKE, whether your guy won or lost didn’t matter tremendously to the average American.  Maybe your taxes would go up or down a bit or maybe the price of gasoline or chicken might change a bit, but that was it for most people, because government, particularly the federal government had little impact on their everyday lives.

Today not so much. In America of 2022 the federal government impacts almost every aspect of American lives, daily.  The price of gas, grades of meat, rate of pay at work, MPG for your car, Epi-Pens, not to mention vaccine mandates, gun regulations and shipping illegal immigrants to your neighborhood.  But it’s not just the federal government.  It’s state and local government as well.  From inane licensing requirements for hairdressers, bartenders and Uber drivers to union-centric dysfunctional schools and gun laws that outlaw the 2^nd Amendment in all but name, the fists of the federal fit perfectly into the state and local regulatory gloves, together strangling American freedom. 

But government’s not the only front in this war. There’s culture too.  From social media – the 21^st century’s public square – to mass media to academia and big business, the left dominates.  Not just dominates as in winning, but dominate as in ruling over everyone else.  Live and let live is not an axiom the left recognizes or exercises.  No, the left demands fealty or will crush you.  They’ll destroy your business, get you fired or banned from social media, take your kids away, kick you out of college and anything else they can think of.

Today we’re seeing the government leviathan becoming even more powerful as it assimilates with the leftist borg.  We saw it for four years as the FBI worked side by side with the media to tarnish Donald Trump’s name and destroy his presidency. Now, Joe Biden has encouraged the silencing of “misinformation”. 

At the same time the federal government has essentially established a gulag to house political prisoners who participated in the “insurrection” despite many being invited into the building by the police, some never entering the building at all and most having been involved in no violence whatsoever.  Some of these “terrorists” have been sitting, without charges or bail, in jails for over a year.  That treatment stands in stark contrast to the treatment of those who participated in the violent and deadly BLM / Antifa riots of the summer of 2020, most of whom were bailed out in the unlikely event they ended up in custody in the first place. 

All of this points to a fracture of America. Observations about “majorities” give one hope, but the reality is that unless the “majority” who reject leftism react, it won’t matter because, as we’re seeing in real time in Canada, the wall between freedom and fascism is fragile, and once it’s breached it’s likely game over.       

If the Republic is to survive it will be up to that “majority” to do something to arrest the slide into tyranny.  The GOP needs to take a page from Newt Gingrich and give them something to focus on, to talk about, and most importantly, vote on. The Contract with America was pivotal in nationalizing the election, and that’s exactly what we need now, a message that patriots can rally around.

The fronts upon which the left is attacking are too numerous to defend against simultaneously.  The battle lines need to be streamlined just as the Contract did.  As such, here are Five for Freedom… five common sense items that every GOP candidate or official must agree with if they want to win.  If they refuse on any one of them, they should be primaried or defeated in favor of someone who does support them.

1.  The 2020 election was fraudulent and such fraud cannot be allowed to occur again.

2.  Covid mandates are unconstitutional and must stop.

3.  The #1 job of the federal government will be to seal the southern border.

4.  The United States must be energy independent.

5.  CRT has no place in American schools.

If any candidate running on the GOP ticket can’t support these five positions, they have no place in the GOP. The threats to liberty are too numerous, the threats to the Constitution too grave to elect someone who will waffle on these basic principles.

If there is indeed a majority of Americans who are interested in saving the Republic, they have to have something to rally around.  Thus far the GOP has done an atrocious job of focusing America’s attention.  They need to do that now and Five for Freedom is the tool to do just that.  It’s likely it will have to happen over the objections of establishment Republicans like McConnell, McCarthy and Ronna McDaniel, but so be it.  At the end of the day you’re either on the side of freedom or not.  As the last two years have demonstrated, liberty is fragile and without citizens willing to stand up for it, it vanishes. This is the time, this is the place and Five for Freedom is the weapon with which patriots can vanquish the borg of woke leftism that has been seeking to assimilate America for decades.  The only question is, does the GOP have the courage to wield it? 

(Image courtesy of www.AmericanThinker.com)

Surrender: Why does anyone ever vote for the Republican Party... at least one run by Boehner & McConnell?

Do you ever wonder sometimes why Americans vote? How many times have you heard people say “I don’t vote because my vote doesn’t really matter, those politicians are going to do what they want regardless of how I vote.” In some cases that’s true. Obamacare was a perfect example. In January 2010 Scott Brown won his campaign for the Senate in deep blue Massachusetts by promising to be the 41st vote against Obamacare. The Democrats didn’t care, and despite the fact that 60% of the American people were opposed to Obamacare, they sidestepped Brown and used “reconciliation” to shove the law down the throats of the American people. As a result, that November the GOP retook the House in a landslide election, but by that point the damage had ever been done. If there was ever an example of politicians doing exactly what they wanted in the face of constituent opposition, Obamacare was it.

So why did citizens reward Democrats in 2012 and send Barack Obama back to work? Because presidential elections are personality driven contests (as opposed to issue driven contests) far more than are midterms, with the presidential candidates generating an unparalleled level of attention. Voters in midterm elections are generally more engaged and more aware of the issues than many who vote in presidential elections. Not sure? How many videos did you see in 2008 where voters could barely name the vice presidential candidates, nevermind the issues or candidates lower down the ticket. That reality repeated itself in 2012 with the cult of Barack Obama. Add to that the fact that Mittens Romney ran a campaign so uninspiring that millions of conservatives didn’t even bother to show up and it’s easy to understand how the country got another 4 years of The One.

Just two years later however, 2014 proved to be 2010 on steroids as the GOP picked up 9 seats in the Senate. Why? Not only had Obamacare proven to be exactly the disaster Republicans had predicted, but more timely was the fact that Barack Obama was basically promising amnesty to 4 million illegal immigrants. For the GOP, the numbers were clear: fully 70% of GOP voters were against Obama’s amnesty and at the end of the day those voters delivered a victory.

But alas, that doesn’t seem to matter. Like the Democrats in 2010 voting for something 60% of the Americans didn’t want, in 2014 the Republican leadership plans to ignore the wishes of 70% of their constituents by surrendering on immigration.

Surrender? That is essentially what the leadership has done as it promises there will be no government shutdown. The purse strings are one of the few checks the legislative branch has on the executive. As such, the primary way Congress can impact what the administration does is by deciding what to fund and what not to fund. In this context, a shutdown would occur when Congress passes a bill to fund the entire government except for those DHS functions involved in the president’s amnesty and then the president vetoes it. No dice say Boehner and McConnell. They are scared that the GOP would be blamed for any shutdown and get hammered in 2016. That’s an illusion, as most of the government would still function, and, frankly, most Americans wouldn’t even notice a shutdown were it not for the bleating of the administration’s media minions. In last year’s shutdown, once it was over a full 78% of Americans reported that they weren’t inconvenienced by the shutdown at all and another 11% felt only minor inconveniences. And a year later the GOP went on to flatten the Democrats in the midterms!

So the question is, why would anyone bother to vote for the GOP in the first place? What’s the point? If they are going to rail against the president acting unconstitutionally but take the single most powerful weapon for stopping him off the table, what’s the difference between the parties besides rhetoric? The truth is, now that they are firmly back in power, Boehner and McConnell feel like they have no obligation to respect their voter’s wishes. Apparently the desire of the Chamber of Commerce’s members for cheap labor trumps Republican voter’s opposition to amnesty.

Such has become life in America in the 21st Century. Half of the voters don’t bother to vote because they feel like their votes don’t count and the other half go to the polls to prove them right. Barack Obama has demonstrated that government can basically do what it wants, regardless of what the law says. The GOP has ostensibly stood against that principal as it claimed to be a bulwark built on the voices of the people. But in reality it is anything but. If the GOP is unwilling to go to the mattresses for amnesty, one of the most visceral issues of the day, what are they willing to do for more pedestrian things like reining in the bureaucracy or the welfare state?

If Boehner, McConnell and the GOP establishment continue to act as paper tigers in the fight against government overreach because they fear a 2016 backlash, they should be prepared to for that backlash to become a self fulfilling prophecy as conservatives abandon them in droves. Some will go Libertarian, some will stay home and some will simply jump ship to the Democrats. At the end of the day at least with Democrats voters understand that the law is no roadblock to getting what you want. Why bother voting for the Republican illusion of restraint when they can simply throw their weight behind Democrats and at least sit at the table when the spoils are dispensed?

How much is your country really worth to you?

Over the course of the last ten years millions of brave men and women have served in the United States military. Those people, those fathers, mothers, sons and daughters deserve every ounce of respect that Americans of all stripes have.

It says a lot about both the country and these individuals that they still see something in the United States worth defending and that they were willing to sign on the dotted line to do so.

Unfortunately, that is simply not enough. Not that those brave men and women aren’t giving enough, but rather, the great sacrifice they have been and are making today is simply not sufficient to save the United States.

The United States is far more than a military power. In reality, military power is but a small part of what makes America great and a leader in the world. People around the planet have been flocking to watch Hollywood movies for decades. They’ve also been sending the best and the brightest of their progeny to study at our universities. During the Cold War it was Levis and Pepsi that Soviet citizens were clamoring for. According to Interbrand, ten of the ten most valuable consumer brands in the world are American, including names like Coke, Disney, McDonalds and Google. None of these things were accomplished with a barrel of a gun. From Star Wars to Big Macs to our private and public universities, people around the world see the United States as a place where seemingly everything is possible, where great ideas come from and where anyone can find success. Little of that is the result of American military intervention. It’s the result of accomplishments and achievements Americans have forged throughout the nation’s history… although winning two world wars certainly didn’t hurt.

The bottom line is, the United States’ military is strong because America is strong. Not the other way around. And what has made America strong is her people, the individual freedom and liberty they have enjoyed since June 21, 1788 and the economic strength that freedom has created.

Unfortunately the liberty and economic strength that underlie two centuries of success are under assault today like they have never been before. As much as I dislike Barack Obama, the blame is not all his. He may be the worst president this country has ever had, but the problem that is undermining the foundation of American greatness has been going on for seven decades. No, the majority of the blame does not fall on the shoulders of Barack Obama, or even the collective presidents of the last 70 years… The fault for the situation we find ourselves in is the fault of the American people.

A free people get the government they deserve and we are to blame for what Barack Hussein Obama has wrought as well as what George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and their predecessors did. Government is a dangerous weapon in the hands of mere mortals with their natural failings of greed, vanity, arrogance and avarice among others. Our Constitution was specifically designed to temper the worst inclinations of men and to limit the scope to which a citizen’s life might be impacted by government action. Staggered terms, a Senate appointed by state legislatures, an independent judiciary a bill of rights. Everything in our Constitution was written to give citizens the greatest degree of liberty possible.

None of that matters when the government simply decides it wants more power and the people do nothing to stop it, or as in the case of the 17th Amendment, assist in the takeover. A government of men can be expected to try and expand its power and reach and James Madison’s Constitution and George Mason’s Bill of Rights were intended to stop such expansion.

Today however both might as well have been written on an Etch-a-Sketch. How does this happen? Simple. Two symbiotic developments resulted in the situation we find ourselves in today. The first is the division of labor. When Cyrus McCormick freed mankind from the yoke of the farm he unleashed a parabolic curve of innovation such as the world had never seen. The specialization wrought an increase in the standard of living that was exponentially more powerful than anything that had come before. Simultaneously Americans began to enjoy something that few people in the world had ever enjoyed and no people had had on that scale: leisure time.

The division of labor meant that while citizens were able to focus on their jobs stamping engine blocks, editing books, testing scientific theories or flipping burgers, everything else was magically available to them at far less than it would cost them to produce or procure on their own. As their lives became more silo like, they began to understand less and less about things with which they had little contact. For a while they relied on family, friends and community organizations to help fill in the gaps. Then government stepped in and decreed that it was their job to tell citizens what was good and what was bad and what needed to be done, when, and by who. Government is, after all, there to help… isn’t it?

Then of course there is the money. Government largesse becomes a powerful weapon when combined with citizen’s ignorance. As government started providing more information and benefits it started issuing more and more regulations. Today we have the situation where the government seeks to control virtually every aspect of a citizen’s life. Indeed, half the population pays no income taxes, one third of the population relies on the government for most if not all of their income while the entire population is burdened with regulations around every corner. This regulation is particularly onerous to entrepreneurs and businessmen, the backbone of American progress.

Today, with individual liberty and capitalism under fire, the foundation of American greatness is withering away like the grains of sand through an hourglass. The question is, can the country be turned before the sand is fully drained? This is one battle that the men and women of the military cannot fight for us. This is a battle that will be fought in the voting booths across the country. But the real battle is going to go on long before November 6th. The question is, are you going to join the battle? How far are you willing to go to preserve the greatest nation in the history of the world? Politics is rarely a pretty thing and sometimes it causes real pain when you disagree with people close to you. Such is life. Would you rather keep the peace with your brother in law or friend at the cost of watching everything you hold dear slip away, or do you want to take a chance and try and change someone’s mind? It may not work. You might end up talking to yourself or having someone yelling at you. The battle between now and November 6th is not a hot war like what is going on in Afghanistan, but it no less important.

The pending nomination of Mitt Romney demonstrates that conservatives cannot depend on the GOP to light a fire under the American people about the dangers of the leftist agenda and profligate spending. The danger posed by your mother in law or your best friend are nothing compared to the Taliban or Al Qaeda and the other real dangers our men and women in uniform face every day. How much are you willing to do to make sure that their sacrifice is not in vain? Are you willing to do what it takes to help send the Democrats home? Are you willing to do what it takes to help put the United States back on track to greatness and prosperity? Pick up the phone, buy your buddy a beer. Start a conversation. Have a dinner party. Post something on Facebook. At some point someone has to do it. If not you, who? If not now, when? How much is your country really worth? How much are you willing to do for her? Are you going to sit back and watch as the sands of liberty and prosperity pass or is a free Republic worth fighting for? Twenty years from now when someone asks you what were you doing during the most important election of your lifetime, what do you want to be able to say? Do the things today that you will be proud to speak of tomorrow... make a difference, help save your country.