I & I Editorial BoardA 1987 television miniseries that visualized the condition of the U.S. a decade after the country had surrendered to the Soviet Union was probably not far off the mark. Life in “Amerika” was nothing like life in America before the Soviet takeover. Though the USSR no longer exists, life in this country in 2022 feels like Amerika due to transformational changes brought by virulent inside influences, just as Nikita Khrushchev said would happen.
The U.S. is not a single-party state. There are pockets of resistance to the progressive agenda, most notably in Texas and Florida. But the effort to turn this nation toward a hard-left future has been accelerated by the lockdowns, mandates, and the do-as-we-say diktats of the Great Coronavirus Panic, and the Democrats’ control of the lawmaking and executive branches, as well as the administrative state.
Unlike the Americans in “Amerika,” we didn’t surrender to the Soviets. We have simply handed power to the left. The hard (and unrelenting) left controls most of the media, sets the tone for popular culture, and has hegemonized most of our institutions and many of our businesses.
Consequently, freedoms have been overrun, dissent forbidden, free speech shredded, and crime allowed to thrive. Our Second Amendment rights are in grave jeopardy. The price of energy is intentionally being increased. Failure to conform to leftist demands risks ostracization. The rule of law is being ignored. Our justice system has been corrupted by politics. Both policymakers and activists want to increase the middle and lower classes’ dependency on government. Wealth is not to be created but redistributed by elected officials and their functionaries in the bureaucracy. Inflation caused by Democratic policies has wrecked the value of the dollar. Abundance has been replaced by shortages, the worst of which are yet to come.
Amerika in 2022.
Seven years ago, while Barack Obama’s “transformational” efforts were winding down, and then to be passed over to Hillary Clinton for further fulfillment, constitutional law professor John O. McGinnis noted in City Journal that “progressivism’s vision of the role of the state conflicts with the system of government envisioned by America’s Founders.” The men who dreamed of a nation based on liberty proposed a unique system in which citizens would be “free to pursue their affairs individually and in voluntary association,” while government power at both the federal and state levels was “to be tightly constrained.”
“From its inception, progressivism has posed a threat to constitutional government. It has sought to replace limited and decentralized governance with dynamic, centralized authority in order to force some arrangement of equality on the nation,” says McGinnis.
Leftists are in the minority in the U.S. Yet they punch far above their weight politically and culturally. They get their way through bullying, crying, turning protests into violent engagements, partnering with a like-minded media, throwing tantrums, and lying in ways that a decade or two ago were unfathomable, even in a profession (politics) that mass produces falsehoods.
And though they don’t outnumber non-progressives, that is independent thinkers and those who hold our founding values as sacred, humane principles, they are picking up converts. Soon every Democrat, and many independents, will have to identify as progressives, because the Bolshevik ideology that fuels the left leaves no room for opposition.
We didn’t aim to be negative. But we can’t avoid the facts, especially when the country is headed so hard and so fast in the wrong direction. Reality is an effective teacher, especially when it’s unpleasant.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
Unfortunately, this is NOT a new thing – its beginnings date back to the Wilson administration and the rise of the administrative state and continued with increasing impact through the several Democrat administrations before this one. FDR, with his alphabet agencies, was probably the worst of this administration’s predecessors, but its impact pales by comparison.
It’s easy enough to say that we should never again trust the future welfare of our nation to the Democrat party, but the reality is that there is no shortage of people for whom the leftist agenda is the promise of pie in the sky, of a pass into the and of milk and honey. Even sadder is the fact that our very rights have been, and will continue to be, used against us. If we’re to survive, we’re going to have to treat the Democrats as the terrorist threat they are.
Do we have the cojones to do that?
I dare to say what has and is happening is a non combat version of Red Dawn to include the invasion from the Southern Border. We are being driven to becoming the United Socialist States of America (USSA).
“Leftists are in the minority in the U.S. Yet they punch far above their weight politically and culturally” I&I
Unfortunately, the never-Trump GOP act as collaborators and are enabling the progressive Bolshevik takeover of USA life. Without these GOP “useful idiots” (a Bolshevik term for their collaborators, who are participants in their own eventual demise), fraudulent election results like Pennsylvania 2020 would be impossible. How these faux GOP can overlook Pennsylvania counting several hundred thousand more mail-in ballots than were mailed out to voters shows a moral and ethical rot. This unexamined source of corruption is also a triumph of hate (of Trump) over love, honesty and fair play. Now we define democracy Ukraine style, where the deranged leader has arrested political rivals and made opposition political parties illegal. Ukraine is Stalinist and National Socialist 1930/40s German style, yet USA media calls it a democracy. And Pelosi and her allies strive to implement the equivalent here with more arrests, disbarring and deplatforming of the Trump GOP. On the bright side are the polls showing the majority of GOP and Independents reject the Democrat-controlled major media. That is a source of hope that the Bolshevik DNC tail can be stopped from wagging the USA dog.
But then there is the ethnic and racial cleansing or transformation of the USA via dilution: The Open Borders with a quarter million people per month from 150 countries around the world claiming asylum; and being put on secret night flights and buses to resettle the USA; and being given free everything (baby formula, shelter, food, welfare benefits, etc.). Over time, if this continues and accelerates, the USA will morph into a giant refugee camp ruled over by the well-armed, Central American MS-10 gangs being imported by the caravan-load under Uncle Joe (Biden). It is like the USA is dissolving itself.
A good article.
America is about individual rights.
Progressivism is about group, aka collective, rights.
Progressives believe that their cause justifies the use of duplicity and deceit to attain their ends.
This means that they aren’t committed to negotiating in good faith.
The question for conservatives is how to deal with political activists’ lack of good faith interactions. The traditional approach is Maoist-all power flows from the barrel of a gun.
It may come to that, but in the meantime, conservatives have to face reality and learn how to check and then checkmate those who are committed to enslaving them.
The present Republican party leadership isn’t acting like they recognize what the Left is doing. Trump might. Other leaders might arise, but if not then conservatives will need to organize on their own and give up some individualism to protect themselves.
The current Republican Senate leader is not interested in what the left is doing as long as his coffers grow. Sadly, corruption is a big part of what has lead to this and it is pervasive in our legislature.
Conservatives have abandoned the media, traditional and new. In the competition of ideas, it is a disadvantage if only one side has a bullhorn. But from what I see, the media ownership, which determines what kind of message is sent to the American people, is not reflective of the makeup of the American populace.
Diagnosis is accurate, but what is the treatment that needs to be applied? It seems to me the Democrats are a lost cause. They will not listen to anyone but themselves and their preferred news sources — every inconvenient fact is “a right-wing lie” or comes from an “unreliable news source.”
Republicans do not vote in near the percentage of Democrats. We can argue that Democrats near complete voting in opaque urban areas is contrived, but that is no excuse for Republicans sitting on their butts at home. Also, anyone who has aged parents in nursing homes should ensure they are not made victims of Democrats get out the vote campaigns.
The immediate solution lies within the 40% or so who claim to be Independents. How much authoritarianism and surveillance can they tolerate? How much irrationality can they observe masquerading as “fairness” or some other vague good, until they recognize grave danger to themselves?
Vote Democrats out of power. Do so beginning at the county level where they get their political training, and where possible repeat at the State level.
We have a polity now that gangs up on Republicans and center-right independents who constitute about half of the electorate. This gang is suffused with certainty, with the self-assurance of the possessed and the hubris of a religious know-it-all. Democrats have brought disparate elements together – academics, mainstream media, social justice warriors, minority opinionators, leftist college students, abortionists, unionistas, southern border absolutists – and forged a juggernaut that stifles news if it disfavors the liberal perspective. This is, of course, anti-American and anti-democratic, for it silences much of the public square, thus ignoring relevant news that is required for an informed electorate. Democrats in high office stabilize the gang by propagating features of the progressive zeitgeist which are wildly popular to gang members. We must contest these authoritarians by registering to vote and pursuing a rational, purposeful and knowledgeable course.
“The U.S. is not a single-party state.” COULDA FOOLED ME.
The IBD is sounding more and more like “controlled opposition”…sort of the journalistic equivalent of the Republicans.
It was your (Republican/Conservative) support of mass immigration over the last 40 years that handed power to the left. Everything establishment conservatism said about mass immigration and assimilation during that period has come a cropper, has been shown to be false. Now we’ll all pay the price for that folly. Forever.