OPINION

Reboot America: Step Back From The Brink Before It’s Too Late

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

Welcome to 1968 2.0, the new and improved chaos, featuring a cutting edge assault on our foundational principles by an idiot elite that thinks it can gut the rule of law without consequence. Time to reboot, to wipe the hard drive and reload the factory software coded two-plus centuries ago by those dead white male geniuses.

Except I don’t think this country’s elite has the character, nor understands our constitutional technology enough, to do it. I think it fails to appreciate what is going on outside its cloisters, among those weird, patriotic, religious, and – significantly – armed people living in uncool places between the coasts. I think it believes this anger is a passing fad, that it can bluff and bully its way through it the way it did to previous challenges to its rule.

Obama and the progressive elite were not satisfied merely with exonerating the clearly guilty Hillary Clinton of charges that would have sent any mere mortal to the slammer. They had to shove it in our faces. The AG met with Bill Clinton. Then the FBI director laid out a devastating case, followed by an “and…nope.” Then President Faily McWorsethancarter swept her away in Air Force One – at our expense – to campaign with her and even placed her at a podium with the presidential seal while the liberal media thrilled and quivered. This is beyond mere corruption. This is them gloating over what they see as their unassailable power. This is them laughing at us.

Then Obama made yet another speech telling us how cops are racist. Understand that his attacks on cops are an attack on all of us normal Americans. Like soldiers, the police come from the ranks of us normal Americans, not the elite. And just as with soldiers, we normals revere cops as symbolic of the best of how we see ourselves – loyal, brave, patriotic protectors of order and decency. Obama – the guy who immediately assumed a Cambridge cop acted “stupidly” – as well as Hillary Clinton and the liberal elite, attacked cops as racist and evil as surrogates for attacking us as racist and evil.

And then yet another racial malcontent went on a shooting spree. The Los Angeles cop killer, the Virginia TV reporter, and now this creep in Dallas, all full of racist hate, and not one damn word about it from the elite. The motive hurt the narrative; they wanted to talk about cops oppressing people, so the elite simply lied by its silence about the Dallas killer’s expressly racist motive. And their media love-slaves obliged; when it became clear that this clown who couldn’t make E4 after six years was essentially just a Black Lives Matter supporter in a hurry, the story faded away.

But the lies did not fade away. Obama came out, feigned ignorance about motive (“We many never know what motivated the guy who expressly said that he was motivated by a desire to murder white cops.”), and blamed us yet again – this time for our stubborn refusal to disarm ourselves to please people who hate us and who refuse to acknowledge what drives those who say outright that they intend to murder us.

Did Obama try unity? Of course not – he divided Americans into the good ones who agree with him and us bad ones who refuse to kneel and bow. Leftists don’t want unity and they don’t want peace. Community organizers succeed when they divide; they need discord and hate to survive. Understand that all this discord and hate is not a bug. To them, it is a feature.

And this strategy is really, really dumb. It’s dumb because this country is not one big Chicago. It’s not one discrete, dysfunctional tumor surrounded by healthy tissue. The progressives can afford to play their games in the Chicagos and Austins and Berkeleys because outside the city limits there are normals of every race, color, and creed whose work feeds and powers and defends the elite’s urban petri dishes of blue model failure. They can live out their lefty fantasies because we normals subsidize them through our normalcy, like parents from Orange County paying tuition at Oberlin so their blonde daughter can learn how there’s no such thing as gender while she majors in Anti-Colonialist Pottery.

But what happens when they try to do that to the whole country? This time, the normals can’t just move away. Instead of driving them out, now the elite has to suppress normal Americans in place. They don’t realize that they are putting our backs against the wall.

And you have to wonder – have the elites considered their endgame? Because they may have learned the wrong lesson when they drove all the normals out of the Chicagos and Austins and Berkeleys. They may actually believe that normal Americans can just be bullied and badgered into submission. This is a very, very, very dangerous notion.

Have you elitists ever met normal Americans? Try this little experiment. Jump in your Prius and drive to, say, Oklahoma. Go ahead, Google it – I’ll wait. Then find a bar and go in after work. Look for a guy at a table in boots and jeans and a work shirt enjoying a Coors or some other non-craft, non-pumpkin-infused beer. Then tell him this:

“Hey stupid, you’re dumb because your parents couldn’t send you to college. You’re also dumb for believing in Jesus. You’re a sucker and a baby killer for joining the Army and fighting in Iraq. Plus, you have privilege because your great-great-great-great grandfather came from Glasgow. So I’m going to tell you what to do from now on. I’m your boss and moral superior. You’re going to let any dude dressed like a woman into the bathroom with your daughter. You’re going to turn in your global warming-causing pick-up truck. You’re going to be out of your job when we finish off the oil industry. You’re going to give up your guns. And I don’t care what you say about any of it. You don’t matter. You don’t get a say. Also, you’re racist.”

See how that works out, but check your dental coverage first. Now, think about how that strategy is going to work out in our country as a whole.

What’s the endgame here, liberals? Do you see over half the country just . . . giving up? Surrendering? Throwing in the towel once you have sufficiently nagged and insulted them? Or do you see them getting mad? Your media lackeys keep attributing phenomena like Trump and even Sanders to “anger.” Well, yeah. Right now, they are expressing that anger through legitimate means, at the ballot box. But what happens when you decide you’re going to step outside the law once again to ensure that their lawful expression of that anger is silenced?

Do you expect that normals will just shrug and submit? What if they don’t? How many of the 60,000-70,000 guns Americans buy every single day do you elites purchase?

What’s the endgame? What happens when – and the day will come – the normals say “No?” Does the elite try force? There’s no doubt it would if it could, but in the end, it needs to ask itself another question: Exactly who is willing to fight and die for their liberal Utopia? The elitists themselves? Their snowflakey kids Kaden and Ashleigh? Do they think they can pay enough people to suit up and go make people conform? How much money will you need to pay somebody to risk his skin to go down to Texas and try to take those Lone Star knuckle-draggers’ guns?

Oh, this is crazy talk! Hey, another right winger threatening rebellion! You know, the elite’s tactics of attacking strawmen and deliberately lying about political opponents pioneered by Obama and the Jon Stewart clones makes reasoned discussion almost impossible, and the malicious dishonesty underlying these ploys only ratchets up the anger. Eliminate the legitimate modes of opposition and you’ll leave only illegitimate modes of opposition.

I am not advocating the consequences that I see coming from the elite’s actions; to say so is a lie, though I suspect that will not stop them from lying about this column in the comments and elsewhere. I am only predicting the likely consequences of the elite’s unwise and malicious campaign against those it hates and seeks to rule.

But here is another way. Step back from the brink and reboot. Stop the corruption. Embrace the rule of law. Listen to those you have ignored. Hear what they say. Drop the divisive initiatives designed to humiliate and bring normals to heel – the gun grabs, the bathroom edicts, the Christian cake baker pogroms.

But if you can’t do that, if you can’t give up the money and the power, if the joy of inflicting petty oppressions and humiliations upon the people you look down on is just too satisfying to pass up, then ask yourself: What is your endgame?