Editor's Note: This column was co-authored by Jim McCoy.
George Washington, the true father of our nation and current subject of ridicule and derision by progressives once wrote, "You could as soon as scrub the blackamoor white, as to change the principles of a profest [professed] Democrat; and that he will leave nothing unattempted to overturn the Government of this Country." Nearly 250 years later the Democrats haven’t changed much.
By nature, we are both optimistic academics and try to see the goodness everywhere in the United States. It has become nearly impossible to perpetuate our Pollyannaism since Donald Trump became president; it is getting much worse rather than better. How has this happened and what will become of our nation? There is good reason to believe our nation is heading for a bloody civil war given the myriad forces supporting rioting, looting and terrorizing innocent people during the Floyd/Brooks conflagrations.
People are starting to take sides not seen since the American Civil War. Revolutionary forces beyond most conservatives’ understanding are raising huge sums of seemingly legitimate money to fight any and all conservative change after voters rallied against the Obama years and their causes.
The mainstream media are all in on defaming and defeating this president, his cabinet members and outside supporters. This battle royal has been primed and sponsored by the "Trump resistance movement"--leftist grant-making organizations supported by the MSM, education establishment, Hollywood and woke corporations.
Groups like Soros’ Tides Foundation, Open Society Foundation and the Emergent Fund all finance surreptitiously the overthrow of conservatism in America. This arrangement allows any and all donors to contribute large sums of money to leftist causes while remaining completely anonymous. For all we know, prominent Republicans could have given some aid to these enduring efforts against Trump and conservative ideals.
The Emergent Fund website says, "The fund will focus on grassroots organizations in communities of color who are facing injustice based on racial, ethnic, religious, and other forms of discrimination. We will provide resources to defend against what's coming, and to develop innovative strategies to transform our country." Transform via rebellion, get it?
According to Bloomberg News, even what seems to be upstanding organizations like the Ford Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz's Open Philanthropy Project surreptitiously promote and fund far-left causes. This happens because all that is needed in such organizations is a few leftist board members to co-opt the board’s other members and direct legitimate money to corrupt causes.
Since President Trump was sworn into office, America’s current insurrection by the progressives has been slightly more measured than our last civil war. Abraham Lincoln was elected president on November 6, 1860; it took three months before the Confederate States of America was formed. Two months later the Battle of Fort Sumter became the first battle of the American Civil War. Our new civil war, while taking longer to develop, is equally acrimonious and contested and is once again led by Democrats in a minority of states against a Republican president and all conservatives.
Our revolution-in-the-making is happening through a confluence of forces. Democrat politicians have become emboldened by young, truly radical members like The Squad (AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley). The academy has retired or expelled most of its conservatives, trading the competition between the most robust theories, for blind acceptance of climate change dogma and its lucre. Lawrence Krauss lamented in the Wall Street Journal how even the hard sciences have been corrupted by ideological biases about race, sex and economic dominance--“National laboratories and university science departments joined the one-day strike. The pre-eminent science journal Nature, which disseminates what it views as the most important science stories in a daily newsletter, featured an article titled 'Ten simple rules for building an anti-racist lab.'"
Many medical doctors and organizations like the AMA also cave in to leftist ideas like Covid-19 treatment orthodoxy. Dr. Stanley Goldfarb opines in the Wall Street Journal that medical organizations and especially medical schools have succumbed to the stupidity of progressivism saying, “A new wave of educational specialists is increasingly influencing medical education. They emphasize ‘social justice’ that relates to health care only tangentially.”
Older, established Democrats like Joe Biden are fearful they will be cast out by younger, more radical contenders and are doubling down on radical progressive ideas. Public opinion polls are produced (not conducted) almost daily by the very forces that support the radical agenda for America, favoring Democrats and leftist causes uniformly.
In Political Tribes, Amy Chua has written that today’s tribal politics demands group markers—“There is nothing more tribal than elite disdain for the provincial, the plebian, the patriotic [deplorables]…America’s elites miscalled the 2016 election in part because they don’t understand—even look down on—what matters most to America’s non-elites.” The Deep State and mainstream media are among the elitist of these elite.
In his new book, Left Turn—How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind, Tim Grosseclose describes the PQ—Political Quotient. Grosseclose argues that most people can be identified by their PQs on a 100-point scale. Groseclose and Milyo, in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, also computed SQ’s—“Slant Quotient” of major media outlets. Most readers will be surprised to learn that PQ scores of media outlets are markedly more biased than politicians’— news from almost all newspapers today will be decidedly more leftist than most Democrat politicians. Watching Apple TV, CNN, MSNBC is the same.
With this empirical evidence of Americans being fed wholesale leftist propaganda by most media outlets, it shouldn’t surprise us that so many Americans now support abjectly leftist causes like BLM, police defunding, and tearing down statues of American forefathers including black abolitionists. As a Prager University video documents, this triumvirate of media, Democrat, and education misrepresent Republicans and their ideals, arguing that we are the anti-women, racist and anti-freedom party. They have remade our language with meaningless catch phrases targeted at conservatives like systemic racism, social injustice, wokeness, terrorist, anti-scientist, climate deniers, religious fanatics, bigots, greedy capitalist, etc.
Conservatives are the polite segment of American Society with standards of personal and public decorum much higher than most liberals. In the prevailing “cancel culture”, the very existence of conservatism is being threatened. The temperature of the American conservative world today is rising to Covid-19 levels; there is a growing sense that we are finally ready to fight back.
Election 2020 won’t be just another election, it may be our Ft. Sumter.