“We have to clean out the rot of our failed foreign policy establishment,” Donald Trump declared at his rally in South Carolina on Saturday. Trump’s thousands of enthusiastic supporters who braved the unseasonably cold March temperatures in the Palmetto State fully agree.
Part of that “rot” is due to Republicans in Name Only (RINOs). Trump was in South Carolina to help defeat two of them, Representatives Tom Rice (R-SC) and Nancy Mace (R-SC).
Congressman Rice’s response to Trump’s praiseworthy visit to the small state was illustrative of how clueless many entrenched incumbents are. Rice referred to Trump as a “would-be tyrant,” and bizarrely compared patriots who rallied at the Capitol last year on January 6th to violence in Ukraine.
The invasion of Ukraine would never have occurred if Trump had remained in the White House, yet Rep. Rice was one of ten Republican turncoats who voted to impeach him a second time in the final days of Trump’s first term. All of those RINO congressmen need to be defeated in their primaries, and three of them have already quit in the prime of their careers.
The “rot” in D.C. bears responsibility for embracing a globalist agenda that allowed the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine to occur. Conservative Poland, one of the poorest nations in Europe, has borne the brunt of the exodus so far of 1.7 million refugees from Ukraine, nearly 5% of Poland’s population, with almost no help by wealthier liberal European countries.
Ukraine has prohibited men of fighting age (defined as 18 to 60) from leaving the country, which has created another crisis for the transgender agenda. Men who self-identify as women are not allowed to leave, while women who self-identify as men are changing back to their biological gender in order to escape.
The incredibly charitable Poland was recently sanctioned, at an estimated cost of billions of dollars, by the Leftist European countries in part for not being pro-transgender enough. Hungary was sanctioned too, although it is taking in hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees.
If the Leftist politicians who seized power in Ukraine in 2014 had been more conservative by promoting armed self-defense by its citizenry, as done in Finland and Switzerland, then Russia might have thought twice before invading, and millions of Ukrainians would have less reason to flee. Self-defense is necessary both to repel an invader and to protect against resultant looting and violence.
In 1999 Ukraine reported to the United Nations that civilians are not allowed to possess handguns. In a lawless society that results from bombing, less access to self-defense means more refugees.
Contrast that with Finland, which is generally liberal but has long valued a high rate of private ownership of guns. Finland ranks #4 worldwide in gun ownership, while the United States is #1.
The Soviet Union unsuccessfully invaded Finland in 1939, and it was Finland’s private ownership of guns that saved it. Ordinary Finnish citizens then repeatedly ambushed Soviet soldiers as they took cigarette or meal breaks.
The Soviet Union thereby lost six times as many men as Finland did, and the Soviet soldiers quickly retreated back to where they came from. It was not military jets or no-fly zones or more tanks that saved Finland, but private handgun ownership.
To this day Finland allows and encourages a fully armed citizenry, and training is widely available. Switzerland, also a small country trapped between more powerful neighbors, has maintained its independence for over 700 years the same way.
But instead of adopting a conservative approach of self-defense, the “rot” in our State Department and Europe encouraged Ukraine’s politicians to expect NATO and American intervention with billions of dollars and fighter jets. Ukraine President Zelensky himself is speaking to an unprecedented joint session of Congress on Wednesday, but the United States should not become the world’s policeman again.
The liberal rot in D.C. snuck into the massive Ukraine aid bill more gun control in the United States, without adequate debate. The Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2022 (VAWA) was rushed through a late-night session, with one Republican saying she was just trying to help Ukrainians by enacting the overall bill that sends nearly $14 billion to liberal Ukrainian politicians.
VAWA’s new gun control provision authorizes our federal government to deputize state and local officials to enforce federal gun laws. It further requires new federal investigations into all denials returned by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), even though most of those denials are wrongly based on federal database errors.
Many including Trump have called for Biden to allow more drilling for oil to end dependency on Russia. We should also be exporting handguns to arm private citizens in countries that live in fear of invasion by Russia or China, as liberals should have been advocating for Ukraine.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work. Their great-grandfather came to the United States from Switzerland in 1854.