Sixty years ago this week, fledgling politician Ronald Reagan delivered what he referred to as merely “the speech” — remarks now known simply as the legendary “A Time For Choosing.” The years 1964 and 2024, it turns out, aren’t that dissimilar. On Tuesday, the American people will make the choice Reagan described decades ago in support of Barry Goldwater: “We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”
It’s not wrong to question how each and every election can be labeled some version of the most “important” or “consequential” of our lifetimes. This one, though, might truly be the one that determines not just the short-term but also the long-term future of America.
On the radical left, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz — two generally failed politicians who managed to luck and network their way into positions of power — seek to abolish the Electoral College, pack the Supreme Court, and then run roughshod over the United States Constitution just as the Biden-Harris administration has done repeatedly since 2021. Electing those who wish to destroy or at the least render irrelevant the institutional guardrails that have protected Americans from power-tripping Democrats would indeed send future generations into a dark and dangerous future.
For those who also judge their safety and security beyond our own borders, the looming specter of the Democrats’ continued weakness ushering us into World War III is not hyperbole. During previous reporting trips to Taiwan and Israel, conversations with leaders of our allies revealed a bleak outlook for them if American strength is not restored. Do we want to live in a country and a world where our radical enemies have unfettered access to the homeland and remain unconcerned about launching deadly attacks on our service members and allies around the world?
Another of the now-iconic lines from Reagan’s 1964 speech encapsulating the modern conservative movement was a prescient warning that “the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so.” To pretend Biden, Harris, Walz, and the rest of the Democrats’ machinery is the result of ignorance is to miss the danger of their agenda. Their policies and words may be repugnant, foolish, and downright idiotic — but they know precisely what they’re doing.
It wasn’t a slip of the tongue when Hillary Clinton called those who refused to be bullied into supporting her “deplorables.” It wasn’t a mistake when now-National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sparked the Russia collusion hoax. Biden didn’t accidentally label more than 74 million of his fellow countrymen “enemies of democracy” while bathed in red light and flanked by United States Marines outside Independence Hall. Democrats didn’t simply misunderstand Trump supporters at Madison Square Garden last weekend when they attempted to smear them as “Nazis” and “fascists.” Biden, again this week, wasn’t missing “context” and an apostrophe as his aides insisted when he again attacked Trump’s supporters as “garbage.”
While bold conservatives and Republicans take the brunt of Democrats’ vendetta against those who value America’s founding principles and their God-given rights, all of America and her future citizens will suffer from their attacks. Since our “liberal friends” can’t be counted on or trusted to do the right thing for the future prosperity or security of the United States, it’s up to all of us deplorable-fascist-Nazi-
Sixty years ago, Reagan warned that, if Americans “lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.” Is that the fate we want to wake up to on November 6th?
That’s why, borrowing from another great leader of free people against tyranny, Winston Churchill, Reagan quoted the British Bulldog’s line that “there’s something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.” Now is the time for choosing to rise to that duty and, as Reagan described, have our “rendezvous with destiny.”