Dennis Prager has rightly said and written that fear of the Left is the most powerful force of life in America today. Given that undeniable reality, it is no wonder many conservatives have predictably developed an acute case of Stockholm Syndrome. Upon pain of losing their jobs, being shamed or doxed, disowned by family and friends, their lives threatened, conservatives are forced to either publicly repent and "agree" with the totalitarian edicts and programs of the Left or endure debilitating moral injury on a daily basis in silence.
Tragically, many conservatives fail to understand the warped psychology of the Left, or the emotional pathologies that undergird leftist thought and behavior. Conservatives tend to believe that progressives are good people who mean well but have bad ideas. Progressives, on the other hand, tend to believe conservatives are evil people who need to be eradicated from the face of the earth. Ever sanctimonious, progressives are humorless snobs with boulder-sized chips on their shoulders, always looking to be offended by something, anything. Consciously choosing to perceive themselves as victims, they seek unearned nobility and cheap virtue through faux victimhood. When real world facts contradict their ideology and cognitive dissonance ensues, triggered progressives often revert to their Taliban-like proclivities for destruction and violence; like the sniveling and entitled children they are (psychologically, emotionally), progressives know that conservative adults will foot the bill and clean up the mess afterwards. Infantilized though they are, progressives desperately want to impose (and live within) a profoundly authoritarian, government-centric society, a progressive police state where they alone dictate all terms and conditions of the social order.
Posing as moral paragons, progressives are secular zealots who will not debate ideas in good faith; instead, they reflexively reach for their grab bag of labels -- racist, sexist, homophobe, and related catechisms of the Left -- not to facilitate dialogue but to render it impossible (the dogma lives loudly within them, as Senator Dianne Feinstein might say). Progressives habitually speak in euphemisms, torturing language to denude it of meaning. Thus, an obviously fascist entity like Antifa claims that its Orwellian name somehow renders it "anti-fascist." Progressives believe their regressive and reactionary ideas (socialism? wasn't that debate settled last century?) are in fact rooted in "progress." When progressives turn their passionately contorted faces up to the sky and scream "Power to the people!," what they really mean is more power to the government over people. Progressives cannot be deprogrammed and do not wish to live in comity alongside conservatives in a friendly spirit of social and civic compromise. Progressives are rigid conformists who seek to force everybody to live in their soul-sapping monoculture. From demagogues like Nancy Pelosi to the smiling news anchors deliberately inciting violence to the "fact checkers" who "curate" the content found on Google and Wikipedia right down to many (most?) individual Democrat voters, progressives seek to vilify and cancel anybody who disagrees with them or who is perceived to be obstructing their Utopian agenda.
Frightened by the pervasive climate of fear instilled by the hysterical Left with the attendant specter of endless mob violence, many heretofore conservative thinkers and Republican politicians have chosen the path of least resistance and made common cause with the Left. These Vichyite collaborationists (whether Republican politicians, syndicated columnists, or those working for the Lincoln Project) now openly endorse the civilization-destroying objectives of the Left, while reductively affixing blame, Alinsky-like, on the all-purpose bogeyman known as Orange Man Bad and his voters. As evidence of Republican fear and perfidy, note how the vast majority of Republicans in congress eagerly cooperated with the government-media Russia hoax, long after they knew it was a preposterous beard, a fig leaf concealing a coup. Yet, with very few exceptions, eager-to-appease Republicans in congress vocally defended the destructive and destabilizing charade until the very end, to the detriment of the country, the president, and even their own political party. And now with an open Supreme Court seat to fill due to the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, senate Republicans, solidly in the majority, are dithering and making excuses to avoid voting on or confirming a Trump-nominated judge before the 2020 election. Cowardly conservatives offering themselves up as useful idiots will never pacify the Left.
The social compact between conservative citizens and the federal government, which uses conservative tax dollars in furtherance of big government's progressive agenda (antithetical to the interests of conservatives), was arguably broken long ago. But it wasn't until the Obama administration came to power that the federal government charted a bold new course of openly and unapologetically persecuting conservatives, whether at the national or grass roots level, with the intent to silence, marginalize, or destroy them outright. As has been documented by The Federalist, 95% of political donations made by federal government employees (of whom there are millions) are earmarked for the Democrat party, the party forever espousing ever larger, more intrusive, and more powerful government. Lest it be forgotten (history is now either bowdlerized or goes untaught), the Democrats were the party of slavery, of the Confederacy, of segregation, of the Ku Klux Klan, and the party that blocked civil rights for African Americans, among other unsavory historical facts.
Indentured servant-taxpayers who work a typical eight hour work shift generally give no thought to the fact that roughly the first three hours of their workday and salary are wholly expropriated to pay federal, state, and local taxes into the gaping, voracious maw of government. Much of the money pays for the exorbitant salaries, perks, and benefits of highly ideological federal employees who perform little work (your tax dollars at work, indeed) but who have outsized say not only in how those tax dollars are used, but in how conservative taxpayers may conduct their very lives. Leading gilded lives of leisure, federal employees -- just like public and private sector labor unions -- then recycle untold millions of those expropriated tax dollars back into Democrat campaign coffers in classic quid pro quo fashion. With virtually the entirety of the federal workforce in bed with the Left, it is no wonder the Obama administration brazenly weaponized the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Security Agency (NSA), and Department of Justice (DOJ) against conservatives, whether peaceful tea party groups, private citizens like Dinesh D'Souza, or others feared and loathed by the Left, like candidate (now President) Donald Trump.
Plush in their taxpayer-funded sinecures, federal bureaucrats, an overwhelming majority of whom identify as Democrats, know they cannot be fired and are exempt (just like the license plate says) from any accountability for their actions. Federal agencies were only too happy to operate as the Obama administration's progressive battering ram, prosecuting and punishing conservatives, driving them out of the public square by using the awesome force of government. In addition to its near total monopoly over government, media, and culture, the Progressive Left, with the blessing of Democrat politicians and the federal bureaucracy writ large, continues to encourage its pampered urban guerrilla wannabes to visit mayhem upon the nation's cities. Whether it was the Democrat-aligned Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and Weathermen of yesteryear or the Black Lives Matter (BLM), Antifa, and Occupy Wall Street brownshirts of today, the use of violence as a political tool is a longstanding tactic of the intolerant Left. Yet, few elected Republicans (certainly not the quisling Mitt Romney, who has praised Antifa and BLM) have the courage to condemn or confront these violent and racist proxies of the fascistic Left.
Every slander directed against conservatives by progressives is a projection. Yet, the slanders largely go unanswered by conservatives. Consider, for example, the slur that American conservatives are Nazis. The socialist Nazis of Germany before and during WWII were the uber woke left-wing progressives of their day. Nietzsche and Freud had declared that God was dead. Soon thereafter, irreligious Nazi supermen substituted their new, progressive morality in place of God and religion. Entire populations of humans would need to be exterminated in order for the human race to be recalibrated and perfected. America's progressive icon Margaret Sanger further inspired the Nazis with her science-based social engineering projects revolving around sterilization, eugenics, and aborting black babies (human weeds, in the eyes of progressives like Sanger). Decades later, Sanger's progressive vision has been fully realized, as Planned Parenthood has aborted tens of millions of babies, and profits further by selling body parts and organs harvested from those babies (who, alas, had no "choice" in the matter). For decades, progressives have been defecating upstream in America's cultural river, with noxious results for our politics downstream. Yet, with very few exceptions, elected Republicans have groveled in fear at the feet of the Left, saying precious little in response, and doing even less.
Progressives will never live by the Golden Rule. Rules and laws are only for conservatives, and do not apply to progressives. Unlike leftists, conservatives never riot in the streets. Conservatives do not destroy public and private property, or murder thousands annually in the nation's cities. Hardly a day goes by without some A-list progressive celebrity or Ivy League academic engaging in exterminationist rhetoric, publicly wishing murder and death upon #45 and his voters. Can anybody recall a corollary on the Right -- say, Candace Owens, James Woods or Jordan Peterson -- tweeting and calling with impunity for the killing of Obama, his family, and his (Obamabot) voters? Of course not. Similarly, every progressive who shrieks about racism is engaging in projection. Only progressives, irrespective of their skin color, publicly demonize people with degrading racist insults like Bananas, Coconuts, and Oreos/Uncle Toms/the N-word (dehumanizing slurs against conservatives who happen to be Asian, Hispanic, or African American). To obsess over race and to ascribe moral virtue or moral blame to groups of people based on the degree of melanin in their skin is the definition of racism, and progressives are drenched in it (it's in progressives' DNA, as Obama might say). Yet, Republicans continue to emphasize decorum and retreat, as if they are playing a friendly game of pinochle in a gladiatorial arena where progressives observe no rules whatsoever in a grisly fight to the death.
It is surreal to behold progressive LGBTQ groups making common cause with militant Muslims and attacking the values and beliefs of Christians. Would gay Americans really want to be airlifted into Iran or Saudi Arabia in order to organize parades and floats, wave the rainbow flag, and shout loudly about the glories of homosexuality? Would feminists who despise the so-called western patriarchy, for that matter, fare better in Yemen or Afghanistan?
Amoral progressives yearn for socialism in the monumental conceit they are saving the planet from the evils of capitalism, all the while wearing Nike attire, drinking Starbucks, and typing furiously on their iPhones while waiting for an Uber to take them to Panera Bread to buy sustainable organic quinoa (that they know just magically shows up on the shelf). Yet, conservatives (including, sadly, many modern church clergy) refuse to participate in a rearguard action, let alone mount a counteroffensive, against sustained leftist assaults on free market capitalism, the nuclear family, traditional values, and common sense itself.
Absolutely everything is politicized by the Left. Every institution, every policy, every topic and anodyne utterance is subordinated to left-wing politics. For example, progressives claim science supports the idea there are 50 or perhaps thousands of different genders (does that also apply to fellow mammals like dogs, dolphins, and lemurs?). Incapable of empiricism or critical thinking, progressives and Democrats are the Borg of Star Trek, mindless marionettes who have the paranoid millennial belief that the end of the world is nigh due to climate change but whose carbon footprint absolutely dwarfs those of their despised parents and grandparents. Since at least the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962, progressives have believed life on earth is always on the verge of extinction -- but extinction or resource depletion is always 10-12 years from now, whenever "now" happens to be. With climate change, unless we act now by seizing trillions of dollars from the productive private sector and transferring all that money to unaccountable international governing bodies and jet-setting bureaucrats (as if that will somehow stop climate change in its tracks, or accomplish anything at all, other than further engorging the rapacious tapeworm of government), the earth will soon become uninhabitable. So say progressives who can't be bothered with rudimentary facts, which they dismiss as inconvenient and irrelevant anachronisms. Yet, Republican silence and passivity lends unwarranted credence to the ad hominem attacks and deranged narratives of the Left.
The media and the Left (a redundancy, granted) maintain that conservatives concerned about the government-wide attempted takedown and removal of Trump are somehow engaging in conspiracy theories. It is a mass psychosis of the paranoid Left that #45 conspired with Russia to steal the election from the fair and virtuous Hillary. But in the absence of any discernible pushback against coup-minded federal agents, the wider public correctly perceives Republicans are too afraid of political combat, no matter the atrocity perpetrated by the Left. Like the innate bullies they are, or frenzied sharks smelling blood in the water, leftists are further emboldened by Republican timidity and weakness.
The Left understands how to leverage the psychology of fear, and has made censorship in its many manifestations (whether speech codes, boycotts, de-platforming, shaming, or death threats and outright violence) into an art form, using its corporate proxies in Big Tech, media, universities, and HR departments to muzzle conservative speech. Funny how dissent, so patriotic when practiced by the Left, suddenly becomes intolerable and unpatriotic when it is a conservative who is doing the dissenting. Self-censorship and coerced silence may not be violence, but it is passive complicity, and most elected Republicans maintain a deafening silence on matters of free speech as the Left eviscerates the first amendment and takes another hill, another bridgehead, overrunning the culture by force of intimidation.
Like the Russian and Ukrainian collusion delusions, the racial hate crime hoaxes go on and on without end -- just like the fake news that shamelessly and uncritically promote the hoaxes. If it weren't so toxically corrosive to society, it would be comical how the hoaxes and fake news all go in the same direction. Progressives hate America for what it manifestly is not (transphobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, etc.), while conservatives are rightly wary of America for what it is rapidly becoming (a postmodern dystopia in thrall to the hard Left; anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-civilization, anti-reality). If anybody at all should be taking a knee in protest against the social conditions of life in modern America, it should be conservatives. Yet, the prevailing narrative is that anonymous, law-abiding citizens and taxpayers who vote Republican are by far the worst demographic in America's new caste system, and need to feel the lash of the federal government, and perhaps experience mob violence as well. In their endless campaign of incitement against conservatives, the media caricature Trump voters as uneducated, racist, rural mouth breathers (that is, citizens who don't have worthless college degrees in the humanities, or related gender, ethnic, and grievance studies). However, few Republicans in office have the courage to speak up in defense of their own conservative constituencies.
In yet another case of projection, brainwashed leftists claim that conservatives have built a "cult of personality" around #45. This fallacy is pathetically echoed by former conservatives like George Will and Jonah Goldberg, both of whom have succumbed to the sweet release of Stockholm Syndrome. These sunshine conservatives fail to understand it is progressives with their Che Guevara iconography, images of Mao, Castro, Lenin, Marx, Obama, and other beloved figures of the hard Left, who swoon and worship at the altar of celebrity. Unlike progressives, conservatives are far more likely to vote on policy rather than superficial looks or a magnetic personality. The axiomatic charge that conservative voters are backwards and uneducated hicks (the Left disingenuously conflates a so-called college education with wisdom and enlightenment) is particularly laughable. Progressive social psychologists and the media seem to infer that the inner cities, which vote in lockstep for Democrats, are populated by a bunch of PhDs. Yet, most elected Republicans have no response to these calumnies; like Elvis, they have left the building.
In America and throughout the West, conservatives today are analogous to the Jews of Germany, circa 1936 or 1937, convenient cardboard cutout villains and scapegoats for the endless and irrational grievances of an increasingly shrill and violent -- but also highly-subsidized, well-organized, and government-supported -- international progressive movement. Raw hatred provides an inexhaustible supply of rocket fuel for the Left, and state-sanctioned anti-conservative (and anti-white) bigotry is normalized and unremarkable, cheered by the media, and increasingly becoming codified into law. The Silent Majority of 1972 is more like a Silenced Minority in 2020, while the lunatic fringe has been mainstreamed.
If the Democrats win in November, it will be one-party statist rule in America, perhaps forever, and this time it won't just be the IRS and the surveillance state gunning after innocent conservatives who dare to raise their voices in the public square. With the Democrats controlling the White House, the racist BLM and Antifa will have pride of place in American government, with direct say over policy matters along with a complete reordering of American society (think Animal Farm meets Lord of the Flies). Like the author of Mein Kampf, these modern fascists have a Final Solution in mind, and are very clear about who they think is to blame for all of society's perceived shortcomings. Of course, history repeats itself, but never exactly as before. So for traditionalists and conservatives, it might be boxcars, or something more subtle, or perhaps something even more sinister. It is equally concerning that Stockholm Syndrome Republicans will continue to remain silent at best, or perhaps (quisling-like) openly complicit at worst.
