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Now that former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has unmasked the true intentions of the hard left regarding guns – to repeal the Second Amendment – it begs a very troubling question:
How can it be that America’s youth – spurred on to participate in mass gun control demonstrations by their leftist handlers – is actually demanding the removal of…their own rights?
Sure, those kids who’ve been making a spectacle of themselves – organized and financed by the Oprah/Clooney/Soros axis of statism – say they only want “common-sense” gun control, but of course, that’s what they are supposed to say. Why? Because if, like Justice Stevens, the organizers revealed their true intentions, the public would turn on them.
It’s like so many other issues, where but for a left-lockstep media, the mask would be pulled off those who view America as a nation defined by racism, sexism and multiple additional phobias, and who consequently seek to reverse this curse through government control of virtually every area of our lives from cradle to grave.
Certainly, the left’s contempt for their own rights – and ours – is hardly limited to the Second Amendment. They increasingly threaten the First Amendment – you know, the one that allows people to speak in public without fear of arrest. Free speech is undeniably under assault on college campuses from coast to coast, with surveys revealing a disturbing trend of restricting unwelcome or politically incorrect speech and labeling it as “violence” – a pretext for declaring it unlawful.
Is there a single historical precedent for a people insisting on the specific renunciation of their own rights – ones that are so central to their own freedom, and which were won at such a great cost of blood and treasure? No, there most decidedly is not. Tyrants don’t promise to take away rights – they simply abolish them once they assume power. But demanding to have your own rights eliminated is an entirely different matter.
The hundreds of millions of people around the world who are living under despotism would do almost anything to secure these rights to speak freely and defend themselves. They understand, as Mao Tse-Tung once said, “all political power comes from the barrel of a gun.” That’s why so many of them seek to move here.
But it seems impressionable young Americans are being instructed by the left to hate what America represents – including themselves. They are taught to be ashamed of any privileges which might have accrued to them by birth and to renounce the very values, culture, and freedoms that allow them, through none of their own effort, to live in the most free and prosperous nation in the history of civilization. This is beyond disturbing.
We know how conservatives have been silenced on the college campus, but this growing contempt for constitutional rights extends well beyond the academy. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump was forced to cancel a campaign event in Chicago – and had several others placed in jeopardy – because of orchestrated violence and threats leveled against Trump supporters exercising their right to speech and assembly. Demonstrators at the women’s march right after Trump’s inauguration were treated to virtue-signaling, anti-American celebrities, one of whom actually said she considered burning down the White House because she refused to accept the results of the election. Calls for removing Trump began the day after he was elected and continue unabated for, as the lawyers like to say, any reason or no reason.
In provoking the most bitter political divide in generations, the institutional and activist left have not needed the right to point out their naked desire for power at all costs. Like Justice Stevens, they have unmasked themselves. They have unleashed their most radical inclinations by attempting to overturn the results of a free election. And they have done so by fully implementing Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon…Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
If attempting to topple a president by throwing a kitchen sink’s worth of scurrilous and fabricated charges against him is not a certain sign of a totalitarian mindset, nothing is.
We saw nuanced hints of this – and some obviously not so nuanced – during the Obama years. The 44th President and his cohorts watered down the freedom of religion embedded in the first amendment by consistently referring to it as “freedom of worship.” The underlying message: while the government will not try to enter churches and shut down worship services… if you try to extend religious freedom to the public square, all bets are off and you’re on your own.
As tens of millions of Americans were set to keep a bit more of their own money after the tax reform bill was passed, Nancy Pelosi clearly implied that only the greedy would celebrate this legislation which she called “Armageddon.” This was entirely consistent with the leftist view that if you believe you are entitled to enjoy just a touch more of the fruits of your own labor – or, God forbid, oppose the government continuing the most confiscatory tax rate on businesses in the free world – you deserve to be condemned. You should instead willingly pay more taxes to a demonstrably dysfunctional government and demand that your constitutional right to self-defense be overturned.
As jobs abound, businesses thrive, and the economy grows at a rate well above and beyond the Obama years, leftists refuse to even acknowledge this unmistakable upturn, treating it as a foreboding sign of a more vibrant free market. We can’t have that now, can we?
When Barack Obama dismissed American know-how and determination by telling business owners that they “didn’t build” their entrepreneurial enterprises, that they would never have succeeded without the government, it sent an unambiguous message that prosperity is to be subsumed by central state authority. Obama also revealed his belief that America is no more exceptional than any other nation: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
Such statements, like that of former Justice Stevens, reveal the left’s underlying belief that the U.S. is just another name on the list of nations, and that the rights we fought a bloody revolution to secure are, at best, nothing special, and perhaps illegitimate and worthy of renunciation.
An extension of the left’s self-loathing is their view of the proper role of America in the world. In what Obama called, oxymoronically, “leading from behind,” they wish to renounce American sovereignty, virtue, and strength – you know, the kind we displayed in vanquishing the evils of Nazism, fascism and Soviet communism. Instead, they desire to fall into the waiting arms of a global world order, ceding authority to the United Nations, the Paris Climate Accord, World Trade Organization, etc., all of which seek to render the U.S. increasingly indistinguishable from the other 200 nations of the world.
Teaching young Americans to be ashamed of themselves and their country stands to create a generation of self-loathing Americans prepared to willingly, even enthusiastically, forfeit the rights with which they were blessed. They are being manipulated by leftists who have proven they will not surrender in their ceaseless quest to deconstruct the very foundations of our country and roll back the liberties which define what Ronald Reagan once called “the last, best hope of man.”
