Truth Bombs Page 2
Oh, and did I mention I met my wife in a hook-up chat room on the old, dial-up AOL, which might as well have been called “pagans in heat”? Heck, when we brought our first child home, her crib had to share a room in our crummy apartment with a porn collection that would make Ron Jeremy blush.
In short, I was conceived in, and then did, almost everything progressive utopians promise us is “freedom.”
Except what I got from it wasn't freedom at all, but bondage—to debt, personal baggage and dysfunction.
To be a conservative is not to elevate yourself, but to come to the end of yourself. You seek to align your beliefs and behaviors with the tide of history, guided by history’s ultimate judge, as often as possible.
What I’m really saying is no one gets to define what or who conservatism is, for what is worthy of conserving has already been defined for us.
That recognition also produces integrity—meaning a consistency (not perfection, because none of us is perfect) of belief and behavior. And if we fail, as we all will, to live up to the standard we claim, we have the humility to admit it, be held accountable, and try to do better next time.
If you want to know why we sadly have conservative heroes we used to look up to selling us out at every turn, it’s because for them, for whatever reason, this has become about elevating themselves. Ego has replaced integrity. They are, ironically, like the very snowflakes they often mock for clickbait, arrogantly believing if it weren’t for their presence or way of putting things, conservatism would melt away.
This is always where the sellout starts, and it’s a pattern all too familiar in our pulpits as well.
If I should ever rise above my current better-than-average career prospects, I will be susceptible to it, too, for this is the human condition. Therefore by the grace of God go us all. So I won’t mention any names here, because I don’t have to. We both know some names already came to mind, don’t we?
And when we as conservatives give up on that which is objectively true, and instead rely upon that which we subjectively scheme, we fail not just ourselves but our fellow man and families. We are no longer stewards but salesmen.
We devolve from patriots to partisans. And there are definitely differences between the two. Big differences.
Patriots preserve (or conserve) an exceptional country. Partisans allow exceptionalism to perish while they’re busy posturing either for profit or position. Patriots believe in a higher cause. Partisans believe theirs is the cause. Patriots will defend their rights as citizens. Partisans will gladly trade their rights as citizens for political power. Patriots believe what matters is if the politicians support the people. Partisans believe what matters is if the people support their preferred politicians.
How can we tell if that’s happened to us? Try taking this simple ten-question test:
1. Are you willing to even ask yourself “am I a patriot or a partisan”? Often a good sign we’ve yet to succumb is our willingness to self-critique.
2. Do you seek to politicize almost everything and almost every circumstance, or are you offended when others seek to?
3. Have you ever said the following: “I only watch/listen/read [fill in the blank of your favorite media echo chamber here]. I don’t trust any information unless it’s from them?”
4. Do you alter your core convictions to justify voting for a candidate? No, I don’t mean a willingness to choose between imperfect options. We live in a fallen world, after all, so we must confront less-than-ideal choices every day. What I mean specifically is, do you refuse to even acknowledge you’re compelled to make an imperfect choice instead of deluding yourself by rationalizing the option you deem less painful is now heroic and ideal, when it’s clearly not?
5. Do you really believe it every time a politician has said “this is the most important election of our lifetimes”?
6. Do you believe America’s ultimate future is at stake in the next election, like you believed it was in the last one, and the one before that, and the one before that, and the one before that, and the one before that, and the one before that? Then, just days after the party you voted for won the election and took power, you found yourself already complaining about how they always sell you out? However, once the next election rolls around, you’re back to repeating “the future is at stake” mantra all over again?
7. Have you ever compared a misbehaving politician favorably to King David, while ignoring the fact that King David’s personal peccadilloes nearly led to the downfall of his kingdom—and both his people and his family paid heavy prices for them?
8. Do you define “fake news” as the news that isn’t politically convenient for you to believe at the time?
9. Can you articulate what you’re actually for better than you can condemn what you think you’re against?
10. Is your excuse for constantly being betrayed by Republicans you helped elect that they’re the “stupid party”?
If you answered yes to at least several of these questions, then consider this your intervention before it’s too late and you end up cranky and miserable on the ash heap of history. If you answered no to most or all of these, then prepare yourself to remain on the narrow road. We need you to stay vigilant for the task at hand.
No matter which camp you’re in, if you dare proceed with this book from here, you’re about to get a crash course on how the truth can set us free. As in, free to see the world as it really is, not as we prefer it to be. Free from magical thinking, and on to critical thinking instead. Free from deception, including the way we deceive ourselves.
It won’t be subtle, and it won’t be gentle. But it will be necessary. I can’t promise you this will be the best political book you’ve ever read, but I can assure you it will be among the most honest.
Bombs away!
LIE #1
The Republican Party is Our Rightful Home
Political parties may be the single most corrupting influence ever devised by mortal man.
The older I get, the smarter Thomas Jefferson becomes.
While I prefer my theology with a more robust helping of orthodoxy than Jefferson fancied, when it comes to politics he was nothing short of a prophet. One of his keenest insights was on the corrupting nature of political parties.1 Jefferson once quipped, “If I could not go to Heaven but only with a political party, I would rather not go there at all.”
In other words, Hell—a place of everlasting torment, estrangement, and desolation that is the dominion of the devil himself (evil incarnate)—was preferable to perhaps our most brilliant Founding Father than spending eternity in paradise with political hacks. And while Jefferson was clearly being sarcastic, he may not have been all that far off.
At the very least, the myopia and internal corruption caused by undying allegiance to a political party is as much of a threat to liberty as any domestic dissension or would-be foreign invader. For it rots the soul, of both the individual and the nation at large, which results in the dulling of not just our senses but our intellect and integrity.
In other words, if we’re not careful, slavish devotion to political parties makes us dumber and more deceitful.
A dumber and more deceitful populace is a lethal combo to liberty. It erodes cultural cohesion until a country is softened up to accept an unprecedented level of authoritarianism from the next false political messiah, who comes along promising “hope and change” or “I alone can solve your problems.”
But a free people won’t just leap from liberty to authoritarianism. They must be corrupted first by the status quo. In history, that status quo was often represented by monarchies, oligarchies, feudal lords, or empires. In our day and age, it is represented by political parties.
For sure, political parties can be, and have been, tools to do good. Just as not all monarchs, oligarchs, feudal lords, and empires throughout human history were evil. But once a people tie their identities and destinies to these earthly instruments, the clock is ticking on their sanity and character.
Once that happens, eventually will arise “a pharaoh who knows not Joseph” (if you get the biblical reference), who either wasn’t a participant in the virtues of the past or wants to vanquish them altogether because raw power is preferable.
He will exploit the imbalance within the people—demonstrated by the fact they have lost themselves to the system—to acquire and/or consolidate power. Convincing them—via charisma, rhetoric, and exploiting their collective fear of the political alternative—their hopes ultimately reside with him. His demise means their doom.
This is how our two major political parties function nowadays. They each offer little in the hopes of affirmative change and far more often exploit the fear of the consequences of the other party winning. If only I had a penny for every time someone has said something like this to me: “I don’t vote for anyone anymore, only against the other,” I’d be as rich as Warren Buffet by now.
Democrats and Republicans offer you a lack of change agents on purpose, because at the leadership level they are creatures of the status quo. One party run by neo-Marxist progressives, the other by corporatist progressives. Collectively they are not proxies of an existential battle for the soul of a nation, but a unibrow.
This is why they battle most fiercely over procedure, like government shutdowns, and not principles, like what should the government’s moral and constitutional purpose be in the first place? The former speaks to what empowers them and the system they serve. The latter speaks to what actually serves you.
They are not competitors in the traditional zero-sum sense, as in one side wins at the expense of the other. Rather, they are a duopoly. Since the
y’re considered the only options that exist in the political marketplace, they both win regardless of what the voters decide on Election Day. All the outcome typically determines is how much more one party won than the other.
More seats on a committee. More positions of leadership. More office space. More negotiating leverage with lobbyists. More say in specific legislation. More reasons to genuflect to donors. More chances to virtue-signal for mainstream media acceptance.
But make no mistake, the “losing” party will have ample opportunity to do all those things just the same. Just as the size and scope of government is never really reduced (only if we’re lucky they’ll slow the rate of growth), so it goes with the so-called losing party after an election. They’re not cut off from the levers of power—only given access to fewer of them.
This is particularly true after Republicans win elections, because they loathe their conservative base at least as much as the Democrats do. The Democrats may loathe us philosophically, but Republicans loathe us personally.
See, the people running the Republican Party seek to pillage and plunder the taxpayer every bit as much as the Democrats do, albeit for a different set of special interests and priorities. And they’re just as eager to support America’s slouch to Gomorrah as well. But they can’t fully take the Thelma & Louise plunge2 as long as they have to still pretend for our benefit. This puts Republicans in the untenable position of perpetually fighting a two-fight war.
On the one hand, there’s the fight for power and positioning with Democrats, which on its own could simply be negotiated since they both want mostly the same thing anyway—more government, more spending, more amnesty, and so forth.
However, as long as Republicans must present the pretense of being an opposition party by paying us lip service, their negotiating power is diminished. Which brings us to the second front: the GOP’s ongoing war on (not with) its own base.
This is why they rarely show resolve on our issues. They know they have to talk a talk they don’t believe but will get killed by the liberal media despite no plans to follow through by walking it out anyway. So they get the worst of both worlds. They get killed by the liberal media for conservative rhetoric, all the while getting killed by their conservative base for having almost no record to show for it.
This creates a level of personal animosity for us even the Democrats don’t have. You can see it in the way they come harder after those who would seek to challenge their power within the Republican Party than they do the Democrats.
Mitt Romney went hard after Donald Trump3 as he was seeking the 2016 Republican presidential nomination (several of his criticisms of Trump I shared at the time). Romney left no flesh on the bone, going so far as to refer to Trump as a “con man.” Meanwhile, during the final 2012 presidential debate, with a tight race on the line, the Huffington Post noted then-GOP presidential nominee Romney “agreed with Obama on everything.”4
John McCain once ridiculed conservatives daring to challenge the status quo on Capitol Hill as “wacko birds,”5 but when he was the Republican presidential nominee in 2008 McCain told conservatives “you don’t have to be scared” of an Obama presidency.6
This came after it was revealed that Obama spent years as a disciple of a heretical, anti-American pastor, and described those who disagreed with a progressive remaking of America as “bitter” while they “cling to guns or religion.”7 As president, Obama would go on to preside over unprecedented intrusions upon liberty—like taking nuns all the way to the Supreme Court, demanding they disobey their vow of chastity to pay for the killing of children by the promiscuous.8
So, um, yeah, no reasons to be scared here.
There are so many more examples of Republicans fighting their own base harder than the Democrats, it would take an entire book by itself to catalog them. But I don’t have to, because if you’re a conservative reading this right now you’re nodding your head in agreement, knowing this to be true. You’ve already lived it.
I’ve done my share of primary campaigns, in coverage and activism, all over the country. And if you don’t think the GOP elites have a killer instinct it’s because you haven’t truly seen them try to kill. You’re primarily focused on how they take on the Democrats. And you wonder why when the Democrats come at them with “you’re a racist, misogynist, homophobic xenophobe bigot,” most Republicans simply and blandly respond with something like, “I don’t want to question the motives and character of my Democratic opponent; we simply disagree on the issues.”
As a species, we attack most viciously that which truly threatens us. That’s why the Republican Party typically attacks conservatives more viciously than it does the Democrats. With the Democrats they simply disagree regarding the pace and procedure for implementing progressivism. With us they fundamentally disagree on the role of government, what defines a culture, what the Constitution means. The list goes on.
Most Republicans are progressives, just of a different denomination than most Democrats, and one word defines the ultimate goal of progressivism in all its forms: control. Republican Party elites would rather lose elections to Democrats than lose control of the Republican Party to conservatives. This is why they fight us harder than they fight them.
To the Republican Party, we conservatives are the “them.”
We conservatives see ourselves as the heroine Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games—reluctant culture warriors who really don’t want to spend our lives in government but would rather live our lives away from “the Capitol” enjoying our families and the fruits of our labors. We only get involved because we have to, not because we want to. And we’re out of there the first chance we get.
We see the Left as President Snow, the authoritarian who uses a centralized government to maintain control of commerce and conscience—all the while his willing patsies/accomplices in pop culture (like Stanley Tucci’s character Caesar Flickerman) dumb down the masses with empty calorie consumption on the boob tube.
Yet if you know how the story ends, you know there’s a missing character here, a reveal that shocks the audience and shows the emptiness of putting your faith in political messiahs/parties.
At first, Katniss believes she’s fighting for the freedom fighters of District 13, led by Alma Coin. On the surface Coin seems reserved, selfless, and not driven to extremes. Except it turns out she’s been a false flag operation the entire time. Behind her technocratic exterior lies one just as cunning as President Snow, albeit for the interests of her District 13 instead of Snow’s District 1.
Coin has simply been using the powerful symbolism of the courage of conviction driving Katniss, and those she inspires, for her own partisan political purposes. Once she successfully overthrows Snow, Coin continues on with the status quo. All that’s changed is who has control of it.
Alma Coin is the Republican Party.
Repealing and replacing Obamacare sounded great, until the insurance cartel that fills Republican campaign coffers balked at actually having to operate in a free market rather than the guaranteed outcome government was giving them. Then Republicans suddenly didn’t have the numbers to repeal it, after promising to do this for years and holding over fifty show votes. But dang if railing against Obamacare didn’t help Republicans win over nine hundred elections nationwide.9 Alma Coin would be proud.
On issue after issue, year after year, the Republicans similarly exploit our principles and policy ideas to get power, only to do almost nothing with them while in office as they maintain the status quo for their vested interests.
As a result, other than perhaps Second Amendment freedoms, virtually nowhere is America more conservative in terms of public policy today than it was thirty years ago when Ronald Reagan left office.
Right about now, some of you reading this are grimacing. Wanting me not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, because there are some good conservatives in elected office in the Republican Party fighting the good fight on our behalf.