The Great Deception - The "Progressive" Version

I love my liberal friends. They are an unending source of material for my blogs. The other day I said that it looked to me as if the Democrats had mistaken George Orwell's cautionary tale, "1984" for a how to run a government manual. My friend corrected me and said that I must have meant the Republicans. Sadly, this lovely honest man really believes this. 

I am reminded of how the devil is able to lie outright and usually tells us he's going to lie to us before he even does. Somehow, we get so wrapped up in the details of the lie and allow our good feelings about what we are being told and our strong desire that what we are being told should be true to over-rule our heads in the matter. When Satan told Eve that she would be like a god, she was so excited about that idea, she missed the first lie (Thou shalt not surely die). With the consequences of disobedience clear out of her head, she followed her feelings. Her feelings over-ruled the logical part of her thinking so that she also missed the ethical problem that should have got in the way of her trying to be a god.
 
My friend has perhaps forgotten some things we learned about Democrats and their agenda over the past eight years.

1. It was Democrats who were using the IRS to punish churches and conservative organizations which disagreed with the president? Locally we had mayors and city councils punishing conservative groups and demanding to see the sermon notes of local pastors to insure they weren't speaking ill of certain new local bathroom ordinances, the mayor and council had passed. These local officials partnered up with the Internal Revenue Service to threaten church's nonprofit status for daring to dissent.
2. It was Democrats who passed the Affordable Care Act (a misnomer if there ever was one) and told us we couldn't see what was in it until they passed it. The ACA, as we discovered after they passed it, not only gave the IRS access to our health care records, but also gave them the power to fine us if we didn't buy health insurance even if we couldn't afford it? 
3. It was the Democrat administration that sent in government agencies to arrest ranchers and private citizens (and in one case actually shoot private citizens) in their attempts to appropriate more land into federal ownership. 
4. It was Democrats in Oregon, whose very Democrat state government staked a claim to the very rain that falls from the sky and has fined and imprisoned people who use such rain on their own land. Oregon and other Democrat states have threatened people who even try to catch some rain as it runs off their roof into a rain barrel.
5. It was Democrat president Obama who wanted to create a domestic military force with weapons, tools and power to equal that of the US Military for the purpose of policing citizens who might become unruly? Barak Obama, during his administration, actually started putting a couple of battalions of soldiers into training groups for this purpose - to intervene domestically in a president-declared "emergency", something that is in direct violation of the Posse Comatatus rule put in place by Congress over 100 years ago specifically to prevent the Army from being used as a domestic police force (for obvious reasons).

So many liberals really don't understand conservatives if they think we favor an Orwellian society. In 1984, Orwell posited a large centrally planned collectivist government that spied upon its citizens, altered history, news stories, and even the language in order to preserve its power. I'm a conservative and sometime Republican. That's anathema to me. Like my fellows, I believe in these principles:

• Smaller government
• Individual rights and personal liberty
• Free market capitalism
• Local control of schools, charities and infrastructure (other than interstates and similar essential national infrastructures.
• I believe in the first amendment including free speech, religious liberty
• I believe in the second amendment which guarantees personal gun ownership rights
• I believe parents should have education choice. In that respect I am pro-choice.
• I believe that no one has the right to deny another life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness. This means I cannot legislate another person's morals. I might however resist attempts to legally change the meaning of words for the purposes of deliberately altering culture. I also don't think you should be able to murder a human being for your own convenience. I define a human being as any creature with human DNA and a beating heart.
• I and other Conservatives are strict Constitutionalists. We believe the Constitution limits the powers of the state for good reason.

Having associated with Democrats and talked to them, sat in on their councils, read their books and listened to them speak, here, I have learned that this seems to be what they believe, at least according to their own public relations:

• Democrats espouse collectivism, or the idea that the individual should serve the state which, in progressive ideology, IS the collective.
• Democrats support population controls and the right of one person to take the life of another person so long as that person hasn't safely left the womb of its mother. Some Democrats don't even stop at birth, espousing infanticide up to two years old. It's a different definition of what a person is than the one I have. That's a tougher issue to address than most, but I'm certainly on the other side of killing humans just because they haven't got themselves born yet.
• Democrats have and do support limits on free speech through things like the Fairness Doctrine, which didn't guarantee fairness at all by the way. It simply forced the media to artificially balance their programs so that things nobody wants to watch or listen to were given equal time or better no matter what the public itself preferred. It is significant that the only media the US government now supports is NPR and NPTV, both of which lean hard to the left. This is an artifact of years of Democrat rule. The Democrats have long used government programs as a propaganda tool to support the progressive socialist agenda. The DNC even got caught manipulating the election in favor of one of their candidates over the other. The also got caught colluding with mainstream media journalists by handing them talking points for their news stories that supported the Democrat narrative. Obama even tried to shut down the Voice of America because it was too conservative and said nice things about our American culture and system of government to other countries.
• Democrats favor federal control of charities, schools, healthcare, the economic market, education, speech, religious liberty, and rights to assemble for redress of grievances, unless said group agrees with the state.  One federal agency even got caught trying to manipulate the appointment of church officials. 
• Democrats support doing away with the second amendment and initiating a massive gun confiscation program. I know they haven't been able to do it so far, but it's definitely on their ideological wish list and that troubles me. 
• Democrats complain that the Constitution only tells the government what it cannot do and doesn't say what the government ought to do. Many advocate adding the above mentioned functions to the Constitution as a kind of "Government's Bill of Rights". 
•  Democrats dream of building walls around cities to keep the citizens from roaming around freely, but not around our borders to protect them. I have sat in on meeting of Democrats and environmentalists who dream of building walls not around our borders, but around our cities to prevent anyone from going into wilderness areas (to take pictures and stuff) without the proper government permits. What is being planned by Democrats is truly Orwellian,

I draw every word of this from things Democrats have said to me and done, written (I read their stuff), or speechified about. I've sat in their meetings when I was doing transportation advocacy. They were very honest about wanting gasoline to become unaffordable so that the majority of Americans would be limited to public transportation. One Democrat in the group, in a sudden burst of honesty, commented that if people had to use public transit, their movements would be easier to track by authorities. Big Brother is precisely what the progressive Democrats want. What that inevitably works out to in states where government is powerful and highly centralized is a return to a virtual monarchy (see Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin). The progressive ideal is a massive oppressive government by elite party members and a single class proletariat. A worker's paradise may sound pretty in theory and feel good to talk about, but so far, every one of them has worked out to be collective misery shared equally.

I think the free market system and the Constitution's almost obsessive support of individual liberty has done a good job of treating its citizens fairly, outstripping almost any other nation on Earth. Nine out of ten Americans have an income that is in the top 50% of incomes worldwide. The biggest health problem our poor have is obesity.

The frantic efforts by progressive Democrats to convince us that we need massive change in how our government works is nothing more than a power grab by a socialist elite class, seeking to create a kind of political version of the old European nobility. The Republicans are not without sin in this regard and are as tempted by power as their colleagues across the aisle. This is why I formally left the Republican party when they allowed the Democrats to force them to nominate Donald Trump.

Turns out, Trump may actually turn into a conservative after all. If that happens, well and good. Trump may buy us time to finish the work of spreading the gospel to the entire world. By challenging the forces of international Marxism perhaps the forces of global socialism will be stalled in their advance. That could be a very good thing. I am praying that Trump continues to do the right thing and that Americans of both political persuasions can refrain from shooting and suing one another until we see how this will all work out. Obama had his chance and he left 19 million Americans pushed out of the workforce and not even counted among the unemployed. So much for the worker's paradise. Trump deserves his chance at policy-making too. Who knows. He may show us something better than collective misery.

God go with him.

© 2017 by Tom King

Postscript:  It is 2021 and Trump has been ousted by what I can only describe as a Democrat coup de' tat. What with vicious media attacks, racial attacks, coordinated riots, looting and violence, election fraud, and a propaganda campaign against the president not seen since 1930s Germany, it appears the Cloward-Piven idea that Obama loved but failed to successfully accomplish, is being revived. Francis Fox Piven, co-author of the Cloward-Piven proposal was a regular visitor to the Obama White House. Her idea was to do so much government spending that the American economy collapses and under cover of this "emergency", to institute hard socialism, theorizing that Americans will accept it if they are afraid not to. Obama failed, but the Dems never give up. We now have a senile old Democrat as our figurehead president; one whom the leftist Democrats manipulate like a puppet on a string; a president that can hardly complete a coherent sentence, and whose only agenda seems to be undoing the gains we made under President Trump. We've once more got rampant inflation, massive gender confusion, open borders with hundreds of thousands pouring in without visible means of support, unemployment, an epidemic gaining new life, businesses (and buildings) collapsing, and an economy teetering on disaster, all the while his party is spending money in a manner that would shame a drunken sailor. And they are calling it progress. Jesus needs to come soon or he may owe Sodom and Gomorrah an apology.