Earlier today I posted a news item about the failure theater of Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz making a motion to “favorably” report the Biden administration’s FCC nominations for a full vote in the Senate, even as Cruz at the same time stated he was against their nomination. This absurd lack of real fight now prompts me to add this quick comment, and a repost of a January 2022 essay.

In that essay I quoted the words that open each volume of Winston Churchill’s memoirs of World War II:

In War: Resolution
In Defeat: Defiance
In Victory: Magnanimity
In Peace: Good Will

Cruz’s actions are typical of our conservative leadership for decades. They are good at magnanimity and good will, but know nothing of resolution or defiance. To them, there is no war, and defeat is really just another word for victory.

We are in a war however, and we have been losing that war now for more than a century. We have reached a point where a sizeable part of the American population thinks it is okay to imprison its opponents, even as it firmly supports censorship and blacklisting.

Fortunately, more and more Americans recognize this, and are no longer easily fooled by Republican failure theater. As a reminder to help strengthen that resolve and to remind the fence-sitters of the real war we are in, a war that now requires resolution and defiance by all who value freedom, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the rule of law, I give you my January 2022 essay, which outlined starkly what the other side wants:

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Freedom is under siege, and the besiegers have now told us they have no mercy

Liberty under siege.

For many years I deeply and sincerely believed that many rank-and-file Democrat voters honestly did not know how corrupt and power-hungry the political leaders of their party had become. I thought that if I could simply get them to see the clear evidence of misbehavior and abuse of power that has been going on in the Democratic Party without check since Bill Clinton was president, they would reconsider their voting habits and abandon their support of that party.

I thought that the vast majority of Democrats were decent people who opposed oppression and intolerance and simply were unaware that they were voting for it when they supported the Democratic Party.

I now know unequivocally that I was wrong. Two stories in the past week illustrate bluntly that a large number of ordinary Democrats, maybe even a majority, are eager supporters of oppression and intolerance and dictatorship. They like the corruption and abuse-of-power coming from Democratic Party politicians. They even want more of it.

First we have a new Rasmussen poll that looked at the attitude of Americans toward the government’s response to the Wuhan flu. While it found the American public largely divided along party lines in their response to lockdowns and mandates, with Democrats supporting such things and Republicans opposing them, a closer look of the attitude of Democrats revealed some shocking facts.

• 55% of Democrats want the government to fine people who don’t get COVID shots.
• 58% of Democrats want to put such people under permanent house arrest.
• 48% of Democrats want to fine or imprison anyone who questions the usefulness of these shots.
• 45% of Democrats want to confine people in camps for not getting the shots.
• 47% of Democrats want to the government to electronically track such people as well.
• 29% of Democrats even want to take the children away from parents who refuse the shots.

This data was further strengthened in that the survey also found that Biden’s strongest supporters, whom obviously were generally Democrats, strongly favored the harshest government actions, such as imprisoning people for expressing dissenting opinions or putting people in camps for refusing the COVID shots.

Obviously, polls must always be looked at with some skepticism. The number of people sampled (1,016 likely voters) is small, and can be skewed to misrepresent the entire population. The questions themselves might have been shaped to get these results.

Nonetheless, these numbers are disturbing, to say the least. The data clearly suggests that a large percentage of the American public — the bulk of whom are Democrats — not only no longer believes in freedom, it is aggressively hostile to it. Instead, this large faction enthusiastically wants a Soviet-style North Korean dictatorship, with variations of Nazi concentration camps added to the mix.

If that conclusion seems absurd to you, the second story this week provides undeniable proof it is true, and the proof comes from their own lips. On January 15, 2022 the editorial board of the Salt Lake City Tribune published an editorial calling for the use of military force to round up Wuhan shot resisters and have them imprisoned. To quote:

Were Utah a truly civilized place, the governor’s next move would be to find a way to mandate the kind of mass vaccination campaign we should have launched a year ago, going as far as to deploy the National Guard to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.

In other words, the editorial board of this newspaper doesn’t think it right for Americans to have a different opinion, or to have the right to decide for themselves what medicines they should take. No, they believe the government should have that power, and it is right and proper for it to send storm troopers out to arrest anyone who disagrees.

Is this board made up of Democrats? From my experience as a science journalist I would say it is a safe assumption that almost all of them are. Like the academic and entertainment community, the journalism field has spent the past three decades aggressively blackballing all conservatives, so that today these communities are dominated and largely controlled by the left.

Some would argue I am wrong because the owner of the newspaper, Paul Huntman, claims to be a Republican. However, his family — which includes former Utah governor Jon Huntsman — has consistently shown in its politics that they are unreliable conservatives, and have regularly allied themselves with the establishment Republican Party that has spent the past three decades purposely losing to the worst policies of the Democratic Party in order to feather its own bed.

This editorial from Huntsman’s own newspaper further confirms his own fascist tendencies, and strongly suggests that he is all in with Biden’s mandates and the worst dictatorial measures of the past two years that are so eagerly endorsed by so many Democrat Party voters.

[A quick side note: When I first read this editorial yesterday it ended with a paragraph listing the editorial board’s members with their email address. I wish I had done a screen capture. That information is now gone. I suspect it was removed because the public was overwhelming them with outraged opposition to their editorial, and rather than rethink their position, they — the petty dictators that they are — decided to block any dissent from reaching them.]

So where do we go from here? As Sun Tzu wrote in his classic book on military strategy and tactics, The Art of War,

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

For decades conservatives like myself have thought we knew our enemies. We have assumed the left really did believe in freedom and liberty and the legal values expressed so well in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and were merely disagreeing with the right on basic policy and the methods for achieving it.

We were wrong, and as a result “every victory gained [we] also suffered a defeat.” This is why the right has consistently lost ground for the past half century. We thought our opponents were fellow Americans who believed in individual rights and human dignity and personal freedom. They did not, and as a result they surreptitiously used every small victory they gained as a weapon to further weaken those American values, until we have reached the situation of the last two years, where the political leaders in power, from both parties, consider it entirely proper to issue unilateral edicts violating almost every amendment of the Bill of Rights, and the police and government officials everywhere consider it entirely proper to enforce such dictatorial and illegal edicts.

For those who love liberty, the present battlefield is thus not favorable to victory. That does not mean however that the cause of liberty should be abandoned. Instead, it means that its soldiers must coldly recognize the shape of that battlefield so that they can move forward in battle effectively.

Know your enemy. They are out to destroy us, without mercy. We can’t negotiate with them any longer. We have to approach this war as Winston Churchill did in World War II. As he said at the beginning of every volume of his memoirs of that war:

In War: Resolution
In Defeat: Defiance
In Victory: Magnanimity
In Peace: Good Will

We now are somewhere between war and defeat. The lovers of liberty need to stiffen their spines, and push forward with resolution and defiance in order to win. Only then can we return to magnanimity and good will.

One final note: I was originally going to title this essay “An obituary for America?” I decided to reject that title, as even with a question mark it was too defeatist and pessimistic. In the end freedom will always win, if only we have the heart and determination and — most importantly of all — the courage to stand up and defend it. I decided rather than talk of death and defeat, I would instead bluntly outline the hard battles we face, and then use that as a clarion call for action.