America with the Constitution and Rule of Law or the Garbage Pile of Failed Socialist Ideas -- November 6 Voters Will Decide

WHERE IS AMERICA TODAY AND WHERE IS SHE HEADED? While the young gang members and Progressive Democrat foot soldiers like to call conservatives and Republicans and President Trump "nazis," it is pretty clear that they don't really understand what "nazi" actually references or just how evil the German nazis of the 1930-40 era were. • • • NAZIS ARE NAZIS -- WHETHER IT IS 1938 OR 2018. Ben Stein -- the actor, lawyer, economist and former GOP speechwriter -- said last Saturday that the protesters who berated Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at a Louisville restaurant on Friday are “becoming like the brownshirts in the early days of the Nazi Party.” Senator McConnell and his wife, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, were confronted at the Havana Rumba restaurant by at least two hecklers who reportedly stole the couple’s leftover food off their table and threw it outside. It was one of many similar incidents involving Republican politicians being heckled in public in recent months. McConnell was recently heckled by protesters at Reagan National Airport near Washington. Stein, who is also Jewish, told TMZ at Politicon in Los Angeles that leftist protesters are wading into fascistic territory : “Disgusting mob rule. Antifa is becoming like the brownshirts in the early days of the Nazi Party. Very, very disgusting, shocking behavior -- stunningly horrible." Stein said he considers it "violent -- to go to somebody while he’s having a meal, and take the meal away from him and throw it away -- I consider that as close to violence as I want to get. Democracy in action is voting, it’s not violence, it’s not taking people’s food away from them and throwing it away. These people are gangsters, they are mob gangsters, they’re not decent people." • And, the truth is that this is where America is today. Representative "Mad" Maxine Waters' calls for in-their-face confrontation of President Trump's Cabinet members whenever they are in public places soon turned to acts of violence by those same ProgDem gangs and foot soldiers against all Republicans everywhere. Ben Stein is right about the nazi Brownshirts in Germany confronting Jews -- it was the first step in the Nazi extermination of European Jews. Americans are sued to saying "this too shall pass" and seem to be lackadaisical or ambivalent about dealing with these paid insurrectionist thugs. That is a huge mistake. As we discussed in Monday's blog, the violence is different this time. America's law enforcement, legislatures and executive branch need to get these thugs off the streets and into jails where they belong. American voters need to demand that their government take action now, before the neo-nazi socialist Democrats take over America's corridors of power. The German Jews believed the Brownshirts would go no further. The German Jews paid for their error of judgment in the concentration camps built by Nazi Germany. • AND, that Tom Steyer and George Soros are reportedly paying the Antifa thugs and other gangs should be the subject of an FBI/DOJ investigation -- if CEOs of private corporations are responsible criminally for their employees who break environmental or financial laws -- TELL ME why SOROS and STEYER should not be responsible for the violence and calls for insurrection against the United States government by the thugs they pay??? America still has a Rule of Law -- let us demand that it be used in this crisis. • And, to be sure, Americans do NOT advocate or agree with this breaking srory from Fox News : "Explosive device found at George Soros’ home: An explosive device was found on Monday at the New York home of billionaire George Soros. Bedford police said the department received a phone call from the Soros residence in Westchester County about a suspicious package....The package contained bomb components, police said. Police referred Fox News to the F.B.I's New York office, which did not confirm the report. Soros was not home at the time of the incident, according to the New York Times." • • • PRESIDENT TRUMP LAYS IT ON THE LINE IN TEXAS. The Washington Times reported on the rally held in Houston by President Trump and Senator Ted Cruz on Monday evening. Trump declared himself a "nationalist" defending the US against "power-hungry globalists." President Trump proudly declared himself a “nationalist” Monday night on everything from immigration to trade, fighting an international order that’s unfair to the US. Trump mocked Democrats for seeking to “restore the rule of power-hungry globalists," saying : “A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much. You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, OK? Nationalist. Use that word, use that word,” Mr. Trump told a packed arena of 18,000 supporters. There were an estimated 75,000 requests for tickets for the rally. The Washington Times said : "While the President swept into office on an 'America First' agenda, he typically has avoided the term 'nationalist.' His opponents frequently use the word as criticism that the President promotes white nationalism." But, on Monday in Houston, President Trump reminded the audience that he pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accord, and earlier on Monday, he confirmed that he is withdrawing the US from an arms treaty with Russia [that the Russians have in fact never honored]. President Trump also used some of his most fiery rhetoric of the mid-term election to accuse Democrats of destroying the country with weak immigration policies that encourage illegal immigration. He said Democrats want to give “free health care and education to illegal aliens, paid for by you. They want to be able to vote, the illegals. And I hate to tell you, if you go to California, they vote anyway. They’re not supposed to. Voter ID, folks, voter ID.” Referring to the caravan of thousand of illegal migrants headed to the US from Central American -- a caravan pandered to and reported as a refugee march by mainstream ProgDem lapdog media -- Trump said : “As we speak, the Democrat Party is openly encouraging millions of illegals to break our laws, violate our borders, and overwhelm our nation. That’s what’s happening. The Democrats have launched an assault on the sovereignty of our country, the security of our nation, and the safety of every single American. The crisis on our border right now as we speak is the sole result of Democrat laws and activists, Democrat judges that prevent us from returning illegal aliens from Central America and all over the world.” • Senator Ted Cruz, on the rally platform with President Trump, is leading Democrat Representative Beto O’Rourke in polling in his bid for reelection. The President said Mr. O’Rourke is a “stone-cold phony” who favors lax border security : “He pretends to be a moderate. But he’s actually a radical, open-borders left winger.” • The President accused the Democrat Party of instigating the caravan in order to influence the mid-term election : “I think the Democrats had something to do with it. They made a big mistake. People are seeing how pathetic our laws are. That’s an assault on our country. In the caravan, you have some very bad people. We can’t let that happen to our country. We need a wall built fast.” • President trump and Senator Cruz buried their 2016 campaign differences when the President acknowledged that his 2016 primary campaign against Cruz was “nasty.” But he praised Senator Cruz for “a beautiful job in staring down an angry left-wing mob” that tried to defeat the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. Trump lamented that Justice Kavanaugh was put through an unfair FBI investigation into alleged sexual misconduct, while the President’s former rival Hillary Clinton should be investigated for her actions as secretary of State : “If you want them to investigate, we’ll just have to nominate Hillary Clinton to the United States Supreme Court,” the President joked. Senator Cruz introduced the President to his Texas home state crowd, predicting that “in 2020, Donald Trump will be overwhelmingly reelected as President of the United States. I look forward to campaigning alongside him.” • Everyone knows that the Progressive Democrat Party has moved to the radical socialist left in its bid to retake power in Washington, as the beginning of their trashing the Constitution and remaking the United States into a socialist, elitist-run country. America MUST react now. • • • CAN WE RECOVER THE CONSTITUTION? The Heritage Foundation published in 2012 an article by William A. Schambra, Policy Analyst Director of the Hudson Institute's Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal. Schramba states : "Indeed, wrestling with the problem of democracy and its relationship to the American Constitution is, I would argue, a first step toward recovering our founding document from the Progressive opprobrium beneath which it has labored for over a century. As the Tea Party senses, progressivism acquired for itself an unfair advantage when it linked the notion of constitutional legitimacy to the cause of unlimited government powers in the name of democracy....Happily for America, however, the Founders were men of great practical wisdom who applied to their task a 'knowledge of the material with which government has to deal, that is to say, human nature with its multitudes of feelings and impulses and passions and weaknesses.' They believed that 'self-restraint is the supreme necessity and supreme virtue of a democracy' and that the way to nurture that virtue is for democracy 'to establish for its own control the restraining and guiding influence of declared principles of action.'....Hence, the Founders rejected democracy and favored instead what they called republicanism; that is, popular government 'in which the scheme of representation takes place.' As Hamilton had written in Federalist No. 71 : 'The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they entrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests.'....In our Constitution, we have embodied the eternal principles of justice; we have set up a barrier against ourselves....American democracy has bound itself to the great rules of right which...make it impossible that the impulse, the prejudice, the excitement, the frenzy of the moment shall carry our democracy into those excesses which have wrecked all our prototypes in history....The Republican Party must remain the party of Abraham Lincoln, who had declared in his First Inaugural Address that 'a majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations...is the only true sovereign of a free people.'....the Constitution remains our central governing charter. It remains our central governing charter because the Taft Republicans [in 1912] prevented it from being consigned to the ash heap of history....In spite of the scorn the Tea Party has drawn for its alleged anti-intellectualism and ahistoricism, its understanding of a Constitution that can limit democracy while at the same time being fully democratic in fact reflects an intellectually respectable and historically grounded view of the American founding." • • • MODERN AMERICAN CONSERVATISM AND RUSSELL KIRK. The Tea Party is perhaps the final child of the mid-20th century's efforts to redefine conservatism and preserve the Constitution. Many of us who are for all intents lifelong conservatives and Republicans were awakened to that undeniable yet unspoken fact by Russell Kirk in The Conservative Mind. Friday, October 19, was the centenary of the author of The Conservative Mind : From Burke to Eliot (1953). We were forced by the strength of Kirk's analysis to conclude that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, taken together, are in every respect a conservative document. • Russell Kirk set out principles that defined modern conservatism. • First -- a belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience. Over the centuries, the Judeo-Christian tradition, because it promotes freedom, virtue, order, and justice, has been a salutary influence on government, so in the interest of good government, the state should encourage morality and religion among the people. The Constitution does not disagree. All but one or two of the Framers were men of religious faith, even though they produced an essentially secular document. By prohibiting Congress from establishing a national religion, however, they provided a harbor of safety for religion. In these respects, the Constitution was not neutral toward religion, but actually exerted a positive influence. • Second -- diversity, or an affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and egalitarianism and utilitarian aims of most radical systems. There is not even a hint in the Constitution of 1787 that political, social, or economic equality among the general population is a desirable or valid objective. Nor does the Constitution establish or recognize a privileged class. It implicitly favors a free society, which affords men of natural abilities every opportunity to rise by their own efforts, and resists the radical notion that either privilege or equality of station and wealth could benefit society. • Third -- the conviction that property and freedom are inseparably connected. The Constitution not only makes free enterprise possible, but promotes as well the sanctity of property rights through such provisions as the Contract and Takings Clauses. • Fourth -- a suspicion of concentrated power and a consequent attachment to our federal principle and to division and balancing of authority at every level of government. Notwithstanding the occasional lapses of certain Federalist Party members in the formative era, conservatives have generally and with increasing regularity rejected big government, rallying to the defense of the states, separation of powers, and the checks and balances system. • Fifth canon -- recognition that change and reform are not identical and that innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it is a torch of progress. Society must alter, for slow change, as Burke noted, is the means of its preservation. But, true and enduring reform requires time, thoughtful consideration, and the establishment of a general consensus. The Constitution recognizes the wisdom of this principle. The deliberate process in our bicameral Congress, for example, rejects the notion that speed is a virtue in law making. Our cumbersome amendment process shields the Constitution from the forces of innovation, requiring determined, not transitory, majorities for alteration of the fundamental law. • Washington Free Beacon's editor Matthew Continetti wrote on October 19 : "I picked up The Conservative Mind as a college junior after coming across a reference to it in Jonah Goldberg's G-File. Like many others over the last 60-odd years, I was taken by Kirk's prose style and considerable learning. His interpretations of Edmund Burke and John Adams and Alexis de Tocqueville inspired me....Kirk's reliance on tradition, prescription, and prudence sparked a heated argument with a close friend over the extent to which principle and natural right ought to inform our judgments of society." Continetti notes the current political situation in America and President Trump's ties to Russell Kirk : "The truth is that, for all of its emphasis on spirit and the imagination, Kirk's conservatism necessarily implies certain real-world applications....An America-First foreign policy is only one of item -- and the most divisive. Most conservatives would agree with the rest of a program inferred from his conclusions. Another corollary of Kirk's thought, for example, is strict constitutionalism. Kirk called the US Constitution 'the most successful conservative device.' He was indefatigable in its defense. That is reason to approve of President Trump's originalist and textualist judges, while advocating judicial restraint over engagement. An opponent of bureaucracy and centralization such as Kirk would also support the deconstruction of the administrative state through deregulation, a pause in rule-making, the reassertion of congressional imperatives, and judicial enforcement of the separation of powers. And he would oppose technocratic elitism. 'To prate of ‘democracy' but actually to invest decision-making in the hands of administrators at the nation's capital,' Kirk wrote in 1990, 'is either hypocrisy or dense ignorance.' Conservative critics of Silicon Valley might also seek guidance from Kirk. He was a critic of libertarianism and free-market dogma who often referred to trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt as a conservative hero. Kirk, for whom television was an abomination, would be horrified at the 'bread & circuses' of debt-financed entitlement spending and Candy Crush Saga for Android. Followers of Kirk are antagonists of Progressive elitism as well as demagogic populism. The power of our tech oligarchs should be diffused, our avariciousness reined in, and 'King Mob' prevented from assuming his throne. Years of conservative political power have not arrested the decline of character-building institutions such as family, school, and church. The task for traditionalist conservatives is to build a shelter over the places where children are raised to be self-governing citizens, insulating them as much as possible from the stultifying and corrosive effects of political correctness and cultural decadence. That means protecting religious freedom, extending school choice, the home-school movement, apprenticeships, and vocational training, and encouraging federalism and localism, as well as making family formation easier by increasing the supply of housing." • Kirk wrote : "Most restoration and improvement must be contrived and effected by individuals and voluntary associations, and in local communities. This is true of schooling especially. A policy of discouraging grandiose and visionary policies, abroad or at home, would be the most prudent of all policies." Russell Kirk's ghost, says Continetti, "points us to a less dogmatic and more modest conservatism. This is a temperament willing to adapt to present circumstances. Nor is it afraid to ignore the admonitions of economists and central planners. Kirk's is a conservatism of the heart centered in the old places where human connections are multiple and enduring. It is well versed in the Great Books. It is eager to defend hearth and home, faith and family, and classical and religious education against the gathering armies of wokeness. Revisiting Russell Kirk on his hundredth birthday, our eyes are opened not only to the intellectual lineage of conservatism. We also glimpse the daunting future that awaits it. And yet, as Kirk put it, it is precisely by facing these challenges honestly that conservatives might 'succeed in capturing the imagination of the rising generation.' " • Many conservatives who would shape American politics rethought their understanding of conservatism. William F. Buckley, for example, abandoned the term “individualist” (from his 1951 book, God and Man at Yale) and adopted “conservative” in 1955 when describing himself and his new magazine, National Review. Buckley consciously sought to build a coalition of traditional conservatives, libertarians, and anti-Communists under the rubric of “conservatism,” which he knew would not be possible under an “individualist” banner. Similarly, when Barry Goldwater first ran for the US Senate in 1952, he called himself a Jeffersonian Republican and even a Progressive, but not a conservative. By the time of his 1958 re-election bid, having absorbed Kirk’s thought, he proclaimed his conservatism, and two years later, he titled his best-selling political manifesto The Conscience of a Conservative. Continetti calls Kirk’s trailblazing book "a feat of scholarship -- a synthesis of the ideas of leading British and American conservatives of the late 18th century through the mid-20th century, including Edmund Burke, John Adams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Benjamin Disraeli, Orestes Brownson, Paul Elmer More, George Santayana, and T. S. Eliot. The Conservative Mind demonstrates convincingly that there had been a significant conservative tradition in America since the founding of the Republic. First among these redoubtable writers and thinkers in Kirk’s mind was the Anglo–Irish parliamentarian and political philosopher Edmund Burke, of whom Kirk wrote : 'Burke’s ideas did more than establish islands in the sea of radical thought : they provided the defenses of conservatism, on a great scale, that still stand and are not liable to fall in our time.' Second, The Conservative Mind challenged every liberal nostrum from the idea of human perfectibility to economic egalitarianism and offered conservatism as a prudential alternative to modernity run amok. The intelligent conservative, Kirk wrote, knows that many of the popular slogans of the past 150 years are fallacies, but 'he does not intend to substitute for them the twentieth century fallacies of centralization, standardization, plebiscitary democracy, and the cult of the omniscient secular social planner.' The book carefully examined all plausible political and social alternatives and systematically dismissed them.....A divine intent as well as personal conscience rules society, 'forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead.' ” • How important has Russell Kirk been to the modern conservative movement? Continetti states : "You can no more separate the two than you can separate the vine from the branches. Among the many who have declared their indebtedness is Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who said, 'No one had a greater role in the formation of American conservative thought. And no more courteous (indeed, courtly) a gentleman, nor one devoted to the United States of America, could be imagined.'....In the last chapter of his last book, The Sword of Imagination, Russell Kirk, who had received honors and achieved fame (although not fortune) beyond the reach of most men, asked a fundamental question: 'Is life worth living?' He suggested that in our age, many would shrug or shake their heads. Contrary to this modern atmosphere of moral ambiguity, Kirk offered an alternative, writing that life 'ought to be lived with honor, charity, and prudence.' " • • • DEAR READERS, the question facing us today could not be more clear or more critical. Are we to continue in the path the Constitution laid out for us as a nation and as individual citizens, or are we to abandon the Constitution and allow non-democratic and elitist fascist socialism to replace our Constitution, our individual liberties and our moral responsibilities to one another? In 1996, Russell Kirk said : "Every right is married to a duty; every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility; and there cannot be genuine freedom unless there exists also genuine order, in the moral realm and in the social realm." AND "In any society, order is the first need of all. Liberty and justice may be established only after order is tolerably secure. But the libertarians give primacy to an abstract liberty. Conservatives, knowing that 'liberty inheres in some sensible object,' are aware that true freedom can be found only within the framework of a social order, such as the constitutional order of these United States. In exalting an absolute and indefinable 'liberty' at the expense of order, the libertarians imperil the very freedoms they praise." AND ten years earlier in 1986, Russell Kirk said : "Some 'separation' zealots would expunge any vestige of religious observance in public schools. Many of the same anti-religious fanatics would like to wipe out of existence all church-related schools, by regulation or taxation, so that universal ignorance of the life of spirit should prevail." • President Reagan stated in Westminster Hall, London, in 1982, with Margaret Thatcher in the audience : "...there is a threat posed to human freedom by the enormous power of the modern state. History teaches the dangers of government that overreaches -- political control taking precedence over free economic growth, secret police, mindless bureaucracy, all combining to stifle individual excellence and personal freedom." And, in another part of his 1989 farewell address, President Reagan expressed both his own essential modesty and his confidence in the capacities of the American people: "I won a nickname, “The Great Communicator.” But I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference : it was the content. I wasn’t a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn’t spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation -- from our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in the principles that have guided us for two centuries. They called it the Reagan revolution. Well, I’ll accept that, but for me it always seemed more like the great rediscovery, a rediscovery of our values and our common sense." • Judge Brett Kavanaugh, when he was being attacked by Democrat members of the Senate Judiciary Committee in September, 2018, said : “I understand the passions of the moment. But I would say to those Senators, ‘Your words have meaning.’ Millions of Americans listened carefully to you. Given comments like those, is it any surprise that people have been willing to do anything, to make any physical threat against my family, to send any violent email to my wife? To make any kind of allegation against me and against my friends? To blow me up and take me down?....You sowed the wind. For decades to come, I fear the whole country will reap the whirlwind.” • Kavanaugh was echoing the words of Russell Kirk : "Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it : they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.” • I offer one last quotation : "Through this inscription I wish to enter my dying protest against what is called the Democratic party I have watched it closely since the days of Jackson and know that all the misfortunes of our nation has come to it through this so-called party, therefore beware of this party of treason." __Nathaniel Grigsby, Civil War vet (1811-1890) – the quotation was engraved on his tombstone at his request. • November 6 will be a watershed date in American history. We will move forward under the Constitution and our traditions, or we will crash and burn on the garbage pile of history's failed ideas. The choice is ours -- and only ours. We must take upon ourselves the moral duty and responsibility to make that choice by voting. It is clear that a majority have already decided to support America, the Constitution and our traditional way of life -- 100,000 RSVPs were received for the Houston Trump rally with Ted Cruz, and a tailgater was set up outside to accommodate the massive crowd. Those massive crowds must line up on November 6 at their polling places across America to save the United States.