FREE SPEECH ONLY FOR THE "WOKE"

Remember the bloody sock? It became the symbol of the Red Sox World Series championship in 2004 that ended “the curse of the bambino” — an 86-year-long drought following the Babe Ruth trade in 1918. The sock was worn by pitching ace Curt Schilling who’d just had surgery. With a bleeding ankle, he still won the crucial game six of the American League Championship series against the New York Yankees. That put the Sox into the World Series in which Schilling won game two in a four-game sweep of the Cardinals.

Schilling is a hero to New Englanders, but not to the liberal Boston Globe which ran the Sunday headline: “Will Curt Schilling’s inflammatory rhetoric keep him out of the Hall of Fame?” Sports writers cited his conservative politics for their negative votes. Now Schilling’s scalp hangs in the cancel-culture hall of fame. No one can doubt that Schilling is one of the greatest pitchers of all time, but to liberal media his politics are deplorable, especially his support for Donald Trump.

Kati Couric

I voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 — and I would again given the same choices. So would tens of millions of other Americans, but our vilification is accelerating. In 2016 Hillary Clinton called half of us “deplorable” and “irredeemable.” However, two weeks ago former mainstream media news anchor Kati Couric suggested we need to be “deprogrammed.” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson echoed that saying: “there are millions of Americans, almost all White, almost all Republicans, who somehow need to be deprogrammed.”

How would that be done? Gulags?

WaPo columnist Jennifer Rubin

Fellow Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin said: “We have to collectively, in essence, burn down the Republican Party” and leave no survivors. She also said we have to blacklist Trump supporters from universities and media. And it’s not just media; Former FBI Director James Comey said: “The Republican party needs to be burned down … It’s just not a healthy political organization.”

James Comey

Does that sound like inciting violence? Just as Cool Hand Luke was warned, you conservatives have to “get your mind right.” I only hope the above-named “progressives” envision only a night in the box and not life in a concentration camp or a bullet in the back of the head. But, then again, WaPo columnist Jennifer Rubin said: “We have to level them, because if there are survivors… they will do it again.”

Leftists in academia control what students learn, but Pew Research said last week that almost all Americans increasingly get their news from their smartphone or tablet, often on platforms like Twitter and Facebook and Google. These are owned and operated by liberals who use their power to censor news like the Hunter Biden laptop story they spiked until after Biden won the election.

Smith College Professor Loretta Ross

For years now our colleges and universities have banned conservatives speakers. Now Smith College Professor Loretta Ross says Trump supporters must be: “treated with the same public condemnation that the Nazis received after World War II.” For Professor Ross, “The term “Nazi” is not even strong enough to convey the opprobrium and disgust human rights activists feel for those who brazenly claim they are simply patriots with different opinions.” It’s hard to believe students pay Smith $75,000 a year to learn this stuff.

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley says: “Many professors admit…they are afraid to speak out… about the rising level of intolerance [for conservatives]… In over 30 years of teaching, I have never witnessed the level of intimidation at colleges and universities that we have today.”

Democrats, and some Republicans, are pushing impeachment of President Trump because of his remarks at the White House on January 6th, which they claim incited a violent takeover of the US Capitol the same day. In a column January 7th, I called on Trump to resign for the same reason, but what is the point of impeaching him after he’s gone? None I can see except spite and fear he might run again.

Now my newspaper column is affected by the leftist cancel culture. My piece last week explaining why I voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 and listing his accomplishments was spiked in one of the newspapers that has carried it nearly every week for decades. The Conway Daily Sun had no problem running the previous column telling Trump to resign, but the publisher claims he spiked last week’s (and others recently) because of “factual errors.” I responded that he owns the paper and he can print or not print whatever he wants, but scoffed at his pretense of political objectivity. He has agreed to discuss his claims with me face-to-face on my local Valley Vision TV show “Left & Right” February 3rd.

That should be interesting.

WILL THE ELECTION BE ABOUT FEAR?

Every four years, it seems, we have “the most important election in history.” Exaggeration? Maybe, but I don’t think so, not this year anyway. While many Americans see November 3rd as  Biden vs Trump, others see it as left versus right. I’ve voted in every presidential election since I became eligible in 1972 and, while I used to be swayed by who the person running was, that’s not very important to me anymore. It’s the platform he or she espouses that matters now.

Over that forty-eight year span, my political outlook has moved across the spectrum from left to right and two aphorisms sum up why. The first is attributed to Winston Churchill: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re twenty, you have no heart; if you’re still a liberal when you’re forty, you have no brain.” The second is from that other British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who said: “The facts of life are conservative.” Democrats are so far left now they’re becoming socialist.

In a February 17th column, I said Trump looked unbeatable, and he did. Then, in the last paragraph, I wrote something which has proven prophetic: 

But nine months is an eternity in politics. Anything can happen between now and November. Like what you may ask? The Corona virus, for one thing. Chinese efforts to contain it have been futile. So have their efforts to censor information about how serious it is. Their economy is slowing considerably and likely to tank. Pulitzer-Prize-winning science writer Laurie Garrett has covered first-hand over thirty epidemics worldwide and she offers a very sobering account of what we may expect from the virus now being called COVID-19. “The economic and political repercussions are going to be enormous,” she says.

Then, on March 16th, a British professor at Imperial College named Neil Ferguson issued a devastating prediction. If the U.S. and the U.K. did not shut down for eighteen months and isolation measures were not taken, he claimed, 2.2 million Americans and more than half a million British would be killed. American and British health officials — and President Trump —took that very seriously and shut down their countries. Thus, covid became the biggest issue in the campaign.

Ten days later, Ferguson said, Whoops! I was wrong! And he revised his prediction down. Only 20,000 Brits would die; half of them would have died anyway of old age and comorbidities; and the U.K. already had enough ICUs to handle the victims. But it was too late. The left loved the shutdown here in Amcrica because President Trump’s surging economy — his biggest asset for reelection — was crippled. The left and its mainstream media allies weren’t about to let it recover until after election day in November.

Using the British scale above, Ferguson’s prediction for the deaths in the U.S. would revise downward by 2500%, from 2.2 million to 88,000. Here in mid September the CDC has reported 200,000 Covid deaths, but in August the CDC said that only 6% of fatalities reported as Covid deaths were solely from the virus. The other 94% involved Covid, but the virus wasn’t the only killer. Nonetheless, mainstream media continue to hype the virus with endless stories about how many are testing positive and how many are dying. Is that because they want the shutdown to continue through to the election? Seems like it.

Actually, in June, the CDC estimated 0.2 % overall chance of dying from Covid

On my local Left & Right TV show months ago, I asked my left-wing opponent if there will come a time when we view the shutdowns as a major disaster far worse than the virus itself. Never before has there been such a drastic step taken to deal with a disease. Never before has this country shut down its entire economy plus its schools, sports, parades, churches, and countless other activities for medical reasons. Have our state and federal governments exceeded their constitutional authority? Have they violated constitutional rights of citizens?

In 1933, the US Supreme Court ruled that no governments — neither state nor federal — may exercise powers not enumerated by the US Constitution. “[A]n emergency may not call into life a power which has never lived,” said the ruling in HOME BUILDING & LOAN ASS'N v. BLAISDELL. Lawsuits have been filed in several states alleging governors wielded unconstitutional powers, but given the slowness of the judicial process, many plaintiffs will have gone bankrupt before they’re adjudicated.

Governors and other officials, especially in blue states like Maine, drunk with new power over people and economies, are reluctant to give it up as the virus threat fades. Have partisan politics controlled government response to Covid? Do politics influence research into Covid? Consider this: According to Federal Election Commission records, over $285,000 was contributed by CDC employees to Democrats, but only $1000 to Republicans.

Is it possible the CDC is hoping to sway November’s election by pushing fear?

Shifting Political Nomenclature

THIS COLUMN RAN IN NEWSPAPERS THREE OR FOUR WEEKS AGO AND I'M JUST GETTING AROUND TO POSTING IT HERE.

“Left and Right” is the name of a small community TV show on which I argue from the right, but what does that mean in 2020 AD? Taking a long view, the best I can say is our left/right political spectrum is in flux. What political positions define the two sides? Boston-Irish-Catholic-Democrats in a generation that worshiped John F. Kennedy (and into which I was born) didn’t see all Democrats as leftists or all Republicans as conservatives, but that has changed. There are still liberals in the Republican Party but are there any conservatives among today’s Democrats? I can’t name any. Can you?

JFK was a staunch anti-communist. His fellow Democrats in 1960 saw socialism as communism-lite and disdained both. That cannot be said of 2020 Democrats after a 2018 Gallup poll indicated that: “For the first time in Gallup's measurement over the past decade, Democrats have a more positive image of socialism than they do of capitalism… 57% today having a positive view… [with their] attitude toward capitalism, dropping to 47%.” The same poll indicated Republicans with only a 16% positive view of socialism and a 71% positive view of capitalism.

When newly-elected Congresswoman Alexandria Occasion Cortez (AOC) proposed the Green New Deal last February there was consensus among Democrats that it was a radical-left proposal. Provisions like banning air travel, banning cheeseburgers, banning fossil fuels, rehabbing every building in America, eliminating 99% of cars, free education for life, guaranteed income without work, etc. seemed crazy to them. By spring and summer, however, nearly all Democrat presidential candidates endorsed the Green New Deal and sought AOC’s endorsement.

That most Democrats now favor socialism — and the massive expansion of government into nearly every aspect of life required to implement the Green New Deal — is more than enough to label them the party of the radical left. Now, however, political language has shifted. For example, the headline of a December 21 article in the Washington Post by Chelsea James declares: “Buttigieg shifts to center, embodying the Democratic primary’s rightward drift.” Janes cited shifting positions by Buttigieg on Medicare for all, abolishing the Electoral College, packing the Supreme Court, and decriminalizing illegal border crossings. He also claimed that:“Environmentalists complain [Buttigieg’s] climate plan is less sweeping than his early rhetoric suggested it might be.”

Conservative pundit and attorney Paul Miringoff of powerlineblog.com asked last week: “Is Medicare for all the liberal position? Is decriminalizing illegal border crossings? Is packing the Supreme Court? I would have called Medicare for all socialist, decriminalization leftist, and court packing radical. I would have expected the Post, at a minimum, to call them progressive. If, instead, these positions are liberal, the political ground has moved from under our feet.”

So then, what positions would be considered radical left today? Must someone be a bomb-tosser like Bill Ayers and advocate violent overthrow of the government? The Green New Deal would put government in control of how people eat, travel, reproduce, work, and what kind of house they live in. What else is there? That looks like total control to me — somewhere between socialism and communism lite.

The Washington Post is a big voice in mainstream media, all of whom are on board with the new labels. What was radical left only months ago is now liberal. What was liberal is now centrist. So, where do mainstream media want to put yesterday’s conservatives? Are they fascists now? If so, it was a short trip from Hillary Clinton’s racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic basket of deplorable to today’s fascists. 

At the end of Barack Obama’s two-year tenure as a US senator, the National Journal labeled him our most liberal senator. As president, mainstream media referred to him and his VP Joe Biden as “centrist” and “moderate.” Until lately, it would have been very hard to call Joe Biden anything but liberal over his 30+ year career in the senate, but liberal media outlets like the Washington Post think themselves moderate too and give plenty of coverage to leftists who charge that President Trump is fascist and compare him to Hitler.

John F. Kennedy would be called conservative today and wouldn’t likely feel comfortable in today’s Democrat Party He opposed Affirmative Action, was pro-2nd Amendment, and favored major tax cuts. He couldn’t possibly get the 2020 nomination for president. He was a US Senator in 1954 when President Eisenhower implemented “Operation Wetback” and deported over a million Mexicans from the United States. Maybe it’s there somewhere, but I could find no evidence that JFK or any other Democrat opposed it. His predecessor, Democrat President Truman, deported plenty of Mexicans as well at the end of World War II.

How far left will Democrats and their mainstream media go?