Category: Politics

I deeply appreciate my growing following of loyal fans of the Tumbleweed Sagas.  I’m going to use today’s post to talk about the American frontier and freedom in light of the current pandemic.  Oh, and just so no one gets their pants bent out of shape, I’m not aiming to foment rebellion, just lookin’ to get folks thinking about freedoms as maybe folks 150 years ago might have.

Perhaps, you share my concerns about preserving our liberties and rights during this time of stay-at-home orders, quarantines, restrictions on gatherings, virus testing, surveillance, and so on connected with this COVID-19 pandemic.  Judging from media op-eds and seeing paranoiac posts on social media these days, folks seem to raise justifiable concerns as to how many of our liberties might be forever lost.  I do think it’s appropriate to talk about our liberty in comparison with the American west of the 1850s and what might be considered to have been the last great revolution for freedom.  As author of western genre fiction set in an era when the American west was being tamed by folks mostly looking for a second chance at life, I get to creatively weave in how they protected their hard-won and at times elusive freedoms.  Many had escaped the perceived freedom-sapping social and political injustices broiling in the east.  They sought the sense of freedom associated with tall mountains, big skies, crystalline waterways, and fresh air.  The Sioux and Kiowa and Comanche already lived that freedom.  But the mightier forces of westward-bound frontiersmen, gold-seekers, and settlers supplanted them.  Once established in their new-found lands, they became quite protective of their newly won freedoms.

We are rightly concerned about the COVID-19 responses that seem to be putting our liberties at risk.  People often compare it to the Spanish flu of 1918, but many other pandemics have existed.  Yellow fever was widespread.  It struck Corpus Christi back in 1867 and killed 11 percent of the city population, including a half dozen of my own ancestors.  They had no idea it was caused by a female mosquito.  Folks that caught the fever hunkered and sweated it out until they recovered or died.  Others simply continued their lives as ranchers, farmers, merchants, smithies, or whatever.  No hunkering down.

 

Is 2020 all that different from a hundred or two hundred years ago?  Maybe in terms of more people and more technology.  Were people any less intelligent a century or so ago? Did they give up freedoms to the extent we’re being called to do?  While a single COVID-19 death is too much, how much freedom are we willing to give up to slow the progression of deaths?  Is there a law of diminishing returns as suicides mount, “elective” surgery folks endure pain, drug addicts scream for help, citizens fear criminals released from our jails?  Can closed businesses hope to recover?  What of the collateral effects of ensuing poverty?  All lives are so very precious, but so is freedom.  What is our price?

As an example of the value placed on freedom, I was struck by my cousin Patrick Dunn’s feelings about freedom back at the turn of the 19^th century.  For several decades, he owned and successfully ranched North Padre Island adjacent to Corpus Christi, Texas.  He sold his rights to the island in 1920.  To the end of his days, he regretted the sale.  He equated the island with its grasses, sand dunes, and easy sea breezes to a sense of freedom not to be found on the mainland much less anywhere else on earth.  Seems Patrick Dunn truly captured the essence of freedom.  Freedom is life.

What will be the nature of our liberties after the crisis of the coronavirus has passed?  As a life-long student of history, I offer up a thought about the old west as best expressed by my famed author cousin Mary Maude Dunn Wright (aka Lilith Lorraine) back in 1932, “Not in the spirit of judging their actions by artificial standards which in their day had no existence, but by asking ourselves if we were in their places, should we have acquitted ourselves as well…?”  My Tumbleweed Sagas beg readers to answer that question.  How much fight is in you to protect our freedoms?  Could we acquit ourselves as well as our frontier ancestors in protecting our liberties?  There’s an oft-quoted phrase, “freedom isn’t free.”  Folks gone before us at times paid the ultimate price to attain it.  Would you?

I contend that the experience of the main character in my novels, Texas Ranger Captain Luke Dunn delivering justice and redemption to preserve hard-won freedoms across the vast Nueces Strip of the 1850s, has parallels in today’s world.  Readers and listeners are drawn to the built-in raw edginess and pace of the Tumbleweed Sagas in its all-too-real frontier era setting where freedoms could command a high – even ultimate – price.

Thanks again to my growing following of Tumbleweed Sagas enthusiasts, as Nueces Reprise continues to exceed sales expectations.  I do appreciate every review that’s posted.  My latest Saga, Nueces Reprise, is available online in print, audio, or eBook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and directly from my publisher at defiancepress.com.  And you just might want to read or listen to Nueces Justice, the first Tumbleweed Saga.   Thanks. Y’all stay safe and protect your freedoms ya hear.

In Romans 12:18, we are advised “Do everything possible on your part to live in peace with everybody.”

Seems like great advice for the United States today.  After all, the sort of nation we’re going to be and the sort of life we citizens live depends on each of us. Attitude seems to be important.  Tumbleweed has observed that negative attitude tends to lead to negative outcomes while positive usually leads to positive.   Fascinating.  Seems we have divides that need healing.

If we’re to believe certain elements in our political infrastructure, many of us qualify as gun-toting bible thumpers, deplorables, and dregs of society.  Lest you be wondering, those appellations are from Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, respectively.  Throw in Resist, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Women’s March, the KKK, white supremacists, Nation of Islam, and a few other organizations, and we have quite an array of angry, condescending, elitist, fire-breathing, glitterati arrayed in the morass called social politics.  Hate and vitriol are their weapons of choice.  Words like sexism, racism, homophobia, misogyny, and more are thrown about as hate chaff.  There’s certainly nothing positive to endear them to us, and we should not expect positive attitudes from among them.  They are divides cutting us apart.

Tumbleweed has further observed that this hate and discontent didn’t begin with the recent elections, though the outcome thereof seemed to exacerbate the vitriol and division.  Now, Tumbleweed could go on here about social ills in general and could endeavor to place much of the blame to the rise of cultural Marxism in our midst, but suffice for now to simply label it societal misanthropy.  Oh, and we tend to forget that we’re a Republic, not a pluralistic democracy.  Generations in our midst don’t understand the difference.

Lest we forget, a war was fought in our nation over deep divides more than 150 years ago and millions died.  Violence was endemic for years before and after.  We can point to vignettes of political turmoil from Aaron Burr killing Alexander Hamilton to John Wilkes Boothe assassinating Abraham Lincoln to Lee Harvey Oswald assassinating John Kennedy to James Earl Ray murdering Martin Luther King and more.  When and how might such violence, such weaponized hatred end?

We need to step back, take deep breaths, and reflect on civility, respect, and love and the freedom from fear they imply.  If nations are formed to provide for common defense, then we need to ensure that such defense is provided against both the internal and external forces that would deprive us of our freedoms.  We must heal the divides among us without compromising our natural rights and freedom.  I do suggest that we need to take Romans 12:18 to heart.  Just sayin’.

 

Think On: “May you be poor in misfortune, rich in blessings, slow to make enemies, and quick to make friends.  And may you know nothing but happiness from this day forward.” IRISH PROVERB

Tumbleweed continues to be horrified at the lack of civility that characterizes today’s leftist progressives.  The far-left progressive choir wallows unhinged in vitriol as they spew forth all manner of hatred for our President, his supporters, and many of the founding principles of our nation.  It’s too easy to write them off as a bunch of whining children throwing a massive temper tantrum.  However, it’s certainly not the first time.  The leftist hatred has been palpable for decades.

First, let’s get a bit of perspective.  That Irish proverb resonates with Tumbleweed.  Also, let’s keep in our consciousness the words from James 1:2-3, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know the testing of your faith develops perseverance.”  Be assured, perseverance in the face of anger and vitriol is very much in play here.

Back in the 1920s, the liberal left was motivated by Communists lying about Marxism, as the left was easily duped by the Bolshevik propaganda machine.  They attacked Woodrow Wilson and his Attorney General Alex Palmer, painting them as stupid, bloodthirsty anti-Communist savages stirring up a “Red scare.”  The leftist rants didn’t lighten up in the 1930s and 1940s, as the Hollywood liberal elite, leftist academia, and news media (led by the New York Times), harangued Congress as behaving like Hitler’s Germany, supporting fascism, and setting up America as a concentration camp or an Auschwitz.  Famed entertainers of the era like Danny Kaye, Judy Garland, and Gene Kelly spewed the Communist party line.  Even Humphrey Bogart was duped for a while.  Moving into the 1950s, the leftists turned there hate on President Harry Truman, attacking him as the “butcher of Hiroshima” and an enemy of the Soviet state.  Truman was vilified in the media as a warmonger and another Hitler.

Of course, Tumbleweed is scratching the surface.  There’s a temptation to view the Vietnam era of the 1960s and 1970s as the pinnacle of left-wing anti-Americam anger and vitriol.  The USSR, which had a vested interest in the Communist Viet Cong, ramped up a huge propaganda machine enlisting American liberals into convincing U.S. citizens that the Vietnam War was a losing proposition.  Emboldened by their success in controlling public opinion and causing the pullout from Viet Nam, the left sought to build upon their success.  They had torn into one-time Democrat turned conservative Republican President Ronald Reagan, blasting his “Star Wars” missile defense system (actually, Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI) as a threat to cause a third world war.  A leader in undercutting Reagan was none other than liberal darling and hero of Chappaquiddick Senator Ted Kennedy who secretly proposed a deal with Soviet Supreme Leader Yuri Andropov to sabotage SDI in return for USSR support for his own presidential ambitions.  Blessedly, along came the tearing down of “The Wall” along with the socio-economic implosion of the USSR, momentarily taken the wind from the far-left sails.

The Communist threat seemed defused until a succession of progressive-leaning presidencies succumbed to the ascension of former KGB muscleman Vladimir Lenin.  Leveraging terrorism spawned from the Middle East and supported directly by Iran and North Korea, the Russian propaganda machine was rejuvenated and brought to bear to once again recruit liberal progressives in the United States.  Who emerges?  The likes of “Swiftboat” John Kerry, Maxine Waters, and Harry Reid expounded total hatred of President George W. Bush, calling him a liar and betrayer of the nation.  The vitriol quotient was rising exponentially.  Soon enough Barack Hussein Obama arrives on the scene spawning supporters like ACORN and the SEIU and inciting the Hollywood, journalistic, and academic elite to spew forth all manner of hate speech and violent protest.

So, here we are today.  It’s as though Lenin’s “useful idiots” have gone into overdrive.  Supposedly reasonably intelligent politicians, journalists, academicians, and entertainers are caught up in the extreme emotions of hate and exercise of violence.  The vitriol is off the charts, as foul language and unfounded accusations blast across television screen banners and spew forth from the mouths of liberal talking heads.  They seize upon the most insignificant action to go nuclear with their vitriol.  The President can do no right nor no wrong without negative over-reaction.  How sad, indeed.

Hmmmm.  In the United States, we have this little matter of a Constitution that defines how we are governed.  Donald Trump was duly and properly elected by gaining far more Electoral College votes than his opponent.  In establishing the Electoral College, our founding fathers had in mind that representation of the less-populated states would not be diminished.  The idea was to not have the entire nation run by urban centers like New York City, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles while ignoring our vast and just as important heartland.  It’s a similar principle to why we have two Senators from each state versus our Representatives as proportioned by population.

Now, Tumbleweed was far from pleased with the election of Barack Hussein Obama as president.  But the voters – and Electoral College – had spoken, so we strove to accept the results.  Despite the perceived scandals, lies, and far-left progressive autocratic actions of President Obama over the next 8 years, we kept our powder dry until we could elect Donald Trump in November 2016.  There were no violent protests or unhinged vitriol from the conservative right during President Obama’s administration.  Admittedly, while there was peace, there was not much joy.

Tumbleweed reminds of that Irish proverb that concludes with, “And may you know nothing but happiness from this day forward.”   Tumbleweed is especially taken with part of the refrain of the Switchfoot song “Rise Above it,” “It feels so typical, Guess I’m looking for a miracle; Rise above it rise above it; The curse is spoken, The system’s broken; Rise above it, Rise above it.”  The left really needs to rise above it.  Just sayin’.

Think on: ^“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” MARK TWAIN

Tumbleweed must confess to having actually conducted market research projects.  Market research can be a fascinating area whereby response statistics are gathered, analyzed, and outcomes reported.  Notably, how you ask the question can dictate outcomes, even “engineering” desired outcomes.  Statistics can be shaped and recipients duped.  Think on Mark Twain’s caution.

A few days back, Tumbleweed saw a social media feed announcing that dozens of school shootings had occurred since the beginning of the year.  There had certainly been a couple of mass shootings of grave concern, but the number quoted – 44 – intuitively seemed misleading.  The source of the number was an organization called Everytown for Gun Safety.  Turns out it is a favored resource of the left-wing anti-gun movement.  Mind you, our hearts go out to those whose loved ones were killed or injured, but it seems hypocritical, even deceptive to leverage tragedy for political advantage.

According to its website, “Everytown is a movement of Americans working together to end gun violence and build safer communities. Gun violence touches every town in America. For too long, change has been thwarted by the Washington gun lobby and by leaders who refuse to take common-sense steps that will save lives.  But something is changing. More than 4 million mayors, moms, cops, teachers, survivors, gun owners, and everyday Americans have come together to make their own communities safer. Together, we are fighting for the changes that we know will save lives.”  Sounds worthy enough.  Then, Tumbleweed dug deeper.

Tumbleweed examined each of the 44 incidents in 2018 reported as school shootings through May 21.  We dare not diminish the three horrific mass school shootings at Santa Fe, Texas; Benton, Kentucky; and Parkland, Florida that account for the vast majority of deaths and woundings in the data.  But what of the other 42 incidents.  Thirteen were accidental firearm discharge and 19 of the 44 shootings resulted in no injuries.  Eleven incidents resulted in one or more deaths, including the three suicides.  Thirty-nine involved a handgun, while five used a rifle or shotgun (two AR-15s).  Overall, among 34 K-12 shootings and 10 college shootings, 39 lives were lost and 66 people were injured.  Eleven incidents involved non-students, and in two cases metal detectors were not in use or broken.  Any shooting is scary, deaths and injuries are terrible tragedies.

There are 98,000 K-12 facilities in the United States and 7,200 post-secondary institutions.  Cold, unemotional analysis would reveal that the percentage of incidents – despite tragic consequences – are statistically insignificant (0.0004 percent).  Statistically at least, our institutions are pretty safe.  Keep in mind, too, that many of the incidents reported in 2018 could have been readily avoided.

Everytown for Gun Safety statistics are startling, but hardly a rationale for taking away the right to bear arms.  Everytown is inexcusably deceptive, as it plays with truth.  There are preventive means that are far more complex and effective than stripping away our Second Amendment rights.  The over-reaction of the gun lobby certainly reflects shades of Mark Twain’s caution, as they repeatedly seize tragedies to leverage their anti-firearm message.  Analyzing statistics doesn’t bring back lives or heal wounds, but misusing statistics to gain political ends is a horrific tactic.  Tumbleweed suggest always looking at the political motivations underlying statistics.  Just sayin’.

Think On: “Did you ever suspect that there are thousands upon thousands of revolutionaries who are daily and nightly planning and plotting to set a torch to this country?  Spread enlightenment…[if] any of your workers have misconceptions concerning what Bolshevism really is, take time to explain matters.” B.C. FORBES, Forbes Magazine, March 22, 1919

Truth be told, Tumbleweed minored in history in college and has spent his lifetime reading and striving to especially experience and better understand U.S. history.  As taught today, history has mostly fallen victim to the PC police, revisionist historians with political agendas, and their minions in academia and media.

All that is past qualifies as history, and it is little wonder that there are many points of view on so vast and complex a subject.  From a historical view, today’s “resist” crowd is bush-league at best, a loud but ineffectual bunch of crybabies.   It’s not enough to simply be “anti” something.  They could take lessons from the resisters to Presidents like James Polk, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt to name a few.  Let’s take a high-level look at an ongoing resist movement that affects our lives us to this day: Anti-Communism.

By now, most of us are aware that Communism and communism (little “c”) have amounted to a total failure wherever and whenever put into practice, having consistently devolved into totalitarian regimes with the deaths by violence and starvation of tens of millions of people.  Few folks are aware of the huge campaigns by the Moscow Comintern to promote communism in the U.S. beginning with the 1917 establishment of the Bolshevik government in Russia and the efforts to fight back, to resist the Communist scourge.  The Communists were experts at duping unsuspecting folks into following their movement, even having visitors tour “Potymkin Villages” in Russia where their citizens were paid to appear successful and happy.  These became Vladimir Lenin ‘s “useful idiots/”

Anyone ever heard of A. Mitchell Palmer?  Likely not.  He was Attorney General under Woodrow Wilson back in 1920.  His “Palmer Raids” – a series of extrajudicial roundups of supposed anarchists and communists – resulted in arrests of thousands of people across the country.  This was serious resistance.  Palmer aspired to the presidency, but great communist-promoted PR frustrated his bid.

Some folks may have heard of Senator Joseph McCarthy who famously sought in the 1950s to identify and purge what he saw as numerous Soviet Communist spies and sympathizers in our nation’s government, universities, film industry, and elsewhere.  From him, we get the term “McCarthyism.”  Horrified by his techniques and fearful of any success he might have, progressive liberals – ironically inspired by communist sympathizers – attacked McCarthy unmercifully as a demagogue.  The Communists reconstituted as far left-wing secular progressives aiming to chip away freedoms and expand “big brother” government to gain control through infiltration and indoctrination.  But McCarthy was a big-time resister.

Anyone remember “My vas pokhoronim!”?  Those were the words in a 1956 speech by Soviet Chairman Nikita Kruschev.  Translated: “We will bury you.”  These words not only fed the aforementioned McCarthyism, but led to long-held paranoia within the U.S.  Seemingly well-intended movements described as social justice, human rights, or social democrats pepper the history of the past century.  Yet, few history books teach the high levels of subversive communication between the central Comintern in Moscow and the Communist Party USA over the past century aimed at in fact “burying” the United States.  Ironically, the most effective resisters to Communism were liberals who were first duped into supporting communism and later became aware of having been duped and fought back.

Where’s Tumbleweed going with this?  Look under the covers of the today’s so-called “Resist” movement, and you’ll find dozens of communistic and socialistic front organizations like Organizing for America, Black Lives Matter, and even the aforementioned CPUSA.  Sadly, much of our population has insufficient knowledge of history to avoid repeating past mistakes.  Thus, we are in danger of succumbing to an inexorable move toward a socialist state destined to fail for lack of scalability and then devolve into communism and then – when all freedoms are stolen – totalitarianism.  The grossly inadequate teaching of history in our education system coupled with widely-duped media and sycophantic politicians has left a huge segment of our population susceptible to being duped by movements like Resist.  Just sayin’.

 

Think On: “Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.  It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” WILLIAM PITT, Speech in House of Commons, 1783

Tumbleweed has written before about ideology versus principles.  Some folks took issue with my comparison of ideology resting on a foundation of emotional sand versus principles resting on the bedrock of moral rules.  Folks are entitled to their opinions, but let Tumbleweed suggest that ideologies, as described so very effectively by clinical behavioral psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson, are “simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that purport to explain the complexity of the world and offer remedies that will perfect it.”

Tumbleweed suggests that ideologies are mere substitutes for true knowledge and invariably dangerous, as a simple-minded, know-it-all approach – such as utopianism – cannot be a match for the complexity of our real-world existence.   The very word “ideology” has an 18^th century French origin attributed to A.L.C. Destutt de Tracy and was to be used to designate the science of ideas.  While it was originally a serious philosophical term, Napoleon Bonaparte borrowed it, used it derisively, and relegated it to the trash heap of now being defined as a systematic body of concepts especially as ascribed to particular groups or political parties.  Tumbleweed has suggested that ideology not grounded in solid moral principles is downright dangerous.  In today’s morally relativistic world, the underlying morality of an ideology is critically important.

For example, there is a growing demographic in U.S. culture that has adopted socialism as its ideological mantra.  These folks are generally labelled as far left progressives, most often of the “new” Democratic Party persuasion.  Most have learned their socialism from media, academics, and political zealots as opposed to any intellectual debate in the crucible of ideas and experience.  No where in history has socialism succeeded as a form of government.  Certainly not Sweden for those not paying attention to that nation’s gross failures.  Socialism either regresses to a dependent culture with widespread socio-economic repression in which capitalistic elements are cherry-picked by the ruling class of utopians in a desperate effort to try to salvage the society or they take the next step to totalitarianism, as in Fascism, Communism, or Nazism.  Of course, the Communists have found the most expeditious way to control their utopian experiment is simply to kill dissenters…like more than 110 million in the past century alone.  Thank you, Karl Marx.  Oh, and the Communists are very much alive and well in the United States…some disguised as socialists.  Indeed, an ideology can be a dangerous, especially when grounded in faulty moral principles.  Tumbleweed argues that socialism seriously threatens our republic.  The sound moral principles embedded in our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are vastly superior to any socialistic ideology, yet they are being challenged by mostly what Vladimir Lenin called useful idiots.

Tumbleweed believes it’s important to fight against evil.  Evil is an aggressive, pervasive, often subtle artifice that must be fought and defeated.   The alternative is to live in mediocrity or worse.  It boils down to a natural human tendency to treasure liberty, the opportunity to carve out our own opportunities unencumbered by some ponderous metastasizing supposedly-utopian government’s idea of how we should live every facet of our lives.  So, Tumbleweed has chosen the “red pill” (recall The Matrix) and is fighting  the evils of relativism, nihilism, and utopianism.  Just sayin’.

Think On: “The greatest enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and realistic.” JOHN F. KENNEDY, U.S. PRESIDENT

Scandal is defined as an action or event regarded as morally or legally wrong and causing general public outrage.  You’d hardly have guessed from the way scandals bounce around these days.

In today’s toxic environment, the term scandal is tossed around so readily as to have become meaningless.  After all, there are rarely any consequences in the political arena.

See whether you can say the following in a single breath: IRS Scandal, AG Contempt, Benghazi, General Motors Bailout, Obamacare, NSA Spying, DOJ Spying on Journalists, National Intelligence Leaks, Fast & Furious, Clinton Email Server, Veterans Affairs Scandal, Iran Deal, Bergstrom Deal, Chelsea Manning Commutation, Solyndra, Investigation of James Rosen, Illegal Executive Appointments, Iran Cash, Food Stamp Mania, Student Loans, Record Executive Orders, FISA Warrants…huff an’ puff.  That barely scratches the surface of “scandals” in the Obama White House.  Of course, some aren’t considered scandals if you’re of the Progressive liberal political persuasion.  The political liberals have their own set of Trump White House “scandals.”

The common thread among these scandals is not so simple.  They are certainly morally and legally wrong and have caused outrage by some segment of the public.  Tumbleweed hopes readers catch the drift.  Your morality or my morality; your legality or my legality?  Arghhh.

In Tumbleweed’s humble opinion, much scandal is a product of the failure of our cultural infrastructure from suppression of free thinking in our education system to the conscious devaluation of faith and family to the erosion of the nation’s founding principles.  In defense, people have learned to look out for themselves, as they seek pleasure in their hedonistic-driven culture and lash out at annoyances (i.e., scandals) that threaten that pleasure seeking.  Tumbleweed suggests that is a quite arrogant worldview given that most of the 108 billion humans that have populated the earth have already come and gone.  An infinitesimal fraction has the gall to complain!

Solutions?  For a start, we might reinsert our nation’s founding principles into the culture.  We might build/encourage families as basic unit of society.  We could stop government from stealing our liberties.  We might avoid addiction or enslavement to any ideology.  WE might strive to avoid taking advantage of others for selfish purposes.  We might try doing all things to the glory of God.  Yep.  There are some solutions.  These but scratch the surface.  Just sayin’.

Think On: “The greatest enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and realistic.” JOHN F. KENNEDY, U.S. PRESIDENT

Like so many folks concerned about the ever-metastasizing Federal government “swamp,” Tumbleweed has observed that the often-manufactured divisiveness of politics layered atop the bloated bureaucracy defies credulity.  As JFK noted, myths abound.  If the myth suits your beliefs du jour, you fly to it like a moth to a lightbulb.  Our President refers to these politically-oriented myths as “fake news.”  But tumbleweed contends that its not really about politics and the accompanying myths, lies, exaggerations, half-truths, and sleight-of-hand, but an underlying paradox.  There is a major philosophical contradiction at work in our nation.

First, let’s consider compromise.  Compromise is the finding of some middle ground that two politically disparate parties can support.  Recall a definition of diplomacy as “the knack of letting the other person have your way.”  Think about if you accept a compromise on an issue that in some part contradicts your core beliefs, you thus have become party to something that thereby compromises your own morals.

Politicians are used to compromise, as they quickly learn to check the latest opinion polling (or convenient nearby lobbyist) and test the political winds of the day rather than reach into their own set of core beliefs.  “There are liars and there are politicians, but I repeat myself.”  So, goes the quote often attributed to Mark Twain.  Don’t we find it refreshing if not surprising, when a politician actually comes close to keeping campaign promises?

Tumbleweed contends that the United States has become a fertile breeding ground for lies and deceit, often cloaked as “news” but actually promoting seditious agendas that would totally undermine the founding principles of our nation.  We dare not lose sight of Adolph Hitler’s “social justice” reforms, Josef Stalin’s ethnic cleansings, or Pol Pot’s genocidal madness, as we listen to wet-behind-the-ears students, elitist academics, and leftist progressive politicians espouse their own agendas of reform that would rip our founding principles asunder in the name of some bumper sticker worthy issue.

Today’s real-world outcomes of progressive socialism-oriented entitlement culture that eschews compromise of their radical agenda, such as found in California, New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Rhode Island, and more, find themselves in horrific social and financial trouble.  A socio-economic divide of their own making!  Big government entitlements require ever-higher taxes to maintain that safety net that fast becomes a spider web that then envelopes its victims.  Myths of global warming (no such thing as “settled science”), one-size-fits-all education (like failing “Common Core”) rooted in an archaic Prussian model, racism that simply no longer exists, urban “plantations” that enslave the poor of all races, “social justice,” and the plight of women purportedly downtrodden by a male-oriented culture are all fodder for the radical agenda.  Compromise isn’t in the radical lexicon, as it defeats their divisive purposes.

The amoral “anti-establishment” radicals of the 1960s and 1970s sowed the seeds for today’s morality-compromised generation of progressive professors, politicians, lawyers, and cultural absolutists.  Often as followers of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals playbook for the left, these demagogues live by those persistent, persuasive, and realistic myths of which JFK spoke.  They have spurned absolutes of right and wrong.  Little wonder that it seems as though America has lost its way.  As Christian apologist and author Ravi Zacharias notes, “the power to harness rebellion through media and technology is much easier.  One statement in one minute can reach one million now.  And evil people will harness that.”

Those who ascribe to the U.S. Constitution as the guiding principles for our nation have compromised for so long that they’ve nearly given away our freedoms.  It’s high time that freedom-loving citizens got some backbone.  Compromise is indeed paradoxical; call it absurd, abhorrent, enigmatic, or whatever label we choose to more accurately define it.  The paradox is that in ascribing to compromise, we give away some pieces of our principles.  Do it enough, and we soon discover that our principles – the ones that protect our freedoms – are gone.

Tumbleweed believes that political compromise is a game in which there are no winners but certainly losers.  It boils down to ideology versus core philosophical principles.  Ideology refers to a set of beliefs or doctrines that back a certain social mindset.  Philosophic principles refer to looking at life in a pragmatic manner and attempting to understand why life is as it is what principles govern it.  Leftist progressives see principles as a metaphoric straightjacket rather than as standards for protecting freedoms.  When you compromise your principles, you have lost.

Recent politics have offered a serious lesson in backlash.  Pushed to the brink by years of political compromise and its impact on our daily lives (e.g., sprawling invasive government, loss of freedoms, etc.), frustrated angry Americans elected a non-politician president.  We might take issue with his colorful Bronx style, but love the way it offends the condescending elitist leftwingers.  They call it “Trump derangement syndrome, or TDS.  Draining the swamp, deregulating business, freeing energy resources, cutting taxes, appointing an apolitical judiciary, and hardline foreign policy have answered the prayers of the political right while throwing the political left into pangs of apoplexy.  The president has given hope that the nation might yet be saved from the brink of failure-prone European-style socialism.

Tumbleweed has shared an unusually long post wrapped around a complex subject.  BUT, our nation was founded on important bedrock principles.  Any further compromise will most certainly destroy the freedoms those principles protect.  Just sayin’.

Think on: “Non teneas aurum totum quod splendet ut aurum.”  ALAIN DE LILLE, Parabolae

Tumbleweed’s having a bit of fun with y’all here.  In plain English, “All that glitters is not gold.”

So, my family tells me that writing a post about the “gold standard” is simply too heavy for most folks to absorb.  Well, that may be because most people don’t know what it is, and when they do hear about it, it’s usually being treated with derision as something archaic.  Interesting.  Once again, our education system has let us down by giving in to the progressive lefties in our mix.  Heaven forbid that our founding fathers and capitalism should make sense.   By definition a gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is based on a fixed quantity of gold.

Currency manipulators chalk up a win!  Actually, the United States was technically on the gold standard until President “Tricky Dick” Nixon signed its death warrant on August 15, 1971.  That’s not really that long ago.  The question is why was it dumped?  If you follow to economists like Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, or Nathan Lewis, you’d understand that the key to great economic booms is stable currency.  Oh, and you may have heard of a fellow named Adam Smith who framed capitalism in his Wealth of Nations treatise.  Effectively, hardly anything in an economy is created without combining goods, services, labor, and capital networked through use of money and shared via prices, interest rates, profits, and losses.  Whew!  That’s a mouthful and likely pretty dry stuff for many people.  Bottom line, a stable currency is critically important.  An unstable currency in an economy is like a computer virus, corrupting “bits” of the economic program to create destructive bubbles not unlike 2007.  For example, in 2001, our beloved Federal Reserve deliberately weakened the dollar, and that drove oil from $20 a barrel to more than $100 a barrel.

Gold lost its luster.  Gold affords a fixed weight and measure to the value of products and services.  (For those concerned with today’s fluctuating price of gold, it’s simply a reflection of wildly fluctuating world economies based upon U.S. paper – not gold.)  The gold standard’s demise pretty much began in the 1890s with Democrat William Jennings Bryan’s pro-inflation, anti-gold presidential run.  The Great Depression – of which the gold standard was a victim not a cause – gave the left-wingers the ammo to further sow the seeds for playing vague paper-money games via central bank theory, aka, the Federal Reserve.  They embraced John Maynard Keynes (Heard of Keynesian economics? Try socialism or social capitalism.), and stable monetary value went down the toilet from there.  Throw politicians into the socio-economic mix, and we’ve got a volatile concoction that has throttled the U.S. economy ever since.  People don’t understand the complexity, and this translates into fear that politicians prey upon.  While capitalism may seem complex, the seeming simplicity of socialism becomes attractive until you learn its fatal flaw as articulated by George Orwell in Wigan Pier.  That is, socialists actually don’t like the poor; they merely hate the wealthy.  Unstable currency enables the socialist mantra of power in the hands of a few and keeps the road to serfdom wide open.

President Ronald Reagan tried and failed to restore the gold standard in the 1980s, as he was blocked by Keynesian progressives sowing fears that social justice causes would be destroyed through economic stagnation, rampant inflation, and political upheaval.  Hmmm.  It seems that’s exactly what the Keynesian central bank acolytes have wrought for us today.

So, my family is probably right.  The gold standard and its critical importance might be too much for most folks to grasp.  For my part, I wish more citizens would get a hot branding iron in their pants toward returning to the gold standard.  Just sayin’.