OPINION:
For more than 240 years, America’s Christian culture and its continued influence have combined with limits on government imposed by the U.S. Constitution to make the United States the freest, most prosperous nation in history.
We overcame slavery, Jim Crow and won two world wars and the Cold War. Americans have given trillions in aid to afflicted areas around the globe. America was founded by Christians who believed that God had given them an unprecedented chance to fashion a country where “We the People” govern instead of a king. In fact, one of the rallying cries during the American Revolution was “No king but King Jesus.”
But forces have been at work for decades to “liberate” us from our self-governed republic. Marxists have specifically targeted cultural foundations without which we cannot maintain our republic. These are faith, family and the free market, which are supported by the freedoms of religion, speech, assembly and the press, property rights and due process.
The left is licking its chops at the prospect of taking over all three federal branches of government in 2020 and/or removing President Trump from office over a misreported phone call to a foreign leader.
Fresh from their secret briefing room, Nancy Pelosi’s House Democrats voted on Halloween to approve rules of a formal impeachment inquiry. But they can’t pretend it’s bipartisan, since no Republican voted with them. If this doesn’t work, they’ll cook up something else.
They sound sane at times, but don’t be fooled. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, for instance, described herself in 2018 as a “capitalist to my bones.”
But the Massachusetts Democrat, who once falsely identified as a Native American, wants a federal takeover of corporations and health care, just for starters. Her version of the Green New Deal, which she unveiled in September, calls for repealing the Trump tax cuts and hitting up the 1 percent to pay for phasing out fossil fuels entirely by 2035.
That’s right. Just as America has achieved energy independence, she wants us to count on solar panels, windmills and perhaps millions of hamsters in tiny wheels attached to generators.
Where is PETA when you need them? Just to make it clear, I’m joking about the hamsters. I think she prefers gerbils.
In October, Ms. Warren began railing against charter schools because they compete with government schools.
Her plan, “A Great Public School Education for Every Student,” calls for banning for-profit charter schools, plus deploying the IRS to investigate nonprofit charters that may “actually serve for-profit interests.” For a self-declared capitalist, she sure hates the concept of profits.
“We should stop the diversion of public dollars from traditional public schools through vouchers or tuition tax credits,” she said.
Translation: There will be no escape from leftist indoctrination. If you Christian and orthodox Jewish parents, in particular, think that you can keep your children safe by home schooling or putting them in a private school, you’re whistling past the graveyard. If she gets her way, it’s only a matter of time before everybody’s children are enrolled in Miss Lizzie’s New Age School of Bliss.
In Ray Bradbury’s haunting 1953 novel “Fahrenheit 451,” a totalitarian regime has burned all the books, leaving a small band of freedom lovers who memorize the great works to keep them alive.
Today’s book burners are not the parents and school board members who protest when schools ply children with perverse and obscene texts. The real burners are the legions of the left who have declared all dissent to be the equivalent of “hate speech” or “racism.”
The ultimate goal of progressives like Ms. Warren is to replace self-government with an all-powerful socialist state to supplant and suppress Christian morality and dictate how we all live and what we’re allowed to say.
Eventually, they’d dictate who could buy and sell. We already have a model of this in Communist China, whose “social credit” system rates citizens according to their ideological compliance with the regime. Depending on the score, people are either allowed to travel and access services — including medical care — or prevented from doing so.
This is chilling to anyone familiar with the Mark of the Beast foreseen in Revelation 13:16-18.
If you don’t think it can happen here, you might check out the growing list of people facing fines, loss of job or even jail for refusing to go along with the LGBTQ agenda or climate change hysteria.
Cultural elites have bought into socialism as the road to utopia, and they mean to impose it on the United States. This poisonous doctrine has already weakened much of Europe.
But there is one problem for them: The American people, and specifically, voting-eligible citizens. Even after decades of media and educational propaganda falsely denigrating America as uniquely evil, millions of Americans still love our country and stubbornly resist the siren song of socialism.
The left has captured much of the culture, the media, education, the entertainment industry and even large corporations. They long to conquer the place where people can voice their contrary political opinions directly — the ballot box.
This week in Virginia, and next year all over the United States, let’s disappoint them.
• Robert Knight is a contributor to The Washington Times.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.