How I became an insurrectionist threat to Democracy

OPINION:

The president can’t stop talking about me.

I’m one of those vile, ultra-MAGA Republicans you keep hearing about. I’m told that I want to force women to bear children and oppress minorities – even though I am one. I’m an insurrectionist who pushes the Big Lie that President Joe Biden and his minions hijacked the 2020 election. In short, I’m a semi-fascist, the president claims.

If Mr. Biden says it is, then it must be true. After all, he has so much real-world experience, having spent the past half-century in Never Land on the Potomac.

I must admit, I had a great start at becoming a threat to democracy and civil liberties. I grew up in a small town in upstate New York in the 1950s. It was a time when we saluted the flag, prayed in school and actually learned U.S. history. In a 2015 survey, only half of Americans knew when the Civil War was fought.

We were proud to be Americans. We had just defeated fascism (my father and three of my uncles served in World War II) and were striving to save humanity from the threat of communism.

We believed in equal rights for all Americans while acknowledging that some of us were denied this.

When we left our homes for a weekend, we didn’t lock the doors. We looked out for each other. If we made a mistake, we took responsibility for it. We didn’t blame lack of opportunity, or socio-economic conditions, or institutional whatever for our failures.

I was MAGA long before the expression was coined. I was a campus conservative in the ‘60s, part of the anti-tax movement in the ‘70s, worked for then candidate Ronald Reagan’s presidential election in the ‘80s, and took up the causes of fiscal responsibility, constitutional government and the family during my career as a writer.

In case you’re curious, this is what one ultra-MAGA Republican believes.

I believe there’s an autonomous human being in the womb of a pregnant woman. It has human DNA, after all, and not the genetic material of a whale or an aardvark. If gestation is allowed to take its course, the result will be a live baby. If you allow abortion up to the moment of birth, then, logically, you must countenance infanticide and euthanasia. It’s a death march that started with Roe to a destination yet to be determined.

I’m horrified by what’s happening at the border. U.S. Customs and Border Protection estimates that since Biden became president, 2.5 million have entered the country illegally. For the most part, they haven’t been screened for disease, criminal background or terrorist ties. Thanks to this porous border policy, drug smuggling and human trafficking have thrived. To say the border is secure is an insult to our intelligence.

I believe the type of federal spending we’re now engaged in is digging our graves with a power shovel. Spending to fight inflation is like organizing an orgy to celebrate virginity.

And, predictably, it’s backfired. The CPI is now up 8.3% for the year. Electricity is up 16%, food is up 11.4% and gasoline is up 26%. Congress is bleeding consumers to benefit its constituencies and buy votes.

Under the current regime, the national debt grew by $3 trillion in less than two years – from $27.8 trillion to almost $31 trillion.

While they whine about January 6, the president and his party are shameless scofflaws.  

In 2020, Mr. Biden waited most of the year to issue a tepid rebuke to the George Floyd riots that rocked the nation. Other Democrats added fuel to the fire. Defund the police succeeded. It’s become almost impossible to hire new police in major cities.

In New York City, as of August, major crimes were up almost 40% over 2021. In Memphis, a jogger was abducted, raped and murdered. Los Angeles has enriched our vocabulary with expressions like “smash and grab.” Mass looting is organized on the Internet. And, everywhere, woke prosecutors are letting those arrested back on the streets in the name of racial equity.

Yep, I’m an ultra-MAGA Republican all right. Add to my other crimes a faith in God, a conviction that there are only two sexes, and a belief in an inherent right to self-defense guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

The alternative to Make America Great is the president’s Watch America Keep Dying movement, also known as the Democratic party.

• Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer and syndicated columnist.