“A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

~ William F. Buckley, National Review (19 November 1955)

I’m in a pretty ugly and cynical mood these days, especially where politics is concerned. It seems to me we live in an age where we are about to begin paying for mistakes of the past…and I mean really paying for them.

Progressivism has stripped all meaning from America’s founding values and has effectively rendered worthless the status of being an American citizen. There was a time when we paid taxes for the privilege of being a citizen and those taxes went toward protecting the value of being a citizen – today, we are simply extorted to pay for things people want who do not value being American. In a way, we pay ransom to preserve fractions of the freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Every single aspect of the Bill of Rights is compromised, nullified or is currently under attack. From the First Amendment to the Tenth, our own government is in open violation of every single one.

We have decided, in our infinite wisdom, to expose all to moral hazard by extending the rights of citizens to non-citizens and equating people who pay no taxes or own no property to people who do, eliminating the value of actually being an American citizen. Like the old saying states, when everyone is special, no one is.

It has devolved to such a level that our elected officials, especially those from the Democrat party, openly scoff at the concerns of the citizens who pay the bills, deriding them as bigots, racists and xenophobes. If you express any concern for the decay of the country of your birth, you are immediatley described as evil.

And we allowed this. At best, we have allowed a loud, vocal minority to shout us down and at worst, there really is a majority of people who simply don’t care.

I tried to make a point about illegal immigration the other day – that people coming to the US with no knowledge of America’s history, the reasons it was founded, the painful transformation it has endured to attempt to live up to those founding values would logically have no affection, allegiance or loyalty to her – and then I realized that this not only describes illegal immigrants but what seems to be a growing segment of young American citizens. These people can’t discern the difference between fact and opinion and yet they vote and hold office without even the most basic understanding of what their vote means or what their role in a constitutional government means

The Internet promised to be the greatest tool for knowledge since the ancient library at Alexandria but instead, it gave us the ignorance of another Alexandria – Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Not to pick on Che-quita Khrushchev, but she is the poster child for such mile wide and inch deep transient knowledge that google experts and scholars possess.
Che-quita is just the most prominent current example of what Ronald Reagan said – “It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant. It’s just that they know so many things that aren’t so.”

Comedian Flip Wilson created a famous skit about a crooked preacher who founded “The Church of What’s Happenin’ Now!” in which the rules were constantly bent to the benefit of the preacher’s own desires. Progressivism is nothing but the post-millennium version of that church. It is a church where only now matters, where relativism and ignorance are seen as values and destruction of Western Civilization is a virtue. Righteousness is defined as compliance with the destructive progressive agenda.

But there is s difference between being righteous and self-righteous. Being righteous means being morally right or justifiable; virtuous. Righteous people are validated by immutable principles, their actions are guided by them. Being self-righteous is defined as having or characterized by a certainty, especially an unfounded one, that one is totally correct or morally superior. Self-righteous people are guided by malleable propositions, not principles and define their “principles” to justify their actions.

Where the actions of righteous people are justified by their principles, self-righteous people justify their principles through their actions. Their actions are always approved because their motives are assumed to be the purest – even when they are not.

The progressive left has become all they once professed to hate. The only way they can exist in this environment of cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy is to “other” all who are non-progressive. Everybody else is evil, a Nazi, a racist and God only knows what else. They have succumbed so much to the self-love philosophy of “Gosh darn it” Stuart Smalley (Al Franken), they have come to only worship themselves and this church will continue to attract the weak minded because absent principles or morals, progressivism promises the seduction of always being right

The fatal flaw in this Church of Progressivism is that no moral superiority can be built on a foundation of amoral or immoral acts.

As we are witnessing at our southern border, nothing short of direct confrontation with the progressive agenda is going to work. It’s way past time to be standing athwart and yelling “Stop!”

God help us all.