No substitute for total victory

As the Left continues to spiral out of control — foaming, spitting, frothing in rage — it’s time to state the obvious: that in the battle for the soul of America, there can be only one winner. Either we retain as much as possible of the country-as-founded, including its national character, or we watch it “fundamentally transformed” into a “social democracy” of the kind envisioned by the adherents of Critical Theory, and brought to us courtesy of the Frankfurt School‘s ideological seizure of academe. Although some might wish otherwise, there is no middle ground, no accommodation, no splitting the difference.

(Article by Michael Walsh republished from PJMedia.com)

Our opponents on the Left understand this perfectly well. Their motto, for decades, has been “there is only the fight,” which also happens to have been the title of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s senior thesis at Wellesley. They’ve made it very clear all along that they’re in this for the long haul. Conservatives like to think that history, tradition, logic, and morality will win out in the end, and that our opponents will eventually see the error of their ways, if not the light. But as history shows, that’s simply not true. The Left won’t stop unless it is stopped. Which means that, for us, total victory in the defense of Western civilization and the American ideal is the only option.

Ascribing good motives to our friends across the aisle is a fool’s errand. Like most villains, they think of themselves as the heroes of their own twisted morality play, casting themselves as noble superheroes for truth, silver-surfing the “arc of history” as it bends toward their definition of justice. We, however, see their assault on our history, customs, and traditions as nothing of the sort; to us, they are the vandals who cannot abide something they had little or no hand in creating, and just want to see the world burn. After watching liberals hide behind the Bill of Rights for decades — because it protected them when they were weak — we can only shake our heads in wonder at the effrontery of something like this story in the house organ of Leftist Central, the New York Times:

On the final day of the Supreme Court term last week, Justice Elena Kagan sounded an alarm. The court’s five conservative members, citing the First Amendment, had just dealt public unions a devastating blow. The day before, the same majority had used the First Amendment to reject a California law requiring religiously oriented “crisis pregnancy centers” to provide women with information about abortion. Conservatives, said Justice Kagan, who is part of the court’s four-member liberal wing, were “weaponizing the First Amendment.”

But it wasn’t enough for the Times to simply quote Kagan, it then had to support her argument with its own voice (in this case, that of the writer, Adam Liptak)…

The two decisions were the latest in a stunning run of victories for a conservative agenda that has increasingly been built on the foundation of free speech. Conservative groups, borrowing and building on arguments developed by liberals, have used the First Amendment to justify unlimited campaign spending,discrimination against gay couples and attacks on the regulation of tobacco, pharmaceuticals and guns.

… and then find a handy fellow traveler to endorse its editorial stance:

“The right, which had for years been hostile to and very nervous about a strong First Amendment, has rediscovered it,” said  Burt Neuborne, a law professor at New York University.

Behold the Leftist jiu-jitsu at its baldest. I’ve been a conservative all of my adult life and have been a First Amendment absolutist from the start; this is also true of every other conservative I’ve ever met. It is a flat-out lie to say that the Right is “hostile to” the 1A. Indeed, I long believed that the common ground the Left so often speaks of was to be found in both sides’ fidelity to free speech and the associated freedoms mentioned in the amendment’s text. The Left has since disabused me of that notion.

“The libertarian position has become dominant on the right on First Amendment issues,” said  Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer with the Cato Institute. “It simply means that we should be skeptical of government attempts to regulate speech. That used to be an uncontroversial and nonideological point. What’s now being called the libertarian position on speech was in the 1960s the liberal position on speech.”

Now, it’s the Left that has no use for free speech, even going to far as to attack free speech as “racist.” What they mean is that, having no further need for the shield of the 1A, they now want to prevent us from enjoying its protection as well.

Liberals who once championed expansive First Amendment rights are now uneasy about them. “The left was once not just on board but leading in supporting the broadest First Amendment protections,” said Floyd Abrams, a prominent First Amendment lawyer and a supporter of broad free-speech rights. “Now the progressive community is at least skeptical and sometimes distraught at the level of First Amendment protection which is being afforded in cases brought by litigants on the right.” Many on the left have traded an absolutist commitment to free speech for one sensitive to the harms it can inflict.

This is why there can be no peace with the Left: in their zeal to destroy the pillars of the American Republic, they keep moving the goal posts, discarding positions faster than runway models can change clothes. To conservatives, this appears to be inconsistency or hypocrisy, but to “progressives” there is nothing at all contradictory about it: whatever serves the cause will be wielded as a weapon against the established order. The only consistency they have is their desire to win “by any means necessary.”

Read more at: PJMedia.com