Posts Tagged → republican
President Trump’s one mistake is the biggest
President Donald Trump is a fantastic American. He was a fantastic president; probably the best America has had since Theodore Roosevelt.
All of the fake outrage criticism heaped on Trump has been shown in just five weeks of the Biden administration to have been utterly partisan manufactured horse shit. Like the “kids in cages” boo hoo nonsense that had Democrat Party adherents branding Trump a cruel and evil man. Now corrupt financial criminal Joe Biden is doing the exact same thing, a policy that was begun in Bush II and perfected in Obama’s administration due to a Ninth Circuit court decision, continued on in the Trump administration with great fake outrage and crocodile tears by his opponents, and now is continuing on in the Biden criminal gang administration, with the US Democrat Party Media looking the other way.
This is to say, criticism of Trump was 99.98% baseless horse shit fake outrage nonsense meant to poison the political environment.
So yes, Trump was fabulous, brilliant, hard working, devoted to America and its un-appreciated citizens who are quickly turning into slave labor for the Democrat Party’s illegal alien troops being trucked in to our nation in order to displace us and steal our stuff. Yeah, Trump was the one sole person standing between America’s citizens and the howling gulf of civilizational destruction now opening at our feet wider every day.
But as great as he is, and as devoted to him as I am, it is important to say that President Trump keeps making one mistake over and over, and it is a fatal one.
He is hopelessly loyal to something that does not deserve his loyalty.
He keeps playing politics by rules designed to hamstring him and other law-abiding American voters and that the other political party will never follow; he remains loyal to a political system that is hopelessly dysfunctional because it is filled with corrupt frauds in both political parties; and he remains party to a Republican Party that is utterly useless, filled with spineless jellyfish gutless political pukes whose sole purpose for being in politics is to enrich themselves and their chums, not to carry a political philosophy of freedom and liberty to fruition, or to oppose the Marxists.
When Trump was elected, he entered the White House expecting to run government like it was a business. He mistakenly presumed that American citizens working in taxpayer-funded government positions would be loyal to the Constitution, its process, the rules and regulations, and therefore, they would follow the directives from their legal boss Chief Executive in the White House. Trump’s White House did not immediately, or ever for that matter, dig into the executive branch and legally remove the politically partisan people who ended up deciding the outcome of his 2020 election.
Basically, Trump put up with a daily dose of illegal insubordination from within the executive branch, and he played nicey nice with the criminals who openly did it for the US media cheering section.
He mistakenly believed that the same corrupt bipartisan political establishment that stole the 2020 election from We, The People, and from him, would eventually treat him fairly in lawsuits and investigations into open vote fraud from coast to coast.
And now President Trump is mistakenly remaining loyal to the useless spineless jellyfish bottom feeding scumbag Republican Party (don’t get me wrong, I am not somehow in favor of the Democrat Party; I just recognize that the GOP is only half as corrupt as the totally corrupt and anti-America Democrat Party) that sold him out in Washington, DC, and in state legislatures across America.
President Trump has the rare opportunity to truly transform American politics. He tried to do so inside Washington DC, and despite succeeding wildly for four years, he mostly failed in the end. Because his re-election was illegally blocked so that the thieves and criminals could re-assemble their cozy little lair they had carefully constructed over the past fifty years. And despotic edict by despotic edict, the Biden crime syndicate daily tears away the hard work Trump did for America.
So Trump could start a new political party, a pure party, a party devoted to America First principles and policies. At least 50 million Americans are ready for him to do so. And yet, instead of starting this new political party, Trump wants to continue working within the existing messed up system, within the same Goddamned disgusting corrupt Republican Party that is run by the disgusting likes of PA State Senator Jake Corman, the political hack of all political hacks in the history of American political hackery.
Is there any way for Donald Trump to win this insider fight with the GOP ultimate insiders? Well, in the company of many other hard working, devoted political activists, I myself have spent over a decade in open and direct personal political warfare with the PA GOP establishment. And while I have some modest gains to show for all my effort, the fact is, vile Jake Corman (www.jakethesnake.us) has been promoted to “leader” of the Pennsylvania state senate.
By the same PA GOP that tonight voted NOT to censure RINO closet Marxist US Senator Patrick Toomey, who used his elected position to undermine and damage America at every turn, and to attack and hurt President Trump at every turn.
This is just one example of a billion such examples of how the GOP is hopelessly beyond help and reformation.
I would have to say that Trump has a very long row to hoe here; a very long uphill slog through slime and muck to turn the GOP around. A new political party (Patriot Party, MAGA Party) would have immediately gutted the useless GOP and sent it to the dustbin of history, where it belongs, but Trump has said he will not do this.
What can we say? President Trump remains hopelessly loyal to America and everything he knows about it. God bless the man. And God Damn the political hacks in both parties who have brought our great nation to the edge of fatal failure.
How lovely. Our first ever un-President’s Day!
We Americans just had our first un-President’s Day. That is, the non-President’s Day President’s Day. Which is to say, the holiday about presidents Washington and Lincoln that is actually not really about them any more.
This is because some people have decided to destroy everything that makes America America, and to try to turn America into something else that bears no resemblance to the America founded by General George Washington, our first president and the one for whom President’s Day is really all about. The person these people have selected to represent them is corrupt political careerist Joe Biden, who represents absolutely zero of what George Washington stood for.
King George III remarked about George Washington that he was “the greatest man in history” for having refused the crown as America’s first monarch. George Washington was so devoted to democracy in general, and in particular to the republican form of democracy with all of its fractured power sources and inherent checks and balances, that he declined to assume the absolute power of a monarch.
Contrast our heavenly subject George Washington with the lying, thieving, senile, corrupt failure in the White House right now. Joe Biden and his corrupt family are pretty much owned by the China Communist Party, and both Biden and his Democrat Party enablers are on a mad dash to not only steal elections, but to consolidate power Power POWERRR! so that no one can ever again challenge them or stop them from coercing heretofore free Americans into doing things we would not normally choose to do.
And this is why the President’s Day of 2021 is actually the un-President’s Day. Because unlike past President’s Days, this year’s holiday is not about the finest human qualities as demonstrated by George Washington’s self-control and humility. Rather, it is now remarked by the exact opposite behavior: Deep personal financial corruption by the current occupant of the White House, deeply fraudulent elections nationally and in many states that enabled Biden and the Democrat Party to illegally seize power, and a lethargic inward-looking Republican Party that cannot move off its ass to save itself much less the America that it supposedly exists for and to serve.
And so rather than “celebrate” President’s Day yesterday, I toasted General George Washington, for simply being an incredible human being. May God grant America such brave, just, and good leadership again, and soon.
And for all the nitwits who complain that General George Washington owned slaves, where the hell is your outrage against the Democrat Party you vote for and cheer on as it wipes out 244 years of carefully crafted democracy in its bloodthirsty quest for absolute POWER? Today’s Democrat Party is the second largest slave owner in the world, the first being the Chinese Communist Party, in which the Democrat Party is enthralled and in awe.
Sorry. I forgot. If liberals did not have double standards, they would have no standards at all. “Rules for thee but not for me” is the new Democrat Party mantra.
“Make the US Military BLM”
When you are a small business guy like me, and you satisfy your political interests primarily by blogging about politics and culture, the past twelve years have provided endless opportunities for going from one “I can’t believe it” post to another.
Let’s face it, while most Americans were asleep and under the illusion that America is too big to fail, America is under increasingly direct assault from within. We have an entire political party devoted to destroying America, while calling everyone else standing in their way ‘traitors’ etc. This is evil, vile stuff.
So along the way lots and lots of people on both sides have been kind of squaring up across from each other, kind of sizing each other up and assessing the likelihood of the other guy’s chances in what seems a more and more inevitable violent clash between the Americans and the actual traitors worming holes through America from inside. Lots of times the Leftists would say they would have the military on their side, and the Patriots would laugh out loud. Because the US military has always been America’s bastion of patriotism and loyalty to the US Constitution. Those boys and gals would never take the side of people who were actually against America.
That was true, until now.
As of a week ago, the US Military is in a “stand down” order by the new and openly communist Secretary of Defense.
Claiming without any evidence that the US military is presently rife with “extremism” and “white supremacy,” Lloyd Austen has ordered an illegal, un-American, unconstitutional, and classically Marxist philosophical purge of the United States military. Despite the US military serving as the largest ethnic and racial melting pot on Planet Earth, all bound together by a common set of values and American identity, Lloyd Austen is trying to eliminate the very people we want protecting us, so that he can turn the US military into a Black Lives Matter militia that will forcefully dominate the American civilians.
So to those Qanon people who were dreamily fantasizing about the US military conducting a corrective action against the fraudulent and illegal Biden administration, keep dreaming. The reality is a nightmare, where all true patriots who are loyal to America as founded, will be illegally and systematically eliminated from military service. Austen’s true goal is to make the US military into an officially armed Black Lives Matter.
God only knows how this immoral ethnic cleansing will be accomplished, but if the way openly racist, violent, Marxist BLM has conducted itself on college campuses and in police forces across America, it will be swift, totalitarian, authoritarian, and designed to absolutely crush any opposition to it. Due process will be non-existent, and plenty of fake examples will be made of the innocents gathered up in this net. The Democrat Party media will help spread the lies.
If there were ever a time for the US military leadership to rise up and strip these pretenders to the throne of their illegal gains, now would be it. But we also know that the deep character rot inside the US military is like every other institution now overthrown and co-opted by the Democrat Party, and so no corrective action will occur. At best a few generals and admirals will officially voice their opposition to Lloyd Austen’s genocidal plan, and they will be summarily retired. In their places will be elevated those human scum who dream of nothing but dominating other human beings by force. And so we now witness the true end of America happening right before our eyes.
There is likely no political solution to this. The spineless Republican Party has turned out to be yet another adjunct to the extremist anti-USA Democrat Party, and so the GOP mounts zero opposition. Perhaps some strong governors can try to stem the tide for a while. Maybe some states will secede from the Union, understandably so. But this is it. Once the US military is purged of its patriots, the true end of America as we knew her until a couple months ago is nigh.
The Marxist revolution will be complete.
Democrat Party steals White House – A-OK, Americans briefly occupy their own Capitol – ‘arrest everyone’
America is in the rubber-meets-the-road period of a full blown authoritarian Marxist revolution aiming to destroy our constitutional republic.
The Democrat Party uses blatant election fraud to steal the presidency right in front of our faces, and then two Georgia senate seats, and we are told by the mainstream media that we must shut up, sit down, and do what we are told. Then, a few hundred thousand patriots assemble peaceably in Washington, DC, to air their grievances. A handful briefly occupy the US Capitol, which is known as The People’s House, four of whom are executed in cold blood by the US Capitol Police, and suddenly the Democrat Party-run media are telling us that every single protestor there must be rounded up and jailed as well as anyone who supported them.
No mention of the four executed protestors, or even an acknowledgement that quite a few ANTIFA guys got into the Capitol and raised hell.
The hypocrisy of this situation is glaring, because we just experienced a solid year of violent BLM and ANTIFA riots that were driven by Democrat Party politicians and their media and tech arms, like MSNBC and FaceBook. Entire cities were destroyed or set back on their heels for decades to come, without any repercussions at all. None, zero.
This situation is exactly how the Communists took over Eastern Europe in the 1940s. They used the appearance of democracy to achieve power and non-democratic results, like locking up their innocent political opponents on fake charges.
Folks, we have a full on illegal takeover of America happening right in our faces. How many Americans are willing to live under the Democrat Party’s ruthless tyranny is a big question.
Another big question is what the hell is the purpose of the Republican Party, if most of its elected members are unwilling to mount any kind of resistance but are actually all too happy to help the Marxist takeover happen?
Vice President Mike Pence is a shameful example of this spineless attitude. Pence said on Wednesday that “the Constitution constrains me” from sending the contested Electoral College votes back to the several states for a re-certification, and so he certified the utterly false Electoral College votes that gave the presidency to a fraud, Joe Biden.
Hey, Pence, the US Constitution and the laws from it actually enabled you to do exactly what was needed. And did you not notice that your supposed political opponents, the Democrat Party officials, do not feel constrained by anything? Not laws, not rules, not decency, not a democratic spirit, and certainly not the US Constitution. Now that you gave them the power, the Democrat Party and their allies in Big Tech are blowing up the Constitution.
Guess this end result makes Mike Pence really committed to the Constitution…
If elected Republicans continue to play nicey-nice by the most restrictive interpretation of the rules and laws, while their opponents are falsely accusing and jailing good people without any regard to law at all, then there is no official opposition to the Democrat Party’s evil. And so there is no purpose to the Republican Party. A political party that cannot stand up to what has just transpired is not worth being called a political party.
Let’s face it, as so many people have said for decades, the GOP is truly a country club, a gentleman’s club, a social club, an investor’s club, a blue blazer and short hair and and khaki pants club, an elitist snob club; it sure as hell is not a political club or political party.
I have run against the GOPe three times (in a Republican congressional primary in 2009-2010, a Republican state senate primary in 2012, and another Republican state senate primary in 2015 that I bowed out of after severely injuring my left knee while hunting), and each time the Pennsylvania Republican officials and GOP money men fought harder against me than empty suit VP Mike Pence or Senator Mitch McConnell just fought against this Marxist takeover of America. In 2012 the Pennsylvania Republicans actually gerrymandered me out of my own State Senate District #15 at the last second, and it took the PA Supreme Court to throw that out and put me back in, a historic decision. Then the PAGOP ran two people against me, and their chosen candidate beat me with I think 43% of the vote, only to lose to the incumbent Democrat state senator that fall.
If the GOP has more fight against America-loving conservatives than it does against open Marxists seeking to overthrow the rule of law, then what the hell is the purpose of the GOP? Not much. Seems like America needs a Patriot Party to supplant the failed GOP. Yes, third parties always enable the Democrat Party, but so what? So does the GOP!
The GOP welcomes all the hypocrisy, sedition, treason, and lawlessness that the Democrat Party and its adjuncts in Big Tech and Big Media can daily assemble, just so long as the existing GOP elected officials maintain their jobs…
Folks, this is not the political arrangement planned by America’s founders in 1776 or in 1787. If Americans wish to hold on to their most basic freedoms, then they must organize right now and plan on mass direct action against the lawless theft of our government. Think of yourself as living in 1776, and act accordingly.
Pursuing power vs. pursuing pleasure
If people are mystified by the US Supreme Court’s recent inability to address a textbook example of violated federal voting law in Pennsylvania, they need to understand how this has come to pass. Because that deadlocked Court is now just as corrupted as every other institution in America.
For sixty years at least, maybe eighty years, the Democrat Party has been waging a war to capture America. That political party has been focused on infiltrating every institution in America, capturing each one, and then bending it to its will and using it for further political gains. This has happened with the mainstream media, colleges, grade and high schools, Hollywood and the entertainment industry INCLUDING the National Football League and the National Basketball Association, the American Bar Association, the American Medical Association, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, charitable foundations, Big Tech, federal government agencies, the Papacy and the Catholic Church, Mainline Protestant churches, etc ad nauseum.
All of these institutions have been captured by the Left and they all now represent a politically and culturally united front. In America, their leaders and staff members work hand in glove with the Democrat Party to promote and implement leftist policies, to attack all opposition, and to ensure that future generations of Americans will no longer share the cultural identity and traditional American values of their own parents and grandparents.
The US Supreme Court was just the last of the targeted institutions to fall. And that is what this week’s unbelievable decision represents. In the Kelly/Parnell case this week, the Court was presented with several clear violations of state law and constitutional requirements that ensure that a FEDERAL election is clean and fair. But the Court was unable to muster a 5-4 majority to correct the illegal and unethical last-minute shenanigans committed by the Wolf Administration and the PA supreme court. The US Supreme Court was unable to muster this bare majority because only four justices on the bench believe in an America that has existed since its founding in 1776. A fifth justice, Brett Kavanaugh, is an ethereal dreamer of intellectual musings. Like he did with the recent North Carolina voting law case, he punted, saying that what North Carolina does with its election laws is a state’s prerogative; despite the fact that we are dealing with a FEDERAL election.
Kavanaugh would have been a better professor than he is a justice. Kavanaugh represents the modern Republican Party at its core: A group of people devoted to theoretical living and what-me-worry laissez faire policies with no direction to them. They believe in hedonism, and that probably is what Justice Kavanaugh is, an intellectual hedonist. His dreamy thoughts lack anything concrete, so no one is offended by him. Let the party roll on…
The Republican Party and its ideological allies and affiliates have long worshiped and pursued money and pleasure at all costs. This is why elected Republicans largely have no fight in them today, while President Donald Trump and his 80 million supporters are doing all of the heavy lifting in this election fight. Meanwhile the Democrat Party was busy gaining control of every institution so that elections will be meaningless and they will have sole dominion over all Americans. Under the color of law, of course, but also, as we have seen, with great official and unofficial coercive force, too. You will obey!
And that is how we got to where we are today.
And for those people who believe that the US Supreme Court will be able to muster five votes for any case related to fairly resolving this illegal election, like the Texas case now before the Court, you are dreaming. If this week’s Pennsylvania case didn’t wake up five Court members that their republic is in cardiac arrest on the gurney, then no other case will.
Dear Americans, we are going to have to find other solutions to solving the Democrat Party’s systemic evil and illegal lawless behavior.
Malcom X on American Blacks who vote for the Democrat Party of slavery
Malcolm X was a complex man, a smart man, a conflicted man, an articulate and passionate man. One most admirable thing about him undeniably, he cared deeply for his fellow “negroes” and wanted them to have better lives and more rights. To that end, he excoriated them for reflexively voting for Democrat Party candidates.
Malcolm X called American Blacks who reflexively vote Democrat “chumps.” After all the Democrat Party is the party of slavery, secession, civil war, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, anti-Black violence, lynchings, and church burnings. And the Democrat Party is still all of these things today, every single one of them, and yet, unbelievably…American Blacks keep voting for more dependence upon welfare handouts, failure, and permanent underclass serving the bidding of white liberals in the Democrat Party.
Listen to this fifty-some-year-old three- minute speech by Malcolm X. Listen to his passion and ask yourself if he was wrong. Your own conscience will tell you he was right.
Dear American Blacks, what have you got to lose by voting for Donald Trump? Nothing. And I will say that the Republican Party has its warts, its failures, its corrupt members and problems, too, but in all, the GOP can’t hold a candle to the racist discrimination heaped by American white liberals upon poor American Blacks.
Malcolm X: Don’t vote for Democrats!
Illegal billions: Big tech & national media’s undeclared in-kind political donations
For twelve years at least, billions of dollars worth of undeclared in-kind political contributions to just one political party have been made by the Big Tech companies and our national media.
Owners and staff at Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and all of the national media (NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, PBS, MSNBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, the Patriot News and Capital Star here in Harrisburg, etc.) have gone out of their way to treat one group of people one way, and another group of people a totally different way.
Big Tech and the media go so far as to report only good things, even fake good things, and not report the negative things, about one group. Yet Big Tech and the media only report negative things, especially fake negative things, about the other group, and never report the good things. This artificial treatment of the two groups has had a hugely disproportionate effect on the flow of information to American voters, and, therefore, a hugely disproportionate effect on election outcomes.
Who are the two groups who receive such different treatment at the hands of Big Tech and the national media?
Why, they are Democrats/ liberals/ anarchists/ socialists on the one hand, the favored fair-haired child, and then Republicans/ conservatives/ patriots/ constitutionalists on the other hand, the hated red-headed stepchild. Because the treatments these groups receive are so totally over the top different from one another, you could almost swear that Big Tech and the national media are owned and run only by Democrats and liberals, to the point where they are acting like they are part-and-parcel of Democrat political campaigns.
Today, the Republican National Committee FINALLY filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission about Twitter’s obviously one-sided effort to suppress damning information and news articles about the Biden Crime Family. I say finally, because this issue has been out there in the wide open for many years, and the GOPe never acted on it. It is hard to believe that it took this long for someone to file a complaint, when for years people like me, and much higher profile than I, have documented the unfair one-sided treatment conservatives and Republicans have received from Big Tech and the national media. For my own part, posts on the Josh First Facebook page were mostly shadow banned, and my paid political campaign ads had dubious reach, which appeared to be fraud by Facebook. They took my money, and then launched weak ad campaigns into which I had limited views. Facebook has been doing the same thing to the Donald Trump campaign, too, by the way. Activist Laura Loomer, now a candidate for Congress, has been completely de-platformed from all of these services, without any explanation why. But her political opponent, communista yehudia Lois Frankel, enjoys all the benefits of Facebook etc
It is just not fair. And it is not legal.
All of these one-sided activities by Big Tech and the national media amount to an enormous undeclared political campaign contribution effort that by the simple reading of the statute is blatantly illegal.
During the Obama administration, conservative political activist Dinesh D’Souza was sent to prison for a long time for giving someone money to make political contributions with. About twenty thousand bucks total, if I recall right. Here we have Big Tech and the national media donating billions of dollars worth of free political advertising and political information suppression to the Democrat Party, without ever disclosing it. If D’Souza went to jail for a couple years, then how many decades in jail do Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Dorsey, Google’s Brin, and so on for the many other Big Tech owners and content managers, now face?
All of the Big Tech and national media owners and managers deserve to pay huge fines and go to jail for long times.
I have written about this before, and it is worth it to write about it again. That is because America’s election rules and laws are supposed to apply to everyone equally. No one person or group in America is supposed to receive special treatment, the way Democrats and liberal socialist anarchists do when it comes to our election laws and campaign contributions. That kind of special treatment up-ends the rule of law on which America is based. One rule is supposed to apply to us all equally.
So, if Hillary Clinton is finally going to face the music for her wild crime spree, then the Big Tech and national media activists and political donors, should too.
Lock them all up. They earned it all.
“Ridgie” no more
In 1998 I joined the Governor Tom Ridge administration in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, fresh off of a solid seven years of DC Swamp. Coming from the Washington, DC, federal bureaucracy, I was considered a professional insider and policy whiz. My own view was that I was a refugee from the anti-citizen, anti-taxpayer, anti-America administrative state that was so crazily overboard that I could no longer work inside of it. My job in the Ridge Administration was as Director of Education & Information on the executive staff at the PA Department of Conservation & Natural Resources (DCNR).
The state civil service bureaucrats in Harrisburg had a name for people like me. We were called “Ridgies,” because we were so dedicated to the unique Tom Ridge way of doing things. And what was that unique way of doing things? What was it about being dedicated to Governor Ridge that earned us this almost mocking sobriquet?
In a word, Ridge was honest. He brought a refreshing honesty and down-home common sense to running government that had not been seen in decades. So different and refreshing was this bright light being shone on The People’s business, that it left those of us who were implementing it with almost Moses-like beams of light emanating from our faces. You could say we were bright eyed and bushy tailed, excited to do our work. We humored the staid bureaucrats, but we meant it and we persevered.
I was proud to be a Ridgie, because Tom Ridge represented almost everything that was good and necessary in government doing the taxpayer’s work.
Fast forward 25 years and holy moley, what has happened…. Governor Tom Ridge has endorsed senile, corrupt, pedophile, racist failed liberal career politician Joe Biden over President Donald Trump. Trump being the Tom Ridge of today, Biden being everything that everyone hates about corrupt career politicians.
All that Ridge’s bizarre endorsement did for me was make me realize that unlike when he was governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Ridge now values the permanent and unaccountable administrative state over the interests of the citizenry. When Ridge was governor, he confronted Pennsylvania’s hide-bound bureaucracies and forced them to serve The People, the forgotten taxpayers who underwrite all of government. Now, Ridge is on the side of that administrative state, a complete 180 degree flip from where he was.
What can account for this change of philosophy? Probably that Ridge Global, Ridge’s lobbying and consulting firm, is so closely tied to that same big government administrative state. He certainly is not advocating for good policy, because President Trump is implementing everything that Ridge used to say that he believed in, and here Ridge is opposing it.
I feel badly that such a good man as Ridge has been flipped by filthy lucre. It is painful to see someone whose good citizen name inspired us, his staff, to be proud “Ridgies,” to now renounce and stand against all he once stood for. The person in whom I put my trust to implement citizenry-saving policies is now an open and proud tool for anti-America forces and activists.
Contrary to what Ridge claimed in his Atlantic article earlier this year, he is definitely not a conservative. Because his policy views are very liberal. And based on the things he routinely says in public, and his consistent support for an obviously corrupt Joe Biden, Ridge can in no way claim to be a Republican any longer. Yet he is using his claim as a “conservative Republican” to advance anti-conservative, anti-Republican ideas and people. This is not honest behavior.
Sadly, Ridge is just as much a part of the fake news as all the other fake news people. In turn, I must now say that I am no longer a “Ridgie.”
Unlike Governor Tom Ridge, I remain on the side of The People. I am still, however, a Trumpie, loud and proud.
USA! USA! USA!
TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP!
Response to PA Gov. Tom Ridge on Conservatives & the Environment
On April 22nd this year, Earth Day, The Atlantic published an opinion piece by former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, about conservatives and the environment (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/environment-gop-out-touch/610333/). The Atlantic solicited responses to Ridge’s essay, and so I submitted one to them, but received back no indication they would publish it. They did not publish it, because liberals like those at The Atlantic accept and publish only liberals, and reject conservatives. So here it is, my response to Governor Ridge’s essay about conservatives and the environment.
I felt compelled to respond to Governor Ridge’s essay, in part because I worked in his administration, and in part because I have met few Republicans who can articulate a truly conservative view of environmental policy, which Governor Ridge failed to do. I was also afraid of being seen as attacking someone I hold in high esteem, and I need to say that while I may disagree with Governor Ridge’s essay and some of his recent public stances, like supporting PA governor Tom Wolf’s covid19 lockdown, I remain impressed by Governor Ridge’s high character. I am proud to have served in his distinctively excellent administration.
Governor Ridge’s essay slightly opens a doorway that I am both pleased and also reluctant to push all the way open. But it needs to be opened, all the way, because for far too long establishment Republicans have claimed to be conservatives, while acting like liberals.
Governor Ridge writes his essay “as a conservative,” and despite boldly leading by example in placing highly competent gays, women, and minorities in senior government positions literally decades ago, long before most Democrats followed suit, Governor Ridge was, in fact, a true conservative. His achievements in conservative policy are legion, including Pennsylvania becoming a shall-issue concealed firearm carry state and his administration’s brownfield land recycling program.
Nonetheless, the emphasis today is on he “was.”
Governor Ridge was a conservative, and by today’s standard, he is not. This is not because Governor Ridge has changed, but because what now defines a conservative has changed so dramatically since the time he was governor. The same holds true for liberals, by the way, in their own way (we see the Democrat Party now a totally, openly, violent, racist, anti-America Marxist organization).
And like so many, if not all other political elites, especially Republicans, and most especially establishment Republicans from the hide-bound, bunker-mentality Pennsylvania GOP, Governor Ridge has not changed with the times. Governor Ridge was a conservative, and today he often speaks like a liberal, and sides with liberals on policy disputes. He is not alone in this, but each Republican who does so still causes pain to us conservatives in the political trenches. It is frustrating as hell to experience a former Republican appointee or elected official try to speak with authority as some sort of representative of conservativism, when in fact, they are simply liberals. Or RINOs for short (Republican In Name Only – not conservative).
Probably the biggest indication that Governor Ridge is out of synch with today’s conservatives is how he encourages us to adopt a laundry list of liberal environmental policies in his The Atlantic essay. This means that his solution for conservatives to succeed is for us to adopt liberalism. Even though most of the “environmental” groups are simply employment offices for Democrat Party operatives pushing Marxist, partisan policies. Very few environmental groups today are even seeking solutions, because they are busy dreaming up new problems.
Most of the policies pushed by environmental groups today are by definition Big Coercive Government, Small Defenseless Citizen, anti-Constitution, disregard for private property rights, mountains out of mole hills, and so on. These groups are not about the environment, they simply use the subject of the environment as another avenue to push Marxism and the Big Government necessary to force it down our throats. Governor Ridge should know this, of all people.
What Governor Ridge failed to address is: How can we conservatives embrace the very same failed and inferior liberal policies that drove us to becoming conservatives in the first place? If we adopt liberalism, then we are abandoning conservativism, and failing as conservatives.
Every single environmental policy recommendation that Governor Ridge lists in his essay directly contradicts core conservative principles, like small government, less intrusive government, less spendy government, less activist government, less regulatory government, accountable government and accountable taxpayer-funded government employees. Literally every single policy he lists requires the government to intervene in a big, coercive way, often over trifling differences or demonstrably false premises.
Governor Ridge’s environmental ideas are not conservativism; they are quintessential big government liberalism.
Perhaps the centerpiece of his essay is that conservatives must concede at least a bit on “climate change.” Yet, for conservatives, this particular issue, more than any other, highlights the distinction between us and liberals. For conservatives to agree with the Marxist, disproven, and notoriously phony climate change religion would be to abandon basic, solid, conservative principles altogether….like Capitalism 101, solid math and science, and transparency. Again, we are unpersuaded the climate warming-cooling-change-whatever issue even exists, let alone that a government solution consistent with America’s Constitution could be found.
Governor Ridge writes “The Republican Party has largely abandoned environmental issues.” To which I and a host of other conservatives would respond, No, but many Republicans have abandoned the citizen voters and the forgotten taxpayers of America. Many careerist Republicans have embraced popular culture and its feel-good-now bubblegum policies. For Republicans to respect openly partisan “environmental” groups and embrace liberal nonsense like so-called ‘climate change’ and similar policies would only be one more betrayal in a long line of policy and political betrayals committed by the Republican establishment. Conservatives have perfectly sound environmental policies based on perfectly sound, all-American principles. If you but ask us, we will explain them. We conservatives didn’t abandon environmental issues, nor did we leave the Republican Party. The Republican establishment abandoned us.
Josh First is president of Appalachian Land & Conservation Services, LLC. He has worked at the US EPA in Washington, DC, The Conservation Fund, the Central Pennsylvania Conservancy, and was Director of Environmental Education and Information at the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation & Natural Resources in the Governor Tom Ridge administration.