Examine Your Values: Set Some Brushfires for Liberty

A great number of Americans, some ultra-Patriots, some simply concerned folks, all are pinning their hopes on Donald J. Trump as the “Great Savior” of America, not even for an instant comprehending that in far too many cases, he is part and parcel part of the problem and he has facilitated many of government’s ills. This is in evidence, as he stated he hopes that Congress votes against the USA Freedom Reauthoriztion Act of 2020, in several recent tweets; and yet, he authorized it again in 2018 – supposedly tweaked to halt any future abuse – knowing at the time it had been abused and used against him and others… but the vote was just cancelled at 8:30 pm CST. He also holds himself up as the strongest defender of the Second Amendment, all the while sneaking about and all too willing to move against our rights by way of executive order, as seen via his bumpstock ban and his early nods towards unconstitutional “red flag laws”. And of course, there is the USMCA that was compiled by Democrats and has Elizabeth Warren ecstatic.

Even so, yes, I know the Democrats will attempt to do even much worse, when and if they should ever regain the White House, but, in the meantime, the slow dredge towards tyranny and communism through Congressional actions and within the State legislatures show that Trump isn’t serving as any real deterrent to the Marxist agenda that seems to have taken hold in so much of America. Whether Trump wins or not is not of too much concern at the moment, since what is coming has arrived and the push will exponentially increase and become ever incessant across tha land, ’til the breaking point is reached.

Trump isn’t a stop gap and he isn’t even much of a place-holder.

If anything, let the proverbial “shit hit the fan” and the chips fall where they may, since that day is going to arrive sooner rather than later, and maybe in the aftermath and out of the ashes of chaos, the forces of those who truly desire to live free will have abolished a government that has grown to work against the ends described in the Declaration of Independence, namely the right to pursue life, liberty and happiness, and all those Americans left standing can truly set forth on a new day under a form of governance and a newly laid foundation that truly secures liberty, safety and happiness.

I only know that as is, America’s days as a viable and free republic are numbered, vote or no vote, with or without Trump, and no matter who is president.

“I was the first of the men who refused to give up the pursuit of his own happiness in order to serve others. … To those of you who retain some remnant of dignity and the will to live your lives for yourselves, you have the chance to make the same choice. Examine your values and understand that you must choose one side or the other. Any compromise between good and evil only hurts the good and helps the evil.” ~ John Galt, ‘Atlas Shrugged‘ by Ayn Rand, 1957

Support Trump if you must, but at least be honest with yourselves and with America, and don’t claim to be a “Conservative” or to be defending freedom and liberty, when You do, since President Trump, a Conservative-In-Name-Only and a self-described “King of Debt”, does not adhere to the Conservative Ideology that harkens to the earliest days of America’s founding. He doesn’t believe in limited government, personal responsibility or free markets, and, never seeing a spending bill he didn’t love, his administration’s policies have overseen an addition of five trillion to the national debt and the annihilation of conservatism and conservative values, within the ranks of Trump Republicans and evidenced by their acceptance of Democratic Socialism.

Trumpist philosophy is incompatible with conservative principles and it has driven many conservatives from the Republican Party, that, at one time, led the movement to keep conservative values and policies first and foremost in the hearts and minds of all Americans and a driving force within our government, as a true means of ensuring our government was always mindful of our rights and liberty. And nearly four years later, no one should be denying this fact, if they are honest Americans.

Aside from President Trump’s inclination to always return to the ideas that sustained him as a lifelong New York liberal, this destruction of conservatism and the Republican Party itself, in part, is the handiwork of President Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who couldn’t vote for Dear Ol’ Dad in 2016, because both have been big donors to the Democratic Party and registered Democrats until just before the 2018 mid-term elections.

Although Ivanka claims to lean more towards conservative ideas over the Democratic Party Marxist notions, she has been a strong advocate for an Al Gore type global warming agenda, a Hillary-inspired paid family leave plan and the anti-Second Amendment Extreme Risk Protection Orders also called “red flag laws”. Her partner in all this, Jared Kushner, has been the driving force within Trump’s administration seeking to make DACA permanent, amnesty for so-called “Dreamers” in exchange for border wall funding and create a merit-based immigration reform program that doesn’t do anything to halt illegal aliens coming to America; however, Kushner’s plan does benefit family businesses.

Kushner’s hands are also in the First Step Act “prison reform” that grants early releases to violent criminals and the recent COVID-19 driven Patriot Act for healthcare designed to spy on all Americans. And, since being placed in charge of the Republican Party Platform for 2020, in a move that has the Democrat Commies laughing their heads off, Kushner is acting to eliminate “politically incorrect conservative language” such as “gay conversion therapy”, in a nod to the deviant and perverted LGBT extremists who objected to a line in the platform’s 58 pages that reads as follows: “We support the right of parents to determine the proper medical treatment and therapy for their minor children.”

It seems to me there was a day when the Republican Party supported “radical concepts” like parental rights, especially where those rights involved medical decisions.

More importantly, the Trump administration’s embrace of a massive intervention to soften the blows and the economic impact of the national shutdown and “self-quarantine”, through bailouts for the airlines and other businesses and Wall Street in general, has placed a spotlight on the Republican Party and its new views on the role of government, views that, much like their Democratic Party Marxist counterparts are far and away from anything mandated by Constitutional mandates and anything that our Founders would have accepted as normal, or even right.

This year has been defined by the sudden disappearance of fiscal conservative Republicans, as remaining Republican policymakers have exerted their energies towards crafting large-scale, high dollar, Big Spending programs that would place government checks in the hands of those most severely harmed by policies they set in place themselves, namely the shutdown of the entire national economy, all systems brought to a cold, hard, full stop, unnecessarily so. The economic crisis that led to the collapse in March was already well underway, before he ever took office, and it was brought on by the Federal Reserve Bank, over the past two decades, and policies pushed by Trump and economic advisor Larry Kudlow, designed to enrich those in Big Business and the Wall Street stock brokers, that hastened its arrival.

Twenty plus years of only stimulus and Quantitative Easings has made it seem virtually normal for this generation, who have known nothing else and believe it will always work, because they haven’t yet witnessed a collapse, that wasn’t softened somewhat. However, nobody should believe The Fed will save America’s economy, since it has neither the power nor the inclination to protect the average American from economic folly, that places money in its own back pocket. Even now, it has become more than apparent that billionaires, in the know, and even some insider-trader Congressmen have actually profited from this recent economic collapse.

Interventions through Federal Reserve stimulus and Government programs is a Catch-22 and no solution whatsoever. Printing money as if there’s no tomorrow and no accounting to be called only has extremely limited benefits. It doesn’t stop an exponential rise in production costs, inflation and necessary goods, and it can’t manage supply chain disruptions and manufacturing shutdowns for any reason. No printing scheme in history has ever been able to solve an economic collapse, not one. And, at most, all this current spate of printing and spending will only slow down the approach of complete collapse for a time; but it will not stop it.

Now it appears that the government’s new duties extend to bailing everybody out, no matter what and no matter the cost to the nation. Republican senators, such as Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley are attempting to push a new kind of populism that is obviously anti-liberty, wary of Big Business, and yet comfortable with Big Government, as Rubio was largely in the lead for the Paycheck Protection Program that demands billions of dollars to be shoveled out the door each month, while Hawley wants to pay businesses to keep workers on their payrolls in times of crisis, even when nothing is being produced, ending with trillions more added to the national debt, with dubious results or any real solutions for America’s financial woes being found.

The $3 trillion HEROES Act that was recently passed by Speaker Pelosi’s Democrat majority in the House will be considered by the Republican majority Senate on June 1st. While Republicans supposedly are largely in opposition to it, they have suggested they may be open to another bill similar to the CARES Act that Trump approved in March. And, while Trump has showed a willingness to enact another round of payments to Americans, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin recently told Bob Cusack of ‘The Hill’, that “We’re going to step back for a few weeks and think very clearly how we need to spend more money and if we need to do that.”

The problem remains that the economy was already in deep trouble before the COVID-19 event. Most of the population, all Americans need money now. The black hole of debt is always hungry and demanding more in a debt-based economy.

“How we need to” and “if we need to”? Does anyone else see the Keynesian and Marxist economics at play here, couched in Orwellian double-speak?

Anybody who questions President Trump on his policies and the numerous flawed bills that heap more harm on America are quickly dismissed as “Never Trumpers” or “Republican-In-Name-Only”, but he and his minions certainly can’t claim to be true to the form of decades past Republicans who were committed to fiscal discipline. They have been responsible for the largest increase in the deficit and the national debt in any three years of American history, as they continue to refuse to contain the primary drivers of the national debt.

Zealous as ever, Trump and Company have placed Obama’s 2009 Quantitative Easing “Industrial” policies into overdrive, in a newly acquired Republican penchant for picking winners and losers, as they pervert the fundamental principles of free market conservatism, whereby the forces of private exchange in the markets decide winners and losers. Far from saving the economy or America, they show themselves to be less than a true Republican or conservative whose policies can only end with more harm to the economy, through their newly adopted failed Leftist philosophy.

How surreal it all seems to look back at President Trump’s message during the State of the Union Address, on February 4th 2020, in regards to America vs. Socialism, where he declared that “America will never be a socialist country.” This was followed in the last week in February with an assertion by Larry Kudlow, Trump’s top economic advisor, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, stating that “What is or could sink the American economy is the socialism coming from our friends on the other side of the aisle.” How ironic.

President Trump, the interventionist, activist and populist, is far from being a real conservative, and so he has not had the least bit moment’s hesitation or compunction in squashing free market principles. He is a cancer on America and Her institutions, and if you fear the alternative, Donald Trump has already accomplished more for a Big Government Socialist agenda in America than any Democrat in U.S. history, with the exception of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

This is not conservative leadership. It is populism. And it’s high time true Conservative Americans acknowledge the fact.

The president, his policies and his blind, unquestioning chanting followers have abandoned nearly all the causes that made the Republican Party a conservative party.

Ayn Rand once stated, “The smallest minority on earth is the individual.” She was echoing the sentiments of Sam Adam’s declaration that “It does not take a majority to prevail but rather an irate, tireless minority, who keep setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.” Both statements go hand-in-hand with noted anthropologist Margaret Mead’s message, when she wrote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

Trump doesn’t really afford us much in the way of a stop gap measure to prepare for 2024. But all Americans certainly must ask, “What happens after 2024?” In choosing one side over the other, all true Americans will choose liberty every time.

Only You, the American Patriot, can truly ever restore this country, even if it means pointing to President Trump’s failures and calling President Trump to account for his own actions, as any concerned citizen would normally do, in regards to any sitting U.S. President’s policies. Be not afraid of costing him the election, since the status quo is far from tenable and not too unlike what will follow, under the Democratic Party Marxists and a government worthy of being abolished, so that the American people can re-establish the governance of the land through a philosophy of limited government and return in earnest to securing their liberty and happiness in a manner that actually completely aligns with their inalienable rights.

Get off Your asses and set some brushfires for liberty, for true economic prosperity and for freedom in America.

May 28, 2020

~ The Author ~
Justin O. Smith has lived in Tennessee off and on most of his adult life, and graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, with a B.S. and a double major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – minors in Military Science and English, for what its worth. His real education started from that point on. Smith is a frequent contributor to the family of Kettle Moraine Publications.