Guilty by Reason of Insanity Read online

  To my fellow patriots joined together in our common struggle to save America from the political left’s insane and destructive ideas. Only through vigilance, commitment, and faith in God will we succeed in beating back the forces that seek to complete the fundamental—and sinister—transformation of this great nation.

  Introduction

  Everything you need to know about America’s political division today, and what the two sides really believe in, was evident during President Trump’s 2019 State of the Union address.

  Originally scheduled for January 29, the speech was postponed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who cited security concerns—specifically, that the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security were lacking funds due to the partial government shutdown then in effect. The shutdown stemmed from congressional Democrats’ refusal to grant Trump’s request to fund construction of a security wall on the southern border. Many Democrats balked at the wall’s $5.7 billion price tag, though within weeks much of the same crowd pledged support for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, whose cost she has projected to be a staggering $10 trillion—which now appears to be a dramatic underestimation.1

  Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen quickly debunked Pelosi’s reasoning, declaring that both her department and the Secret Service were fully prepared to provide security for the President’s speech. That was irrelevant to the left, which cheered Pelosi for ostensibly humiliating Trump. Progressives were less ecstatic a few days later, however, when Trump retaliated by cancelling a weeklong trip Pelosi was scheduled to take overseas. Several Democratic trip participants, including House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff, Congress’s most prominent advocate of the Russia collusion hoax, were filmed exiting a bus that was supposed to take them to an airport but instead merely circled the block several times. At the time Schiff was left speechless by the affair and refused to comment to the press, a rare occurrence for him.2

  The shutdown was resolved about a week later, and the State of the Union went forward on February 5. The audience featured a large block of Democratic women, including Pelosi, wearing white as an anti-Trump protest. Undaunted, the president delivered a passionate defense of American greatness. He championed border security, deregulation, and lowering prescription drug prices while denouncing radical abortion laws that would allow infanticide. He touted the tremendous economic accomplishments his administration had achieved in just two years, particularly the great strides seen in minority communities.

  In pledging common cause with the freedom fighters in Venezuela, Trump roundly denounced the brutality of that nation’s regime, tying socialism to totalitarianism and exposing it as a destroyer of prosperity and freedom. He then deftly segued to the alarming calls for socialism in America, noting that America was “founded on liberty and independence—not government coercion, domination, and control.” He endorsed America’s age-old appeal to liberty, underscoring the incompatibility of freedom and socialism. “We are born free, and we will stay free,” proclaimed President Trump. “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”3

  The speech was a tour de force of American exceptionalism and unabashed patriotism. On hearing these remarks, however, Democrats presented themselves in stark relief, with many refusing to stand against socialism. In fact, many Democrats defiantly refused to rise for: American greatness, middle-class prosperity, blue-collar wage increases, low unemployment rates for minorities, the disabled, women, cutting regulations, America’s leading the world in oil and natural gas production and becoming a net energy exporter, the USA chant, veterans, the child tax credit, legal immigration, an immigrant ICE agent who saved hundreds of women and girls from sex traffickers, ICE itself, angel families, school choice, the reduction of food stamp rolls by five million, the elimination of the Obamacare penalty, the banning of late-term abortion, deescalating tensions with North Korea, and moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.4 The women in white applauded very little in the speech, but they did give one line an animated reception, replete with hugging and enthusiastic cheering—Trump’s lauding of the historic number of women now serving in Congress. In a speech filled with tributes to all sorts of individuals and groups as well as to America itself, they were roused to cheer for themselves.

  Trump’s optimistic address was filled with calls for unity, promoting American greatness as a benefit to all Americans. For the Democratic response, failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams offered an entirely different perspective, one grounded in identity politics—a message that was less optimistic, less hopeful, and decidedly more divisive. Whereas Trump proudly recited America’s noble history and emphasized the sacrifices of all Americans, Abrams focused on the shame of the nation’s racist history and the continuing prevalence of racism today. She also took a shot at the nation’s sexism for good measure. “We fought Jim Crow with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act,” said Abrams. “Yet we continue to confront racism from our past and in our present.… America achieved a measure of reproductive justice in Roe v. Wade, but we must never forget, it is immoral to allow politicians to harm women and families to advance a political agenda.”

  There could be no sharper contrast between the visions and agendas of the American right and the left today. Conservatives are proud of the amazing economic improvements President Trump has overseen and are delighted that they permeate our whole society, including the poor, minorities, and women. We’re pursuing a vision of American greatness in which our government limits its own intrusive powers in order to unleash the awesome power and ingenuity of free American people. We have faith in the inherent goodness, generosity, and kindness of Americans and their dedication to their families, neighbors, and communities. We believe the American nation is exceptional and worth defending, including at the border.

  The left, by contrast, is consumed with fury at their own nation. Leftists detest much of the history of our country, which they believe was born in the sins of continental theft, genocide, slavery, white privilege, sexism, and mercenary capitalism. They are on a mission to right all these alleged wrongs and to punish those still benefiting from them. The American people, in their view, are crawling with racists who want to resurrect Jim Crow. Thus, Americans need systematic indoctrination through every conceivable lever—the education system, entertainment, the media, corporate America, and social media, to name a few—to disabuse them of their backward mentality. Every element of American society must be politicized with this goal in mind. Every American must be shamed, publicly and vehemently, for any utterance that strays beyond rigid ideological boundaries. Rejecting the principle of equal opportunity for all, the left pits Americans against one another according to race, class, gender, and other categories in a grim struggle for power and government largess.

  The left is emboldened by its cultural dominance and cloistered in its own echo chambers where opposing views are demonized and excluded. Leftists have grown dangerously extreme, dogmatic, and intolerant. Regarding their views as the only acceptable ones, they are increasingly disillusioned with the principle of free speech and seek to suppress ideas they consider offensive—a category in which most conservative expression now belongs.

  Crucially, leftists want to punish Americans for the cardinal sin of electing President Trump. They consider anyone who works for Trump, is associated with him, or supports him beyond the pale. In this state of resentful delirium, they have embraced an extremist agenda of socialism, open borders, and legal abortion up to the moment of birth. Contemptuous of constitutional constraints, they propose circumventing measures such as abolishing the Electoral College and packing the Supreme Court to regain and eternalize
their political power.

  Leftists are stunned and outraged that grassroots Americans are fighting back, through President Trump, to recapture America’s freedom tradition and its underlying values. This book chronicles the left’s proliferating insanity, born of its extremism and its own frustration with the formidable opposition it is now encountering. It is a wake-up call to anyone who believes the leftists’ endgame is anything short of the wholesale conversion of this nation to something only they could love—and something America’s founding fathers would abhor.

  CHAPTER ONE The Threat from Within

  The world is going crazy and America is rapidly following suit. The left’s decades-long assault on our traditional values and constitutional liberties has immeasurably damaged our society and our republic. Up is down. Right is wrong. Good is evil. Words are twisted to represent the opposite of their actual meaning. Intellectual and moral anarchy abound. Radical leftist ideas are hailed as mainstream, while conservative ideas are demonized as extreme.

  Every great world power eventually falls, and the process often begins with self-inflicted wounds. There has never been a greater and freer nation than the United States, but it is now tearing itself apart. How long can our nation survive amid the relentless attack on everything that has made it unique?

  Well-meaning people say Republicans and Democrats have the same fundamental goals but different ideas and strategies for achieving them. I’ve always regarded this as wishful thinking, but if it were ever true, it no longer is today. The two parties, as presently constituted, have distinctly different visions for America based on conflicting worldviews. Some will object that all Americans want everyone to be prosperous, safe, free, and to live in harmony, but I’m not sure that’s even true anymore, given the left’s anti-Americanism, its intolerance and authoritarianism, its romance with socialism, its hysterical environmentalism, its preoccupation with identity politics, its radicalism on race and gender, its attempts to erase our borders, its culture of death, its devaluation of the Constitution, its hostility to Second Amendment rights, and much more.

  The Democratic Party is a vehicle of leftist extremism that poses an existential threat to America as founded—because it is at war with our first principles and traditions. It is anti-capitalist and rejects equality of opportunity in favor of a hierarchy of privileges for identity groups ranked according to their levels of alleged historical oppression. It’s a brazenly anti-life party that promotes gender anarchy, militant feminism, and hostility toward traditional male roles and masculinity itself. It prosecutes a vicious culture war punctuated by an ongoing assault on Christians’ religious liberty.

  The left isn’t turning to socialism just because its members think it’s more equitable than capitalism but also because they seek revenge against America’s founding generation and its successor beneficiaries. They want to eradicate the Western tradition that spawned our unique American culture because it allegedly led to continental larceny against Native Americans, is in irredeemable moral debt over slavery, and is forever culpable for oppressing minorities and women through white privilege and the inherent exploitation of capitalism. They are hell-bent on suppressing conservatives and Christians and overturning the entire existing order. Their radicalism is unquenchable. They don’t seek solutions but to create permanent turmoil. While holding themselves out as models of tolerance, leftists have become ideological totalitarians, intolerant of dissenting views and contemptuous of those who hold them. It is conservatives who promote a tolerant, optimistic message and still believe in the proverbial melting pot—a truly integrated society. For all the left’s talk of tolerance and peace, its power depends on continually pitting Americans against one another.

  Progressives have weaponized race to discredit and silence conservatives and to enhance their own power. They are consumed with avenging wrongs allegedly committed by certain groups against other groups. Democrats don’t talk about maximizing liberty and prosperity but instead engage in virtue signaling by invoking aggrieved mantras—social justice, income equality, cultural appropriation, intersectionality, white privilege, patriarchy, and toxic masculinity. Having once campaigned for civil rights, they now seek victims to leverage for partisan gain.

  It’s frightening how rapidly extremists took control of the Democratic Party—and how little resistance they faced. While the party’s establishment wing pretends to moderate the radicalism of its newcomers—and there is sometimes spirited infighting between the two groups—the old guard have largely adopted their extremism.1 Few influential centrists remain. If left unchecked, the Democratic Party would complete—in horrifyingly short order—Obama’s twisted vision of fundamentally transforming America. It would drastically redistribute wealth, suppress dissent, dilute and ultimately destroy our national sovereignty, and dismantle our constitutional structure and individual liberties.

  AMERICA’S FOUNDING PRINCIPLES

  The modern left, then, is in an all-out war against Western civilization and the values and liberties it produced. It is at odds with the Constitution, American sovereignty, and the free market. It does not believe in American exceptionalism. A Gallup poll showed that only 51 percent of Democrats are very proud or extremely proud to be American, compared to 95 percent of Republicans. While a higher percentage of Democrats were proud when Obama was president, Republican pride in the nation remained the same during those years.2

  “We’re not going to make America great again, it was never that great,” declared New York governor Andrew Cuomo. “We have not reached greatness, we will reach greatness when every American is fully engaged, we will reach greatness when discrimination and stereotyping against women, 51 percent of our population, is gone.”3 (After taking a deserved rhetorical beating, Cuomo unconvincingly walked back his remarks, claiming he meant America hasn’t reached its full potential.) Cuomo’s statement was reminiscent of President Obama’s America apology tour, wherein he repeatedly bashed the United States on foreign soil and proclaimed that America is no more exceptional than other nations.4 This attitude had been telegraphed during the 2008 presidential campaign by Michelle Obama, who exclaimed, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country… not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.”5 More recently, Democrat Senator Cory Booker expressed similar sentiments. “I’m a big believer that if America, if this country hasn’t broken your heart, then you don’t love her enough,” said Booker. “Because there’s things that are savagely wrong in this country. There’s a normalcy of injustice that we’ve accepted.”6 Likewise, former attorney general Eric Holder queried, “When did you think America was great?” This supposedly great American past, said Holder, “never in fact existed.”7

  Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the poster girl for America’s left and today’s Democratic Party, barely conceals her contempt for this nation. She describes America as racist and close to “garbage,” insisting that the Reagan presidency was “a perfect example of how special interests and the powerful have pitted white working-class Americans against brown and black working-class Americans in order to just screw over all working-class Americans.” She suggests that by promoting an image of black women as “welfare queens,” Republicans created a racist caricature of one specific group of people and primed Americans to subconsciously resent them, thus providing a diabolical “logical reason” to “toss out the whole social safety net.”8

  Conservatives aren’t angling to eliminate the social safety net; we just want to reasonably limit it because excessive dependency diminishes people’s self-worth and productivity. Conservatives deeply value our God-given natural rights and individual liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and sustained by its structure of limited government. The Constitution promotes liberty through the enumerated powers of Congress, the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers among three branches of government, and the federalist system, which divides power between the federal, state, and
local governments. Conservatives believe, and history has shown, that the closer people are to the seat of power, the more prudent and responsive the government will be. Accordingly, our freedom, security, and prosperity depend on preserving the Constitution’s designed limitations on government, which in turn rely on courts interpreting the Constitution according to its original intent and honoring the rule of law.

  The left is far more interested in acquiring power to achieve its political ends than in upholding a system that guarantees personal liberties. Determined to control people’s lives and thoughts, leftists push to consolidate power in the federal government—especially when they control it. They are untroubled by delegations of power to administrative agencies staffed with career bureaucratic liberals insulated from accountability.

  Firmly believing in America’s uniqueness, conservatives jealously defend America’s sovereignty and its borders and oppose globalism. The overused term “globalism” is often associated with conspiracy theories of one-world governments out of a Robert Ludlum novel. But it’s inarguable that leftists often seek to delegate important policy decisions that impact our national sovereignty and personal liberties to like-minded international bodies that hold the United States in contempt.

  The disparity in the parties’ fidelity to America’s freedom tradition partially explains their differing views on illegal immigration. The conservatives’ strong opposition to it is not rooted in nativism or racism, as Democrats maliciously allege. Our love for America is based on ideas, not race. We believe America’s continued greatness depends on a culture united behind those ideas, which is why we favor the assimilation and integration of legal immigrants.

  Squandering the progress memorialized in the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,9 which outlawed racial segregation in our schools, the left incites minorities to obsess on their color and ethnicity. Consequently, in some ways we have come full circle. Universities now foster segregation by making race a criterion for participation in certain student organizations and housing arrangements. Some recommend separate workout rooms for minority students where white students are excluded. Leftists are preoccupied with race, assigning highly paid diversity coordinators to monitor the racial percentages of students, faculty, staff, and contractors. In their racial zealotry they have bastardized the term “diversity,” which originally referred to people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds freely interacting and comingling. But heightened race consciousness and the segregation of racial groups on our campuses undermines these goals, fomenting mutual distrust and deterring interracial interaction.10 This trend is hardly accidental. It’s a logical outgrowth of the left’s vision for America which, as we’ve noted, no longer includes people of all races, ethnicities, genders, and religions living together in peace and harmony but sees America as a fractured land of mutually suspicious groups living in uneasy hostility.