Barbarians were at the gate long ago as communist and fascist ideas crept into the minds of some Americans as early as the early 19th century with Utopian communities such as that in New Harmony, Indiana. Labor activists, almost all British, German and Jewish immigrants, founded the Socialist Labor Party in 1877 which in turn became the Socialist Party of America in 1901. Almost all of the early labor strikes turned into violent riots, as police tried to break up the crowds. Under the leadership of Socialist Party presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, of Terre Haute, Indiana, socialists opposed American entry into WWI, resulting in government suppression known as the First Red Scare. After the Russian Revolution, the Communist Party broke off from the Socialist Party and gained more influence but also became more feared as the Cold War followed WWII and the Soviet Union of Socialist Soviet Republics became the number one enemy of the United States, overtaking countless eastern European countries and turning them into authoritarian satellites of the U.S.S.R. Senator Joseph McCarthy initiated a purge of socialists and communists from positions of power in the U.S., removing many communists from the army and positions of influence even in Hollywood, but destroying many innocent lives in the process.
Socialism and communism resurged in the turbulent 1960s and 70s with the rise of anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and the Civil Rights Movement. Most of those opposed to the war or in favor of ending segregation were loyal Americans, but groups of radicals pushed extremist ideas and used violence to make their point. The country as a whole turned against this repudiation of American values, but those radicals who were not imprisoned or did not escape the country, grew up and to become the journalists, the college professors, the CEOs of companies, and the leftist politicians of the present.
And then came Barack Obama. With an African father (not present in his life) and a white mother, and raised partially in Muslim Indonesia, he was young, handsome, charismatic and had an attractive young family. Black and white Americans alike saw in him the possibility of eradicating any lingering racism in the country and uniting us once and for all under this bi-racial president. Unfortunately, his motto of “Hope and Change” did not bring hope to the country, but despair. Under his administration, multitudes of new regulations were passed which stifled business, and the recovery from the Housing Crisis at the end of his predecessor’s term was the slowest since the Great Depression, leaving countless Americans out of work, many of them having given up hope of ever finding a job.
In the first two years of his presidency, Obama pushed through a massive healthcare bill, The Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, refusing to consider any suggestions by Republicans on how to lower health costs. He promised the American people repeatedly on television that this plan was only to include those who currently did not have insurance, and that those who had insurance plans they liked and family doctors they trusted would be able to keep those plans and those doctors, and that the average American family would save about $2500 in health care costs each year. He lied. He knew well that costs would skyrocket for everyone, and that Americans, forced into the Health Exchanges, would all lose their doctors and their current health insurance coverage. When the Democrat controlled House and Senate passed the bill without accepting any across the aisle input, I told my senior Honors Composition students at Paris High School that for the first time in my life I was frightened of what a president was going to do to our country. And I was not wrong.
In the ensuing eight years we saw the morals and values that had always been the bedrock of this country carefully eroded away. Marriage, which for thousands of years and throughout every country and civilization was understood to be between a man and a woman, was thrown out by a left-leaning Supreme Court who sanctioned marriage between two men or between two women. Books appeared in elementary libraries with titles such as “Brooke has two mommies” and gay married couples appeared quickly in movies, novels, and on television shows, teaching our children that such an unnatural relationship was normal.
Suddenly the media and the left informed us that you might be born with the body of a woman but really be a man at heart. Gender, they assured us, was not determined at birth (or in the womb), but rather was a choice that each individual could make for himself or herself and transgender became trendy. Parents who hadn’t gotten the boy they wanted, simply changed their daughter’s name and started her on hormone treatments as young as kindergarten, much to the worried dismay of pediatricians and psychiatrists who viewed this new trend as both contrary to science and dangerous to the well-being of the child. In the ensuing years, we have been told that there are multiple genders to choose from, not just male and female, although of course no other genders exist in nature — anywhere.
Likewise, abortion, legalized by the Supreme Court in Roe V. Wade, has become, in some states, acceptable up to the very moment of birth, and Governor Northam of Virginia famously stated that if a late term baby survived an abortion it would be kept comfortable while the doctor and mother decided whether or not to kill it, a living, breathing child outside the mother’s womb! Undercover reporters captured on video doctors from Planned Parenthood talking about all the money they were making from selling aborted baby parts. And gradually we began to hear that a baby has a beating heart inside the womb before the mother even realizes she is pregnant, which exploded Pro-Choice advocates’ argument that a fetus was just a collection of cell tissue. Aborted babies, we soon learned, are sucked, limb by limb, out of the womb as they writhe in pain. A woman was executed at the Federal Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana last week for having murdered a pregnant mother and cutting her baby out of her womb. Barbaric, we cry. But is it any less barbaric than abortion? What civilized nation legalizes the murder of its children and calls it “women’s rights?”
Instead of bringing black and white Americans together, then President Obama took the side of the black man in every black/white confrontation before any facts were known, and in every case the black man was proven to be the aggressor and the white man only defending himself. But the damage had been done. The President had said the black man was a victim and blacks across the country believed him time and again, ignoring the final verdicts of even his own Department of Justice. We became more and more divided. Black students demanded and got black-only dorms and other spaces that non-blacks could not enter, despite the fact that this exclusion of other races was in fact a form of segregation and totally illegal. Many colleges began holding separate graduation ceremonies for black students only. Democrats were ensuring that blacks thought of themselves as the victims of whites, and that only Democrats could rescue them from victimhood — which promise the Democrats never follow through on.
President Obama refused to enforce the laws that had been passed by Congress such as immigration laws, if he did not agree with them, and when he began to lose control of Congress, he eventually bragged he had a pen and a phone which he used to pass executive order after executive order, limiting the freedoms of the people he was sworn to serve. We saw Catholic nuns and Hobby Lobby forced to go to court to avoid paying for birth control for their employees when doing so was against their Christian beliefs. Obama’s administration gave no quarter to the free practice of religion, even though it is guaranteed by the Constitution.
The Chairman of the Democratic National Committee announced that the Democratic Party was the Party of the unreligious, and that statement, intended to invite non-religious individuals to join them, was in fact a warning that many Christians ignored. The Democrat Party has no time for God, no use for the Judeo-Christian values upon which this nation was founded, no respect for the First Amendment to the Constitution which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion (such as Climate Change), or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” In some Democrat-controlled states, during the COVID-19 lockdowns, churches were forced to remain closed or limited to only 10 congregants at a time when marijuana stores, casinos, and abortion clinics were allowed to remain open. Churches in some places have had to go to court in order to open, and other congregations and pastors have been fined thousands of dollars for continuing to worship God together.
This new Democrat Party has no respect for law and order, breaking whatever laws they can get by with but pillorying conservatives for far lesser offenses or no offenses at all. When Black Lives Matter, a Communist organization, or the Fascist terrorists, Antifa, riot, loot, burn, and murder, Democrats claim they are exercising their rights to free speech in “mostly peaceful demonstrations,” and rather than trying to stop them, Democrat governors and mayors talk of defunding the police and in some cities have already greatly cut their budgets, seeing police resign and move elsewhere. But when one, one small group from a mostly conservative crowd broke into the Capital building, they were deemed domestic terrorists. Indeed they were wrong and should be punished, since their actions cost the lives of four people, but to condemn their riot while supporting the riots of BLM and Antifa is unfair and hypocritical and typical of the New Democrat Party.
The Constitution permits members of the House and Senate to challenge electors who have been chosen by states to vote for their preferred candidate. Democrats have done so regularly when a Republican President has been chosen. But when over 140 Republican members of the House and a number of Senators challenged electors from states where there had been hundreds of sworn statements of voter irregularities and fraud, and even some video evidence, these Congressmen and women have been dubbed the “Treason Caucus.” There have been calls for their resignation from Congress, large banks have announced they will not process any donations to them, and a number of corporations such as Ford are reviewing whether or not to donate to them in the future. The president, blamed for inciting the riot, which he did not do, was impeached by the Democrat-controlled House for “inciting an insurrection against the government” of which he himself was still the leader (sound a little crazy?) He, the President of the United States of America, the most powerful man in the world, was also banned from Facebook and Twitter. When he and a hefty percentage of conservatives closed their Twitter accounts and moved to Parler, Parler immediately lost use of its servers and saw its lawyers resign, effectively putting them at least temporarily out of business.
This silencing of conservative viewpoints has been ongoing since the Obama years when anyone who disagreed with the president’s policies was dismissed as a racist on television by both Obama and his supporters. The charges of racism were thrown constantly at President Trump by the media, yet his support among Hispanics and blacks increased considerably over the 2016 election, reflecting the increased prosperity his administration brought to these minority groups. All Trump supporters were vilified repeatedly, and many were shamed and frightened into recanting support for the President and his policies, while others who did not recant lost their jobs.
The new leftist Democrats have changed our speech and our actions, as well. Certain words can no longer be used because they might offend someone. Aunt Jemima syrup and Land O’ Lakes butter have removed the images from their packaging. Sports teams using “Chiefs,” “Braves,” “Indians” and so on are gradually being forced to change their names. Children cannot dress up as Indians at Halloween or wear ponchos and sombreros. These are all deemed to be culture appropriation although we are still allowed to eat tacos and Chow Mein, at least for now. The okay sign is now a white supremacist sign. Mathematics is a sign of white privilege according to one black professor, and every white person is born a racist oppressor, while every person of color is born a victim.
Constitutionally protected rights to freely worship God without government interference, to bear arms, and to free speech — all of these are under siege and being curtailed as quickly as the new Democrat government can curtail them. Judeo-Christian morality is no longer recognized by those in power. There is no longer any absolute right and wrong, only that which the Democrats deem to be right and wrong. No law, but their law.
The Barbarians are no longer at the gates. The Barbarians have taken the city. The future looks grim.
Yet there is hope!
(Barbarians at the Gate, Part 2 coming soon.)