I recently reread a novel by Helen McInnes that I had read when I was in college. The settings of her many novels range from Europe in the year or so leading up to WWII to the United States during the early years of the Cold War. This particular book, Above Suspicion, traced the efforts of an Oxford Don and his wife to backtrack the escape route used to smuggle anti-Nazi Germans out of Germany and to safety, as well as to supply information to Great Britain. Valid information and escapees had ceased to arrive and the British feared the head and first man in the escape line had been killed or captured.
As all of her books, it was a thrilling page turner, but I was struck by more than just the plot as it unfolded. Like all of her books, it was well researched, and I found myself reading comments by the American journalist and the British grad student, who eventually met and joined forces with the British couple, with growing concern. They described life in Nazi Germany and Austria — the stoic, unsmiling faces of the populace, the ubiquitous uniformed men on every corner and in every café, carefully observing the foreigners. They spoke also of those who were beaten on the streets simply because they were Jews, of how people were afraid to criticize the Nazis because to speak out was to be silenced, and of how people had to be careful to only do business with the “accepted” people. They worried that everyone was careful to whom they spoke and what they said. They described the young soldiers as young men who had attended the universities where they had been indoctrinated with the Nazi propaganda until they believed it in defiance of truth or logic. And I began to see America.
Although anti-Semitism is on the rise, egged on by two Muslim Representatives to Congress, Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Jews in America are not the most vilified of Americans. Instead, those who are routinely silenced are conservatives and most especially Evangelical Christians. And they are being silenced by members of one of the two political parties, the Democrats, who are rushing leftward toward the radical Democratic Socialists and leaving behind the working-class Americans who voted Democratic for decades.
The acronym Nazi stood for National SOCIALIST German Workers’ Party. They were, in fact, socialists which all Americans today should find extremely disturbing considering the direction of the Democratic Party in 2019. All of the Democratic presidential candidates support the Socialistic Green New Deal which would: eliminate gas powered cars; eliminate all air travel (except for the private jets owned and used of necessity by the ruling elite); force Americans to stop eating red meat because cows fart methane gas which is, they say, killing the planet; eliminate all insurance companies except the one run by the government which will then determine what medicine we can be prescribed and when it is time for older Americans to die since they are no longer productive citizens.
Abortion will not only be available upon demand, but may well be demanded by the government since, according to Bernie Sanders, we must stop having children because the earth is becoming overpopulated. And then there are all the free things which the working class will end up paying for: free health care, free child care, free college education, free salaries for everyone even if they don’t work. Kamala Harris even argues that it is a human right to have a home, so the government will provide every American with a place to live. They did that in Soviet Russia, too. Everyone had an apartment. . . shared with four or five other families and owned by the government that never seemed to get around to fixing that broken faucet or that leaking pipe.
These things dismay and alarm me. The same promises of Utopia, of equality, of a bountiful life for all was promised by the Communists in Russia, by the Fascists in Italy, and by the Nazis in Germany. But the promises are never kept. Once the ruling party is in power they impose whatever regulations they want without ever sweetening them with the promises that sucked people in.
But what frightens me is something entirely different. It is the silencing of conservative voices on college campuses. It is the capitulation of university presidents when a group of leftist students object to a conservative speaker or a conservative professor. It is the removal from social media platforms of conservative organizations such as Prager University. It is the fact that I looked through 14 pages of articles on Climate Change on Google and never found a single article that suggested the world wouldn’t end in 12 years without draconian measures that would return us to the 1800s. I had to go to Yahoo before I found articles from the literally thousands (30,000 alone signed a letter to the UN arguing that their Climate Change theories were deeply flawed) who contend that CO2 is more beneficial to the planet than harmful and that humans are not the main drivers of climate change.
It is the fact that leftists outnumber conservatives at virtually every university in the country by 12 to 1 according to a survey reported in the Washington Times. It is the indoctrination of students in elementary school who in Illinois must be taught LGBTQ history and who in California only just escaped being taught that Capitalism and father figures were racist (Williams, Walter. “Academic Stupidity and Brain Washing”). It is the doxing (publishing of home address, phone number, place of work) of anyone who disagrees with the left. It is the chasing out of restaurants of members of the Republican Party or the Republican Administration. It is the labeling of any conservative or individual who voted for President Trump as a racist and a white supremacist. It is the stupid contention that mathematics and correct grammar are white supremacy.
It is the sham science that the left foists upon us and demands that we believe in. It is the ever-growing list of words that we cannot utter for fear of offending someone. It is the weaponization of governmental agencies like the IRS who wrongfully kept conservative groups from obtaining the permit that would allow them to advocate for the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, and the creation, out of thin air, of a Russian collusion hoax that, thanks to members of the Obama administration, the Department of Justice, the State Department, the CIA, and the FBI attempted a bloodless coup to take down a duly elected president of the United States.
It is the listing of everyone who donates to the President’s campaign so that leftists can and do stop doing business with them that frightens me. It is the gathering of mobs outside of the homes of Republican members of Congress to disrupt their sleep and frighten their wives and children. It is the shooting of Republicans practicing for a baseball game and the physical attack of a Republican Senator as he innocently mowed his lawn. It is the thuggish fascists called Antifa who attack and often beat up journalists and peaceful demonstrators while police look on, having been ordered by their Democratic mayor not to intervene. It is the attack on the family and the vilification of men, whose very absence in homes causes much of the juvenile crime in inner cities. It is the lies that pour from the mouths of those whom we have been told to trust — both media and Democratic leaders—that frightens me, for the uninformed are so easily taken in to their peril.
This frightens me because, while I will not call the Democrats and their left fringe Nazis as they so often call us, these things that they have done and are doing are so reminiscent of the coercion of a socialistic, totalitarian government such as existed in Germany in the late 1930s and 1940s. There, the shepherd tending his sheep, the hausfrau with her white aprons, the brauer in his biergarten, all believed the propaganda that the radio and newspapers spewed at them daily. Why would they not? The job of government officials was to tell them the truth and allow them to continue to live their quiet lives. And surely the media would faithfully report the truth. But of course, it did not, no more than it does now.
Just as the German media told its audience what the power-seeking Hitler wanted them to hear, so our mainstream media faithfully reports what the left wants everyone to believe, true or not. Just as the Brown shirts, Hitler’s squad of thugs, used violent intimidation to keep dissenters in line, so Antifa, dressed in black and often masked, uses violent intimidation to silence any who disagree with them. The violence; the hateful rhetoric from sports figures, movie stars and Democratic members of Congress; the intimidation through public shaming of both private individuals and businesses — these are not tools that either political party has used in the past to suppress votes since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. It is not only blacks who are being intimidated now, but millions of Americans of every ethnic background and color who simply hold a different, and according to our “betters,” wrong political viewpoint.
Where is “the land of the free and the home of the brave?” If we choose wrongly in 2020, we will become the land of the enslaved and the home of the fainthearted. We are nearly there now!