Just a quick thought on the recent Supreme Court ruling to allow NY Prosecutors access to Trumps tax returns. I will agree that law enforcement has a right to gather evidence when investigating a crime. What I would object to is if they use the law to go on a fishing expedition to see if a crime has been committed. If there is probable cause to pursue an investigation so be it. If you just want to rip into someone past because you don’t like them, then who is the criminal.

There has been a lot of talk about why the left keeps winning. The question is, do they? Today most people get their information from the web or cable news networks. The Newspapers, which have been in decline for years, have returned to the days of yellow journalism with sensationalized headlines and front-page reports designed to provide editorial content above actual news events. In this way the left is winning since for most people this is the quickest, easiest, and most seductive way to be “informed.” We have also seen this in our educational system. There is no doubt that in primary and elementary schools it is necessary to work on basics, the 3Rs. But what has been lost, if it was truly ever there, is teaching how to think. This should be part of middle and high school education. Lean to question what is being said and to search out information.

Recent examples of failure to think occurred in a CNN town hall meeting with President Biden. According to Biden in the town hall there was no Covid-19 vaccine before he entered office, which we know is not true. That there was no distribution plan for the vaccine, which we know is not true. He further went on to say that with his plan there will be 100 million people vaccinated in the next three months, or 1.07 million a day. Before Trump left office, they were vaccinating 1 million per day. It did not take long to figure these numbers out, just a quick check on Google. Without the education to question there is no need to look this up, it just quicker and easier to accept. The news media was no help since, as was done in the Washington Post it was dismissed as it is difficult to speak on live TV, his childhood stutter or just a typical Joe Biden Gaffe. Nothing to see here so stop looking.

Lack of civics teaching is also a problem. The drum beat from the left is continuous, the courts have found no proof of fraud in the elections. The truth is that the courts, as they historically do, have found procedural reasons not to hear the cases, mostly lack of standing by the plaintiff. The most recent headline, today, is that the Supreme Court decided against Trump. What in fact happened is what I had predicted, the case is moot since the election is over.  

What has protected us in the past is open discussions and somewhat far journalism. Today we are under the control of what could only be called propaganda. We need to toughen up and learn to think as individuals. Perhaps we need to increase the number of private schools and demand quality education from the public schools. Parents need to demand collages and universities stop denying free speech on campus. Students must be taught that they are students and not in charge. They must be given a level of freedom and liberty but must be made to understand they are not equal to professors, administrators, or their parents.

PLEASEThink what we have lost by being quiet and what we need to do to regain or liberty.

Steven Covey author of the “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” set up as one of the habits, to put first things first. First things first was the title of his next book. Without a doubt the Republican party must begin to rebuild itself, so should the Democrat party but I will not get into that. To rebuild we must borrow Covey’s second habit “begin with the end in mind.” What do we want the party to look like and how will it serve the nation and the people. Conservatism is the obvious place to start but what is conservatism? Book publisher Henry Regnery once said, “Conservatism is not a fixed and immutable body of dogma, and conservatives inherit from Burke a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the times.”  There was a time when conservatism was in ascendancy and may have peaked with President Reagan. When once asked to define conservatism, the father of modern conservative thought, William F. Buckley responded “Conservatism aims to maintain in working order the loyalties of the community to perceived truths and also to those truths which in their judgment have earned universal recognition. Now this leaves room, of course, for deposition, and there is deposition — the Civil War being the most monstrous account. But it also urges a kind of loyalty that breeds a devotion to those ideals sufficient to surmount the current crisis. When the Soviet Union challenged America and our set of loyalties, it did so at gunpoint. It became necessary at a certain point to show them our clenched fist and advise them that we were not going to deal lightly with our primal commitment to preserve those loyalties. That’s the most general definition of conservatism.”

Where to go from here? The truths Buckley referred have been twisted and turned until they are unrecognizable. When Buckley and Regnery where speaking the main enemies were the Soviet Union and China. There was a clear distinction between Western and Communist governments. After the Berlin wall came down and the east opened, and then the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist, many people still remembered the horror stories that had emerged. before that we were told by Solzhenitsyn of the type of system existed. It has been more then a generation since the fall of the Soviet Union and China has developed a hybrid system that fooled the west for years. The left proceeded during this time to convince the world that the old communist systems were not that bad, that socialism was an answer to all the problems that exist. 

As we said, one of the things the left likes to claim is that they alone can solve the problems of race and are the only party that believes in equality. This is an area the Republicans have tied to reject but have done a bad job. While highlighting the number of minorities who have switched to the Republican party they fail to say why. The liberal left continues to tout the need for a central government role in all aspects of life and try to bribe minorities to stay by promising monetary support across the board. What is less likely to be shown is that minority business ownership and the number of minorities in the middle class has grown to a point that it is approaching equality with the white population. When this began to become apparent in the Trump administration politicians and news media brough to light concepts of white privilege, white supremacy, and critical race theory. The Republican party backed away from discussing this and in some ways encouraged the belief in this line of thinking.

The main tactic of the left is to convince people to stop thinking and to just accept group think. The end state we must strive for is that the individual counts and will not be lost in the drive for collective thinking. A main tenet of conservatism has been prosperity. For many years now there has been a strong push to villainize the wealthy and the idea that all problems with the poor derives from too few people having too much money. Economic inequality is a buzz phrase of the left. This is usually followed by the statement that the rich must pay their fair share, with no one saying what a fair share is.

Beginning with the end in mind lets look at convincing the people that there is nothing wrong with wealth and building wealth. That the individual is responsible for their own welfare and that the purpose of government is to ensure there is no roadblock to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but it does come from the government.