Democrats, our party leaders are betraying us

We regular Democrats can prevent disaster only one way – by voting Republican like our future depends on it. Because it does – as I warned fellow Democrats 24 years ago in a column called “Fascism, corruption and my ‘Democratic’ Party.”

It’s truer now than ever.

Our party leaders are playing with fire, a fire called hate. I wish I could say they don’t
understand the damage they are doing to our country, but I think they do understand and don’t care, and worse, plan to stoke those flames, win or lose – to fundamentally subvert America.

If Antifa street mobs used epithets like Nazi or Hitler, that’s no surprise. But watching top Democrats do so is unthinkable. But even those examples barely touch what’s happening to our party – thanks to our leaders – who have become genuine purveyors of hate and fear, all to scare voters away from the very man who can rescue this great country.

Hate and fear are emotions hard to take back. They’re poison and our leaders know it. So what’s happening now makes Reagan Democrats like me ashamed, and afraid for America’s future. This is how radicals and revolutionaries behave, and if voters give them power again, it will get much, much worse. Regular Democrats shouldn’t stand for it – and we definitely shouldn’t vote for it.

That said, there is good news – very good news. Strange as this may sound, Donald J. Trump is leading a genuine revival of the American spirit, joined by people of all races, colors and creeds – and even some who do not share Trump’s politics, but are glad to work with him. Wow.

His rallies tell you everything, especially the recent Madison Square Garden rally in the heart of New York City. Growing numbers of Americans from all walks of life see Trump as I do. He’s a man who can do more than make America great again. He can make the world safe again through strong, decisive leadership of the country he genuinely loves.

Yes, Trump can frighten some voters with his boldness, pushing back against the left with his own epithets, mostly using the label “communist” to describe my party’s leaders. But keep in mind, there are in fact self-described Marxists in our universities (like Kamala Harris’ father). There are no self-described Nazi academics – so no worries there. You will find avowed socialists in Congress – but try finding an avowed “National Socialist.” And you sure won’t find a book on Amazon called “Nazism for Kids,” but check out “Communism for Kids.” It’s there for all to see. No kidding.

And yet, we are supposed to fear Nazis? That’s even more silly than fearing Trump. (Just watch one of his rallies.) It’s also a distraction from your real choice in 2024: one party that loves America, and one that doesn’t.

No one serious calls anyone a Nazi, much less likens 20,000 joyful Americans attending a Midtown Manhattan event to a 1939 Nazi rally, as Hillary Clinton did. There’s much more going on.

Scare tactics
I watched that Trump event at Madison Square Garden. Like Trump, I’m a native New Yorker. I love my city, and “the Garden,” as we call it, is a special place. I saw it filled with a huge crowd of joyful folks from the Tri-State area. It was a multi-racial love fest, and yet a friend of mine called it a “Tiki Torch” rally – sight unseen – based on what someone told her. (No one told her about the Israeli flags flying in the crowd.)

Some Democrats believe the left’s ugly labels for Trump voters, from “deplorables” and “garbage” to “racist” and even “Nazis.” It’s all meant to divide us from our fellow Americans who happen to be Republicans. Our leadership needs to scare us into unthinking party ranks – us against them, no matter what – so they can bank our votes while they dismantle our country right before our eyes.

This is what we face now as Americans. Lies built upon lies to scare us, not told by Antifa bullies but by prominent Democrats – even presidential candidates. And sadly, believed by millions of uninformed, overly emotional, rank-and-file members.

Why? Because accusations have power – the more outrageous the better, since who can imagine anyone saying such things if they weren’t true? It’s too weird.

So, let’s talk about motives and methods.

Attacking conservatives with wild accusations helps to hide the left’s real politics, its century-long fever dream of a perfect world. But utopian dreams always end up as nightmares. Too many people seek power only to serve themselves, prideful tyrants addicted to control, who crush any resistance when things don’t go their way. It’s not complicated, and sadly it’s nothing new in world history.

America’s founders and framers warned of this and did their best to create a constitutional system that mitigates against absolute government control, whether in Washington, D.C. or our state capitals. They sought to prevent the “big guys” from dominating the “little guy.” They knew big cities or big states could dominate the rest of us with raw voter strength – so they gave us the Electoral College to protect the “little guy.” We are a democratic republic – not a pure democracy, which allows the majority to tyrannize any minority.

But these protections against overreaching government (or special interests) are anathema to those who lead our party. They rage against everything that blocks their progressive plans to reimagine an America “unburdened by what has been.” Sadly, they reject a country they have never understood, seeing only our faults and never our good. This is not who we are as Democrats.

Who are these people?
So Trump asks a fair question, one for all of us to ask: Can someone lead America who doesn’t love Americans? We regular Democrats must ask another key question: Who are these people who have now gained full control of our party?

The one thing I know for sure is that they’re not really Democrats. Young people need to know this. The Democrats of my childhood hated both Nazism and Marxism, and they loved America with their whole heart.

Read President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address. Like JFK, Democrats back then were “proud of our ancient heritage.” Most of us still honor the great traditions of American liberty that ended slavery and Jim Crow, that gave women the right to vote, and that inspired our nation to defeat Nazism and Soviet socialism, spreading liberty to countries around the world.

Considering the behavior of the Biden-Harris administration these last four years, I can’t imagine why more Democrats don’t grasp the crucial importance of voting Republican – women especially, who now seem to be letting their fear of losing abortion rights blind them to the real danger: losing their freedom.

We are under great threat, well beyond our current economic suffering. Because although millions of illegal migrants swamp our system, millions more will be coming if we don’t wake up to the quiet agendas of our party leaders. It’s not just their destructive policies; it’s the destructive mentality behind those policies that doesn’t care who they hurt with their scorched-earth fury, whether subverting a Trump presidency or vilifying the Supreme Court.

I’ve been a Democrat my whole life, but it took much of my youth to wake up to reality and start voting Republican – and start raising the alarm to other regular Democrats. Blessed with different media platforms, when I woke up, I used them to help awaken others.

Election 2000
When I wrote the aforementioned column (“Fascism, corruption and my ‘Democratic’ Party”) – my first on WND – in the summer of 2000, it was just a few weeks before either party’s nominating convention and caused quite a stir. Talk-show host colleague and radio great Barry Farber wrote me a rave email (I still have it), calling the column “nation saving.” The famed Sean Hannity, also a friend, said I’d be talking about this column for the rest of my life. He was right. I got a flood of grateful email from around the country (I still have them).

It was a heady time. I had just won a small writing award from the Wall Street Journal’s opinion website, but seeing my column title, they wouldn’t link to it. Republicans back then were more polite about politics than we Democrats.

But my column wasn’t a smear. It was warning against something real, a dangerous totalitarian trend, whatever the label, which I said could lead to a “cold civil war” and possibly something worse if party leaders didn’t act to contain it.

Ironically, my ultimate message was forgiveness (and still is), but one rooted in fully understanding the existential danger we Americans faced (and still face) – a simple but poisonous combination of false ideology and personal dysfunction that I feared would lead to an “anything goes” corrupt Democratic Party. In other words, the end justifies the means – lie, cheat, steal, whatever it takes to win. I also adopted this view of politics; coming from a troubled childhood, I understand that kind of anger and the damage it can do.

This is a disaster for Americans because, in our two-party system, when one party becomes corrupted, the legislative system stops working as designed. After all, mixing clear water with muddy water isn’t compromise. It’s capitulation. Marxism and Americanism don’t mix. So, as my party radicalized, the Republican struggle to protect America became harder and harder. Meanwhile, we the people are the biggest losers.

When Election Day came that year, little did I know how much we’d be living out my fears. Both parties lawyered up and fought over every ballot. Things got so scary that by mid-November the Wall Street Journal’s genteel Peggy Noonan would write her famous “smackdown” column, “The Donkey in the Livingroom,” about how Democrat leaders were trying to steal the election. Regular Democrats watched in disbelief. I watched in belief – since I had just explained it.

Standing up to Marxists
Anyone who tells you politics got crazy only after the Bush-Gore election needs to read my July 2000 column, which chronicled the end of the Clinton era and predicted a dangerous road ahead if mainstream Democrats didn’t stand up to Marxist influence in our party.

Back then, Americans were shy to call out Marxists or communists, so I used a different term, New Fascism. I was eager to reach my party’s mainstream leadership to encourage them to speak out against the “enemy within.” After all, based on death toll alone, there’s plenty of reason to fear communists – they outkilled the Nazis by far. (Read “The Black Book of Communism.”)

Of course, to comprehend the danger, you had to understand Marxism the way President Reagan did. He said there was no worse thing to say about any society than that it had “no fear of God.” He knew communism wasn’t about economics. (Read Mark Levin’s book, “American Marxism.”)

My reticence to use the word communism in the column must seem odd since the evil of Marxism in all its forms has long since been clear, from Stalinism to Maoism to the Chinese Communist Party. But that was the reality until Donald Trump came along. Now Trump talks about it regularly to explain what we are up against in this election – not regular Democrats (union members, etc.), but those on the Marxist left who effectively stole our party.

No wonder so many Democrats are voting for Trump. We want our country back – and our party for that matter.

Back when I wrote the column, even the nation’s most admired Democrat senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, wouldn’t call a Marxist out. In his forward to the late Eric Breindel’s book, “A Passion for Truth” (1999), he explained that rejecting communists had become impossible since the McCarthy era.

“The prohibition on identifying Communists as such is a fact of American life – it obtains in journalism, in politics, in the academy, indeed in virtually all mainstream public discourse. It’s a rule widely acknowledged and obeyed, rather like a taboo.”

No wonder the founders of Black Lives Matter could publicly declare themselves as “trained Marxists” without threatening their fundraising efforts. I guess some capitalists have no problem with avowed enemies of the free market. Yes, people can believe what they want to believe, but you don’t have to empower them.

Thought police
When I emailed my column to all the Democrat senators, I hoped my warning would reach leaders like Moynihan or Sen. Joseph Lieberman. I warned that the growth of the PC Marxist worldview (now called “Woke”) written about by Newsweek (“Thought Police” cover story, Dec. 24, 1990) would be the destruction of our party, and that my prediction was so obvious it was no prediction at all but, as I said, “practically mathematical.”

After all, human behavior is nothing new, and neither is evil political behavior, which builds its ranks through threats and intimidation – Believe what we say, or else! Americans are realizing this about Wokism. But ultimately, it’s about overreaching government power, which is anathema to American liberty.

The so-called progressive project asks for ever-increasing government control for the sake of “the American Dream” – with their experts in charge, of course. Progressives believe in the goodness of people, which sounds nice, but our founders knew better than to trust human governance. They understood our sin nature, that human beings, though capable of great good, are also given to greed, self-interest, jealousy, pride and a lust for power that can lead to terrible abuses. We’ve been watching that for the last several years.

Our system seeks to protect us from abusive government by protecting us from abusive people who climb the heights of political power, not to serve us, but to rule over us. (Watch or read Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech.)

These are the kind of people who put political opponents in jail just because they can – with the right jury pool. These are people who intimidate others with threats to keep them silent in the face of evil. These are people who threaten those who speak up, causing our youth to think freedom of speech is a privilege and not a right, and even causing adults to think liberty is a gift from government and not our birthright as human beings.

These are people who together concoct foolish theories completely opposed to the “faith of our fathers” (not to mention common sense) and then force us to kneel before their fantasies.

Believers and non-believers unite
Nearly 25 years ago I warned that the American system was failing because one of our two great parties was falling for “the totalitarian temptation.” It sought power at any price, gained by any method available. We are witnessing this now, from packing the Supreme Court to perverting the justice system (and the rest of the bureaucracy) to election fraud to spouting outrageous false accusations like the “Nazi rally” smear … all just to affect an election.

It’s no surprise that some Democrats fall victim to scare tactics, or that a perfectly nice young woman could think a big Trump rally meant “Tiki Torches,” while all I could think of was “revival.”

I don’t mean necessarily an historic Christian revival, but rather what could be called a truth awakening or a commonsense awakening. Whether a Christian believer or not, people who love truth naturally believe it exists, and they pursue it. They enjoy being around others on the same journey, and dialoguing with them. And together they delight to witness what’s true and beautiful about life, not to mention laughing at what’s genuinely funny (a key ingredient to Trump’s popularity).

Clearly those people at the Madison Square Garden rally believed in that “truth journey” and were celebrating it along with Donald Trump (and family), Elon Musk, Tucker Carson, Dr. Phil, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and many more, including 20,000 joyful MAGA folks.

Yes, if someone there had shouted “Jesus is King,” many folks (and likely most) would have cheered their heads off. But this was something different, and uniquely inspiring to watch, something very American. It was a multiracial gathering of people who share a love of truth, all coming together to celebrate their love of country and their mutual “political faith.”

To be clear, political faith is not about a personal faith, but instead about a firm knowledge that American liberty must be rooted in an “under God” system of government, designed to respect our rights – and respect our personhood as well. We may not all believe in God, but we do know one thing for sure. Government is not God.

In this unity of pollical faith we share our historic liberty with those Americans gone before us, including the many hundreds of thousands who died for this political faith guaranteeing our rights.

However, sadly, this unity threatens those who adhere to “political atheism,” Americans of whatever faith, or no faith, who reject our limited relationship with the government we created.

Progressives don’t believe in that relationship. They don’t believe in “under God” America – meaning they don’t believe in our Declaration of Independence. They believe we must be controlled for our own good, and if that means lying to us, then yes, they will do that – with a straight face. All for the sake of a higher good, as they see it, a genuinely caring government that they lead.

It’s not wise to underestimate political atheism (think communism). They are believers of a different kind. Their religion sees mankind perfecting itself into an evolving future, coming ever closer to some kind of joy through an ever-perfecting social order.

American progressives have been seeking this social “promise” for a long time … as the country slowly declines. Going back 100 to 150 years, political atheism has been the worldview dominating our media and national culture, from Hollywood to academia, including our law schools. This eventually led to the Supreme Court’s “separation of church and state” decision in 1947, which amounted to banishing faith from the public square. Thankfully, a few years later the American people fought back by adding “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.

Since then, this same struggle has continued in many forms, most importantly the Reagan Revolution. But now we find ourselves championed by another unlikely leader and inspired by the same simple slogan, Make America Great Again. Yet, there are two very big differences: the massive power of the MAGA movement and the entrenched nature of our Marxist opposition.

Doubting the dividers
This faith struggle has become the key difference in our two major parties. No surprise. It’s having a huge effect on Donald Trump’s massive and growing popularity. Blacks and Hispanics are historically religious people, Christian specifically. They are starting to realize that my longtime party is not their friend any more, and can’t be. Because my party recognizes no higher authority than itself as it seeks to fundamentally transform America, entrenching its power through racial and religious division – blacks against whites, believers against nonbelievers.

But once we all start to doubt those who want to divide us and once we start to accept the reality so evident at the Madison Square Garden MAGA rally (watch it for yourself), the shadows of “Nazi” or “racist” fear-mongering will begin to fade.

If traditional Americans lose this election, it will be more important than ever to doubt the dividers and to stand strong together for our great country across party lines, gathering others to our side to resist the anti-American forces within our country and within the leadership of my party. Hate, fear, envy and division are their primary weapons, but regular Democrats can and must join their Republican brothers and sisters in saying no – as publicly as possible.

However, if voters once again say yes to Donald J. Trump, we’ll be witnessing a political miracle with huge implications. Think of all the lies thrown at him, and the subversive efforts. Even a slim margin of victory would be a true “people’s apology.”

Yes, at first, there may be an angry reaction. We may see disruptive marches or “outlaw” resistance or Antifa-type violence or perhaps even subversion from within our own government. But then I hope, thanks to the patriotic spirit of the MAGA movement, Americans of all persuasions might also start to see their relationship with fellow countrymen in a new light, as what we are – a national family.

Of course, my party’s corrupt leaders and their influencers will still call MAGA “racist,” despite what we truly are, a joyful multi-racial patriotic movement. You could think of this phenomenon as a “red rainbow,” which represents to me what millions of Americans, especially the young, must long to see in our national future. First, the rainbow as a biblical symbol is beautiful and deeply touching, reminding us of hope and of God’s mercy. But second, in the simple modern context, it represents people of all races coming together, in this case, red-blooded Americans who share a love of freedom and a desire to reclaim Martin Luther King’s dream.

What we witnessed at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally (and at his rallies across the country) could lead to a genuine national healing. Yes, when it comes to politics, we may think they don’t care about us. And yes, they may think we don’t care about them. But what if we’re both wrong? What if we can stand together, unified once again?

The American Dream is not owning a house. The American Dream is freedom. And freedom is a gift from God – not from government. Most Americans still know that.