Live Free Or Die Read online

  When a society rejects moral absolutes, it has no basis to protect individual rights against the tyranny of the majority—because without such standards, any action, no matter how good or evil, and any deprivation of our liberties, can be rationalized. As scholar M. Stanton Evans declared, “Moral relativism, however derived, must undermine the very possibility of freedom. No system of political liberty has ever been created from such notions, nor is it theoretically conceivable that one could.”78 All forms of despotism throughout history, Evans observed, have sprung from moral relativism. For freedom to exist there must be basic assumptions about the intrinsic dignity of human beings. It is this Judeo-Christian assumption that underlies the belief that our rights are God-given and must be protected not just against individual dictators and despots but against the tyranny of the majority.

  STOPPING THE PROGRESSIVE JUGGERNAUT

  It’s no coincidence that today’s leftists regard themselves as “progressives,” as their ideas clearly trace back to the Progressive Era. But in fairness, it should be noted that while yesterday’s Progressives seemed to share some of the utopian ends of their modern counterparts, they were less radical, seeking to achieve their goals gradually.79

  Since the 1960s we’ve witnessed the steady advance of progressivism and statism and the corresponding erosion of our liberties. Progressives have continued to become more extreme yet have successfully tarred conservatives as the extremists just for striving to restore and preserve what is noble and good in society. The only antidote for this madness is to fight fire with fire—to match their energy and commitment with our own and to dedicate ourselves to reviving the freedom tradition of our founders.

  Heritage Foundation scholar William Schambra attributes modern conservatism’s success to its grounding in the founders’ constitutionalism. There is no question about that. That is one reason I proudly identify as a constitutional conservative and why I strongly endorse the message of my friend Mark Levin, in his many books on constitutional principles. The left’s assault on our ideals goes back to our country’s first principles. They don’t just reject conservative policy prescriptions; they reject freedom itself as it was understood by the framers.

  For younger generations of Americans, the notion of liberty has become an abstraction. They don’t regard big government as an enemy of their individual liberties because they have been raised during an era of big government, and neither their parents nor their schools have instilled in them a proper appreciation for liberty and the sacrifices required to sustain it. They see no downside in government—rather than individuals, churches, and other charitable entities—providing for the needs of others. They don’t instinctively recoil at the idea of government regulating and even micromanaging the minutiae of our lives. They have become accustomed to the paternalistic attitude that they must be shielded from all adversity and disappointment—a world where everyone gets a trophy and where university campuses train students to be victims rather than self-reliant, constantly on the lookout for “trigger words” and “microaggressions” that could damage their psychic serenity.80 We do truly have a generation of snowflakes now.

  While yesterday’s Progressives rejected the framers’ structure of limited government, their modern leftist offspring have taken it to a new level, undermining our Constitution every day with legislative, executive, judicial, and administrative overreaches. They also wage war against the civil liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights—freedom of speech and religion, the right to bear arms, and the protections of citizens concerning unreasonable searches and due process.

  Our fight for control of the courts has become a crucial battlefield in our struggle against the left. The left rejects the Constitution itself, which is why their activist judges routinely overwrite its provisions by judicial fiat. If they control the courts they can undo any progress we make at limiting government and protecting our liberties. President Trump has appointed more originalist judges to federal courts than any of his predecessors. This, as much as any other presidential act, has given us hope that we can restore constitutional principles and our tradition of limited government and liberty.

  History shows that great nations don’t last forever. We must heed Ronald Reagan’s warnings to never grow complacent about our liberties and remain ever vigilant against foreign and internal threats against them. The left, through the Democratic Party, is promoting an agenda so radical that if substantially implemented it would divorce America from its founding ideas.

  A RISING SUN

  Someone shouted an ominous question to Benjamin Franklin when he was leaving Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention: “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?” Franklin presciently replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Franklin was laying down the gauntlet to his fellow and future Americans. Would we realize the profundity of the gift we have been given—a governmental structure ingeniously designed to preserve our God-given liberties? Would we guard it with our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor? Throughout our history, great leaders have taken Franklin’s baton, blessed and reaffirmed it, and passed it forward to future generations. It is now in our hands and we will determine whether our precious liberties will survive. Will we take them for granted or will we safeguard them with the sacred care they require?

  With that in mind let me close this chapter with another inspiring anecdote involving Ben Franklin. In his notes summarizing the last day of the Constitutional Convention, James Madison reported, “Whilst the last members were signing [the Constitution], Doctor Franklin, looking towards the Presidents Chair, at the back of which a rising sun happened to be painted, observed to a few members near him, that painters had found it difficult to distinguish in their art a rising from a setting sun. I have, said he, often and often in the course of the Session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting: But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting Sun.”81

  It is our duty to ensure that our “sun” continues rising. I believe President Trump reveres this nation, its Constitution, and the unique liberty tradition it guarantees. He recognizes the forces that imperil our liberties and is fighting to defeat them every single day of his presidency. We Americans who value our constitutional heritage and who believe in our nation’s benevolence and its divinely inspired founding must continue to support the president’s efforts.

  Having reviewed the importance of our founding principles, how we’ve slowly veered away from them through the years, and why we must dedicate ourselves to restoring them, I’ll detail in the next two chapters the Democrats’ thoroughly radical agenda and demonstrate how it will destroy everything that makes America unique unless we join together to thwart it.

  CHAPTER TWO Rise of the Radicals

  We conservatives so often point to the extremism of today’s Democratic Party that we might risk numbing ourselves to the seismic shift that has taken place among its ranks. This is important, folks, and so in the following pages I specify how deep and widespread it is, and how much further left the party has moved even in the short years since Obama’s term expired—and it was already far too left then.

  During the 2008 presidential campaign I repeatedly outlined Barack Obama’s radical past and his far-left views. Too many breezily dismissed our warnings, and I pray that they do not do so today—or the tattered flag shown on this book’s cover will tear completely in two.

  We did tons of investigative reporting on Obama’s record—work that the Obama-worshipping mainstream media mob wouldn’t do. We are one of the only TV shows anywhere that vetted Obama. We took a deep dive into his associations with militants like Frank Marshall Davis and ACORN, and revealed Obama’s use of the cynical, manipulative tactics of community organizer Saul Alinsky. We also gave you volumes about his close relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the pastor behind the infamous “G-d d—n Ame
rica” sermon, and an adherent of the radical black liberation theology.

  We reported in depth on Obama’s links to leftist extremists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, cofounders of the Weather Underground—a communist revolutionary group that bombed public buildings, including the United States Capitol, the Pentagon, and New York police stations.1 After the Pentagon bombing Ayers and Dohrn became fugitives. When the Weather Underground issued a “Declaration of a State of War” against the United Sates government in 1970, Dohrn was placed on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List.2 Obama claimed Ayers was just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” but I told you differently, and I was proved right when it emerged that Obama and Ayers were partners in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an education foundation that funneled more than $100 million to community organizers and radical education activists.3 With one exception, the media wholly ignored Obama’s relationship with Ayers. Had Donald Trump had such a nefarious relationship, you can be sure the media would have asked him about it a thousand times, which is a perfect example of why American patriots don’t trust the media mob.

  Don’t listen to anyone who tells you Obama wasn’t a leftist president, and especially don’t listen to the liberal media. They lied to you throughout the Obama years, and they’re still lying today. I wish Americans had heeded our warnings because Obama was serious when he vowed to fundamentally transform the nation. He proved it during his eight long years in office by ramming through Obamacare on a party-line vote, appointing activist judges, issuing unconstitutional executive orders, downsizing our military, traveling the world apologizing for America, engineering long-term economic malaise, waging war on coal and coal miners, haranguing the cops, conferring legal status on more than one million illegal aliens via Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and aggravating race relations in this country.

  I’m not rehashing the Obama-Biden years out of some obsession. This book is about America’s present and future, but we must learn from past mistakes—and as a society we made a major mistake in failing to recognize the threat Obama posed to the republic. Our battle against the left is a constant, never-ending struggle in which we must never lower our guard. Though Obama may seem less extreme than today’s crop of hard-core leftists, his presidency paved the way for their ascendancy. He moved society as far left as was politically possible at the time. However, as shown by the backlash after the Democrats forced through Obamacare—when they lost sixty-three House seats, control of the House, and six Senate seats4—there were limits to how far Obama could take his transformation. We should remember this shellacking when Democrats and Never Trumpers gloat over the Republicans’ loss of congressional seats in the 2018 midterms.

  Even as Obama remade America, he sometimes projected a false image of moderation and bipartisanship that his media cheerleaders obediently amplified. He famously pretended to oppose same-sex marriage until he decided it was politically feasible to announce he had “evolved” on the issue. Even his adviser David Axelrod later admitted that during the 2008 campaign Obama lied in saying he opposed same-sex marriage—for reasons of political expedience.5 He downplayed his health-care ambitions, claiming to reject a government-run, single-payer health-care system even though years earlier he’d privately told his labor union supporters that that was exactly what he wanted.6 But try as he might, Obama couldn’t always hide his militant partisanship.

  I’ll never forget his revealing utterances. While referring to his political opponents in a 2008 speech, he said, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”7 All throughout Obama’s first campaign for president, he mentioned me more than a dozen times—even threatening me by saying, “I’ll put Mr. Burgess [an Obama supporter] up against Sean Hannity. He’ll tear him up.” He told his supporters they were “his ambassadors” and urged them to “argue with [their neighbors]; get in their face.”8 Implying Republicans were lazy obstructionists, he said, “We’re down there pushing, pushing on the car. Every once in a while we’ll look up and see the Republicans standing there. They’re just standing there fanning themselves—sipping on a Slurpee.”9 Obama also often displayed his socialist leanings. He famously told Joe the Plumber, “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”10 And let’s never forget his infamous line: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”11

  Today’s Democratic leaders and presidential candidates dispensed with even the pretense of moderation. Whereas Obama at least pretended you could keep your health insurance plan, which was named “Lie of the Year” by the left-leaning PolitiFact,12 Senator Kamala Harris launched her presidential bid with a promise of eliminating private insurance. Every one of the Democratic presidential candidates on the stage at the July 30, 2019, Democratic presidential debate supported a public option for Obamacare that even the liberal 2010 Democratic Congress rejected.13 All the candidates at the June 27, 2019, debate supported federally funded health care for illegal immigrants. Two of the top candidates, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, supported “Medicare for All,” an outright government-run socialized medicine scheme.

  The Democrats’ radicalism goes way beyond health care. Every candidate at the February 7, 2020, debate either cosponsored or supported the Green New Deal, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s utopian plan to remake the American economy at a cost of unknown trillions of dollars. Indisputably, Democrats have become the party of socialism, open borders, sanctuary cities, the elimination of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), underfunding the military, abortion on demand, infanticide, environmental extremism, gun confiscation, higher taxes, radical identity politics, suppression of free speech and religious expression, and among some Democratic members of Congress, undisguised anti-Semitism. They’re also the party of intolerance, smears, lies, character assassination, besmirchment, and fake Russian dossiers. They are singularly obsessed with their hatred for President Trump and his supporters. As the Brett Kavanaugh Senate Judiciary Committee hearings showed, they have abandoned any sense of fundamental decency, fairness, or common sense.

  “THE LAST THING THEY WANT TO SEE IS A MIDDLE-OF-THE-ROAD DEMOCRAT”

  What are Democrats thinking? Why are they showing their hand so openly? Have the American people taken a sharp turn to the left? They haven’t, but there are worrying trends. Conservatives still outnumber liberals by 9 percentage points, but this gap has shrunk from 19 points in 1992. Gallup reported that in 2018, 35 percent of Americans described themselves as conservative, 35 percent as moderate, and 26 percent as liberal. The majority of Republicans call themselves conservative, but for the first time, a majority of Democrats identify as liberal.14

  These numbers don’t indicate socialism would be a winning message in the country overall. And of course, it’s possible Joe Biden will suddenly moderate his message after winning the party primaries. However, he did the opposite to win the Democrat nomination over Bernie Sanders. It’ll be nearly impossible for Biden to walk back his newfound radicalism. Besides, he seems to mean it. After all, the base of the party is very radical, as are their younger cohorts in Congress, led by AOC and her “squad” of like-minded extremists.

  Like Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic congressional veterans sometimes show they understand the need to appear more moderate, but when push comes to shove, their policy positions are not much different from the squad’s. In fact, more than 25 percent of Democrat lawmakers voted with AOC 95 percent of the time in the first quarter of 2019, and even more damning, Pelosi initially held the coronavirus relief bill hostage to her demands for including Green New Deal provisions in the legislation.15 There is simply no truth to Pelosi’s dismissive claim that the party’s AOC wing represents only “like five people.”16

  Indeed, as Karine Jean-Pierre of MoveOn.org made clear early on, it won’t be easy for the Democrats’ establishment wing to rein in the radicals. “[T]here’s one thing we already know about the 2020 Democratic nomine
e: She or he must offer a clear, unapologetically progressive alternative to Donald Trump,” writes Jean-Pierre. “Because [voters have] made it abundantly clear that the last thing they want to see in their nominee is a middle-of-the-road Democrat who won’t go far enough to turn our country around.”

  Consider that for a second. Democrats controlled the executive branch for eight years under Obama and produced nothing but problems, from health-care chaos and unaffordability, to economic stagnation, to foreign policy aimlessness. Under President Trump, prior to the coronavirus panic, the nation was reinvigorated, with an unprecedented economic boom, strong foreign policy leadership, deregulation, exceptional judicial appointments, and energy independence. What, exactly, would the left have us turn around? Do they want a rebirth of malaise, executive overreach, and an America-last foreign policy? Do they want to reimpose the Obamacare mandate? In fact, yes, you can bank on it.

  “Progressive candidates don’t hesitate when it comes to supporting universal health care, or the fight for the $15 minimum wage, or the right to vote,” says Jean-Pierre. “I can tell you this: [the Democratic presidential nominee] will be the most progressive candidate the Democratic Party has ever seen.”17 Do you hear an implied “or else” at the end of that sentence? You should, because it’s there. The party’s ultimate rejection of Sanders in favor of Biden doesn’t disprove Jean-Pierre’s prophecy. Considering where the party is today and Biden’s leftward turn, Biden will be the most progressive candidate the party has nominated. The Democratic base is feeling emboldened and uncompromising. Even if the party leaders were open to a more moderate course—and there’s no evidence of that—their base wouldn’t allow it.