The thought crime police

One of the common responses to my post urging hidden conservatives to come out into the open in this election, if not to their friends and neighbors, at least to their fellow Republicans was that the situation can’t really be that bad.  The Left isn’t any more snarky and snarly than the Right, and you simply have to speak up and make them back down.

In the ideological middle, where people have rather knee-jerk responses to politics (“my father voted Democrat, so I do too”), that may be true.  The true Left, though, and this is a true Left that’s feeling a great deal of power because of the way the masses surge along in its wake on war and environmental issues, is much more deeply committed to its ideology — and part of the true Leftist ideology is to stifle all debate.

Only days after Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s death, it’s ironic that we are once more engaged in a battle royal for true freedom of speech, whether at the political rostrum or simply in letters we send to friends.  (Solzhenitsyn, after all, found himself in the Gulag for writing a private wartime letter somewhat critical of Stalin.)  Nevertheless, that it precisely what’s happening.  Ralph Peters describes a reporter’s question, asked in all seriousness, on Peters’ pro-War stance:  should Peters be tried for war crimes?  Keep in mind that Peters did nothing at all but speak his mind on the war.  That means, even if we buy into the worst of the Leftist belief and paranoia, and admit that the war was wrong and that the powers that be lied to get us into it, the Leftists are still suggesting that any average American who had an opinion on the war — no, who had the wrong opinion on the war — should be rounded up, tried and “reeducated.”

Are you scared?  I am.  And so are a lot of conservatives buried deep under mountains of blue, and feeling very, very alone.  That’s why I’m urging them, not to announce to the world their conservatism, but simply to go to the place where they are most likely to find others just like them:  their local Republican party.

Hat tip:  Danny Lemieux