Does Dennis Prager even know how often he follows my lead?

Constitution We the PeopleThis post’s title, of course, is facetious.  Dennis Prager is entirely unaware of my blog (and, no, I’m not complaining about that fact).  I have noticed over the years, though, that Prager will often write a post that says what I had earlier blogged about, although he always says it better than I did (which is why he gets paid the biggish bucks).  The latest example is Prager’s article stating that the scariest aspect of Donald Trump’s elevation in the Republican Party reflects the fact that Americans no longer understand either the nature of America or the nature of conservativism.  They have hot-button issues, but no broad conservative principles.

Allow me to quote myself to the same effect:

[C]onservativism in America is also a dead letter.  I don’t mean that the ideas underlying conservativism are dead.  They are timeless and eternally applicable to a vibrant, free, prosperous society.

What I mean is that, by allowing the Left to take over America’s news, entertainment, and education establishments, we have allowed 50 years of almost unlimited Leftist indoctrination.  That’s created two generations of people who lack the mental furniture to understand conservativism.  All they have is a slavering, feral hatred for anything or anybody associated with that term or those ideas.

[snip]

Up to 40% of Americans 18-34 would outlaw free speech to avoid so-called “hate speech.”

Almost 50% of Americans between 18 and 29 believe that the government owes them food, shelter, and healthcare as a “right.”

More than 50% of young Americans do not support capitalism, which they see as class robbery, rather than understanding that it is a system that has raised more people out of hunger,  poverty, and early death, and created more peace between nations, than any other economic system in history.

The majority of young Americans view the Founders as sexist, racist, homophobes whose ideas, no matter how good (ideas such as individual liberty, protection from tyranny, and freedom of choice), must therefore by disregarded.  Throwing the baby out with the bath water is encouraged in today’s education world.

Half the country now agrees that biological sexual differences are a myth.  Instead, gender identity is a mental construct personal to each individual, and we are all required to respect each individual’s choices, no matter how antithetical they may be to public health and safety, or to personal privacy, or to actual reality.

Those who believe that a child does best with a married mother and father are guilty of committing a hate crime.

More than 40% of American babies are born to unwed mothers, which is virtually a guarantee of childhood poverty.  The numbers are really bad for black babies (71% have unwed mothers) and Hispanic babies (53% have unwed mothers).  Not only are those children poor, really, poor, they’re also at terrible risk.  One of the biggest threats in a small child’s life arises when it single mother has a boyfriend with no genetic connection to the child. Those are the children who are horrifically abused and killed.

As the meltdown across American universities shows, America’s “best and brightest” — its future leaders, one could say — believe America is utterly evil.  The ideas driving that notion are many and varied, with the predominant ones being

  • That all whites are racist and unfairly privileged;
  • That all minorities are the victims of racism;
  • That 20% of women on campus will be raped, making an American college more dangerous than a South African slum (although probably less dangerous than a German New Year’s celebration);
  • That all men are rapists, except for Muslim men who do rape but can’t be expected to know better;
  • That all male military personnel are rapists and baby killers;
  • That the Republican party, which fought slavery and Jim Crow, is that party of racial hatred;
  • That Israel, the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, is a dangerous Nazi-like country that is committing ongoing genocide against a Palestinian population that paradoxically keeps on growing; and
  • That everyone who disagrees with them is a hater who must be silenced lest they trigger unpleasant emotions in the minds of these students.

Which gets us to where we are today.  Half the country has become economically communist, desperately desiring a theoretically “fair” government-run economy, as well as being socially delusional, whether it’s about race, gender, feminism, or any other social issue you care to name.

The other half of the country, the half that still clings to some semblance of economic and social sanity, looks at the Republican-lite Party and thinks to itself “No one there is going to be either willing or able to help us.”

And then along comes Trump.  He’s the personification of the rage living in those Republicans and Democrats who still value a meaningful border, who think that it’s insane to invite in tens of thousands of unvetted Muslims who come from cultures that hate everything we stand for and want to kill us, and who hate above all being silenced by political correctness.

[snip]

I do feel as if we Americans are much like the Jews who willingly fled the fleshpots of Egypt and then, in the desert, panicked and resumed pagan worship of the Golden Calf.  God decided that the current generation was too damaged by life in Egypt to withstand the rigors of Canaan.  He therefore kept them wandering for 40 years until the soft generation was gone, and the pure generation was allowed into the Holy Land.

America has become corrupted.  It took 40-50 years of relentless Leftist indoctrination at every cultural level to make that happen.  Perhaps we need our 40 years in the political wilderness to undo it.

The problem isn’t that Americans can’t handle the truth; it’s that they no longer even know what the truth is. And so we end up with Trump.

We principled small, constitutional government conservatives can whine about the unfairness of it all, and about Trump’s despicable character, and about all sorts of other stuff, but the reality is that Americans have been indoctrinated to a level of ignorance that makes it impossible for a reasonable majority to understand Ted Cruz’s small government, constitutional conservativism. He is a prophet, but the people are deaf to his entreaties.

The answer to America’s woes doesn’t lie in the White House. It lies in the schools, and the movies, and the television shows, and the toys, and the universities. Ignore the White House. Turn your focus and your fire on the culture.

Frankly, I’m not sure that we have the 40 years God gave the Israelites in the Sinai. In our super-fast, hi-tech age, we need to work a turnaround a lot faster than that. The only thing that matters in the White House is holding the line, the bare bones line, just long enough to give birth to new generations who understand America.