Regardless of Your Presidential Choice, Vote Straight Republican Down Ballot

The drumbeat of calls to vote for Hillary Clinton to stop Donald Trump continued in the New Jersey Star-Ledger in the form of a guest column by J. Christian Bollwage, the Democrat mayor of the City of Elizabeth, New Jersey. In Conscientious Republicans must support Clinton for good of the country, Bollwage writes:

As a lifelong registered Democrat, delegate for Clinton at the Democratic National Convention and mayor of the City of Elizabeth, New Jersey’s fourth largest municipality, my choice is no secret.

However, supporting Clinton goes beyond political party affiliations or perceived duty, she is just the best choice for the American people.

After reciting a litany of Clinton positives, including her embrace of “diversity,” Bollwage, appealing to anti-Trump Republicans who may abstain from casting a vote for president, writes:

It is not enough for conscientious Republicans to just say they will not vote for Trump. They must endorse Clinton for the job. Vocalizing displeasure and nonsupport of Trump means that either another choice will be made or that no vote will be cast.

Selection of [the] choice . . . no vote will be cast . . . sends the unfortunate message that not exercising your right to vote is the way to be heard and make a difference. That is not a lesson that should be taught by anyone, especially public leaders. . . . Therefore, if Trump does not represent the views of Republicans and/or leadership sought for our country, then an alternative candidate must be chosen.

But why? Bollwage explains:

Saying no to something you feel strongly about, but not doing anything positive to bring about change, has never been good enough. Republicans, who oppose Trump but do not endorse Clinton, are choosing to stand by and see what happens.

But what if the voter believes Clinton “does not represent the views of Republicans and/or leadership sought for our country” either? Why the obligation to vote for her? An abstention is just as much a political expression as pulling the lever for a candidate.

As to the candidates, I don’t want Trump. I definitely don’t want Hillary. I wish there were a better choice at the top of the ballot. Be that as it may, there is a wider perspective to consider here. Abstaining from not choosing a president doesn’t have to mean “not doing anything positive to bring about change.” What about the rest of the ballot? From a pro-liberty, pro-American principles perspective, the Democratic Party is immeasurably more destructive than the Republican Party. The worst of the Democrats’ policies are:

• The Democrats are anti-reliable energy: They have been captured by environmentalist witch doctors who would sacrifice human energy needs to the climate gods. They will double down on their war on reliable, economical energy in the name of “fighting climate change,” with policies aimed at going 50% unreliable “green” energy  within 10 years and elimination of fossil fuels by 2050.

• The Dems are anti-diversity: Oh sure, they categorize people by group racial or cultural heritage, and call it “diversity.” But they ignore meaningful individual diversity in attributes such as ability, intelligence, ambition, values, goals, personal circumstances, and moral character. If the Dems really valued diversity, they’d celebrate economic inequality, which is the direct result of human diversity in a free society. Tragically, the Democrats have allowed the racists to hijack the diversity narrative. Why? Because the Democrats are inherently collectivist, in sharp contrast to America’s uniquely individualist origins and culture. Thus, they will accelerate their war on achievement, in the form of an anti-economic inequality crusade. They have been captured by radical neo-communist egalitarians who value economic equality over individual rights, political equality, diversity and economic progress.

• The Dems are anti-free speech and anti-intellectual freedom: They advocate a constitutional amendment to repeal Citizens United, thus giving the political class the power to control political speech, protect its incumbency, and shield the incumbents from citizen scrutiny, criticism, and accountability.

• There is a dangerous strain of fascism rising within the Democratic Party: The Dems will add a dangerous new dimension to their war on free speech and intellectual freedom, in the form of federalizing the agenda of the Democrat-led “AGs United for Clean Power.” These state Attorneys General are pursuing a prosecutorial assault on ExxonMobil and numerous intellectual institutions, under cover of “fraud,”  for dissenting from the Left’s climate catastrophist dogma. The “Big Lie” tactic—repeat a lie often enough and loud enough and the general public will eventually come to embrace it—is much less effective in a society that allows unfettered skepticism and dissent, as the general public has access to a constant stream of opposing opinions. The “Big Lie” is much more effective when dissent is crushed. Climate catastrophism is the Left’s Big Lie. Since this Big Lie is not getting the public traction the Left desires, they have now turned to crushing dissent to give it a boost. The blatantly fascist “inquisition” of the AGs United for Clean Power is more attuned to a Castro or Mussolini regime than to a major American political party.

Add to this horrific litany the Democrats’ generally insatiable appetite for taxing away earned wealth to create new and ever-broader handouts and unrelenting power-lust that drives them to ceaselessly expand the federal regulatory tyranny. The Democrats are unabashed collectivists. Collectivism is the statists’ tool of oppression of the individual.

True, the Republicans are wedded to the authoritarian social agenda of the religious conservatives. But the GOP’s social authoritarianism is not the main threat to America today. The Democrats’ economic and intellectual authoritarianism is the main threat.

And true, despite their rhetoric, the GOP is not really for limited government, as government always seems to grow both in scope of power over our lives and size under GOP leadership—just not as fast as under Democrats. But clearly, the Democratic Party has gone way beyond the “social safety net” Old Left agenda. The Democrats burgeoning economic authoritarianism, coupled now with a war on free speech and its newly emerging fascist impulse, is the most urgent threat. Add to that the kind of anti-liberty, anti-rights protecting government, anti-constitutional Supreme Court judges the Democrats would appoint, and the Republicans are nowhere near as authoritarian, on balance.

Both Clinton and Trump can lead the country in the wrong direction. But here’s the difference: Clinton is very much wedded ideologically to the statist Left, and can be counted on to advance its agenda. Trump, on the other hand, has an authoritarian impulse but has no ideological leanings; in fact, very little in the way of intellectual coherence. He’s a buffoonish loose cannon. But by that very fact there is much more of a chance he can be influenced toward pro-liberty, pro-constitutional policies than Clinton. If Republicans, Independents, and disillusioned Democrats who feel they must vote for Clinton, a third party candidate, or abstain just to stop Trump—and contrary to Bollwage’s assertion, abstention is a valid way of “being heard”—so be it. But to those Republicans, Independents, and disillusioned Democrats, I urge them to at least vote straight Republican down-ballot to act as a check on the dehumanizing collectivist/authoritarian impulses of a President Clinton.

Related Reading:

Echoes of 1972? The Trump Dilemma: The Democrats are Worse

How Much Does Trump Owe His Nomination to Democrat Voters?

The Democrat Party Platform Committee’s Call to ‘Investigate’ Climate Dissenters is Undisguised Fascism

It’s now official: The Democrat Party is no longer a fascist-leaning party. It is an American fascist movement.

As Michael Bastasch reports in Dem Party Platform Calls For Prosecuting Global Warming Skeptics for The Daily Caller, a panel of Democrats voted unanimously to include a plank in the 2016 Democrat Party platform “calling on the Department of Justice to investigate alleged corporate fraud on the part of fossil fuel companies who have reportedly misled shareholders and the public on the scientific reality of climate change.” Thus, dissent is called fraud for the purpose of using the government’s guns to intimidate, financially ruin, and ultimately jail people who disagree with what is now considered the official state dogma—catastrophic climate change and the “clean energy policies” allegedly needed to combat it. The purpose is to silence dissent and stop informed public debate in America.

The inquisition launched by a cabal of Democrat Attorneys General calling themselves “AGs United for Clean Power” is now official doctrine of a major political party of the United States of America, the country Founded in large part on intellectual freedom. The Democrats’ front line of attack targets the industry that provides the bulk of America’s energy of life—the fossil fuel industry. But like all fascists, the Democrats real target is control over every citizen’s life. Fascism is, after all, socialism through the back door; the enslavement rather than nationalization of private business through regulatory tyranny as a means of providing a conduit for government power. What better cover for American socialists can there be than to sneak in their agenda under cover of the system they hate, capitalism? That’s the role fascism plays in America—a backdoor into socialism. Energy is the industry that powers every other industry. Through profit-motivated investment, innovation, product production, and job creation, industry in the mainstay of the average citizen’s economic well-being. Control energy, and you control the rest.

But the Democrats’ economic fascism alone doesn’t make the Democratic Party fascist. Even Republicans favor fascist economics; e.g., RomneyCare (the model for ObamaCare), antitrust.

To be considered fascist, you need much more; control and censorship of the flow of ideas. This global warming plank is not merely an economic attack on America’s heroic reliable energy producers, and thus on Americans’ economic and social well-being. Dwarfing the economic threat is the overt attack on freedom of speech and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Free speech is the most important political right in a crucial respect: It keeps open the lines of communication among the people, and between the people and their government officials, especially the ability to challenge government policies. Free speech enables us to understand each other, present new ideas, challenge old ideas, settle differences civilly, and ultimately arrive at the truth. Silence industry, and you silence everyone. Who would dare challenge the government’s official line after seeing great industries brought to their knees by out-of-control prosecutors from the federal and state governments?

The end of free speech always begins with an attack on leading voices, in this case the fossil fuel industry. But make no mistake. The democrats are not just looking to silence the fossil fuel companies. The now openly fascist Democrats are also going after researchers, intellectual organizations and individuals, and think tanks—more than 100 of them—that in some way challenge their climate catastrophist dogma. The goal is to shut down dissent. This move is perfectly suited to a Castro or Mussolini regime, not an American government. By cloaking the prosecutorial inquisition in the prestige of science, the American Fascist Party—nor superficially labeled the Democrat Party—mimicks the National-Socialist German Workers' Party, better known as the Nazi Party, which cloaked its genetic purity “master race” agenda in the “science” of racism, also known as eugenics. (Eugenics first became well-established in the United States among the “Progressive” movement of the early 20th Century.) The “science” of climate change is now the infallible authority the censors will rely on.

Incredibly, DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who headed the draft party platform committee that approved the censorship platform, said with a straight face,

As Democrats, we believe that our country’s greatest strength is its people, and we’re committed to the values of inclusion and opportunity for all. Our candidates ran strong campaigns that addressed the priorities of the American people, and I am proud to say that the drafting process has reflected our commitment as a party to elevating their voices.

So the Democrats idea of “inclusion” is to silence voices of Americans who disagree with them, thus denying to all Americans the “opportunity” to hear all sides of the climate debate and make an informed decision. Ignorance, Schultz apparently believes, is “elevating their voices.” Censorship, Schultz tells us, is one of “the priorities of the American people.” The “voices” to be “elevated” are only those voices that parrot approved government dogma. It’s a terrible precedent. Today, it’s climate change dissenters. Tomorrow, it can and will be any dissenter on any issue whichever political faction happens to be in power decides “the people” shouldn’t hear.

Of course, the Left has been waging a covert war against free speech for some time. The war has been waged under cover of campaign finance and disclosure laws and the like. The Democrats’ pledge to repeal Citizens United is part of that war. But their true intentions are now laid bare.

Speech is words. The only alternative to words is bullets. Bullets are what Democrats are now proposing to use in the “debate” over climate change and what, if anything, to do about it. They apparently believe they are losing on the battleground of public debate, and like all true fascists, they are now turning to the government’s bullets. This is the same Democrat Party that, having failed to stop the assimilation of freed black slaves into American society after the Civil War, turned to government’s guns to thwart black Americans’ freedom in the form of Jim Crow forced segregation laws, black voter suppression laws, and police-sanctioned Ku Klux Klan lynchings.  Today, having apparently concluded that they are losing the climate catastrophe/anti-reliable energy debate, are turning to the government’s guns in the form of trampling our sacred First Amendment. This gangster party hasn’t changed its stripes.

I believe the Democrats’ positions on egalitarianism, environmentalism, energy, and “democratic socialism” are horrendous. But this plank is different. It is not a position on a policy issue. It is about shutting out opposing positions at legal gunpoint. It is an overt attack on free speech. Fascism is many things. But you can’t have fascism without government controlling the free flow of ideas and information; censorship. Every aspiring dictator must shut down freedom of speech, sooner or later. For the Democrats, “sooner” has arrived.

Will the Democrats get away with it? The answer to that question will say a lot about America’s future. But there is no escaping the electoral implications of this most heinous development. Assuming the anti-dissent plank is approved at their convention, anyone who votes Democrat from here on has to be considered a fascist, a neo-fascist, or fascist sympathizer.

Related Reading:

How U.S. Attorneys General Are Like Chinese Censors—Steve Simpson

In this article, an attorney and legal scholar explains why charges of fraud have no basis, and why fraud is just a cover for government censorship.

The Democrats’ Fascist Fangs Exposed in Crusade Against ‘Catastrophic’ Climate Change

First The Government Went After ExxonMobil -- Now They're Going After Me—Alex Epstein

Free Speech and Climate Fraud Prosecution Follies—Ronald Bailey for Reason.com

EXCERPT: Free marketeers are surely against fraud, but was it fraud when biologist Paul Ehrlich asserted that hundreds of millions would die of famine in the 1970s; when Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrère, Kenneth Deffeyes, and Daniel Goodstein all predicted global peak oil production by 2010; when statistician Nassim Taleb claimed that biotech crops could cause an "irreversible termination of life at some scale, which could be planetwide"; when natural remedy huckster Joseph Mercola maintained that exposures to trace amounts of synthetic chemicals is a major cause of cancer? All these claims were sincerely believed and argued by their proponents and yet have now been proven largely wrong. And don't say that the difference is that these folks didn't have a profit motive for saying what they said; they all make money as authors, consultants, and snake oil salespersons.

While styled as a fraud investigation, the AG's investigation amounts to a kind of prosecutorial strategic lawsuit against public participation, widely known as a SLAPP. While the AGs United for Clean Power make no secret that they hope that their investigation will yield them billions in the moral equivalent of climate reparations, the additional goal is to shut up advocacy groups that argue that climate change is not as big problem as the Democratic AGs think it that it is.

Blaming the Victims: Corporate Executives Fighting Back Against Government Power are Courageous

J.K. Rowling Laudably Defends Free Speech On Principle

Related Viewing:

Alex Epstein Defends Fossil Fuels and Free Speech—Approximately 10 minutes

Related Listening:

The Climate Change Inquisition—The Yaron Brook Show, featuring Guest host Steve Simpson, ARI’s Director of Legal Studies and former senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, Sam Kazman, general counsel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, and Walter Olson, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute.

Echoes of 1972? The Trump Dilemma: The Democrats are Worse

The New Jersey Star-Ledger is calling for Republicans to abandon Donald Trump and vote for Hillary in the same way that Democrats abandoned George McGovern in 1972, handing Richard Nixon a landslide victory. In Republicans for Hillary: Time to come out of the closet, Star-Ledger editorial writer Tom Moran, who approvingly cited a guest column by former Republican Governor Christie Whitman that compared Trump to Hitler and Mussolini., goes:

Will there come a point when Republicans of good will abandon their party this year, and do what they can to save America from the risk of Donald Trump winning the presidency?

It's a tall order for conservatives. They would have to content themselves with trying to hold Congress for now, so that Hillary Clinton is forced to govern as a centrist.

The only close precedent in modern history came in August of 1972 as the Vietnam War raged, after Democrats nominated Sen. George McGovern, the peace [far Left] candidate from South Dakota.

A former Democratic governor of Texas, John Connally, led a mutiny against McGovern and founded the group "Democrats for Nixon." He recruited several unions, including the Teamsters, along with a meaty list of Democratic governors, legislators and mayors, including Thomas Dunn of Elizabeth [NJ].

In the end, 1 in 3 Democrats voted for Nixon, giving him a 23-point landslide in the popular vote, the fourth largest in history. Democrats then moved to the middle, and soon recovered their footing.

I left these comments, edited and expanded for clarity:

The Star-Ledger is correct. Trump is bad. But here’s the Trump dilemma: The Democrats are worse.

The Democrats have lurched more heavily toward statism and nihilism than ever before, including 1972. The Democratic Party has been captured by environmentalist witch doctors who would sacrifice human energy needs to the climate gods; radical neo-communist egalitarians who value economic equality over individual achievement and political equality; warriors against free speech and intellectual freedom, in the form of endorsing a constitutional amendment to repeal Citizens United, thus giving the political class the power to control political speech; fascists who believe dissent should be criminalized as fraud, in the form of endorsing the prosecutorial inquisition by a cabal of Democrat  “AGs United for Clean Power” against Exxon and dozens of pro-free market intellectual organizations who challenge the Left’s climate catastrophist dogma; liars who mis-identify the causes of the 2008-09 financial crisis and Great Recession—putting primary blame on “Wall Street” rather than government “affordable housing” crusades—for the purpose of rationalizing massive regulatory expansion; an insatiable appetite for taxing away earned wealth to create new and ever-broader handouts, effectively proposing to “save” the middle class by turning it into a vast welfare class; and an unrelenting power-lust that drives them to ceaselessly expand the federal regulatory tyranny with new freedom-restricting regulations to “solve” every “crisis” they can dream up.

Whatever remnants of the “Old Left” liberalism of the likes Scoop Jackson, JFK, Patrick Moynahan, and Joe Lieberman still moderate the Democrats was thoroughly crushed by the demagogic, explicitly socialist rise of Bernie Sanders. The Democrats’ disdain for constitutional limits on their power appears insatiable. As a registered Independent, I have no loyalty to either party. My loyalties lie with individual rights and a government constitutionally limited to protecting those rights—the original American system.

Obviously, Trump doesn’t fit the bill. Given the choices, I’m forced to choose between bad and catastrophic. But here’s the question. If we adopt the Star-Ledger’s call to vote for Hillary to stop Trump, how then do we stop the Democrats? Here’s a possible compromise: Vote for Hillary to stop Trump, then vote for a Republican Congress to check Hillary and stop the Democrats. “Republicans for Hillary” and “Democrats for a Republican Congress.” That would lead to the mirror image of what happened in 1972, when Nixon won big but Democrats retained Congress. Think the Star-Ledger and the Democrats will go along? We’ll get global cooling in you-know-where before that happens. Resentfully and tragically, at this point I feel I have no choice but to vote for a bad Trump, as a vote for Johnson/Weld would only strengthen a catastrophic Hillary.

---------------------------------------------------

The analogy to 1972 is invalid in one important respect. In 1972, McGovern pulled the Democrat Party farther to the Left, where it already leaned. In 2016, Trump didn’t pull the Republican Party farther Right, where it already leaned. He pulled the GOP to the Left.

Nonetheless, given the almost-certainty that Hillary will win, the best pro-liberty forces can hope for is for Republicans to hold congress. This would not, however, be as advantageous for the Right as the 1972 outcome was for the Democrats. Then, the federal government wasn’t as powerful as it is today. Today, the much-bigger regulatory leviathan awards much more power to the executive branch to make fiat law, bypassing Congress. So a Republican Congress would be much less effective at checking Hillary’s statist impulses than it would have been 44 years ago. But that looks to be our best hope.

Related reading:

Dem's Economic Authoritarianism Outweighs GOP's Social Authoritarianism

Election 2016: Forget the Lies. It’s About the Issues

Rutgers’ Linda Stamato’s Unconscionable Smear of TPUSA’s ‘Professor Watchlist’ as ‘McCarthyism’

Recently, a “Professor Watchlist” surfaced from a conservative group calling itself “Turning Point USA.” The watchlist identifies certain academic professors because “students, parents, and alumni deserve to know the specific incidents and names of professors that advance a radical agenda in lecture halls.”

I do not endorse or condemn TPUSA or its project. My point here is to expose the blatant hypocrisy of the Left in regard to freedom of speech.

New Jersey Star-Ledger guest columnist Linda Stamato, a Rutgers University faculty member, said in an article that the watchlist is “McCarthyism,” a smear term rooted in 1950’s government-backed campaigns to blacklist and silence alleged communists as “subversives.” The watchlist, Stamato says, is a threat to free speech—and she quotes academics eloquently defending freedom of speech, lauding them and “countless others” for “their acts of conscience and their willingness to fight efforts to silence and discredit them.”

But is TPUSA’s watchlist really a threat to free speech? Is TPUSA really trying to silence anyone? Does it even have the power? (Note the package-deal: To silence is one thing. To discredit is what opposing views are, in addition to promoting a different view, supposed to do. The freedom to discredit views one opposes is freedom of speech. To silence is anti-free speech. Stamato seems to equate dissent with government censorship, perhaps to protect the watchlist professors from having to defend their views.) The answer to these questions is; No. Senator Joseph McCarthy held Congressional hearings to investigate Americans suspected of ties to communism, thus putting the power of government—the power of guns—behind his efforts. TPUSA is no such thing. Toward the end of the article, Stamato essentially acknowledges that it is not, stating “We may not have the heavy hand of government threatening our constitutional rights, as they did--not yet anyway. . .”

Actually, we do. But it is not coming from TPUSA. They’re coming from the Left. There is the proposed “Democracy for All” amendment, which would overturn Citizens United and award the government the power to severely restrict freedom of speech in the political arena. There is the “AGs United for Clean Power,” a group of state Democrat Attorneys General using the prosecutorial powers of the government to intimidate and silence dissenters to the environmentalist’s climate catastrophist dogma. There are so-called “hate crimes,” which establishes the principle that you can be jailed for your thoughts as well as your actions (fortunately, we don’t have hate speech laws- -not yet anyway).

Freedom of speech means being free from coercive government interference in the expression and debate of ideas. It does not mean being sheltered from exposure, criticism, and scrutiny of one’s ideas by other private citizens. I see nothing threatening about the watchlist. Turning Point USA is an intellectual advocacy group that is doing nothing essentially different from Stamato in her article attacking the Koch brothers, David and Charles. TPUSA’s watchlist calling out people they disagree with is no more an attack on free speech or “McCarthyism” than Stamato’s article calling out the Koch brothers. In fact, both are free speech.

All ideas—not just those on the Right—should be subject to scrutiny. The shoe is actually on the other foot. The academics’ attempt to discredit Turning Point USA by concocting a threat to free speech out of its watchlist is to attempt to do to TPUSA exactly what it accuses TPUSA of doing—”silence and discredit” opposing opinions by smearing and shaming. Stamato’s very accusation of “McCarthyism” is designed to do just that.

Rutgers President Robert Barchi’s eloquent defense of free speech on campus is spot on—except that free speech applies to all members of a free society, not just academia. Every word defending free speech mentioned in the article—”to challenge the ideas of others,” “to explore new and sometimes controversial ideas and to subject assumptions to scrutiny,” the “right to speak freely,” a “commitment to pursuing facts, to seeking truth, to following evidence wherever it leads, to speaking honestly”—applies equally to TPUSA, not just to “our profession and ourselves as scholars.” Although Barchi does observe that freedom of expression “is fundamental to our University, our society, and our nation,” Stamato doesn’t seem to think so. Why isn’t TPUSA’s watchlist also an “act of conscience?”

It seems that the academics’ “willingness to fight efforts to silence and discredit them” is really an attempt to avoid having their ideas exposed and debated outside of their academic “safe spaces.” What are they afraid of? Perhaps they want to peddle their ideas to unseasoned kids entrusted to them for their education without scrutiny or challenge from opposing opinions from “outsiders.”

Related Reading:

Anti-First Amendment Democracy for All Amendment Introduced in Senate

Stamato vs. the Koch Brothers: Campaign Finance and the First Amendment

Real vs. Pseudo-Censorship

Election 2016: Forget the Lies. It’s About the Issues

What is this election about? The New Jersey Star-Ledger editorialized Clinton's lies vs. Trump's lies: separate and unequal. A whole editorial about who is the least egregious liar. You can read it if you want. I left these comments, edited and expanded for clarity:

Both Clinton and Trump are liars? Yawn! This is old news. It’s non-essential. What I focus on is the party platforms. From a pro-liberty, pro-American principles perspective, the Democrats are immeasurably more destructive. The worst of the Democrats’ policies are:

• • The Democrats have been captured by anti-industrial environmentalists who value unaltered nature over maximizing human well-being. They will double down on their war on reliable, economical energy, in the form of policies aimed at forcing Americans into 50% unreliable “green” energy  within 10 years and elimination of fossil fuels by 2050.

  
  

  • They have also been captured by radical neo-communist egalitarians who value economic equality over individual rights, political equality, and economic progress. They will accelerate their war on individual human diversity and achievement, in the form of a demagogic anti-economic inequality crusade that appeals to the basest of human emotions—greed and envy.

  
  

  • They will continue their war against free speech and intellectual freedom—the First Amendment—in the form of endorsing a constitutional amendment to repeal Citizens United, thus giving the political class the power to control political speech.

  
  

  • They will continue their drive to hollow out the Second Amendment, thus undermining the individual right to self-defense. They will use the legitimate issue of “gun control” to so heavily regulate gun ownership as to effectively ban guns just as racists have used the legitimate issue of “voter ID” to restrict the racial minority vote.

  
  

  • They will add a dangerous new dimension to their war on free speech and intellectual freedom, in the form of federalizing the Democrat-led “AGs United for Clean Power,” which is pursuing a prosecutorial assault on ExxonMobil and numerous intellectual institutions, under cover of “fraud,”  for dissenting from the Left’s climate catastrophist dogma. This blatantly fascist “inquisition” is more attuned to a Castro or Mussolini regime than to a major American political party.

  
  

  • Dovetailing with the Democrats’ war on intellectual freedom is the Obama Administration’s assault on private colleges, in particular for-profit colleges. The government’s regulatory apparatus coupled with the government’s virtual takeover of student loans is increasing federal control of higher education, a key goal of the political powerluster.

  
  

  • Their deliberate mis-identification of the causes of the 2008-09 financial crisis and Great Recession—blaming private business rather than government “affordable housing” crusades—for the purpose of rationalizing the massive regulatory expansion over the economy generally and finance in particular. This is consistent with the Democrats’ unrelenting power-lust that drives them, under cover of their slogans of counterfeit compassion, to ceaselessly expand the federal regulatory tyranny.

  
  

  • The Benghazi atrocity, Hillary’s email scandal, and Obama’s absurd claim that climate change is America’s greatest national security threat are all indications that the Democrats simply don’t take national security seriously.

  
  

  • Add to this horrific litany the Democrats’ generally insatiable appetite for taxing away earned wealth to create new and ever-broader handouts. The Democrats’ idea of “helping” the middle class is to turn it from self-sufficiency into a welfare class—funded, of course, by money seized from, you guessed it, middle class (i.e., productive) Americans.

  
  

  
  

  • Finally, and in the long term most importantly, there is the issue of Supreme Court nominees. “Liberals,” or so-called “Progressives,” believe the U.S. Constitution is a “living constitution”—that is, a hollow document devoid of any supporting philosophical principles such as inalienable individual rights or division of governmental powers. Hillary and the Democrats, if given the chance, will install liberal/progressive judges. What will this mean? The great achievement of the United States of America is to check government power over the individual, limiting government at all levels to the protection of individual rights—rights defined as guarantees to freedom of action (the pursuit of happiness], not an automatic claim on material benefits that others must be forced to provide [e.g. “free” college or taxpayer-provided health care]). Liberal/progressive judges—that is, Leftist judges—believe that the constitution, being devoid of principles, can be interpreted any way that fits current politics. Being statists, a Left-dominated Supreme Court would essentially neuter the constitution: Such would be the final nail in the coffin for individual rights and limited government.

True, the Republicans are wedded to the authoritarian social agenda of the religious conservatives. But the GOP’s social authoritarianism is not the main threat to America today. Clearly, the Democratic Party has gone way beyond the “social safety net” Old Left agenda. The Democrats burgeoning economic authoritarianism, coupled now with a war on free speech and its newly emerging fascist impulse, is the most urgent threat. The Republicans are nowhere near as authoritarian, on balance.

Clinton and Trump are both liars. So what? There are much more important issues than who is the worst liar. It is those issues I will focus on. So, here’s where I stand at this time:

Both Trump and Clinton have strong authoritarian impulses, and neither have much respect for Americanism or the U.S. Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. Both can lead the country in the wrong direction. In essence, the choice is between two Democrats. But here’s the difference: Clinton is very much wedded ideologically to the statist Left, and can be counted on to advance its agenda. Trump, on the other hand, has no ideological leanings; in fact, very little in the way of intellectual coherence. He’s a buffoonish loose cannon. But by that very fact there is much more of a chance he can be influenced toward pro-liberty, pro-constitutional policies than Clinton.

At this point, I’m leaning toward a bad quasi-Democrat choice—Donald Trump—in order to keep out a catastrophic Democrat choice—Hillary Clinton. But whatever my presidential choice, I’ll be voting straight Republican down-ballot in hopes of blunting some of the Democrats’ dehumanizing collectivism/statism.

Related Reading:

This Year’s Election Choice: 3rd Party or Best Platform?

The Democrat Party Platform Committee’s Call to ‘Investigate’ Climate Dissenters is Undisguised Fascism