Liars: How Progressives Exploit Our Fears for Power and Control
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LIE 1
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PROGRESSIVES WANT TO KEEP YOU SAFE FROM GUN VIOLENCE
I will use every single minute of every day, if I am so fortunate enough to be your president, looking for ways that we can save lives, that we can change the gun culture.
—HILLARY CLINTON, 2016 CAMPAIGN
This is our first task as a society, keeping our children safe. This is how we will be judged.
—BARACK OBAMA, UNVEILING NEW EXECUTIVE ACTIONS ON GUN CONTROL, 2013
THE LIE
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In the spring of 1922, a group of men in sober dark suits met in a small hotel ballroom a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. At the head of a square table sat the meeting’s leader, a small-framed, unassuming man wearing wire-rimmed glasses that perched above a neatly trimmed mustache. He straightened his papers in front of him, cleared his throat, and read a short prepared statement to the group of assembled government officials of the Prohibition Bureau:
We have made good progress in our efforts to forever stamp out the scourge of human inebriation, having won an Amendment to our beloved Constitution making the manufacture and ownership of liquor as illegal as the ownership of Slaves. However, as long as any of our fellow citizens remains trapped by their inability to resist the temptation to drink, there is still more we can do to protect our citizenry, and their wives and children.
He read on to the silent group and proposed a plan that would help ensure that the government could both identify and “treat” those citizens who still violated their hard-won temperance laws. It was simple: they would add poisonous wood alcohol to bottles of whiskey and then make sure those tainted bottles made their way into the speakeasies and back-alley bars that had popped up across the country in response to the Eighteenth Amendment. When people broke the law by consuming the whiskey, they would get extremely sick or even die, enabling the government to identify lawbreakers and also to discover exactly where alcohol was still being distributed.
The room of federal-government employees listened, nodded, and then left to go dutifully about the business of poisoning and killing thousands of their fellow citizens.i
Eighty-seven years later, government officials of the successor agency to the Prohibition Bureau—the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF)—initiated a program to sell assault rifles to known gunrunners and drug traffickers. The plan was simple, at least in theory: by arming drug warlords with traceable firearms, they could identify the chain of black-market firearms dealers who were enabling drug dealers to be so heavily armed. The government agents set about the work of stamping out the sale of deadly weapons to known murderers . . . by selling deadly weapons to known murders.
Just more than a year after that, an officer of the U.S. Border Patrol was killed in the Arizona desert by Mexican criminals. Assault rifles provided to the assailants by the U.S. government were found at the murder scene.
We’ve met the small-framed, unassuming man in glasses described in the first scene before. His name is Wayne Wheeler, the progressive “dry” zealot who, while not a government official himself, essentially functioned as the United States’ Prohibition czar. In 1921, Wheeler handpicked a former ally in the Ohio temperance movement, Roy A. Haynes, to be the nation’s official Prohibition commissioner.
“Through Haynes,” according to historian John Kobler, “Wheeler controlled the Prohibition Bureau.” Wheeler was a strong proponent of providing poisoned alcohol to America’s illegal drinkers, reasoning that “the person who drinks this industrial alcohol is a deliberate suicide. . . . To root out a bad habit costs many lives and long years of effort.” In the end, the government is estimated to have poisoned some ten thousand Americans.
The second scene above depicts the much more recent disaster of “Operation Fast and Furious,” in which the ATF—which grew directly out of the liquor-poisoning Prohibition Bureau—let guns they were supposedly tracking fall into the hands of drug runners and then promptly lost them. Their strategy, in their own words, was “to allow the transfer of firearms to continue to take place in order to further the investigation.” In reality, the only thing they furthered was murder.
Guns from the Fast and Furious program were linked to the killing of Border Patrol officer Brian Terry, as well as to the deaths of hundreds of Mexican citizens. After notorious drug lord (and apparent pal of Hollywood liberal Sean Penn) Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán was captured, authorities found that his arsenal included a .50-caliber rifle that had found its way to the kingpin through Fast and Furious.
Programs like Wheeler’s deliberate liquor poisoning during Prohibition and Operation Fast and Furious under Barack Obama and Eric Holder’s ATF show just how far progressives will go to further their control and limit your freedom, while telling you it’s for your own good. This fight for control, driven by their fear of a free society, is on full display in the gun-control debate today.
The liberal public grief ritual following every attack by a deranged individual with a gun has become as sad a matter of routine as the shootings themselves. Quick to politicize senseless tragedies, progressives waste little time in using acts of gun violence to further their political agenda.
Barack Obama famously shed tears after the Sandy Hook shooting. “As a country, we have been through this too many times,” he said. “We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.”
About a month later, while taking the opportunity to unveil nearly two dozen executive orders on gun control (so much for “regardless of the politics”), Obama repeated a version of the standard justifications that progressives often use for these kinds of actions: “This is our first task as a society, keeping our children safe,” he said. “This is how we will be judged.”
Hillary Clinton’s campaign takes the safety angle as well, vowing to “ensure that the safety of our communities is prioritized over the profits of the gun lobby.” Clinton even held a campaign event with families of the Sandy Hook victims (again, what happened to “regardless of the politics”?) where she declared that “we just have too many guns in this country” and promised: “I will use every single minute of every day, if I am so fortunate enough to be your president, looking for ways that we can save lives, that we can change the gun culture.”
Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, one of the most notorious progressive gun grabbers, used the Sandy Hook tragedy to push for an “assault weapons” ban in 2013. Her law seemed to choose the guns it wanted to ban simply based on how scary-looking they were or how much news coverage they got, prompting even the liberals at Slate.com to ask: “What’s the real difference between an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle (banned) and the fixed-stock Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic carbine (allowed), for instance, besides the fact that the AR-15 has been in the news?” Feinstein’s efforts ultimately failed, but in attempting to justify them on the Senate floor, she said, “The most important duty a government has is to protect its citizens’ safety.”
Progressives tell us, Give us all of your guns, but trust us, it’s for your own good. Their promise: fewer guns, more safety.
But, as responsible gun owners know, that’s a lie.
THE TRUTH
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Let’s consider the question of safety. How safe are we really in America, and what is the government doing to help?
The nonprofit National Safety Council has compiled data on causes of death. According to its analysis, 1 in 358 Americans will be killed by a firearm.
But:
• 1 in 144 Americans will be killed by a fall.
• 1 in 112 Americans will be killed in a car crash.
• 1 in 109 Americans will die of “unintentional poisoning” (as opposed to the “very much intentional poisoning” carried out by our government during Prohibition).
• 1 in 100 Americans will commit suicide.
• 1 in 7 Americans will die from heart disease or cancer.
The natural question, then, is, what is the government going to do about high surfaces? Or cars? Or poisoning? Or suicide? Or deadly diseases?
Do progressives scramble to hastily call press conferences and push for executive orders every time there is a massive car pileup on a freeway? Are hard-charging senators clamoring to call for a federally imposed height limit on all new structures in the United States so that falls from tall buildings can be eliminated? Not that I know of.
Progressives like Feinstein and Obama say they believe that government’s top priority is “to protect its citizens’ safety”—but what about the safety of American citizen Kimberly Corban? Corban survived a rape in college by a man who broke into her apartment. A decade later, she was still fighting the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression after the assault. Now a mother of two, Corban feels it is her right to defend herself and her children as she sees fit, including with a firearm. She said as much to President Obama directly during a CNN town hall on gun control in January 2016, telling him that she believed her ability to purchase and carry a firearm was a “basic responsibility as a parent.” She continued: “I have been unspeakably victimized once already, and I refuse to let that happen again to myself or my kids. So why can’t your administration see that these restrictions . . . make it harder for me to own a gun, or harder for me to take that where I need to be, is actually just making my kids and I less safe?”
Obama struggled to come up with a response. He condescendingly told the rape survivor that she would “have to be pretty well trained” to use her gun effectively to prevent another assault, and even attempted to turn her concern for her children against her by ominously suggesting, “There’s always the possibility that that firearm in a home leads to a tragic accident.”
None of this fazed Corban. “I would say it was more of a nonresponse,” she told reporters later. “He kind of dodged the question.”
He dodged the question because this survivor exposed what progressives are desperately trying to hide: gun control isn’t about safety at all, or even about guns. It’s about control.
That’s why progressive presidents do not launch dozens of executive orders aimed at curbing the use of cars in America, even though vehicles cause more deaths than guns. Even the fight against the most lethal killers—cancer and heart disease—does not generate as much sustained, passionate progressive fervor as guns.
The reason is simple: curing cancer does not lead to more power in D.C.; gun control does.
Progressives fear an armed citizenry that can stand up to defend itself once their tyranny becomes obvious. Progressives believe they can get away with their revolution as long as they carry it out behind the scenes, and, as we’ve already seen, that strategy has been working for them. But once they seize power outright, they will have to come out into the open.
Maybe there’s even more to it than that. Some progressives want to grab guns because of personal trauma they’ve endured in their own lives. For example, one of the most strident gun-control advocates in Congress for nearly twenty years was New York Democratic Representative Carolyn McCarthy, known as the “Gun Lady.” She first ran for office after her husband was shot and killed on a commuter train. Is it possible that her hatred for guns was driven by her fear of them, as well as her fear of the dark side of human nature?
Even progressives who have never had a personal encounter with a gun worry about what might happen if they had a firearm themselves. Guns are scary. Maybe they worry about their own ability to use guns safely. Maybe they’re concerned that the next time they get angry, they’ll grab their gun and start shooting. They are scared of guns, so they rail against them. They cannot fathom that plenty of responsible and sane citizens, like Kimberly Corban, exist in America, people who want a gun for nothing more than their constitutionally guaranteed right to have one.
Progressives cannot understand this because it undermines their fundamental faith in government. What people like Corban understand—and progressives never will—is that government cannot be trusted to keep us and our families safe. That’s our job.
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i. This scene is dramatized based on known facts. For more information, read Deborah Blum, “The Chemist’s War,” Slate, February 19, 2010.
LIE 2
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PROGRESSIVES CARE ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT
That is what is at stake, our ability to live on planet Earth, to have a future as a civilization. I believe this is a moral issue, it is your time to seize this issue, it is our time to rise again to secure our future.
—AL GORE, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, 2006
I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment . . . when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.
—BARACK OBAMA, NOMINATION ACCEPTANCE SPEECH, 2008
THE LIE
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The fight over global warming, global cooling (yes, that was the scientific Left’s theory in the 1970s), “climate change,” or whatever they’re choosing to call it at a given time might seem like the ultimate cause of the modern progressive. It combines the pursuit of “justice” (in this case, “climate justice”), calling for more regulation and bigger government by elite, unaccountable bodies, with the imposition of a secular orthodoxy based on supposedly “settled” climate science. Never mind that by the progressives’ own admission, the “science” itself keeps changing.
Since the birth of the environmental movement in the 1960s, progressives have made sure everyone knows how much they care about the planet. And it hasn’t just been progressive Democrats; Richard Nixon created a whole new government department of environmentalism, the EPA.
They are continuing the fight today. Hillary Clinton’s campaign called climate change “a defining challenge of our time,” and she promised not to “force our children to endure the catastrophe that would result from unchecked climate change.” Bernie Sanders blamed the evil corporations, too: “While fossil fuel companies are raking in record profits, climate change ravages our planet and our people.” And everyone probably remembers Barack Obama’s messianic victory speech in 2008 in which he proclaimed that his election would be “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
It wasn’t just campaign rhetoric for Obama, either. He made the global-warming obsession a matter of policy. His administration gave taxpayer money to “green” energy companies like Solyndra that then went belly-up. Disastrous “cap-and-trade” policies and all-out war on the coal industry cost American jobs, all for the sake of the environment.
Secretary of State John Kerry, who is supposed to be responsible for our foreign affairs, declared that climate change “ranks right up there” with “terrorism, epidemics, poverty [and] the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.” It is difficult to imagine a statement more insensitive to the real victims of terrorism, epidemics, poverty, or weapons of mass destruction—real problems that kill real people in the real world—but that is how far the progressive obsession with the environment (or at least the exploitation of the environment) really goes.
It also goes that far, in part, because it has the money to do so. Plants aren’t the only green thing the environmentalists love; they love their cash, too. Despite all the liberal complaints about money in politics, “green billionaire” Tom Steyer—who made his hedge-fund money in fossil fuels before his miraculous conversion—was one of the top super-PAC donors in the 2016 elections. Of course, the patron saint of modern progressive environmentalism is none other than former Vice President Al Gore, and the movement’s sacred text is his 2006 “documentary” An Inconvenient Truth.
But saving the planet is not the main goal of the progressive environmentalists. Their true aims are much more in character for people who practice an ideology that only the enlightened should lead.
At the end of An Inconvenient Truth, Go
re admonishes his viewers: “Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, ‘What were our parents thinking? Why didn’t they wake up when they had a chance?’ ”
A better question might be what are the progressive environmentalists really thinking? That is what we need to answer so that one day, freedom-loving people crushed under a progressive agenda will not be forced to ask, Why didn’t we wake up when we had the chance?
THE TRUTH
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Progressives believe that the ends always justify the means. We explored plenty of examples of that in this book. At first glance, it would appear that the end in this case is saving the planet from supposed man-made destruction, and the environmental movement is the means for doing so. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if the global warming “crisis” itself was, in fact, the means to a completely different end?
In 2014, Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein published a book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Klein is an outspoken critic of capitalism; her previous book dealt with “disaster capitalism,” and when it came out, the New Yorker called her “the most visible and influential figure on the American Left—what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago.” Klein has contributed to progressive organs such as the Nation, and her anticapitalist views are well known.
In This Changes Everything, Klein is refreshingly honest, saying what few progressives are willing to admit. She argues, for example, for the use of a new weapon against the global capitalist system: the climate “crisis” itself. Klein writes that climate activism could actually bring down the capitalist system entirely.