Summer 2020—The Tragedy Of Upheaval: Moral Piracy In A Time Of Division And Disintegration

It has certainly been an unusual and frustrating summer for me, but it may surprise you to know that I am not necessarily referencing race riots, shutdowns of the economy, or anything else inherently related to politics, economics, or the general breakdown of cultural consensus and respect for law and order going on around us. True enough, these topics have definitely influenced my summer’s levels of craziness, but what makes the summer of 2020 different from times past is the fact that I have rarely witnessed such a divisive time period in my own private life, a time in which my own personal relationships with old friends and acquaintances have felt more strained, more antagonistic, more contentious, and far less understanding and empathetic than they’ve ever generally been before. Now it must be admitted that a vast majority of my friendships and other relationships are, of necessity, owing to both geographic distance and government-enforced travel bans and COVID-19 shutdowns, maintained through the relatively poor vehicle of social media platforms like Facebook. Still, from just a quick reflection upon my own Facebook friendships, I can stand unhesitating in my insistence that the summer of 2020 has been an unprecedented season in some none-too-encouraging ways.

I have lost a number of Facebook friends this past summer, and I’m not necessarily referring to those relatively few instances in which my friends have literally cut me off and “unfriended” my social media profile. I have maintained a profile and a presence on Facebook ever since I first returned from serving as a missionary for my church at the end of 2011. Since beginning my engagement with Facebook, I have always been active in posting and promoting my conservative political viewpoints. For most of my political posts, I have received positive or, at the very least, constructive feedback. There have, of course, always been exceptions to this rule. For example, in the summer of 2015, my impassioned and negative reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s treachery against the institutional and definitional integrity of marriage garnered strong disapproval from my liberal and left-leaning friends and acquaintances; the small firestorm of protest and number of terminated Facebook friendships that resulted from my staunch refusal to ever embrace same-sex marriage was extremely discouraging and hurtful to me, and it even caused me to take a break from posting on Facebook, a break that lasted for approximately a full year’s worth of time. But through all of this, most of my tough times on social media have been directly attributable to my own words and actions, my own stances and mixed quality of delivering my messages to those who are willing to listen.

The summer of 2020 has been entirely different. Never before in my own engagement with social media have I sensed such a clear and seemingly permanent shift in the public dialogue, in the tone of most people whose posts I am able to digest whenever I log in to Facebook. Indeed, Facebook has become a gladiatorial combat zone of hateful messages and hurt feelings like I have never seen in previous years. When I express amazement over “lost” friendships, what I mean by that is that I have never before felt the way I do now: that I have completely lost touch with any semblance of understanding so very many of my friends’ political opinions, cultural conceptions, self-identities, and most importantly, moral outlooks on life.

In the summer of 2020, I have seen more of my Facebook friends than ever before “come out of the closet” as self-identified homosexuals or transgenders. I have seen more of my Facebook friends than ever before openly rejecting their membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and their faith in its teachings; the same goes for many others whose prior allegiances were to other faith organizations apart from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I have been overwhelmed by how many of my friends are now openly justifying lawlessness and the destruction of private property, by how many of my friends are openly supporting and endorsing violations of freedoms of speech, assembly, and movement. I have been left to feel incredulous at the number of friends who were, once upon a time, almost apolitical in expressing their opinions, but have now made it habitual to call for increased socialist forms of government, especially in the realms of education, social welfare, and so-called “social justice.”

Most (but certainly not all) of these shocking developments in my social media relationships with others have been with people in my own age group: former missionary companions, former high school pupils, and other young single adults with whom I have associated in the last decade. What strikes me about most of these friends and their changed perceptions and attitudes is that most of these people are individuals I spent copious amounts of time with, sometimes on an almost daily basis: former high school students I saw almost every day of the week; former college student peers who took classes at BYU and Stan State with me; missionary companions I lived and worked with as messengers of the good news of the gospel. What most of these people have in common with each other is that I long felt that I knew them and their identities, characters, and loyalties well enough to trust that I could count on them to back me up in terms of public morality, matters of common decency, and the overarching principles that unite us as Americans who seek to live in an open and free society balanced by law, order, and a general ethical structure. Lately, my perceptions of many of these people have been changing so quickly and so drastically as to make my head spin, and during the summer of 2020, I can honestly say that I no longer recognize many of my friends even as I still continue to maintain hope of keeping our friendships alive despite the vast chasms of difference arising between our opposing worldviews.

Through all of this, keeping the friendship alive hasn’t always been in the cards for me. Without revealing any identities, I would like to give just one example of someone in my life who chose this summer to cut off all contact with me, someone whose viewpoints about morality have altered to such a degree that I no longer recognize her. The girl I am referring to once attended church and college with me. I’ve never told her this, but when we first met I was initially quite taken with her; I definitely had a crush on this girl and often thought of her as a friend worthy of considering as a potential marriage prospect. (Incidentally, anyone who knows me well knows that this is not a significant revelation for me to make; as red-blooded single American males go, I feel I’m pretty normal, and I can pretty much say that, at one point or another, I’ve had a crush on almost every nice and pretty girl I’ve ever met…which is to say that a vast majority of the girls I meet are, in one way or another, attractive to me. What can you do? Shoot me for being an unconsciously oppressive and stifling “cisgendered” straight guy? Maybe someday. Anyways…) I only mention my initial romantic attraction to this girl in a public blog post such as this to make an important point about the changes I have recently seen in her. In the year or so before she cut off all contact with me on social media, I had grown increasingly alarmed at her social media posts, in which she had made a habit of extolling a whole host of the vilest sexual and gender perversions imaginable. What made her posts so disturbing to me is that she often tied these sexual and gender perversions to recommended techniques of child-rearing, and she often encouraged others to use these perversions as integral strategies to their own approaches to parenting. When I finally chose to publicly stand up against this girl and her open advocating on behalf of these sick and twisted theories, she pulled the plug on our friendship. I was of course saddened by her choice to do this, but my sadness was overcome by a feeling of amazement that this girl, whom I had once considered as a possible romantic partner and potential mother for my children, had now become in the summer of 2020 someone I wouldn’t even consider as the Saturday night babysitter for my children.

This pattern has repeated itself time and time again this summer, and not just in my interpersonal relationships with others. Places and institutions that I look back at with fondness and nostalgia now seem to be under relentless attack for previously invalid and nonsensical reasons that suddenly seem to be salient in the increasingly insane moral environment currently sweeping over the United States. To give just one such example of this, I have watched with horror this past year as gay rights protests have disrupted my alma mater of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah and demanded that the university abandon its traditional honor code for morally upstanding student behavior. I have watched as vandals have attacked and defaced statues and monuments on the college’s campus, and I have recently been informed that BYU students from racial minority backgrounds are now demanding that the university rename all of the buildings on campus in an effort to erase all memories of the school’s alleged racist past.

What is going on? Why is all of this happening? Some commentators might be tempted to ascribe my strained social media relationships with friends and even family to the ongoing craziness of the coronavirus or the cultural meltdown stemming from race-baiters and malcontents rioting in our city streets over the controversial death of George Floyd in Minneapolis earlier this year. However, I believe that such events are only the immediate catalysts for developments shaping up in our society for at least a generation. Although the assaults and attacks against institutions like BYU most certainly feel sudden and new and unprecedented, they aren’t as unforeseen as you might initially assume, especially if you’ve been paying close attention to what has been going on in our country for at least a decade or longer.

The attacks against our society, against its institutions and values, are being perpetrated by leftists who are acting as moral pirates, as ideologues who seek to hijack American culture and to impose their radical ideas on the rest of us, and it is becoming increasingly clear that they are not afraid to violate Constitutional freedoms and to even employ physical violence to get what they want. I refer to them as “pirates” because I believe this term perfectly captures their strategy: they seek to board by force and imposition the ship of American society and to hijack it for ideological gain, killing and destroying all those who might raise a hand to oppose them.

But how do moral pirates successfully board the enemy ship unfortunate enough to be targeted by them? Well, the answer seems simple enough to me: in order for pirates to successfully take another ship by boarding, the pirates have to close the distance between their ship and its victim; they have to sidle up to their target, to ingratiate themselves with their enemy and, if possible, lull the enemy into a false sense of security or to get the enemy to surrender outright without any fight whatsoever. Moral pirates benefit when their victims are not on guard, when the institutions and values they seek to hijack and destroy are incapable of even contemplating resistance, and that is where the fault for what is happening to the United States of America in the summer of 2020 unfortunately lies with those of us who are now being targeted by today’s insidious new “cancel culture.”

Moral pirates do not win the day unless there is first an environment of moral chaos which grants them the advantage, which gives them the cover needed to realign public understandings of morality, to subtly dismiss as outdated and even bigoted, racist, or homophobic the very virtues upon which a civil society is based. The degradation of America’s moral environment has been well underway since at least the late 1960s, but only now in 2020 is that moral environment reaching such a point of accelerated decay that the moral pirates are feeling emboldened to get away with things unthinkable to most decent and right-minded Americans just a little over a decade ago.

We are all, in our own little ways and spheres of influence, partly responsible for or witnesses to our country stepping down from the moral high ground. The moral pirates are now taking advantage of a United States of America that no longer teaches a uniting and virtuous history of itself to its students, that no longer defines basic and fundamental social units like families in any consistent or constructive way, that no longer prizes private property rights and freedoms of speech, of peaceful assembly, and of self-defense as God-given or Nature-bestowed. The moral pirates are getting away with the hijacking of American society not just because too many of their victims (that’s us) are intimidated into foregoing resistance, but because too many of their victims are no longer capable of marshalling arguments or intellectual premises in which resistance is even justified! Too many Americans are afraid to fight back against the moral pirates, but I fear an even greater number of Americans are now completely incapable of rationalizing to themselves why resistance is an imperative option at all!

We who call ourselves decent, upstanding, Constitution-loving, Founding-affirming Americans need to start fighting back in the realm of ideas and rhetoric, and we need to steel ourselves in preparation for the times when it may even become necessary to literally fight to protect our own personal safety as well as our loved ones, our homes, and our livelihoods. More and more, we need to unapologetically point out the moral pirates and their ideas for who and what they are, regardless of how unpopular it may make us appear in the moment. Our country’s cultural integrity is at stake, and as the conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart once correctly observed, “politics is downstream of culture.” If conservatives continue losing the culture wars, political victories will be fleeting and few and far between. Indeed, they may even become inherently meaningless.

If this language makes you uncomfortable, I understand and sincerely express my earnestness in trying to avoid unnecessarily overdramatizing the situation. The urgency of my call to action in this blog post is inspired by what I see as a desperate need in American society for strong conservative leadership that provides moral counterpoints to the chaos swirling around us. This may be an uncomfortable adjustment and a disconcerting time to those who still think of themselves as politically uninitiated, but the ironic truth of the matter is that we all need to start thinking tragically in order to avoid tragedy.

I celebrated by thirtieth birthday earlier this year. With this, I look back on at least twenty years of intense political and cultural observation. As I pondered the topics most in need of highlighting for this blog post, I thought of those subjects which most thoroughly demonstrate how far the United States of America has fallen in the last two decades in which I have personally been paying attention. For the moral pirates, 2020 has proven to be an unprecedented year of boldness and aggression, but these acts of aggression have their foundations in movements and ideologies which have been percolating for a generation or more. These movements and ideologies explain why, earlier this year, the leaders of the Democratic Party chose to push abortion legislation, of all things, through the U.S. Congress in the midst of an allegedly world-transforming pandemic. This was just one early example of how the moral pirates have been exercising their ascendance more and more brazenly this year; the race-baiting and street violence of the Black Lives Matter movement are just more recent examples of the very same thing. Thankfully, some Americans have been awakening recently to the dangers posed by the moral piracy of the on-demand abortion culture, the disintegrationist politics of tribal identity displayed by Black Lives Matter, the intensifying normalization of sexual perversions being pushed by the transgender movement, and the ever-creeping socialism of a Democratic Party more thoroughly hijacked by radical socialists than ever before in its history. However, we still need more Americans to recognize the threats; we need more Americans to rediscover within themselves a moral motivation to reject these moral piracies. As I look out at so many of those in my own age group, I worry that the cause of conservatism will fail to find many recruits. As I’ve already made clear at the beginning of this post, my current sentiments are such that I never thought I would see so many of my friends losing their moral compasses en masse in the way I’ve seen happen this past summer…but that is exactly what is happening all around us. Otherwise decent Americans are handing over the ship of state—our country’s culture and Founding moral legacy—to the moral pirates, and there seem to be fewer and fewer of us left standing who are still willing to resist.

Let us assess where we’re at as a nation.

On the abortion front, it is important to remember that back in March of this year, Democrats at the national level of government remained so devoted to the cause of facilitating a permanent culture of on-demand abortions that their leader, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, attempted to include federal funding for abortions as part of the government’s emergency response legislation for COVID-19 relief. American citizens would be wise to take note of this example of a major political party attempting to take advantage of what we’ve been told is a worldwide crisis, all to simply fight and win another victory in the ongoing culture war. It would be worthwhile to wonder why leftists feel it is necessary to prioritize government funding of Planned Parenthood while lives are disrupted and economies are sent into collapse due to coronavirus concerns. Under previous pieces of federal legislation, taxpayer funding for abortion clinics was forbidden; and yet, under the policies proposed by Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic allies this March, health claims for procedures that included abortions would have been eligible for reimbursement with federal dollars.

This is what I mean when I say that we need to start thinking tragically to avoid tragedy. It may be uncomfortable to think of our politicians using a worldwide crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic to push an entirely different and eminently sinister agenda on us, but I think it is high time that we all start admitting to ourselves that this kind of thing happens all the time.

I recently spoke with an old friend of mine from my high school days. I hadn’t seen him since his high school graduation over a decade ago, and we naturally had a lot of catching up to do. This friend and I have always shared a passion for discussing culture and politics, and as we revisited these mutually-beloved topics, we found ourselves opening up about how we felt about contemporary issues facing our country: the George Floyd protests and subsequent nationwide riots inspired by Black Lives Matter; the “Great Awokening” of the American left and the seemingly religious zeal with which leftists seek to punish ideological dissidents or unconscious “oppressors”; the sad reality increasingly evident on American college campuses, in public school systems at all grade levels, and in the ranks of teachers and learning specialists throughout the educational professions, that exploring and expounding truth has now taken a back seat to pursuits of “social justice” and “educational equity” that fit in with a larger viewpoint of “diversity sensitivity”; the inability of those on the political left and right to even agree on worldviews and premises conducive to basic civil unity. My friend and I hardly agree on a majority of the topics we share interest in, and yet, I was struck by how insightful and enlightening our conversation on this particular occasion actually was, especially when we started joking with each other about the terrible things we continue to see playing out all over the country as highlighted by network television news sources. I told my friend, after he expressed how incredulous he feels that mass rioting and extensive looting in major cities is even happening in the greatest country on Earth, that these are the very things I used to imagine, in my youth, couldn’t possibly ever happen in our country…at least, not on such a widespread basis. Admitting my own foolishness and pride, I told my friend that these are the things I used to haughtily attribute as hopelessly endemic in the nations and societies of South or Central America and Africa…but certainly not in the United States of America! Nowadays, however, I am increasingly forced to admit that the instability of third-world countries is more than capable of spreading to our own American shores. I am, of course, embarrassed and depressed by this because I’ve long had faith that the United States of America possessed a superior culture due to its unique republican civil society and institutions; as a conservative republican, I remain insistent that the America of yesteryear is worth conserving, is worth fighting for.

In fighting for America, it is becoming more and more apparent to me that saving this country will require all of us to cast aside our pride, to give up on the notion that the terrorism, corruption (both cultural and institutional), political intimidation, tyranny, and oppression we see in other societies all over the planet will never visit us in our own communities or in the halls of our own governments. The truth of the matter is that American exceptionalism is a lie if we, the American people, do not work hard to accomplish what is necessary to remaining an exceptional people made special only because of our extraordinary culture, a culture in which wickedness is proactively rejected in favor of conserving the principles and legacies of our nation’s past that have served us so well thus far. Part of this abandonment of pride will, of necessity, require us to start thinking far more uncomfortably than perhaps our parents’ generation might have been accustomed to. As American citizens who actually care enough about our country to rescue it from the moral chaos that is sweeping through our society and allowing the moral piracy of the left to hijack every aspect of our lives, we need to begin our counterrevolution by admitting the limits of American exceptionalism, the limits of a constitutional republic divorced from a virtuous citizenry willing to maintain republicanism, federalism, the separation of powers, a religiously-informed culture, and a family- and community-oriented public spirit. We need to be more willing to think tragically to avoid tragedy.

In the summer of 2020, the United States of America, as a distinct civilization with many problems, is still the most peaceful, prosperous, justice-seeking, and happiness-securing success story in modern history. Unfortunately, the United States and the domestic tranquility and international stability it guarantees us is also more taken for granted than perhaps ever before in its relatively short existence as a geopolitical entity. Incredibly, American youths are brought up in an educational system that does little to nothing to inculcate in them a proper appreciation for why the United States has such a special and unique contribution to make to the story of humankind’s never-ending struggle for freedom and opportunity for all. In a shockingly self-destructive legacy that very few politicians or bureaucrats seem interested in correcting, American college students are actually taught that U.S. history is little more than an abysmal record of exploitation, imperialism, oppression, and ultimate denials of human rights and “social justice.” It should not be surprising that this self-destructive legacy, ascendant and insufficiently opposed since at least the mid-1970s, is leaving us with an electorate that seeks to abolish police forces, radically alter democratic procedures for choosing our leaders and shaping our government, reject time-honored understandings of gender identity, and embrace tribal Marxism. It should not be surprising that institutions like churches, families, and marriages have been abandoned by so many young people. After all, why would young people stick by these institutions when the influence of such institutions has been proactively stamped out of our schools and academies? It should not be surprising that private businesses are targeted for destruction by those who don’t know the first things about entrepreneurship and the value of capitalism. Why would young people rise up to defend such things, especially when they’ve been taught by many of their professors that such relics of racism, sexism, and imperialism are simply perpetuating unjust systems of wealth inequality and white supremacy?

The students I teach as a high school history teacher are nowadays too young to even remember a national tragedy as striking as the September 11^th, 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. Today, young Americans do not know true national or systemic traumas like their ancestors did. The existential threats of race-based slavery, of civil war, of Jim Crow racism, of World War II and the Cold War are not even stories that many young Americans are currently even capable of discussing with maturity or factual authority, much less with distilled wisdom or derived contemporary value. Instead, the youth of today are more concerned with the stupidity of manufactured “crises” relating to skin color, gender identity, perverse sexual experimentation, and materialistic envy. All of this is currently playing out in a country that has done more than any other in modern times to achieve a culture of true color-blind racial equality of opportunity, a live-and-let-live sociality that grants a wide degree of personal autonomy in matters of morality, and an outstanding economic record of material progress and prosperity that would leave the ancients in awestruck wonder. Amazingly, no matter how many victories young American leftists achieve on their never-ending social justice crusade, they statistically remain some of the unhappiest and most unsatisfied and unfulfilled groups in our nation’s demographic history. Problems of anxiety, depression, mental illness, broken relationships, wrecked families, and collapses in community cohesion have combined with rising rates of self-harm and suicide to prove, in my opinion, that rising generations of Americans are failing to overcome challenges that many of our ancestors would’ve found unbelievable or even laughable. And yet, I don’t find myself with the heart to laugh at what is happening to our country and, more importantly, to my countrymen, my brothers and sisters who actually matter a great deal to me.

Once again, I stress that we who love our country, our communities, and our families and friends need to start thinking tragically to avoid tragedy. We need to recognize what is going wrong in our society, and we need to find the moral courage needed to speak out, to confront and counter the moral pirates and their insidious ideologies. Aaron Kliegman, writing in the Washington Free Beacon back in September of 2019, explained what is prerequisite for good people to triumph over the moral pirates, whenever and wherever they appear: “The question is whether there are opposing forces capable of and willing to stop them. When there are no such forces, as was the case leading up to World War II, these monsters bring hell to earth, murdering, stealing, and crushing freedom as they wish. When leaders and their citizens do take a stand, however, peace and prosperity have a chance. But these cruel, expansionist tyrants are always lurking, ready to pounce.”

As we look back at the spring and summer of 2020, who can honestly doubt that moral pirates are on the march in America? Whether you find yourself concerned about governors, mayors, and judges overreacting to the COVID-19 crisis and enacting draconian and unconstitutional dictates that stifle human freedom, or violent thugs masquerading as street activists tearing apart our cities at the behest of “woke” race baiters shrilly calling for revolution from their ivory towers on college campus “safe spaces,” moral pirates are attempting to overthrow traditional American society at every turn. They are succeeding most thoroughly in localities where leftist-pandering Democratic governments and bureaucracies hold unchallenged political control, and where populations of cowed and indoctrinated voters no longer understand the values and virtues of a healthy republican civil society that requires diversity of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion and belief as prerequisites to peaceful living and opportunity for all. The moral pirates thrive in an environment of moral chaos, in an atmosphere where anything goes and there are no rules or sources of authority and order worth following or respecting.

Once again, let us assess where we’re at on a number of fronts. Where are we losing ground to the pirates? How is the ship of American society being overpowered and commandeered for evil purposes?

What’s happening on the abortion front?

Although it started long ago, the American left’s cultural obsession with killing the unborn for any reason whatsoever no matter how trite has, in 2020, taken on an insistence and aggressiveness that is beyond disturbing and now ranges into the psychopathic. We currently live in a society where we pro-lifers are expected to stay silent when women who have willfully ended the lives of their unborn children out of mere convenience “shout their abortions” in gleeful and militantly emotional expectation of the left’s praise and shared celebration. Recently, one woman shared on the internet that when she had her abortion at just sixteen years of age, she did it because she “had to” destroy the fruits of her supposedly unhealthy relationship with her boyfriend, that even though she “didn’t want to get an abortion,” she “couldn’t let a piece of” her boyfriend enter the world and live to tell the tale. When this same woman talks with others about her teenage abortion, she proudly proclaims that she is “no longer ashamed for doing what” she “had to do” to guarantee herself the life she felt she deserved. This woman has concluded her abortion “shout” by informing others that she is “thankful for all of the strong, courageous women who came before” her, “the women who bravely shared their stories and made” her not feel so alone. She stated that women who have abortions and who do not feel ashamed of their choice (this woman seems to have a loose grip on the definitions of choice, agency, and accountability) are “f-----g amazing.”

Another woman who recently shouted her abortion for all the internet to hear blamed her poor life decisions upon a broken condom. In choosing to abort her baby, this woman cited personal economic difficulties as the reason she chose to deny another human being life. She insisted that she “wasn’t conflicted and it wasn’t a difficult decision.” To this, she added, “Looking back, I’m incredibly proud of myself for being so sure in my decision. I was not ready to have a child. The idea of keeping it still seems absurd. And I’m proud of my family, my teachers, and my friends, for making sure I never grew up thinking abortion wouldn’t be a perfectly natural, reasonable, and valid decision. Sometimes I get a little shaken up when I read things online, the horrible things people say about women who’ve had abortions. And I wanted to share my story here because the whole thing was really so mundane, and no amount of misogynist bullying will convince me to feel guilty, or to dramatize the situation in order to justify it to others. I practiced safe sex and I got pregnant anyway. And I didn’t want to be a mother. So I chose not to be.”

One other woman’s abortion shout bears mentioning in this blog post. This woman, who claimed to be married to an “amazing man” she surely wants as a father to her children “one day,” described how “elated” she and her boyfriend felt when they discovered her pregnancy. But then, in her own words… “then we weren’t so sure. We are not financially ready for a family and started thinking maybe we should wait…Together we decided that if we are going to have kids it needs to be when things are more stable…We were both worried that afterwards the other would develop feelings of resentment or anger. That didn’t happen. We remained open and honest and loved each other harder. Two months have passed. We talk about the abortion occasionally. We both regret that the timing wasn’t right and that we were foolish enough to think somehow it might have been. If and when we expand our family, we will be proud to be parents. Neither of us would change our choice. Neither of us feel like villains.”

Why is it that so many of us conservatives feel like we can’t say, in public, what we really think of the choices made by women like this, women who insist on shouting their abortions at our faces? Why is it that the left’s “cancel culture” teaches us that while we are encouraged to shout our abortions to the world, we are forbidden from pointing out that women like this are irresponsibly playing with the lives of the unborn in a state of moral chaos, that they are playing fast and loose with morality, with their own virtuous potentials as child-bearing women, and with the very definitions of agency and accountability? It is intensely unhealthy whenever a society starts treating pregnancy as if it is no more morally consequential than the breeding of livestock. I believe we conservatives are justified in pointing out that these women were acting out of selfishness when they chose to abort their children, that cultural and political leftists are empowering women like this to act out their selfishness without moral reproach, and that both these things are dangerous developments in any society claiming to treasure the right to life.

What about sexual perversions? Where does our country stand on that front?

It is truly astounding to realize that only a little over a decade ago, Barack Obama, the darling of American liberals, the symbol of “hope and change” to the left wing of the Democratic Party, publicly endorsed the notion that marriage was defined as the union of a man and a woman. Today, in 2020, left-wing radicals and malcontents running wild through our city streets would exuberantly crucify Barack Obama if today he dared insist upon such a position in public ever again. It wouldn’t matter to them that Barack Obama’s position on marriage’s definition “evolved” in 2012, and it wouldn’t matter to them that the supposedly homophobic American society they so vehemently decry allowed its own time-honored definition of marriage as a male-female union to be struck down by the Supreme Court. I predict that the 2010s will one day be remembered as one of the darkest ages in American history in terms of the acceptance and adulation publicly and privately heaped upon sexual perversions of the most despicable kind. This was the decade in which the Supreme Court refused to support the majority vote of Californians, who resoundingly voiced in 2008 their support for traditional marriage in a constitutional referendum; this was the decade in which the Court, in 2015, struck the final death blow against the institution of marriage by inventing, on behalf of gay marriage advocates, the “freedom to marry” at the expense of definitional truth itself. The summer of 2015 was a particularly depressing time in my own personal life, for I realized then that with the nationwide legalization of gay marriage, the time-honored conception of “live and let live” would forevermore not only be out of style, but increasingly redefined as insufficiently anti-racist, anti-homophobic, and anti-bigoted. The radical left’s obsession with foisting immorality and outright falsehoods on us all has seemingly no limitations or boundaries, and the 2010s may very well be the final decade in which free speech and free thought are overtly agreed upon as Founding virtues worth conserving by the general public and institutions of influence.

We now look to a future in which mothers and fathers are considered by society’s “experts” and street-level activists alike to be replaceable or optional. Marital or family norms of any kind have been rejected by those in power in our culture dominated by tech companies, media conglomerates, and the thoroughly corrupted education systems. Breakdowns in understandings of marriage and family have and will continue to lead to inevitable breakdowns of communities all over the country precisely because the traditional family unit is the most important social unit in time and eternity. Same-sex marriage is no longer an openly-discussed topic of controversy now that it is legalized in all jurisdictions, and it is unfortunate to have to note that this has only opened up the rest of society—indeed, every nook and cranny of it—to redefinition and consequent moral chaos. Identity politics have metastasized in monstrous and unexpected ways. Who would have ever thought that transgenderism would eventually steal the limelight away from gay rights advocates with such a forcefulness that intelligent and open-minded gay figures such as Dave Rubin and Milo Yiannopoulos, in their own widely divergent ways, would turn against leftism and embrace conservative sensibilities? And yet, that is exactly what has happened; for the radical left, yesterday’s extremism is today’s cause for statue-toppling riots in the streets. Tragically, perversions like homosexuality and especially transgenderism will hurt children most of all, and we are already seeing evidence of this as irresponsible and abusive parents encourage sexual experimentation by even the youngest among us, experimentation both with unconventional sexual partner-pairings as well as with the self-identity of gender itself. Medical “professionals” are allowing and even approving of debilitating drug use and hormone “therapy” to help prepubescent youth “liberate” themselves from gender norms imposed upon by the allegedly oppressive patriarchy of traditional American culture. Courts, corporations, and government bureaucracies all over the country have applauded or signed off on such developments; many others throughout the country have been intimidated or bemused into cautious and fearful silence. Starting with the Obama administration dictates concerning the seemingly small issues of school bathrooms and locker rooms, government agencies at nearly every level have grown more and more accustomed to enforcing immorality in our schools as a matter of institutional course. The inevitable and frightening last phase of this decade-long tragedy of moral piracy is already beating down our doors in a figurative sense, ending friendships and ruining careers and even lives in the literal sense. The American left will never be completely satisfied until, like some sick and twisted band of new age fascists, they successfully stamp out all opposition and dissent. This is no vague brand of alarmist rhetoric on my part; this is demonstrably true and can be seen engulfing whole communities all over the country. If we conservatives ever dare attempt to fight back against the rising tide of immorality with concepts like respect, love of the sinner versus hatred of the sin, or even the seemingly straightforward notions of religious liberty or ideological diversity, we are informed that such concepts are mere “dog whistles” for sexism and intolerance. And, as we all well know, intolerance is the one thing that leftists can never tolerate.

And what of tribal identity politics? Is there any hope on that front?

In January of 2019, long before the George Floyd protests were on anybody’s horizon, and long before the Black Lives Matter movement’s insidious new initiative of race-baiting was such a prominent blip on everyone’s radar, conservative political commentator Kevin D. Williamson warned us that “collective punishment and collective guilt can descend on anyone, anytime,” and that “some people go out looking for identity politics” while “others have it thrust upon them.” Given the developments of the first half of 2020, Williamson’s words seem profoundly prophetic. The American left is now bound and determined to look for and stoke identity Marxist politics wherever and whenever it can, and to thrust them upon anyone who wishes, like most conservatives do, to remain outside and apart from the herd of humanity rushing our society and traditional culture headlong over the proverbial cliff. Whether the cries come from the identity Marxist and patently racist Black Lives Matter movement or the “Me Too” crowd of radical feminism, American leftists are waging a more vigorous campaign than ever before against “white privilege,” “the patriarchy,” and supposed systemic plagues of institutional racism, sexism, and bigotry manifested in the political and economic structures of traditional American society and culture. In waging this campaign, the left has relied upon not facts or objective truth, but emotional appeals and anecdotal (and increasingly nonsensical) cries against falsely perceived injustices. Facts and even the very history of the United States have been distorted in pursuit of one of the greatest intellectual frauds of the still-young twenty-first century: that traditional American culture must be punished, abolished, even destroyed for the sins of white men running the racist “patriarchy” of American society and government since the first oppressed peoples of color began feeling the jackboot of American thuggery in the early 1600s, and that this history of racial and sexual oppression so thoroughly characterizes the United States in 2020 that nothing short of a complete radical transformation of its culture will suffice or satisfy the bloodthirsty leftists who are now on the march in our nation’s streets.

It has become a new and expected standard for American leftists to inappropriately focus on the group at the expense of the individual, both in terms of unfairly assigning collective guilt to particular races or genders as well as maintaining facades of collective victimization on behalf of minority groups of all sorts. What’s scary about this is that the left’s collectivization of guilt, oppression, and victimhood apparently fits into their worldview no matter what the situation may be; from the halls of Congress where Supreme Court justices are falsely accused of committing gang rape, to the public square where school children are unjustly painted as provocateurs of hatred towards Native American street protestors, the American left’s new standing narrative is that racism and sexism are the driving forces behind most of the cultural phenomena and social institutions in the United States, past and present. If you try to oppose this narrative for any reason whatsoever, leftists are eager to brand you as an oppressive racist or sexist guilty of contributing, consciously or unconsciously, to their narrative of hate—a narrative from which you allegedly have no agency to disentangle yourself from. As one transgender leftist activist was recently eager to point out, “The complicity of all white people in racial oppression stems from the systemic nature of white supremacy, in that it is collective and engineered into social machinery; this counters the long-held misconception that racism operates only at the individual level, in a conscious and intentional manner. This is the same framework we must apply to the gendered hierarchy — it is not enough for men to simply not abuse women just as it is not enough for white people not to be avowedly racist.”

This seems to be a very common call-to-arms from leftists: no matter what us non-leftists think or feel, no matter what our motivations or viewpoints or reasoning, we have never accomplished enough in fulfilling the leftists’ dream of progressive utopia. Because of this, those of us on the political right cannot and should not be reasoned with. Instead, we should be ignored, marginalized, even silenced and, if necessary, destroyed. The notion of tolerating dissent and living together in good-natured disagreement seems about as antiquated to leftists nowadays as the dinosaur.

Finally, there is the never-ending struggle against socialism. How is the United States doing on that particular battle front in the war for its spirit and soul?

If anyone needs proof that leftists and their influence now firmly control the Democratic Party, and if anyone needs evidence that moral chaos and intellectual insanity have firmly entrenched themselves in supposedly sophisticated circles, look no further than the most recent round of Democratic primary debates. In February of this year, the American public watched absurdity unfold as the tremendously wealthy presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg was forced to defend his own record of financial success against the outright socialist, Bernie Sanders, a millionaire in his own right who owns three houses. Do we all really seek to live in a country in which politicians like Bernie Sanders are allowed to criticize with impunity men like Michael Bloomberg who are, according to Sanders, “grotesquely” and “immorally” rich? Since when is being rich inherently grotesque or immoral? And where is the morality in watching a millionaire socialist and alleged servant of the people hypocritically criticize a billionaire president for being too wealthy?

Democrats are increasingly calling for our government to have the morally-justified right to redistribute wealth and property at will. But how are we, the people, supposed to trust our government to do that effectively when calls for doing this are led by hypocrites of the Bernie Sanders variety? And even then, it is important to remember that socialism, even at its highest level of efficiency, is inherently immoral to begin with. It is immoral for politicians like Bernie Sanders and for organizations like the Democratic Party to preach such a hollow substitute for true free market capitalism, a system that more and more Americans sadly seem to be forgetting has long been the true engine of economic success for literally billions of people in the United States and all over the world for multiple generations. Democrats like Sanders, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and even empty vessels like Joe Biden are intensifying their calls for yet another Obama-esque “transformation” of our country, especially in its political and economic dimensions. What they are peddling to us is a newer, updated, and more “timely” form of democratic socialism that promises to make everyone except the privileged few in the political class less wealthy, less economically mobile, and less materialistically secure and independent of authoritarian government’s all-controlling arm.

The American left’s crazed notions about the immorality of capitalism and the supposed virtues of socialism are entirely out of step with reality and with human nature itself. Adam Smith, the Scottish intellectual who established the modern principles of capitalist economics that influence our country’s economic system today, once taught that people are naturally inclined by their humanity to seek prosperity and status, to strive to improve themselves and their own material situations in life, and to acquire and manage property. This is true of a vast majority of people to one degree or another, and it is a natural and divine heritage instilled in us by our Heavenly Father and Creator, He who organized Earth’s materials into an ordered and deity-managed system that allows the human race to prosper and act as partial stewards of the divine creation. To be a capitalist is to be nothing more than an enterprising member of the human family. To be a socialist is to reject that grand conception and to instead embrace a morally-chaotic and prosperity-limiting ideology that teaches the falsehood that the economic pie is forever limited in size and scope, and that the only path allowing individuals to secure a piece of that pie is unavoidably paved with envy and coercive collectivism. American voters should most definitely choose the first option of capitalism. In the words of Brent Orrell, the former head of the Employment and Training Administration of the US Department of Labor, capitalism is the morally superior choice because capitalism has undeniably and “inadvertently freed countless millions, and through globalization, unknown billions more, from poverty and disease and delivered living standards our best-off ancestors could scarcely imagine. Those who toil in the world of commerce, though it may have never entered their minds, work far less for themselves than towards ends they never intended and for the benefit of people they will never know.”

Whether it be the virtues of capitalism or traditional sexual morality, the rights to life for even unborn children, or the simple facts revolving around a unified body politic that unites around shared narratives of America’s overwhelmingly positive history, conservatives need to raise their voices and elevate their ideas in response to the American left’s acts of moral piracy. The challenges faced by the United States in 2020 are, to a large extent, creations of our own failures as a people to remain firmly moored to God, to Judeo-Christian religious principles, and to traditional, functional family values. How did we arrive at the tragedy set before us in the summer of 2020? Perhaps too many of us took for granted what is right and good in this country and its history. I’m sure many of us are simply terrified and intimidated by the moral pirates currently attempting to hijack our society and its institutions. I feel fairly confident that most of us have lost our abilities to intellectualize and rationalize an imperative to fight back in the first place. And to be perfectly honest, the longer I live, the harder it seems to be to find emotionally healthy and well-adjusted citizens who don’t squirm with discomfort at any serious contemplation that our country is lurching towards an outright civil war over the battles being waged concerning our cultural clashes. And yet, without needlessly dramatizing the situation, I close this blog post today with an overwhelming insistence that if we truly love the United States of America, its history, and its transcendent Founding principles and all that those principles imply for human freedom, opportunity, peace, and prosperity, we need to start considering more seriously what our lives—what our world—would be like without the cherished America we give so much lip service to.

To bring this blog post full circle, I would like to encourage all of us to do everything in our power to maintain those friendships in our lives that act as the only realistic vehicles for effectively spreading conservative principles to the hearts of others. Despite the strains on interpersonal relationships evident in this season of strife, when manufactured and outsized ethnic divisions are manipulated by cold and calculating political agitators to disintegrate our precious American Union, we all need to work harder than ever to convince our fellowmen of the sincerity of our good will, of the earnestness of our belief that the United States of America has always been a society that has moved, imperfectly and insufficiently at times, towards a bright and inclusive future offering hope for all of mankind. We need our friendships with others, for it is through those friendships that the positivity of American conservatism’s message, which is really just the message of America itself, can flow and wash away the filth and grime of radical leftism’s dystopian vision for the future. I am mindful on this day of the words of our president when he said, just a few days ago in accepting the Republican Party nomination in the race for the White House, that “Americans build their future, we don’t tear down our past. We are the nation that won a revolution, toppled tyranny and fascism, and delivered millions into freedom. We laid down the railroads, built the great ships, raised up the skyscrapers, revolutionized industry, and sparked a new age of scientific discovery. We set the trends in art and music, radio and film, sport and literature. And we did it with style and confidence and flair because that is who we are. Whenever our way of life was threatened, our heroes answered the call, from Yorktown to Gettysburg, from Normandy to Iwo Jima. American patriots raced into cannon blasts, bullets, and bayonets to rescue American liberty. They had no fear, but America did not stop there. We looked into the sky and kept pressing onward. We built a 6 million pound rocket and launched it thousands of miles into space. We did it so two brave patriots could stand tall and salute our wondrous American flag planted on the face of the moon. For America, nothing is impossible. We will reach stunning new heights, and we will show the world that for America there is a dream, and it is not beyond your reach.” Casting all politics aside, I choose to place my faith in the old-fashioned notion that optimism combined with legitimate hope will always remain more attractive to decent people than the doom and gloom of 2020’s brand of woke leftism. I live in faith, hope, and optimism that in the days ahead, I will be able to do my part at keeping conservatism’s vision as the bright and shining city on a hill so many of us brag about, and yet so often forget to sacrifice for in pursuit of its maintenance.

--Christopher Peterson, August 30th, 2020