ORLANDO, Fla.—The Left’s tendency to redefine words to silence dissent is a clear tactic of totalitarianism, and conservatives need to fight back, a prominent conservative leader warns.
“They play with words. They played with the word ‘marriage.’ Now, they’re playing with the words ‘man’ and ‘woman,’” and that “ultimately leads to totalitarianism,” Michael Farris, founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association and currently legal counsel at the National Religious Broadcasters, told The Daily Signal. “The changing words, changing meanings, changing morality is a part of the totalitarian culture, because they have to rip everything down in order to build up the new country, the new agenda, the new culture that they want.”
Speaking at the National Religious Broadcasters convention on Tuesday, Farris warned that the Left’s vision is “a world without God” and “a world without freedom.”
Farris, who ran unsuccessfully for Virginia lieutenant governor in 1993, predicted a shift in the other direction, as Americans learn what the Left is doing. He noted the growth of homeschooling following the COVID-19 pandemic as an example.
“The Left is apoplectic about all this,” Farris said. “They just can’t imagine a school system that they don’t totally dominate, that the parents actually have some say over what’s going on.”
Farris also founded Convention of States, and Convention of States Action President Mark Meckler also joined the podcast.
Meckler noted that his organization’s resolution for a convention of states focuses on ways to restrain the size and scope of the federal government, through a balanced-budget constitutional amendment, tax caps, spending caps, and congressional term limits. He argued that as more Americans move to the Right and to the Left, leaving fewer and fewer in the center, federalism becomes the only real answer.
“The problem we’re having today is, so many things are being decided from Washington, D.C., and that naturally makes us hate each other, because half of us are going to be mad at any given time, roughly,” Meckler said. “And so, if you go back to federalism, I think we can keep the country together.”
“We take off a lot of the heat, cool a lot of the pressure, out of the system by just saying New York’s New York, California’s California, and the conservative states are whatever they want to be,” he explained. “That’s the solution. And the only way back to that, that I’m aware of, is to call a convention of states, rejigger the jurisdiction, bring the power back to the states, and let them be who they are.”
Meckler and Farris covered many other issues, including transgenderism, the hope that the National Religious Broadcasters convention brings them, and the way conservatives and Christians can fight back when they face demonization in the public square.
Listen to the full interview below.
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