My friend Lawrence W. Reed is one of Earth’s biggest optimists. The legendary free-market scholar recalls flipping his vehicle at age 26 on an icy Michigan road in February 1980. As he rolled over inside his Ford Fairmont, he smiled: “Hey, I’ll get a new car out of this!”
Thus, his recent essay for the Foundation for Economic Education, of which he is president emeritus, is a surprise. Reed has gone from cheerful to chilly.
“There’s an awful lot of bad behavior going on — and perpetrators getting away with it, too. From lying to looting, it feels like an epidemic,” Reed writes. “We are witnessing an alarming collapse of social cohesion that is propelled, as if it were consciously planned, by something bigger and more menacing than simply falling standards of character. I call it ‘evil,’ and I sense that it’s on the loose and on the rise.”
One cannot dispute Reed’s FEE.org essay, “Evil Is Rising, but Despair Is Not an Option.” Supporting evidence abounds, courtesy of America’s volcano of evil, the Democrat Left.
Too bad Democrats have abandoned their tax-and-spend roots. Republicans debated and even found solutions with their opposite numbers who wanted merely to take from the Haves and give to the Have Nots. Leftists once listened to rightists’ alternative vision for boosting prosperity through freedom and growth. Taking and giving were compromised on, measured, and corrected as necessary.
But how do today’s Republicans split the difference with people who scream that America is a bigoted country, has been since 1619, and is dialectically divided between white oppressors and nonwhite victims, all of whom are trapped forever in racially determined castes?
How does the Right compromise with people who would deny life-affirming care to babies who somehow survived abortions (as all but one House Democrat voted on Jan. 11)?
How can conservatives do business with people who unleash the FBI on parents who attend school board meetings to complain about racially divisive, sexed-up, and gender-confused curriculums?
How can the GOP negotiate with folks who see a seven-year-old boy and can’t wait to chat him up about the prospect that he is a girl—and vice versa? Meanwhile, hormone-filled syringes and penis-slicing and breast-chopping scalpels sit at the ready.
How can law-and-order Americans respect people who see shoplifters, carjackers, violent hoodlums, and even murders, and either ignore their crimes or, if they are arrested, speed their return to the streets, so they can resume their criminal careers?
How can everyday Americans feel anything but rage against those who completely invented the notion that former President Donald Trump was a Kremlin agent and then incinerated three years hounding him and imprisoning his supporters—all based on an unfiltered lie?
No wonder rightists lately chant “No more Mr. Nice Guy!”
Democrat leftists are beyond convincing. The most elegant conservative arguments glide off their heads like raindrops rolling across an umbrella.
The only answer is to crush them.
The Left must be vanquished at every election.
Conservative victories then must yield vengeance:
Uproot the Left’s programs. Defund their every subsidy. Arrest those who have committed crimes (e.g., much of Antifa and Black Lives Matter).
In Trump’s words, the “thugs, misfits, and Marxists” at the FBI and “Department of Injustice” who perpetrated the endless Russia hoax must be fired, disbarred, stripped of their law licenses, and—if they broke federal law—tried, and if convicted, imprisoned for years.
The teachers unions must be destroyed. Their media bodyguards must be challenged relentlessly, shamed into telling the truth, and circumvented via robust and aggressive alternative media.
The Evil Left must be demolished. Obliterated. Erased.
That will take toughness. Trump has the necessary guts. Ron DeSantis might. Sunshine Tim Scott probably does not. Mike “Turn the Other Cheek” Pence surely does not. This problem cannot get prayed away.
The antidote to American Evil is hardheadedness that supersedes the gentle persuasion that Reed, yours truly, and so many other conservatives have practiced for decades. Those methods stopped Hubert Humphrey, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt, and their kind. But such Democrats are as obsolete as an 8-Track tape.
It will take far more stringent (but peaceful) measures to neutralize Patrice Colours, Ibrahim X. Kendi, Randi Weingarten, Merrick Garland, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, and their comrades as a clear and present danger to the American republic.
“Evil is on the loose,” Reed warns. “Do not be depressed by this fact, for a defeatist spirit will fatally disarm you, and that is precisely what evil wants. The last thing evil desires is an informed citizenry eager to resist. It is not inevitable that evil should win—unless good people give up.”
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.