A coalition of agitators

By Cathy Keim

The cancelled Trump rally in Chicago last week has caused many people to worry about what lies ahead in the months leading up to the Presidential election. As one friend put it, “It has that 1968 feeling.”

For their part, Cleveland police are preparing for a contentious GOP convention:

Both parties’ conventions are eligible for $50 million in federal spending for event safety. The news website Cleveland.com reported that the city’s police will call on suburban forces to boost staffing to about 5,000.

(snip)

City officials on March 9 opened bidding for the purchase of 2,000 sets of riot-control gear, including batons, upper-body and arm protectors, shin guards and reinforced gloves.

A look at Craigslist job ads in Cleveland today showed this interesting new employment opportunity:

Cleveland screen shot

That sounds like somebody in Cleveland is getting ready for political action.

Next we have Breitbart’s Aaron Klein reporting on “Democracy Spring”:

With little fanfare and almost no news media attention, some of the same radical groups involved in shutting down Donald Trump’s Chicago rally last week are plotting a mass civil disobedience movement to begin next month.

Klein adds that “the group is backed by numerous organizations, including the George Soros-funded groups MoveOn.org, the Institute for Policy Studies, and Demos.” The Democratic Socialists of America and the AFL-CIO also support the group.

In addition, CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood affiliated groups are jumping on the bandwagon by pledging to join Black Lives Matter, Hispanics, and other people of color. Watch this video clip to see Khalilah Sabra, the Executive Director and Project Developer for Muslim American Society Immigrant Justice Center, ask the audience why can’t we have that revolution in America?

The protests that started with the Occupy movement morphed into the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri. Now we are seeing protests coalescing around the Trump rallies. While Donald Trump has been more vocal in his comments about immigration than other candidates, it is probably his position as front runner that is adding to the attention he is receiving. If Cruz is able to grab the lead from Trump, I believe that the protests would just shift to Cruz rallies. Indeed, no matter who wins the position of Republican candidate for President at the convention in Cleveland, he will be faced with ongoing protests as long as the groups feel that it is worth their while to stir up trouble.

Sheriff David Clarke of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, makes the case that:

Friday night in Chicago, at the site of the Donald Trump rally, we were awakened to what America will be like if we continue to kowtow to the radicalized left and their violent intimidation tactics to shut down Constitutionally protected speech. Theirs is not a protest movement. It is pure anarchy.

Please read his whole piece as it is right on target with what we need to do to stand our ground. The protestors in Chicago were jubilant when they succeeded in shutting down the Trump rally. It is not surprising that many of the protestors were students from the University of Illinois at Chicago on whose campus the rally was scheduled to be held.

Haven’t the students at universities across the nation been shutting down guest speakers that they disagreed with by screaming and interrupting them until they gave up trying to give their speech? Even better, they have protested and successfully forced their college administrators to cancel the speakers before they could even get on campus.

Our First Amendment rights to free speech have already been seriously curtailed on colleges across the country. The students at elite universities have to have safe spaces where they are protected from hearing anything that might upset them.

Political correctness is causing people to self-censor for fear of retribution or social alienation (shunning). If that is not sufficient, then there are also classes offered by employers to re-educate the employees into the correct attitudes. If an employee is sufficiently contrary, they can be forced into anger management remediation to help them overcome their anti-social behavior.

The most violently enforced censorship is that of sharia where a joke about Mohammed can result in your execution. While we are not at that point in the USA, there are plenty of groups pushing for speech codes about all things Muslim.

Our right to freedom of speech is only there if we continue to exercise it. Sheriff Clarke adds:

Law-abiding Americans must not and cannot back down to these freedom-squashing goons. It is time for all of us to understand just what our enemies want to achieve – chaos and fear — and to rally around the fundamental truths of the Constitution.

Get ready for a long, hot campaign season. Brace yourself for what is coming. The anarchists, CAIR, unions, Black Lives Matter, and assorted other groups will not back down unless forced to do so. If we equivocate and wobble, then the next step to losing our freedom of speech will be taken.

David Horowitz explains:

Battles over rights and other issues, according to Alinsky, should never be seen as more than occasions to advance the real agenda, which is the accumulation of power and resources in radical hands. Power is the all-consuming goal of Alinsky’s politics. This focus on power was illustrated by an anecdote recounted in a New Republic article that appeared during Obama’s presidential campaign: “When Alinsky would ask new students why they wanted to organize, they would invariably respond with selfless bromides about wanting to help others. Alinsky would then scream back at them that there was a one-word answer: ‘You want to organize for power!'” In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote: “From the moment an organizer enters a community, he lives, dreams, eats, breathes, sleeps only one thing, and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army.” The issue is never the issue. The issue is always building the army. The issue is always the revolution.

We had better get this concept in our minds, because our opponents most certainly have.

A prayer for the white state

Lately I’ve been mulling over the idea of red state vs. blue state and how both are impacting society. But there is an element which seems to be missing among the arguments we have regarding conservative vs. liberal.

Once upon a time in America, it was just automatically assumed that we were one nation under God. More than a two-word addition to the Pledge of Allegiance dating back to 1954, for most Americans adhering to the tenets of their religion was second nature. Thus, actions which were deemed immoral were frowned upon: selling alcohol on Sundays, having children out of wedlock, and swearing in public were just some of the actions which ran afoul of our sensitivities. Then, as now, we were all sinners who fell short of the grace of God but it seems like we as Americans tried harder to stay in line in that bygone era.

Naturally, over time the “blue laws” were gradually erased, children who were born out of wedlock lost the derisive moniker “bastard” and became commonplace, and the entertainment industry began a contest to see who could get away with racier and racier content. As this devolution of society in the name of “tolerance” continued we were ordered to accept “alternative” lifestyles. Christians of today in general, and parents who wish to “Train up a child in the way he should go,” to borrow from Proverbs 22:6, face an increasingly treacherous minefield of having to monitor their kids’ entertainment, education, and circle of friends. Unlike any other era in America, Christians are being marginalized and segmented in society as just another subset: Mary went to the Christian store to purchase Christian books and movies while listening to the Christian radio station.

In his Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky once wrote that agitators should pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. In many respects, that has occurred with the term Christian because it is far too often used as an adjective. With a little help from the society and culture, we have set ourselves apart from the rest, yet on a cultural level it has led to the perception that to be Christian is to be inferior – “oh, so-and-so is just a Christian artist” or “this student went to some Christian school.” With a wink and a nod, we are signaled that this hick is simply one of the unwashed masses – look at how elites think of those who come from the “Bible Belt.”

So why is that implied to be a bad thing? In most cases, it’s because they vote for conservative candidates. States in the deep South began shifting from Democrat to Republican a half-century ago, with the election of Ronald Reagan finishing the shift. In large part this was because Democrats embraced the cultural changes with which Christians disagreed. The consequence: as a generation steeped in traditional values has died away, those who had lesser mooring in absolute truths have steered society in an even more radical direction.

For example, I didn’t know what “gay” meant (in the modern usage of the word) until I was in high school – I just assumed boys liked girls and vice versa. Much of that was because in my youth we weren’t constantly exposed to the homosexual lifestyle through the media. No Christian couple would have run afoul of the law for refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding because extremely few even considered the concept of same-sex nuptials to be a viable one. That wasn’t on the radar screen in 1982 when I graduated high school.

But move forward a generation or so and churches are being threatened with the loss of their tax-exempt status if they refuse to participate in same-sex weddings. Some churches in more moderate denominations have already knuckled under, but most remain standing against this practice. Yet, cowed by the media and radical groups, the Republican Party doesn’t seem to have the gumption to fight anymore against gay marriage, abortion, or the downward redefinition of deviancy.

So where can we turn?

The inspiration for the phrase “white state” comes from the Christian flag, which is mainly white as that color symbolizes purity. And while in print white denotes the absence of color, as a function of light white reflects all colors equally. To me this is quite symbolic and much more inclusive than a rainbow flag will ever be, for a rainbow separates colors while white blends all together. Yet a Christian flag is not all white for that would signify surrender, and we must never surrender.

And what seems to be setting us apart from the “red vs. blue” narrative is a faith in God rather than government. At one time, a key social function now relegated to government was taken care of through the church. Christians still take care of the poor and infirm to a degree, but many more of the downtrodden rely on the welfare state that didn’t exist even 100 years ago. In a two-pronged attack, government stepped in to take care of the poor while freeing their conscience from many of the behavioral obligations placed on them by the church.

In short, we need to once again create a situation where the state is subservient to the people, who in turn are subservient to God. At that point red and blue aren’t as relevant as wrong and right, with the arbiter being God’s Word. By no means am I suggesting we should have a theocracy; however, there are many millions who could use a gentle course correction for their lives and making it more difficult to prosper from poor choices through the heavy hand of the government is a good way to motivate them.

Yet this is the place where we Christians need to set ourselves apart and create a united front in order to work through the system we have in place. Of course, the other side knows this as well so they try and keep us divided like the colors in the rainbow flag and dispirited to keep us from being motivated to change. Victories may be few and slow in coming, but in America we have had revivals every so often and we are overdue for another. It’s time to shine all our colors together and be indivisible under God.