All indications are that Republicans currently have the wind at their backs in the hopes of reclaiming Congress during the 2022 midterm elections.
From inflation to defund-the-police to Critical Race Theory to the border crisis to the Left’s audacious power-grabs, the horrifying mismanagement of the Biden administration has proven, yet again, that Democrats in charge of running the country are their own worst enemies.
But the same can be true of Republicans, who have shown prodigious aptitude when it comes to clutching defeat from the hands of victory, oftentimes by taking the bait from their herring-tossing political counterparts’ efforts to re-frame the narrative.
In addition to Republicans needing to maintain focus on a strategic pathway to the 2022 and 2024 polls—while cognizant that enhanced scrutiny over 2020’s vote-fraud and electioneering issues may not deter future corruption—the GOP also should have a plan for how to respond to the Left’s inevitable sour grapes.
As bad as they are at leading, Democrats are very good at being the losing party.
In fact, the party’s entire raison d’être since its devastating defeat in the Civil War has been cobbling together a coalition of special interests strong enough to counter the popular majority. What they cannot do with ideas, they can do with identity politics—even going so far as to pander brazenly to those they once sought to subjugate and oppress.
THE VICTIM CARD
Already, there is evidence that the Left’s political operatives are beginning to erect the scaffolding for their future failure—just as the Hillary Clinton campaign, in coordination with the FBI, began sowing the seeds of “Russia, Russia, Russia” a full four months before the 2016 election.
For instance, after enormous backlash against the pro-Marxist Critical Race Theory and the related cancel-culture that its historical revisionism demanded, some are now using GOP-led efforts to counter the aggressive indoctrination of schoolchildren as means to pivot back into their own comfort zone as victims.
A former teacher and a minority, himself, North Carolina’s Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson may be the best equipped of anyone in the country to fight this pernicious assault on our public-education system.
Robinson recently set up a task force, Fairness and Accountability in the Classroom for Teachers and Students (FACTS), which encouraged parents and community members to flag instances of indoctrination in the classroom.
Included in the more than 500 public submissions to-date were several from indoctrination apologists—some of them teachers—who viciously attacked the notion that the state should have control over the curriculum, WRAL reported.
“It’s McCarthyism. It’s the Red Scare all over again,” said Lauren Piner, a high school history teacher at South Central High School in Pitt County. “Instead of looking for, you know, Soviets and Marxists in Hollywood and in the government, we’re looking for them in our classrooms.”
Expect similar attacks as leftists continue to lash out at any attempt to rein in their excesses and overreaches.
But since they’ve opened the floodgates of historical revisionism by attempting to foist Critical Race Theory onto the unwilling masses, perhaps it’s time McCarthyism also got another look.
DEFINING ‘DECENCY’ DOWN
As part of my continuing series in re-assessing right-wing villains of yore, I now submit the unpopular opinion that Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisc., was right all along.
The big problem with the so-called Red Scare of the mid-20th century wasn’t that it was inherently wrong for the US to take a strong response against a foreign government’s effort to inject radical, anti-American ideas into the popular culture.
The real issue was that the evidence supporting McCarthy’s inquisition was flimsy, resulting in an exhibition of political theater that relied upon tenuous connections and loose affiliations to communism.
Thus, it lost its focus and spilled over into the more nebulous and abstract realm of moral “decency.”
And that, in turn, became a battle of optics instead of facts, thereby giving the Left a home-field advantage.
“No one familiar with the history of this country can deny that congressional committees are useful,” said CBS newscaster Edward R. Murrow in his now-legendary take-down of McCarthy.
“It is necessary to investigate before legislating, but the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one, and the junior senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly,” Murrow continued. “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.”
A GENUINE THREAT
McCarthy’s witch hunt helped Soviet sympathizers to paint the national-security effort with the same brush as the un-American activity it sought to investigate.
But the failure of McCarthyism cannot be conflated, as leftists would readily welcome, with the idea that the communist threat itself was nothing but a paranoia-induced figment of one senator’s imagination.
“We will not take America under the label of communism, we will not take it under the label of socialism,” said Alexander Trachtenberg, a leader of the US-based Communist Political Association, in 1944, according to a witness account.
“These labels are unpleasant to the American people, and have been speared too much,” he continued. “We will take the United States under labels we have made very lovable; we will take it under liberalism, under progressivism, under democracy. But take it, we will!”
Trachtenberg, a member of CPA’s Central Control Committee, reportedly made the remarks while speaking at the party’s national convention that May in Madison Square Garden.
Astoundingly, no mention of the seditious-sounding line was included in the official meeting minutes.
McCarthy’s hearings came a decade later. A decade after that, however, emboldened by the newly ascendant Cold War, radical leftists were fully behind the effort to destroy America from within.
Allegedly, the Soviets even circulated a notorious list of 45 goals as part of Nikita Khrushchev’s 1960 United Nations vow to “take America without firing a single shot.”
NO COMRADE LEFT BEHIND
The subversive agenda first surfaced—based on the official congressional record from January 1963—in conservative writer W. Cleon Skousen’s prescient 1958 book The Naked Communist
According to PJ Media columnist Kevin Downey Jr., at least 16 of these items have now been mostly achieved.
No. 17 of 45 on the to-do list specifically addressed the topic of taking over school curricula:
“Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.”
And No. 31 on the list:
“Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the ‘big picture.’ Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.“
As TownHall’s Marina Medvin observed last year, this Marxist push is far from being a spontaneous process that came about as a mass, enlightened reckoning in the aftermath of George Floyd‘s death; nor one made possible by the Overton window accidentally getting left open after Bernie Sanders‘s dark-horse presidential candidacy.
Instead, it has been decades in the planning.
“Leftist educators see no ethical dilemma in sugarcoating and force-feeding Marxism to our schoolchildren,” Medvin wrote, specifically addressing the topic of “equity.”
“In fact, they do it openly, with pride and arrogance,” she continued. “They will not stop on their own, they will only continue to grow more emboldened by their success in meddling with young minds.”
BUYER’S REMORSE?
While Leftists still love to invoke the McCarthy era, hearkening back with a sort of wistful nostalgia to their once-marginalized status, they have no apparent qualms about seeing their own political adversaries get censored, blacklisted and canceled in kind.
Ironically, at the 1944 communist convention, the minutes indicate that party leaders began with the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Of course, it’s possible that the communist convention’s formal accounts embellished some of the details as to what really transpired.
Yet, the shift in 15 years’ time—during which communists had discredited McCarthyism (No. 34 on the to-do list) and replaced the national anthem with a pledge to “Do away with all loyalty oaths” (No. 13)—shows the staggering rapidity and astonishing success of their relentless effort.
Since then, in the intervening half-century, the parasitic Marxist movement has further resisted the Reagan-era fall of the Soviets’ “Evil Empire” and found a new host to feed on, right here in the USA.
That leaves us to wonder: Seeing what would become of their country, might Sen. McCarthy and others involved in the early attempts to stave off this incursion have given up so readily at the first sign of an ad hominem attack or a negative media review?
And when faced with the barrage of modern-day McCarthyism accusations to complement Democrats’ race-baiting “Jim Eagle” rhetoric, can today’s pro-America conservatives learn from the mistakes of the past?
Another swing of the political pendulum may give McCarthy’s GOP successors in Congress—and state leaders like Lt. Gov. Robinson—a chance to test their own resolve in fighting the Marxist mission-creep.
Until then, good night and good luck.
Follow Ben Sellers on GETTR at gettr.com/user/bensellers.
