RUTHFULLY YOURS

One of Hollywood’s greatest westerns provides a powerful metaphor for both the November election and the state of the nation.

Nearly seven decades after “High Noon” was released, the United States confronts the same kind of existential decision that Hadleyville, the movie’s fictional town, faced: Will the good citizens allow a band of violent outlaws seeking revenge to intimidate and dominate them, or will they support their marshal and fight?

The band of outlaws, in this case, is not Frank Miller’s celluloid gang. It’s the Left and its “progressive” ideology that permeates education, government, the arts, the church and much of the media. That ideology — which the Democratic Party proudly embodies — seeks to destroy the fundamental values providing the nation’s foundation.

Opposing the outlaws is President Donald Trump, who faces the same problem that challenged Marshal Will Kane (played by Gary Cooper): no support from the powers-that-be.

Kane’s commitment to stay and fight was rejected by Hadleyville’s mayor, judge, practically all the townsfolk and even his own wife. Trump’s commitment was rejected by his own party’s Establishment — the Bushes, Kristols, Kasichs, McCains and Romneys.

Yet unlike the movie, in which the townsfolk abandon Kane, Trump receives enthusiastic support from all demographic categories. That support represents contempt for a movement that wraps itself in the cloaks of “peace,” “social justice” and “tolerance” while subverting those values.

Americans are exasperated with the idea that their country — and, by extension, they — are incorrigibly racist and unjust. They are disgusted with watching smug sophists who view themselves as superior to everybody else spit on their values.

Newt Gingrich — no mean member of the Republican Establishment — told the same thing to Slate.com in 2016:

“What we know is that Trump has had the nerve to raise questions in a clear language because he represents the millions of Americans who are sick and tired of being told that they have to be guilt-ridden and keep their mouths shut.”

Trump attracts their support not only because he shares their values. Due to his business success, Trump also represents personal opportunity, and personal opportunity reflects the respect for the individual inherent in the American soul.

The Republican Party forgot about those qualities. The modern Democratic Party, guided by Marxist sympathizers, rejects them in favor of “diversity,” “equality” and “inclusion.”

Yet in proclaiming their opposition to racism and sexism, the Left exposes its own racism and sexism.

The Left’s embrace of “diversity” and “inclusion” provides misdirection from the real definitions of racism and sexism: the belief that one’s ethnic or racial identity or gender supersedes all other considerations — including personal integrity, the quality of ideas and individual ability.

By that standard, the Left is incorrigibly racist. The Left defines people almost exclusively by race, gender and class, and believes that race defines thought. In 2016, Susan Rice, President Barack Obama’s national security advisor, told Florida International University’s graduating class that the national security apparatus is too “white, male and Yale” and that “better outcomes” would naturally result with more non-white agents and supervisors.

Or in a more recent example, comedian Chelsea Handler told her former boyfriend, rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, “I had to remind him that he was a Black person, so he can’t vote for Donald Trump,” she said.

“Diversity” and “inclusion” have nothing to do with human rights. They are merely marketing terms to seduce minorities into the Leftist camp and serve the Left’s ultimate goal: to divorce minorities from any overriding sense of American cultural identity. When activists from Antifa and Black Lives Matter tear down statues and burn American flags, they clearly illustrate the Left’s rejection of American values.

So do graduation ceremonies, college dormitories and “safe spaces” defined by race, ethnicity or gender. They come straight out of Jim Crow. They reflect Plessy v. Ferguson not Brown v. Board of Education — nor the philosophy of a preacher from Alabama who once hoped that Americans would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

Just as “diversity” and “inclusion” have nothing to do with human rights, neither do the Left’s views on abortion.

Blasé disregard of Planned Parenthood’s sale of fetal tissue for profit — fetal tissue that, presumably, came from girls as well as boys — demonstrates the Left’s embrace of abortion on demand, which goes beyond stated concerns for reproductive health.

In the April 1990 edition of Atlantic Monthly, Martha Bayles argues that feminists use support for unlimited abortion to redefine the family as a purely contractual arrangement. But the feminist view ultimately sacrifices individual women to an esoteric ideology filled with inconsistencies:

“Consider the scenario of the pregnant teenager who decides, against the wishes of her mother, to abort a female fetus. In the one instance, she is depriving an older female of a grandchild. In the other, she is depriving a younger female of life. Compared with such deprivations, the idea of striking a blow for women’s freedom seems pretty abstract, impersonal, and public….”

Ultimately, abortion serves the Leftist goal of redesigning society by destroying accepted cultural paradigms, as Bayles writes:

“Not only does feminist doublethink accord women the exclusive power to terminate potential life while absolving them of any responsibility for having conceived life in the first place; this doublethink also extends its influence, by way of the helping professionals and judges under its sway, over the poor, the confused, and the underaged, who are urged to heed the feminist message over the advice of their own families.”

Amplifying its disregard for the innocent is the Left’s fixation with transgender rights for children and reflexive support for the Affordable Care Act, aka “ObamaCare.” Regarding the former, the Left is blissfully, deliberately ignorant about the possibility for long-term psychological damage. Then again, the Left has reasons to be blissfully, deliberately ignorant.

Sexualizing children serves the Left’s interests. It will lead to confusion through the awakening of emotions they can neither understand nor handle. Without the influence of the nuclear family, such children will rely excessively on emotion and not develop a sense of discernment. As a result, they will become perfect fodder for Leftist ideologues and perfect clients for a “nanny state” dedicated to satisfying basic needs.

When it comes to ACA, the Left does not care that millions lost health insurance nor that “ObamaCare” denies life-sustaining medications that other plans allowed. Stephen Blackwood, a college president, wrote in Feb. 23, 2014 edition of the Wall Street Journal about how ACA nullified a plan that his mother needed to cover her cancer treatment:

“(T)here is something deeply and incontestably perverse about a law that so distorts and undermines the free activity of individuals that they can no longer buy and sell the goods and services that keep them alive. ObamaCare made my mother’s old plan illegal, and it forced her to buy a new plan that would accelerate her disease and death.

“Will this injustice be remedied, for her and for millions of others? Or is my mother to die because she can no longer afford the treatment that keeps her alive?”

Like all good totalitarians, the Left and its acolytes in academia view themselves as the apex of sophistication and their opponents as mere apes. “Progressive” academics admit this openly, as the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof admitted in 2016 while quoting some Facebook posts:

“Why stop there?” Steven asked in reference to Kristof’s suggestion that universities hire more conservative professors. “How about we make faculties more diverse by hiring idiots?”

“Much of the ‘conservative’ world view consists of ideas that are known empirically to be false,” proclaimed Carmi.

“The truth has a liberal slant,” responded Michelle.

Such are the views of those academics committed to abandoning instruction about Western civilization in the name of “diversity.”

By de-emphasizing or eliminating Western civilization from discussion of history, the arts and political science, the Left intends to destroy American society’s cultural memory. In its place, the Left seeks to impose its own ideas of race, gender and class, thereby creating a radically new American identity and, eventually, a new society — one that most Americans would neither recognize nor want to live in.

Essentially, the Left’s goal is no different than uprooting a baby from its birth parents, forcing it into an adoptive family and forbidding it to discover its roots.

Like Frank Miller’s gang, the quasi-Marxist forces that have been contained since the 1930s seek to impose themselves permanently upon American society.

Like the sheriff’s bride, a Quaker pacifist, the “Never Trumpers” focus so much on their own integrity that they do not see the imminent danger. But at a pivotal moment as her husband is outnumbered and outgunned, the bride takes action by shooting one of the reloading gang members in the back — a most un-Quaker, un-pacifist act.

Nothing is as powerful as an idea or a person whose time has come. Using this election to reject political correctness imposed by a class of self-righteous class, pseudo-sophisticated elites is an opportunity that the average American cannot afford to miss.

In the long run, November’s election demands answers to these questions: Do we begin the task of restoring the fundamental values on which the United States was built? Or do we allow a self-appointed coterie of arrogant totalitarians to build their “new order” on the bodies of the innocent?

This is war. Stand and fight.