RUTHFULLY YOURS

Since forever, Republican politicians and their apologists in conservative media have assured their constituents that unless they voted for the Republican Party, the country would go to hell in a handbasket—or, what amounts to essentially the same thing, be “fundamentally transformed” into a socialist dystopia.

We owe it to ourselves, and especially to our children, to vote against Democrats and for Republicans at every turn.

To be clear, it is never sufficient to vote for a third party candidate or to simply abstain from voting altogether. The only way that one can adequately “defeat the Left” is by voting for Republican candidates—regardless of how otherwise indistinguishable those candidates may be from their Democratic Party rivals.

Talk radio host Michael Medved was doubtless representative of his colleagues throughout the universe of Big Conservative media when he would tirelessly ridicule those members of his own audience who, having reached their limit with the perpetual pattern of broken promises and acts of betrayal on the part of the self-styled “conservative” Republicans for whom they always voted, would threaten to vote for third party candidates. Medved would refer to them as “losertarians” while informing them that, if they were really upset with the GOP, they needed to reform the party from within.

Of course, when the GOP candidates were those, like George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, over whom Medved and his ilk waxed orgasmic, then this counsel of Medved’s was framed as though it were axiomatic. When, however, conservative Republican voters acted on Medved’s imperative and voted in record numbers for Donald Trump, Medved failed resoundingly to practice what he preached: He blasted Trump at every turn and became, if not in theory then in practice, a “NeverTrumper.”

In 2020, Medved wrote a column in which he announced that he would vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Whether Medved ever realized it or not—whether or not he cared—the members of his audience, those who made him a success as a nationally syndicated talk radio host, felt betrayed. It’s not just that he disagreed with them over the virtues of President Trump; rather, he personally betrayed them, failing to practice what he had been preaching to the unwashed masses, the little people, for years.

Medved paid for what his audience justifiably regarded as his elitism, his arrogance, his condescension, and, ultimately, his hypocrisy. He lost his national radio talk show at Salem Broadcasting and is today working his local market in the state of Washington.

The point of this column, however, is not Michael Medved. I focused on Medved here only because his is the proverbial textbook illustration of the vice-ridden mind of the “conservative” public figure who was as eager to betray his fans as he was to ally himself with the Left when it came to a Republican, and a Republican president at that, whom he disliked.

Well, now, beginning with Tuesday’s Senate runoff race in Georgia, is when mistreated conservatives from the Peach State can have themselves some retributive justice. Simply put: Screw the GOP. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue have not earned and do not deserve conservatives’ support.

Being in New Jersey, unfortunately I can’t have the satisfaction of not voting for them. Decent folks from Georgia, though, most certainly can.

The ability to make this decision would require the average conservative to move beyond his comfort zone and adopt a mindset dramatically different in many respects from anything that he has ever experienced before. It would require the average conservative to liberate himself from the matrix, the fake reality that has been concocted by the Big GAME (Government-Academia-Media-Entertainment) Complex. The Republican Party and Big Conservative media axis have contributed much to its construction as well.

Conservatives—Georgia conservatives specifically—must ask themselves:

Substantively, how has voting for the GOP improved my life or the well-being of the country?

Then they should ask themselves a follow up question, no less important than the first:

Substantively, how will not voting for the GOP improve my life and the well-being of the country?

Einstein is credited with having remarked that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. Conservatives have been voting for Republican politicians for decades, and yet there isn’t a shred of evidence that doing so has advanced the conservative agenda a millimeter.

Quite the contrary, there is mountainous, incalculable, ubiquitous evidence that the country has steadily moved, and continues to move, leftward. Due to space constraints, however, I won’t bother going back decades. I’ll keep it simple and just focus on . . . 2020.

Consider all that has occurred since just last March.

Almost overnight, the country bequeathed to us by the generation that, in the midst of a smallpox epidemic, fought and defeated the most powerful empire in the world in order to be a self-governing union of sovereign states subjected itself to a nationwide internment.

The United State of America became the Interned States of America as the Constitution of the old Republic was indefinitely revoked, the economy crushed, and “the little platoons”—as Burke called those buffers between the individual and the state, those forms of community that constitute civil society and make human flourishing possible—were radically undermined.

All of this immeasurable economic, psychological, and socio-cultural damage was executed in the name of combatting a coronavirus that, having a survival rate of 98.2 percent, is no less dangerous than seasonal influenza for most people.

Then, two months after the internment began, Black Lives Matter and Antifa violence exploded throughout hundreds of American cities. Police stood down as they and, crucially, their supporters were victimized by thugs. The White House itself was besieged as monuments to American heroes and other symbols of Western civilization were vandalized and destroyed with impunity while both the street thugs who were directly culpable for the destruction as well as those who funded this campaign escaped the punishment that they deserved.

Despite months of warnings that mail-in voting would lead to massive election fraud, the world watched, and continues to watch, as an unprecedentedly high number of Americans, higher than any number ever to  have voted for a presidential candidate, have their votes stolen.

This happened in a country, a majority of whose state legislatures and governors are Republican, with a Republican president, a Republican-controlled Senate, and a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees.

Big Tech has systematically suppressed anyone and everyone who has dared to expose the conventional narratives surrounding the virus, Black Lives Matter, and the Great Steal of 2020.

And it continues to happen in a country with a Republican president, a Republican-controlled Senate, a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees, and a majority of whose state legislatures and governors are Republican.

The Republicans, along with Big Conservative media, not only did not prevent it; in many ways, they encouraged it.

So why exactly is it imperative to vote Republican? How, exactly, will Republicans stop the Left, and stop them from doing what, exactly?

These are the questions that honest people, and honest conservatives, must ask themselves—even though the questions are self-evidently rhetorical.