THE RIGHT KIND OF ‘REVOLUTION’
We don’t believe a large majority of conservatives in the Tennessee Valley would find a lot in common with Chris Wicker, the Chattanooga handyman who posed with a noose at a makeshift gallows outside the U.S. Capitol on the day earlier this month when protesters breached the building and disrupted proceedings of a joint session of Congress.
We would imagine most were aghast not at the protest itself but at what ultimately occurred, the vandalism at the Capitol, the aftermath of five deaths and the thought that the country’s highest lawmakers could be that vulnerable to terror and violence
We would think practically all conservatives could not conceive of posing with a noose like Wicker did, of saying it was “cowardly” to just walk around, or of admitting that if the mob on his side of the building made it in that he would have joined them.
We also believe a majority, if a slightly a lesser majority, of local conservatives don’t believe the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. They might believe, as we do, that there was fraud and malfeasance but not enough to change the result.
But we do think most area conservatives sense that the days of being doormats when free speech is stifled, when some in the national media can’t be trusted to tell the truth and when the new president signals moves that will open the country’s Southern border, crush small businesses and raise taxes are over.
Wicker said this: “Everyone wants to say [the revolution’s] passed, it’s over. But … [i]t’s not going to be very pretty.”
The Chattanooga man said he “would support political violence in any sense if all other options, especially legal options, had been exhausted.”
That is not something we could ever endorse, and we imagine the great majority of local conservatives feel the same way.
Yet, the last four years Trump, and the resistance to Trump, should have taught movement conservatives — not the fringe that breached the Capitol, if you could call them conservatives — a thing or two.
The former president had the temerity to confront an increasingly biased national media and expose them for what they have become. With all the forms of communication that are available, the American people now could look for themselves and see that what they were being told by the national media often was not true or had at most only a scintilla of truth in it.
The days when Walter Cronkite of CBS was called “the most trusted man in America” had passed.
The resistance to Trump didn’t keep him from lowering taxes, cutting regulations and opening new initiatives abroad, but it did serve as a constant irritant. The influence of media, academia and Hollywood worked to weaken his standing, scuttle his policies and spin him into something he wasn’t.
The president, of course, never helped his own cause with insults, insisting on the last word and making statements that sometimes had as little resemblance to the truth as those things said about him.
President Joe Biden, of course, no matter how unappealing his policies are to the American people, will never be portrayed negatively by the same forces that were aligned against Trump.
That is why movement conservatives must be vigilant and why they must not let themselves be painted with the same broad brush as the small brand of lunatics who invaded the Capitol. That’s what Democrats are counting on — that, and that Republicans will spend so much time debating those lunatics that they take their minds off the radical agenda the party in charge of the presidency, House and Senate is promulgating.
Conservatives for at least the next two years — Republicans will have a good shot at retaking the Senate and House in 2022 — must be unified in resisting excessive federal spending, opposing efforts that will weaken small businesses and objecting to further efforts into making the country a socialist state.
If Biden seeks compromise, they should at least hear him out and not immediately refuse to consider anything he suggests.
And, instead of violence, they should fight back with facts, with bolder ideas and with better recruiting of candidates at the local, state and national levels.
Overall, they should never forget they are 74 million strong (with millions more who lean to their ideas, if not to their 2020 candidate), and are not clones of a small band of individuals who for a moment thought an insurrection at the Capitol was tantamount to a “revolution.”