The New Republicans
In the 1950s, research surfaced proving tobacco smoke could cause cancer. It showed smokers were up to 30 times more likely to get lung cancer than non-smokers.
The tobacco industry developed and implemented a brilliant strategy: They created doubt about facts that had been well-established, in some cases for decades. Hundreds of articles, paid for by the tobacco companies, pointed to hundreds of other factors that “might” be the real cause of lung cancer. The effect of this campaign was to so confuse consumers they didn’t know what to believe. Everything they thought was true was brought into question.
Sound familiar? It’s what the Republican Party is doing to American voters. We can’t trust the CIA; we can’t trust the FBI; we can’t trust liberals, because educated people don’t know anything; our electoral process can’t be trusted; lowering taxes for their largest campaign contributors will create jobs, when no such result has ever been observed; and in a nation of immigrants, we should only accept immigrants who are blonde — or doctors. They lead you to believe you can’t trust anyone except the liars who tell you whatever you want to hear. So if you agree with what they say, it’s true; if you don’t, it’s false. They’ve managed to redefine truth as whatever they say.
We need a new Republican Party — one that doesn’t lie in order to deliberately confuse voters. We need a Republican Party like the one Dwight Eisenhower, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and my father believed in. We need a Republican Party led by intellectuals, by people who dig deep to find the truth, and who hate liars. We need a New Republican Party that rejects ignorant fools, and neither asks for nor wants their votes.
I propose the intellectual Republicans of Tulare County come together to start a renaissance of truth and enlightenment, to scrape off the riff raff that has hijacked the Party, and turned it into something Eisenhower, and Roosevelt, and Lincoln, and my own father would be ashamed of. We need people who are capable of feeling shame for falling for ignorance and lies, and who are willing to restore the good name of the Republican Party.
If you believe that giving $100,000 to poor families will allow them to raise themselves out of poverty, you’re probably a Democrat. If you believe they’ll fritter it away on drugs and hookers, you’re probably a Republican. But if you don’t want to try it and then statistically document the results, because research might show you’re wrong, then we’re not for you. But if you do, please join the New Republicans. You’ll like feeling proud again.
Les Pinter is a contributing columnist and a Springville resident. His column appears weekly in The Recorder. Pinter’s new book, HTTPV: How a Grocery Shopping Website Can Save America, is available in both Kindle and hardcopy formats on Amazon.com.