There is an unsung hero of the American Revolutionary War, whose name is notably absent among the Founding Fathers. His military exploits were as great as those of George Washington, and, in many ways, this general had achieved much more in the early part of the Revolutionary War than Washington had. It was this general’s valor and strategic insight that not only won several crucial battles in 1775, 1776, and in 1777, the last of which resulted in the surrender of the northern British command under British General John Burgoyne. In 1778, wounded and under appreciated, this General Benedict Arnold was appointed the military governor of Pennsylvania.

As a man with quite a reputation as a skilled and resourceful general, Arnold was something of a war hero at the time, and this celebrity granted him access to the political Establishment elite, who surrounded Arnold with wealthy admirers of all political persuasions, including many influential American colonists who were not necessarily enthusiastic about the Revolutionary War. It was here, in a nest of politically influential Tories, that the bitterness that Arnold felt toward the Revolutionary government and military command gnawed at him. Scandalous accusations of bribery and corruption began to swirl around governor Arnold, and this proved to be the final stroke.

Using his Tory political connections within Pennsylvania, Benedict began to correspond with officers in the British military. The deal was simple. He would give the British the Fort at West Point and effective control of Pennsylvania, in exchange for a large sum of money and a general’s commission in the British Army. With so many rumors swirling around Arnold at the time, suspicious were high, and the messenger Arnold trusted to carry this treasonous offer was captured by American Patriots. The Revolutionary Government immediately sought to arrest Benedict, but he fled to the safety of the British.

After serving in the British Army against his own countrymen briefly, without any of the successes that marked his colonial career. After the Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolutionary War decisively for the Americans, Arnold retired to England, where he died, reviled by Americans as a traitor. To this day, the name Benedict Arnold has become a slander of disloyalty, forever washing away all of the good he’d done for the American cause with one act of treason.

Let me die in this old uniform in which I fought my battles. May God forgive me for ever having put on another.
-Benedict Arnold-

This has been a pretty rough week for ideological conservatives, and I know many are still wrestling with the philosophical fallout of Ted Cruz’s endorsement of Donald J. Trump. There’s no way to parse this as a win for Cruz or for ideological conservatism, so let’s deal with it head on. This was a collapse of our front line, not only did we lose the battlefield, we lost a lot of well meaning people, who are now so broken of will that they have turned themselves, frightened and cold, over to Trump.

For all of the immense good Ted Cruz has accomplished for the conservative movement in his tenure as a Senator and his dutiful service before that, all of it is threatened by his defection from the cause of Liberty. The very simple fact of the matter is that Donald Trump either is or is not disqualified to be president of the United States of America by merit or failure of his personal character. For months, we have fought against this blithering fascist, who’s uttered incomprehensibly reprehensible things in the last year, from congratulating dictators and tyrants, to defaming political rivals, and even dishonoring the American veterans.

Heart? He doesn’t have no heart that man. The only thing he has is what he – worry about himself.
– Vera Coking

He has been caught in lie upon lie upon lie, revealing not only a heart utterly overcome with deceit but utterly unrepentantly so. This man resorts to lies as a matter of habit. To him the very concept of personal honor is as alien as would be taking up residence at the bottom of a lake would be. For each good deed Trump has supposedly done, he has committed dozens of cruel and vile deeds, from trying to demolish an elderly American widow’s home to build a parking lot, to bullying rural families in Scotland, so he could and destroy their homes to build a golf course.

Donald Trump is a man of such vile dishonor and gross malevolence that if dueling ever became legal again, the line for a shot at Donald’s head would stretch from New York to Dallas and back again. It is, indeed, that very tradition of dueling that prevented men like Donald Trump from lasting long enough to poison the society with his vileness, and it is men like Donald Trump that make such a tradition seem not only sensible, but necessary. In no way is Donald worthy of the office of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, or Reagan.

Ted Cruz says that he has prayed about this, and that he and his family have forgiven Trump for his vile statements and lies. It is this forgiveness that is the basis for Cruz’s endorsement for Trump. With all respect to Ted Cruz and his family, you may forgive a child molester for his vile deeds against your child, but that does not mean you ever let him near your children again! In just this way, we may forgive Donald Trump for being a rapacious, vile, repugnant human being, but that does not necessitate our political endorsement of him in our name!

Just go back and ruin his own country rather than come to Scotland and ruin our country.
– Michael Forbes

To Andrew Klavan, Mark Levin, David Limbaugh, and many other trusted voices in the conservative movement who have taken a long hard look at Trump and a long hard look at Hillary and blinked, deciding that their fear of the danger Hillary Clinton poses eclipsed even the absolute black hearted, moral bankruptcy of Donald Trump, and thus justified their throwing in with Trump, I beseech you to reconsider. In this time of infamy, when America needs men of good character and reputation to stand up and say “Not in our name!“, where are you?

Are you so cowered by the potential evil of Hillary Clinton, despite her obvious ineptitude and the obvious fractures within the Democratic Party, to do what is right? Where is your moral relevancy to the American conservative movement? If we do not stand for what is right, what is just, and what is necessary, even in the face of bitterness, indignity, and under appreciation, then where is your honor, sirs? Like it or not, you are officers of the Reagan Regiments that form the ranks of  the conservative movement.

Is suffering under what would undoubtedly be an inept and foolish presidency of Hillary Clinton too much to ask in the name of doing what is right? Once again, in the battle of Liberty, the shadow of Benedict Arnold rises among the ranks. The cause of Liberty lives or dies not by the benevolence of tyrants but by the unswerving loyalty of Patriots who fight on no matter the suffering or cost. Liberty is what is right, not what is easy. In the face of the oncoming foes, who stands with me to man the cannons, and who turns coat and runs?

 

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Liberty is For The Win!