Default long form article. Not branded (ie: ESR or A Short Word)
Like many conservatives in 2016 and 2017, I believed the definition of "never" was well understood and generally accepted, and when people said it, I thought I knew what they meant. I was mistaken.
Why should we care at all about "virtue"? Because people will protest over the political. They will kill over virtue.
Today is Memorial Day. It is not a day to thank those who served nor those who are now serving.
[T]he guiding philosophy of the "MAGA" movement has been "victory at any cost", from the very start. Unfortunately for them, the bill has come due.
To everyone that demands that this nation change to become something it is not, I invite to do the only thing that makes sense: Go away.
If these people cannot be bothered to reclaim something as simple as a word, how do they fool themselves into believing that they can ever hope to reclaim their nation?
If the Culture War is a conflict of ideologies, anyone who rejects ideology is engaging in this battle totally unarmed.
In a country once founded upon Locke's "Life. Liberty. Property.", we've become a nation shockingly comfortable with policy that is rooted in "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
So 100 days later, how have Donald Trump's central campaign promises held up?
What if there were a political party purpose built for the great philosophical hunger of our times?
Inconsistency, it seems, is the only consistent policy between the Obama and Trump administrations.
Whether you agree in whole, in part, or not at all with Reagan's politics, let's agree that Ronald Wilson Reagan could be considered a "subject matter expert" on American conservatism.
After a bloody war of independence, the Founding Fathers sought to let natural Liberty loose into spacious skies, across fruited plains, and from sea to shining sea.
As both the Democratic and the Republican Party are enslaved by their political apparatus, only a third party, free of major party establishment influences, has any hope of smashing through the Overton Window for liberty.
Should we stop to think about the underlying assumptions that we've made our entire lives or allow those in media, in movies, in music, in politics, and behind golden microphones to tell us what we should and shouldn't believe and, more importantly, why we believe anything at all?
The Republican Party has, at long last, revealed the final iteration of their grand health care reform plan to "Repeal and Replace" the failing Affordable Care Act.
Here, however delayed, is a four point argument on the differences between Ronald Reagan, a titan of American conservatism, and Donald Trump, a populist, celebrity loudmouth.
As long as there are those that believe the state has any claim to any portion of the wages, salaries, or properties of any individual, then we are not a capitalist society.
What is just, what is honorable, and what is dignified has long since been abandoned by both major political parties.
If we are to hold to the principle of pluralism that those on the left and the right both at least pretend to seek, we have to reject the purposeful intolerance of those whose political ideas may be antithetical to our own, so long as they do not harm others.
Good people must always stand with those who attempt to do good, just as they stand against those who attempt to do evil.
Liberty is For The Win 