As Sir Winston Churchill so famously said at the end of World War II, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Churchill saw the crisis of what was a horrific war as an opportunity to remake the world into a more free society. Inversely, when Rahm Emanuel said in 2008 regarding the financial crisis, “Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” and then again in 2020 regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, he meant it not as an opportunity for more freedom and tolerance, but instead an opportunity to implement more socialist ideals and policies intolerant of conservative ideas and voices by using the moment to change the fundamental way we choose our government.
Just as conservatives have been working and prospering in our free market society and believing in equality, free speech, and self-determining liberty, quite frankly the left has been plotting against these virtues, seeing our laissez-faire attitude regarding interfering into other people’s lives as an opportunity to mold the conversation around leaving other people alone. “My body; my choice” is a prime example of this. By framing the conversation around leaving people alone, rather than the child inside of the mother, they have appealed to our inclination to leave people alone.
While conservatives are busy leading their lives and failing or succeeding based on their abilities, hard work and perseverance, believing in equality of opportunity, the leaders on the left believe in and strive for equality of outcome. They believe society will only benefit if all of society succeeds equally. They have been busy working against a merit-based society and implementing their version of a fair society based on their perceptions of people’s oppressed status.
While it is true that there are a rare few people who succeed wildly in their endeavors, creating wealth beyond what they could spend in a lifetime (and with that enormous wealth comes enormous power; see Big Tech), the majority of people who feel they have succeeded in life enjoy a middle to upper middle class lifestyle, hardly wealthy beyond imagination, and could lose that lifestyle with one major life crisis or one or two bad investments. They have built what they have by equality of opportunity, skills and/or talent, and hard work.
The left believes those middle and upper-middle class people have only succeeded because society has helped them in some way — educated them in public schools, built roads that allow them to drive to work each day, or propped them up and given them success solely because of their gender or color of their skin. They firmly believe “righting the wrongs” of society, by government-mandated preference based on the oppressed status of a group, is the only way to make things fair for everyone. They don’t see conservatives as political opponents. They view them as enemies of the oppressed and of society itself. They see conservatives in politics not as challengers to their ideas but as evil aggressors they must stop by any means necessary.
After failed attempts to oust a conservative president in the three years prior, the crisis stars aligned for the left in 2020 with COVID-19, months-long rioting, autonomous zones, death, and economic devastation. As good leftists and social justice warriors fighting for equal outcomes for the oppressed, they seized the opportunity and used every trick in the book to change the election outcome to their favor, or as they so famously said in a recent Time magazine article, “fortify” the elections.
The left believes they were “cheated” out of the presidential election in 2016. One could assume a lot of minds on the left thought the only way to win future elections was to take matters into their own hands, doing whatever it takes to win. For some, this could include less than lawful actions like barring people from observing vote counting, last minute changing of rules, and ignoring state laws regarding election integrity with the pandemic being an excuse.
The left has known for a long time that they wouldn’t continue to win elections based on their failed policies and poor economic outcomes. Besides marginalizing, doxing, and demonizing the right as stereotypically racist, Islamophobic, homophobic, xenophobic, and misogynistic, they understood these things would help them win:
- Allowing more people to vote who might not have been allowed to vote based on their legal status (whether criminal or alien or under 18)
- Flooding the electorate with “no-excuse,” early, absentee, and no-ID-necessary ballots would cause an opportunity for people on their “side” to do what they needed to do to win
- The nefarious practice of ballot harvesting (letting one person gather ballots from many people, perhaps using intimidation tactics on the voter) would give them a chance to win elections in perpetuity
- The refusal to “clean up” and update voter rolls in certain states. People who have moved, died, etc. remain on the active voter lists and still receive ballots.
39 states and the District of Columbia made changes in the general election procedures during the 2020 COVID-19 panic. These changes included sending all voters absentee ballots, extending the early voting periods, halting witness requirements for mail-in ballots, and extending the receipt of ballots until well after Election Day. Ultimately what happened is that the American people’s right to self-governance was annihilated. Encouraged by their success in 2020, the left is now attempting to codify the corruption with the passage of HR 1, which hopefully will stall in the U.S. Senate.
But if we are to counter the left’s attempt to disenfranchise conservative voters, and restore election integrity, there are many reform items that must happen in 2021 and 2022, whether it be the cleaning of voter rolls, photo ID laws, outlawing ballot harvesting and eliminating universal mail-in ballots, to name a few. American Majority has developed an in-person and online training program dedicated to bringing back election transparency and the rule of law into our elections. Everyone interested in free and fair elections going forward should take this course and bring their friends and families.
We will be bringing this training to Minnesota on March 23 at Hamel VFW Hall, Post 5903 in Plymouth, Minnesota. Space will be limited, so please register ahead of time HERE. You won’t want to miss this event. Come learn what you can do to ensure the integrity of future American elections. It’s worth the fight!
Ned Ryun
Ned Ryun is a grassroots and conservative activism expert. He is the founder and CEO of American Majority, a non-partisan political training institute whose mission is to identify and mold the next wave of liberty-minded candidates, grassroots activists and community leaders. Since its founding in January of 2008, while under Ryun’s leadership, American Majority has trained nearly 48,000 candidates and activists.
A former writer for President George W. Bush and the son of former Olympic medalist and U.S. Rep. Jim Ryun (R-KS), Ned Ryun is highly sought after for his commentary on the national political scene, grassroots engagement and the conservative movement in general.
