Trump II? Sounds Chi-Comm, Doesn't It?

I have never been a fan of Donald Trump. I voted none of the above in '16 via blank, and only very reluctantly held my nose and cast a ballot for him in '20 -- and only then because I was worried that the Green New Deal had a serious chance of passing.

The fact that an authoritarian-styled person like Trump can ride a personality cult to power in the United States is an alarming development to say the least. And it is hard to say what he has done -- spending worse than a Democrat while in office, backing kooky blind-loyalists in (often losing) efforts to control Congress, end federal protection for abortion via court appointments, among many other things -- has most damaged the GOP as a viable opponent to the Democrats.

Republicans keep losing winnable races thanks to Trump. But maybe that's a good thing, given what he plans to do should voters return him to office:

He has said he would establish a government-backed anti-"woke" university, create a national credentialing body to certify teachers "who embrace patriotic values" and erect "freedom cities" on federal land. He has pledged to marshal the power of the government to investigate and punish his critics.

It is a governing platform barely recognizable to prior generations of Republican politicians...

Barely recognizable as Republican?!

I am old enough to remember when Republicans would, correctly, say that such a platform isn't recognizable as American. Indeed, a few with a spine might even call it what it is, Anti-American.

Central planning may or may not now be a Republican value, but it is not and never will be an American value, in the original sense of that term.

Our federal government has no business pushing people to build cities in the middle of nowhere -- like the Chinese government has -- for any purpose, and calling them "freedom cities" is another move from the same playbook.

It is disturbing to say the least that Trump, who is happy to go out of his way to make off-color jokes about the Chinese, gets away with imitating their ruler -- who, unlike the Chinese people, deserves ridicule -- when he thinks it suits his purposes.

The government has even less business running educational institutions. Assuming Trump actually brings his "anti-'woke'" university into being -- by stealing our money to do so, whether or not we agree with his conception of a proper education -- what next? Does the next Democrat President change it into a far-left indoctrination camp? Or do we just not hold elections?

It will be hard enough to separate government from education as it is. But that difficulty pales compared to those that can easily be caused by threatening the Republic in the way such obvious questions suggest.

In her essays, "The Establishing of an Establishment" and "Fairness Doctrine for Education," Ayn Rand respectively (1) explains how government support for education and research leads to entrenched orthodoxy (like the far-left ones strangling our universities now), and (2) presents a measure that could put the brakes on such orthodoxies while we find a way to back the government out of education, so academics will once again have to compete on merit.

Since Republicans have forgotten this, let me say it: Freedom and other meritorious ideas win in any free marketplace of ideas.

(We do not have one today, and the only way to establish one is to have less government meddling in education, not more.)

It is a serious indictment of Trump's conception of freedom that he thinks he has to (or even can) ram it down our throats with the full force of the Federal Government.

Trump's -- and many modern conservatives' -- solutions to America's problems no longer represent opposition to the central planning/welfare state foisted on Americans over generations by the left. Instead, the right has decided to take over the welfare state.

This is all bad enough, but just in case you don't believe Republicans have no idea what freedom means, get a load of the following quote from a former Trump appointee:

Brooke Rollins -- a Trump White House official who now leads the America First Policy Institute, a think tank run by former Trump aides -- argued that the majority of the public thinks that "the federal government [should] ensure that it is working on behalf of the people."

"When local or state government drifts away from that, either unintentionally or intentionally, then I think that the vision is with an America First approach that the federal government will lean in and pull freedom back to where it should be," Rollins said. [bold added]

Contrast this with the following quotes from Ayn Rand:

"Freedom, in a political context, has only one meaning: the absence of physical coercion." [1]

"The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights..." [2]

Now, you tell me what the hell it could possibly mean for the government to "pull freedom" anywhere (but down) when such things as building entire cities and indoctrination centers -- rather than protecting our individual rights -- are being touted by a party that has gone from at opposing the left (even if inneffectively) to aping it on apparently every level.

-- CAV