A reminder to friends of liberty: Others don’t understand our beliefs

By David McElroy · January 3, 2012

Some of my friends think I’m cynical when I say we’re never going to convince the majority to vote for individual freedom. Most people who are steeped in the current left/right divide are honestly confused by what we believe. Let me show you two brief examples from the same newspaper story.

This is an Associated Press article that ran Sunday about Ron Paul in the lead-up to today’s Iowa caucuses. I want to look at two points, one which shows the reporter’s confusion and another which shows a voter’s confusion.

The article is just one of those feature stories with colorful details about a candidate leading up to an election. The sub-text of the piece is that Paul is sort of like a crazy uncle who acts in ways that nobody can predict.

In the fourth paragraph of the story, the reporter refers to Paul as “the mercurial congressman.” When I first saw that adjective, I wondered briefly whether the reporter misunderstands what it means to be mercurial. But then it hit me that he does know what the word means. He simply doesn’t know what Paul means.

To be mercurial is to be “subject to sudden or unpredictable changes of mood or mind,” according to my dictionary. Those of us who admire Paul realize that he’s anything but that. It’s his principled consistency that makes us admire him. But for those who spend all of their time with other politicians — those who see the Republican and Democratic versions of Big Government as opposites — his views are truly confusing.

That’s because the public consciousness is infused with the left/right paradigm — understood as being Red vs. Blue, Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. liberal. The idea that there’s another lens through which to view things isn’t just dismissed. People simply don’t believe another paradigm exists. They’re not being difficult or prejudiced or trying to stop our ideas. There’s not a conspiracy against us. They simply don’t understand what we believe or why we believe it. They aren’t interested in what we believe. So people who are consistent — as we understand it — are going to confuse them.

But it’s not just reporters who don’t understand. Take a look at what a voter said — and keep in mind that this voter is a Ron Paul supporter:

“His ideas are wonderful, but you wonder if you can really run the United States in 2012 with strictly those ideas,” said John Grotte, a Paul supporter and retired engineer. “He really hasn’t changed that much with the flow of the times. So you wish you could take about 60 percent of him, take another 20 percent of something, just a pure politician and stick them together, and you’d have a pretty jim-dandy guy.”

From our point of view, that makes about as much sense as saying, “I really like a lot of the things that Jesus has to say, but I just can’t agree with Him about loving your neighbor and such.”

Most people pick and choose from the things that politicians say — as though they’re picking things to eat in a buffet line. They don’t question their core beliefs and they don’t try to make those beliefs consistent with one another. They don’t believe they’re out of step. They believe we’re out of step. They’re not suddenly going to change the way they believe. It’s just not going to happen.

I hope Paul does well in Iowa today. This will probably be the high point of his campaign. It won’t surprise you to know that I see things as downhill from here for Paul, because I’ve said repeatedly that he can’t win. (I’ve also explained why I decline to vote for anybody.) Regardless of what happens today, though, people aren’t suddenly going to wake up and understand what we understand.

Remember, they think we’re the ones who are wrong. When you look at them and are confused by what they “don’t get,” remember that they’re looking at us and thinking the same thing. For the most part, we confuse them just as much as they confuse us. And that’s not going to change.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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