As the saying goes: The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Over the past century, we’ve embarked on a number of noble initiatives to improve the world in which we live. But in the true spirit of “never let a crisis (or opportunity) go to waste,” the leftists have managed to subvert all of these pursuits. Hiding as benevolent government “servants” they have graciously offered to guide us through the complex social and scientific issues associated with each objective. We naively let them. We’re just now beginning to see that the course they’ve charted does not lead to the destination we were promised. It leads to a loss of self-governance – also known as tyranny.
In the 1940s our government decided to get into the disease control business, by setting an objective to stamp out malaria. That seemed innocent enough. We created the CDC to accomplish it. We already had the NIH, but apparently one bureaucracy was not enough – we needed another one. But it turns out, eliminating malaria (at least in America) wasn’t enough. The NIH and the CDC have since expanded their missions (research for the former and disease prevention for the latter) to become two of the greatest threats to our civil liberties in existence.
They are called for the suspension of our rights in the name of defeating a virus – which the NIH may have created with its gain of function research. Per their guidance, our rights to movement and assembly were restricted. Our property rights were put on hold (e.g., the eviction moratorium). Now the CDC even wants to challenge our right to bear arms – declaring gun violence an epidemic. It’s all being done in the name of the “public good.” There is a term for letting the benefits of the many outweigh the rights of the individual – mob rule. That’s a long way from the original mission to stamp out malaria.
In the 1920s the Supreme Court decided that we needed a living constitution to evolve with society. A little freshening up as the times changed seemed like a good idea. But unfortunately, they decided that the normal (and constitutional) means of evolution – the amendment process – was too hard. The justices began toying with creative interpretations of the Constitution and granted themselves the authority to find things in the document that aren’t actually written in it. By the 1960s, the use of emanations and penumbras by Justices to make stuff up became common practice. Since then, they have declared:
- A right to same sex marriage is protected by the Constitution
- The government can force a citizen to buy a product sold by a private company
- The government can control what products a farmer grows on his land
- And on, and on
And this was all done without the consent of the governed. The court is no longer evolving the Constitution for societal needs, it is imposing its vision on society.
Stamping out racism was the noble goal of the 1960s civil rights movement. There was a time in America when “systemic racism” really was a problem – even to the point of separate facilities for whites and blacks in some states. We set about to change it. But the ideology of Martin Luther King was subverted by the diversity industry. Rather than ensuring that all minorities are afforded equal protections, now we’re fomenting hatred with CRT and the 1619 project.
Children are being taught that they’re guilty of 200-year-old sins because of some genetic similarity to long dead oppressors. Fighting hatred has morphed into promoting hatred against those benefiting from so called “white privilege.” The movement set out to achieve a color-blind society. Instead, now we’re evaluating everything on the basis of race. The civil rights movement is even advocating separate facilities for whites and blacks again. Sixty years of work and we’re almost back to where we started.
The 1970s brought us the initiative to ensure clean air and water for everyone. Midway through the 20th century our waterways and air had become a filthy mess. Lake Erie was so polluted with industrial waste that it even caught fire once. We set a grand objective to clean it all up, and we created a bureaucratic monster – the EPA – to do it. The EPA did clean up the air and water, but didn’t stop there. It has continued to generate regulations that undermine property rights and place a drag on economic development ever since. The EPA has even decided to branch out into controlling the weather – nothing overly ambitious there. Now it wants to regulate greenhouse gases. Of course, the most prominent greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide – the very gas which we exhale. Soon they’ll be asking for an environmental impact statement whenever a couple wishes to add a new member to the family.
Although it had been around for decades, the women’s rights movement really took off in the 1980s, with legislation to protect women in the workplace. Unfortunately, to advance women’s rights, feminism found common cause with leftism – and spawned the whole reproductive rights industry. The feminists ignore the inconvenient fact that Planned Parenthood originated with the eugenics movement – an organized effort to purify the human race by culling minorities from the heard. Regardless of its origin, “my body my choice” has become a centerpiece of feminism. Abortion is no longer safe, available, and rare. It’s safe, available, and revered as a badge of honor. But as feminism tacked further and further to the left, it has placed women in servitude to Marxism. Now we have biological men competing in women’s sports. Somehow, feminism has managed to make women’s rights secondary to those of men again.
Issues of LGBT rights became a thing in the 1960s. Accommodating those with different biases seemed compassionate at the time. Over the course of 40+ years, acceptance of those with different lifestyles has grown. Justice Kennedy even legitimized the movement by finding a right to dignity in the Constitution. We didn’t know it was there, but he found it emanating from a penumbra – or something. It was viewed as an expedient way to grant constitutional legitimacy to the movement. But look where it has led. We now have naked men bathing with six-year-old girls in a health club. Boys in dresses are raping girls in the restrooms of their schools – a place where every child should feel safe. There is even an epidemic of pregnancies in women’s prisons! It seems that if a sexual predator with a penis claims to identify as a female, he/she/xe may now be sent to a female prison in many states. Who knew that equal treatment of those with gender dysphoria meant this?
What do all of these initiatives (and many more) have in common? They started with the best of intentions, were hijacked by leftists and bureaucrats, and then took on a life beyond their intended end point. As they have grown beyond their original charter, they have done immeasurable damage to our culture, our economy, and our self-governance.
But the path that the stealth leftists have put us on is now waking up Americans. As our destination begins to appear over the horizon, we’re becoming alarmed at where we’re headed. We’re belatedly learning that for the left, our noble initiatives were never about solving problems. They were a means to impose more control over the citizenry. We entrusted them with power and they abused it in an attempt to replace the America as founded with a mythical socialist utopia. Luckily, the last few years have exposed what the left is up to, and we still have a say in how we’re governed. The silent majority is getting mad and will not be silent anymore.
This is an update of an article that appeared two years ago.
Author Bio: John Green is a political refugee from Minnesota, now residing in Idaho. He has written for American Thinker, and American Free News Network. He can be followed on Facebook or reached at greenjeg@gmail.com.
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