Article by Loyd Pettegrew in Townhall
A Conservative New Year’s Resolution
All true conservatives hold hope-upon-hope that 2021 will be better in every way that 2020. The fact that the Republican Party snatched defeat from the jaws of electoral victory has left most of us disconsolate heading into the new year. Being an empiricist academic, now retired, I offer you ten resolutions that will allow each of us to do our part to make 2021 a better year in myriad ways.
- Support
any policy that restrains China from continuing its infiltration and
influence in America while working against their efforts and supporters,
especially politicians like Eric Swalwell, who would do China’s bidding
for their own gain and to America’s detriment.
- Fix our
voting system state-by-state by removing all mail-in balloting and
keeping only absentee balloting with the proper identification
safeguards. This means overhauling the Federal Elections Commission that
turned a blind eye to all the state efforts to undo our federal
election security.
- Require a proper I.D. for all voting.
Everyone must already have a proper I.D. that allows them to cash their
federal and state checks. No proper I.D., no vote! In Florida when
handing in your absentee ballot to the supervisor of elections office,
you must show proper I.D. and someone physically matches your signature
to that on your I.D. Every other states must do this.
As National Review has presented, “At any given moment, there are millions of people who live and work in our country on temporary employment visas--Temporary Protected Status (TPS). They don’t get to vote no matter how the Biden-Harris administration feels about it… In the service of their renewed push for noncitizen voting, leftists characterize noncitizen voting as a ‘logically unassailable [As Steely Dan once said, “Pretzel Logic”], if not clearly mandatory, democratic practice. Their theory places restrictions on the franchise for aliens into the same category as previous discriminatory efforts to restrict minority groups’ access to voting.”
The Hill asks rhetorically, “Can illegal aliens actually vote in our elections? The simple answer is yes, of course they can, and they do.”
STOP all of this NOW—we must mandate that only certified citizens get to vote! - Remove
all voting machine and software systems and replace them with software
that is made in America and is mutually tested and certified by
technology experts from both the Republican and Democrat parties. If
they were developed or headquartered in communist countries like
Venezuela or China, they shouldn’t be used under any circumstances.
- Advocate for and support all efforts to dismantle the Deep State.
Lloyd Billingsley reveals that SES, the Senior Executive Service, is the Deep State hiding in plain sight and quotes the federal Office of Personnel Management saying, “This represents the critical role of the SES as a central coordinating point between Government’s political leadership which sets the political agenda and the line workers who implement it. Members of the SES translate that political agenda into reality.”
The SEC is a great place to begin, but the NIA and its affiliates, the CIA and FBI would be very close seconds. There is no public accountability for most federal organizations. - Only support newspapers and television media that tell the whole truth, not just the progressive/Democrat talking point truths.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I have now given up on the Wall Street Journal, most of Fox News, except for Tucker, and have replaced them with the Epoch Times and Newsmax, which are more reliably conservative. Jeff Davidson in these pages argues that, “Concurrently, despite the multitude of eyewitnesses, with sworn affidavits, under penalty of perjury, even renowned journalists insist that the 2020 elections were fair, legal, and aboveboard. They offer a Twilight Zone rendition of what's occurring in the world. And each of us is supposed to swallow it, hook, line, and sinker.” - Support
conservative universities like Hillsdale, Claremont, James Madison, BYU
and others by encouraging your children/grandchildren to apply and, if
accepted, attend them. Also, help endow conservative scholars in these
institutions of higher learning. Sadly, as some of my close friends have
discovered, you can’t trust your alma mater to actually use your
donations as you request because the predominantly leftist faculty and
administrators will take your money and run, using it for social justice
idiocies that have become their overriding priority.
- Lobby your government representatives to stop creating new loan conditions that incentivize people to not repay these loans or work (think college student loans).
As Forbes reported, “Currently we have 45 million borrowers who collectively owe nearly $1.6 trillion in student loan debt in the U.S. Student loan debt is now the second highest consumer debt category - behind only mortgage debt...More than 3.0 million student loan borrowers have student loan debt greater than $100,000, with approximately 800,000 of that total holding student loan debt greater than $200,000.” - Push personal, not social, responsibility as a character strength.
Elsewhere I have made the case that corporate America, through its advertising and support of organizations like Black Lives Matter, have adopted “virtue signaling” as their face to the general saying, “This year’s U.S. Census reveals that African Americans comprise only 13.4% of America’s population, but my informal survey indicates that about 60% of national ads feature black actors. Hispanics constitute 18.5% of the population but inhabit 35% of the TV ads surveyed. Asians are now 5.9% of America’s population and are featured in about 20% of TV ads. The U.S. Census also indicates only 10.2% of married couples in America are interracial, yet 39% of TV ads now display them.” - When voting in the future, as Thomas Sowell urged back in 2010, “When you vote on the basis of rhetoric and symbolism instead of using your mind, it doesn’t matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.” I have some good friends who are lifelong Republicans but voted against President Trump this year because of his bombast, bellicosity and his Twitter pronouncements. As Evan Sayet has said in these pages back in 2017, “So, to my friends on the Left--and the #NeverTrumpers as well--do I wish we lived in a time when our president could be ’collegial’ and ‘dignified’ and ‘proper’? Of course I do. These aren’t those times. This is war. And it’s a war that the Left has been fighting without opposition for the past 50 years.”
This new year will be far past the time to fight but we must begin now and keep fighting until we can once again control our nation for the good.
