When I wish to elude so-called reality, I watch scenes projected upon a vivid mental screen. The last time the inescapable Pride and Prejudice made the rounds, my cerebral theater featured a rewritten novel, set in the 1980s in the penthouses of Manhattan and vibrant streets of Jackson Heights, with all characters the opposite sex. Pride, a female billionaire gentrifying Queens, and Prejudice, a brilliant but angry immigrant, with background music by Cyndi Lauper. When the youngest brother (Lydia character) is drawn to crime by an evil stepsister, Ed Koch appears in court for him, and the whole fantasy ends on a yacht at the base of the Statue of Liberty.
Now the charming fantasies are vanishing. The colors and music are draining away as scenes of recent America pursue my imagination — dark images, fires, angry drumming, and gunshots. I don’t want to watch it. These scenes trace the crescendo of pivotal events in the life and death of a heroic young woman named Ashli Babbitt.
In 2009, Barack Obama infamously disparaged the doctrine that says America is special among the nations: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Obama was raised, educated, and installed in the presidency from traditions of blame for America and could not experience the essence of American exceptionalism. Throughout human history, loyalty to one’s land and people, and the willingness to defend homeland unto death, has been an extension of family, kinship, and religious loyalty.
Then America happened. Our exceptionalism derives not from loyalty to a land or ruler, but from devotion to ideals. The incomparable thoughtfulness and unique spiritual and philosophical intentionality of the American founding, with its extraordinary literature of inspiration, ideals, and methodology, remains the script for American exceptionalism. Obama was partly right. Greece is exceptional to Greeks, but they love their homeland for a fundamentally different reason from why Ashli Babbitt loved America. Greeks love Greece because it’s home. Americans who love America do so because they love the ideal of individual freedom and cherish their personal inspiration to preserve it.
That is why the term “Homeland Security” is creepy and degrading to America. Homeland is a place where one is settled and comfortable. Americans can never be comfortable because the responsibility to preserve freedom never ends. The life and death of Ashli Babbitt exemplified the apolitical, sacred patrimony of sacrifice for individual freedom.
The Democrats are doing everything possible to kill love for America. The American dream they tout has devolved into a goal of material consumerism. When the Democrats call illegals “dreamers,” they are effectively saying you will not be expected to advance freedom, you will not swear an oath to the Constitution as legal immigrants do; we know you are here for what you can get, and that’s the way we like it. Tragically, Ashli took that oath in an America where racialist protesters are protected by the government and constitutionalist protesters are harshly persecuted and may be shot through the neck and murdered.
The first scene I see is a 13-year-old California girl with a big blond ponytail, asking her mother, “Why are they talking about a blue dress?” Ashli’s mom struggles to answer, as American popular culture became one big dirty joke. A soul sickness has crept into America, emanating from a defiled White House. The scene shows the ease with which the president lied, and the co-abusive first lady blamed a nonexistent vast right-wing conspiracy for her husband’s abuse of women. Hillary is history’s greatest madam secretary of hate, a position she still holds today with her recent deplorables double-down. The vast left-wing elitism vilifying ordinary Americans articulated by the first lady birthed the arrogance that led to the justification for murdering Ashli Babbitt.
The second scene I see is a 16-year-old Ashli standing before a television on September 11, 2001. She is frozen in horror and anger as four airplanes hijacked by Islamic terrorists kill thousands of civilians. They were murdered because of the exceptionalism of America, because of our freedom and prosperity. Tragically, many Americans follow the media-government syndicate into deep slumber and watch as the Constitution is hogtied by the PATRIOT Act and used against Americans. Ashli clutches with both hands her responsibility to preserve the Constitution.
The third scene I see takes place in the desiccated alleys of Iraq. Children are running up to Airman Ashli, hands outstretched for toys and candy. Her patriotic heart ignited, Ashli enlisted in the Air Force when she was 18. She serves for fourteen years, with eight deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ashli Babbitt risked her life standing up for Iraqi freedom, then lost her life standing up for American freedom. The politicized Air Force denied her the military burial honors she deserved.Time is speeding up, and I see three scenes in rapid succession, all set in 2020. By that year, Ashli was a small business owner in the San Diego area. Ashli’s mother said of her daughter, “She’s not radicalized; she’s activated.” The fourth scene is set during the sledgehammer California government repressions of what Ashli called the “controla virus.” Now she is not just watching; she is talking back to the loss of basic freedoms. I’m reading the sign on the door of her pool supply business: “Mask free autonomous zone, better known as America.”
The fifth scene in the summer of 2020 is full of fire, smoke, and screaming. Ashli, whose main job in the Air Force was police work, is watching institutionalized race fakery unleash the worst organized crime spree in American history, burning, looting, and destroying hundreds of small businesses like her own, and killing dozens of people, while vilified and paralyzed police watch their own stations torched.
In the sixth scene, Ashli stands before a text she sent her mom at 11:00 P.M., California time, on November 4, 2020. It said, “They are going to steal it.” She watches vote-counting shut down in numerous key states late at night so the cheaters can calculate and supply enough votes to “elect” a severely demented man as the 46th president. That takes millions of votes to accomplish, but they have been preparing for four years to get it done.
In the seventh scene, we see the barrel of a gun being aimed at Ashli Babbitt’s head. No warning by verbal order, no harmless warning shot, no bullhorn, no non-lethal means, just sudden death. Ashli’s family said she died on the happiest day of her life, wrapped in the flag, protecting her nation, the Constitution, and other people even as she died.
Since the Boston Tea Party of 1773, there has been an American faith, enshrined in the Constitution, that unarmed political protesters shall not be summarily murdered by their government. That faith was betrayed before, recently at the Kent State massacre of May 1970. In time, history will record the name Ashli Babbitt in the roll of patriotic American protesters who were killed in a just cause by the government.
The final scene I see is very different. The bright color and radiant light have returned in my imagination. It is more beautiful than any romantic novel could ever be. Ashli walks toward the goldening ridge of a hill upon which stand many people. They are the patriots who have fought America’s wars and who have kept us safe and free. They wave joyfully to Ashli, calling their comrade to join them.
