The Elephant's Ear - GOP March Newsletter

Ellis County GOP Newsletter - March 2019

View this email in your browser

Chairman's Note
by Ellis County Chairman, Randy Bellomy

Dear fellow Ellis County Republicans,

Thank you for a great meeting the other night. I want to thank Dr. David Lewis of Navarro College for informing us about the bill to allow them to have a 4-year nursing program sponsored by State Rep John Wray.

Thank you also to Julissa Martinez and Judge Matt Johnson for announcing their candidacy. Julissa is running for District Attorney and Judge Johnson is running for 10th Court of Appeals.

We also had the privilege of installing Brooke Sereika as the new Pct.120 Chairman formerly held by our secretary Sandra Turner.

Sandra became vice-chair in Pct.121 when she moved. We still have 20 open precincts that need chairmen and vice-chairs.

The following precincts need chairmen: 102,106,109,111,116,118,123,124,125,127,128,129133,136,137,139,141,144,145,146.

If you know anyone who would like to be a precinct chair have them check their voter registration card to find out what pct they are in or call the office so we can determine their pct. and tell them the process they will need to go through.

Our March meeting had very good energy and was very informative. We need to stay focused as the primary season is only 5 months away and candidates are already announcing.

Please plan to attend our fundraiser April 13 @10am at 878 airsoft field at least 8 fully automatic weapons will be there for the participants to buy ammo and shoot.

The address will be on the Ellis County website: elliscountygop.org.

Keep pressing! The Dems are coming for Texas.
We are their #1 target.

Thank you,

Randy Bellomy
Ellis County Chairman

BANG! BANG!

GUN SHOOT FUNDRAISER!

Join us Saturday, April 13th at 10am til 2pm or as long as you want to shoot!

Ellis County Republican Party Gun Shoot Fundraiser

878 Airsoft, 4020 FM 878, Waxahachie

Full Auto guns to shoot!

Safety instructors on hand!

BBQ Lunch provided!

Tickets $35 a person
Magazines start at $75

Bring your friends, bring your neighbors, bring your earplugs!

Texas Lottery Revenue
by John Wray, State Representative District 10

While I have been out meeting with many of you in our district, I've been asked more than once where all the money goes from the Texas Lottery.

Some folks have even suggested to me that we should be using the Lottery to fully fund our public education system.

When the Lottery was being shopped to Texans in the early 1990's, voters were left with the impression that all of the Lottery funds would go directly to education.

This is where the talk began that one day the Lottery could fund public education on its own. Since its inception in 1992, the Texas Lottery has generated $28 billion for Texas.

In the beginning, Lottery proceeds were destined for the State's General Fund. It wasn't until 1997 that the Legislature directed Lottery revenue specifically to Texas public schools.

Since then, the Foundation School Fund (FSF) has been the recipient of $22 billion in revenue; however, the Lottery supports some other causes as well.

In 2018, the breakdown of Lottery revenue looked like this:

65.1 % paid to lottery winners
25.5% funded Texas education through the Foundation School Fund
5.4% for retailer commissions
3.7% for lottery administrative costs
0.4% for other programs

Translating the above into dollars, of $5.6 billion in ticket sales, $1.4 billion went to public education.

That remaining 0.4% includes sales of special Veterans scratch of tickets that go directly to the Veteran's Assistance Fund and unclaimed winnings which fund other state programs.

The public education money the lottery raises is directed to the Foundation School Fund (FSF), which is administered by the Texas Education Agency. The money is used for expenses such as teacher salaries, bilingual education, and special education.

In the 2018-19 budget, the Texas will spend nearly $51 billion on public education. Of this money, about $2.5 billion will come directly from the Texas Lottery. That's a lot of public education dollars, but only about 5% of it is coming from the Texas Lottery.

While the Lottery was not always a dedicated revenue stream, over the past 22 years it has become a very dependable source of public education funds. But as a manner of solving Texas' public school finance woes, the Lottery has a lot of ground to make up.

Do We Stand for Our Man, or Our Constitution?
By John Bielamowicz

In our great experiment in self-government, we’ve pushed the limits of the Constitution at times, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. Jefferson bought Louisiana, and FDR tried unsuccessfully to pack the Supreme Court with additional Justices.

This week, a dozen Senate Republicans rightfully chose to anchor themselves to the Constitution in opposition to the President’s plan to re-direct money for a border wall. While it’s not surprising to see Democrats oppose the President, Republicans actually held the keys to putting the Constitution over political party (which I thought was the whole point of being a Republican anyway). Other Republicans in Congress, who railed on Executive overreach when a Democrat was in office, are today doing legal gymnastics to justify one of the most blatant attacks on the separation of powers we’ve seen in years.

Make no mistake, we should secure our borders. If we have a free-for-all on the border, it’s not possible to live out the ideals of welcoming the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” But this isn’t a warning for or against any border policy. It’s a warning that if you’re willing to move the goalposts to get your way, expect for the goalposts to be moved when the other side is in power.

Madison described in The Federalist that the power of the purse is the “the complete and effectual weapon,” that the people rein in “overgrown prerogatives” or the other branches of government. He goes on to warn of falling into the trap of the rise of “passion over reason.”

The basic premise of the Constitution is because we’re not angels, no one person or group gets all the power. The ones who write the law, don’t get to enact it. Those who enact it, don’t get to judge it. The ones who judge it, don’t get to write it.   The President asked for money for border security. Congress then passed a law, and chose to fund some things and not others. Through the power of the purse, like it or not, the Congress and people spoke.

Embracing political expediency, Republicans are taking what they want today at the expense of our future. Republicans and the President are writing the mortgage with a maturity date of when the opposition takes power through the natural course of the swings of our politics. The mortgage will be foreclosed on. Today’s ‘opposition’ will be the new governing majority. With precedent set, national emergencies could be declared for anything when the President doesn’t get his or her way. For example, national emergency on climate change? Here’s your 10 gallon gas allowance for this week. National emergency on guns? Turn in your AR-15.

Adherence to the ideals of the Constitution allow us the strength to sail against the political wind. In a sail boat, a deep and heavy keel allows a boat to sail against the wind. It also allows it to be knocked down 90 degrees to the sea on its side, yet still it still rights itself through the gusts and waves. The Constitution and its ideals are the deep keel that has kept a fledgling idea of a free country upright and afloat, and 242 years later, still staying the course across the waves and storms of history.

In soaring rhetoric in 1838, the man destined to be the first Republican President warned us of what abandoning the law would do. Abraham Lincoln warned that our government would only exist to the extent we adhered to the Constitution and our laws. He rightly said that no conquering force with all the treasure of the world could take a drink from our rivers. If our country failed, it would be by our own fault. He said, “If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

In Ellis County, each of our Republican elected leaders in Congress effectively voted to surrender their rightful Constitutional power of the purse to the Executive branch. When we are willing to compromise Constitutional principles to get our way today, I fear we’ll wish we had those guardrails back when the opposition is inevitably in power at some future date.

Texas vs. California High Speed Rail
by Marty Hiles

The new California governor has decided to cut the 520 mile High Speed Rail (HSR) to just 160 miles which is in the rural San Joaquin Valley, vice the San Francisco, Los Angeles & San Diego route. And to think this was at taxpayer expense to the illusion of preventing global warming.

The original HSR cost was $33 billion, then soared to $99 billion, then after cuts ended up at $80 billion. The taxpayers lost patience after the state rail authority spent several billions acquiring and destroying hundreds of properties but not yet laid tracks. Just a round trip commute from Fresno, CA to San Jose, CA would have cost $154. a day, assuming no subsidies.

That brings us to the HSR here in Texas which is planning to run through Ellis County. The existing plan is to run between Dallas and Houston about 240 miles.

Just a few weeks ago the Texas Central Railroad/Partners (TCR/TCP) had taken 3 Ellis County landowners to court attempting to seize their property through Eminent Domain.

They have filed 43 cases in six counties losing every one including the recent one here in Ellis County. In every case they are denied Eminent Domain Rights because they are not recognized as a railroad company under Texas Law.

Understand TCR/TCP is not finished, they appear to have financial backers and continue to push their pipe dream.

Beckham Group study estimates that each county's economy, between Dallas and Houston, will decline by 25%.

Read the following facts to understand why this is not impacting a few land owners, but greatly impacts Ellis County and Texans as a whole.

1. They are claiming it will reduce traffic and carbon emissions: On the contrary the HSR N700 Series Shinkansen bullet train moving about 170 mph consumes 2051 mega watts per mile that’s equivalent to 190.6 homes electrical usage per year. One megawatt hour is one million watts of electrical power used for 1 hour. Our electrical grid would require a major overhaul to prevent brownouts since the HSR would require first priority in electrical usage.

2. The HSR will enforce Eminent Domain rights for the railroad tracks that will require around 200 ft width that includes, 2 each 50 ft berms, drainage, maintenance access road, fencing, etc. It will require over 20 million cubic yards of Ellis County dirt that will be taken locally. IAW Texas Statutes up to 2 miles out in either direction from the rail centerline, that’s a 4 mile wide path of environmental destruction of land that will be condemned for its resources; dirt, gravel, sand, water, etc.

4. They will close In Elis County numerous roads around 19 reroutes and closed roads, impacting first responders, personal , business, agricultural, school transportation and more.

5. Financially the HSR will take that much taxable land out of the communities, school districts, cities, and county governments while nearby property values decline resulting in millions of dollars in lost revenue from business, agricultural and property taxes.

6. It will be subsidized; each county will experience economic decline for decades to come. HSR being subsidized ensures there will be no millions (nor pennies) in revenue as stated by TCR. Our taxes will increase dramatically to make up for the major short fall of revenue to prevent schools, cities and county from bankruptcy.

The above information presented here has just touched the surface of this boondoggle project. For expediency this is just a small summation of the total facts. If anyone is interested in understanding the full grasp regarding the HSR impact or need a speaker at your group or organization feel free to contact me.

Marty Hiles
martyhhtexas@att.net

Tax-Payer Humor

The IRS returned a tax return to a man in New Jersey after he apparently answered one of the questions incorrectly.

In response to question 23: "Do you have anyone dependent on you?", the man wrote: "2.1 million illegal immigrants, 1.1 million crack-heads, 4.4 million unemployable scroungers, 80,000 criminals in over 85 prisons, plus 650 idiots in Washington, and the entire group that call themselves politicians".

On the returned form, someone at the IRS had attached a Post-it Note beside the question with an arrow and the words: “Your response to question 23 is unacceptable.”

The man sent it back to the IRS with his response on the bottom of the Post It Note: "Who did I leave out?"

Makes one smile, but grimace as well. The NJ filer was too close to the truth as to who is dependent upon him and other taxpayers.

State of Emergency and the Constitution
by Eric Blake

I'd like to preface my comments with an introduction - I love the Republican Party, and the conservative values that we stand for. And I love that we live in a country where we are free to express our opinions, even when others have differing viewpoints. I am indebted to my wife, Tanya, a legal immigrant and now a U.S. citizen, for the support she lends me as I have spent time helping the Party out.

While I have my opinions about a border wall, I want to emphasize that thisarticle is NOT about the wall, but instead my views on what I see as a Constitutional issue.

Our Founding Fathers were inspired to come up with a system of Checks and Balances in the Constitution. No one branch of the government can unilaterally take over the management of our country, and the division of powers remains a safeguard so that we, as the ordinary citizens, are protected from a government exercising unfair advantage over our lives.

But this separation of powers only works if we stand up for our rights, and work as a nation to preserve our Constitution.

I am grateful that the Republican Party of Texas places a high value on the Constitution. The party platform document starts with a preamble that states “We strive to preserve the freedom given to us by God, implemented by our Founding Fathers, and embodied in the Constitution”, and then the Guiding Principles states that we expect our elected leaders to “[Limit] government power to those items enumerated in the United States and Texas Constitutions.” Upholding the Constitution is important enough to the Party that it is mentioned prior to any of the planks, and it should be first and foremost in the minds of any elected official. (https://www.texasgop.org/platform/)

In the Constitution, under Article 1 on the Legislative branch, Section 9 states that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” This may not be the everyday language we use now, but this statement firmly establishes that all decisions of how to spend the taxes on our hard-earned money must be initiated by Congress. While the Executive branch, led by President Trump, is in charge of managing the country, it must do so within the budget established by the Legislative branch.

Recently, President Trump has declared a national state of emergency, as a tactic to redirect more funds towards his campaign promise of a border wall than what Congress was able to agree to in their funding bill.

While it may be admirable that our Commander-in-Chief is trying to keep his campaign promise, I am very concerned that the manner in which he is attempting to do so is putting our future at risk.

Republican Senator Tillis of North Carolina in on record as stating “As a conservative, I cannot endorse a precedent that I know future left-wing presidents will exploit to advance radical policies that will erode economic and individual freedoms,” even while admitting that he supports President Trump’s vision on a border wall.
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/25/i-support-trumps-vision-border-security-i-would-vote-against-emergency/)

A poll of Texans found that a majority of registered voters are opposed to President Trump’s use of a declaration of a state of emergency as a way to appropriate funds towards building a wall, regardless of whether they are for or against the actual construction of a wall.
(https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/26/politics/texas-border-poll/index.html)

Another interesting consideration is property rights. Those in Ellis
County know that the Republican Party has fought against efforts to build a high-speed rail through our county, because it would require the use of eminent domain to take away property from our citizens. A border wall is no different: while the Executive branch is in charge of overseeing any construction at the border, it is the Legislative branch that controls eminent domain power. As one writer has observed: “By going around Congress and declaring a national emergency, Trump just ensured that congressional authorization isn't coming any time soon. In doing so, he may have created a massive barrier -- so to speak -- to his
ability to construct the wall. He needs land for the wall, and if he's
not allowed to take the land, he's stuck.”
(https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/04/opinions/trump-national-emergency-eminent-domain-panfil/index.html)

I applaud the Republican Senators that have stood up to vote in favor of overturning President Trump's declaration of a state of emergency. Congress needs to assert their power over the purse, and take a strong stance for the separation of powers that they are entitled to by the Constitution, or we will risk future presidents following President Trump's example of declaring a state of emergency to advance whatever agenda they want, without the checks and balances that the Constitution intended to be present. I do not think that this issue should be solved by a straight party-line vote, but rather by honest and thoughtful consideration about the consequences.

And even though it is likely that President Trump will veto any Congressional Resolution opposing a state of emergency, and that Congress may not be able to muster enough votes
for a 2/3 majority to overturn a veto, I want to be on record that I
think the Constitutional issues at stake here are far more important, and far more influential to our future as a nation, than any short-term action on whether a border wall is built now. President Trump should work within the bounds set by Congress, rather than abusing a state of emergency to work around Congress.

We live in an amazing country, where we are free to voice our opinions, and where we can agree to do things in a civil manner even when our personal opinions do not always coincide. And regardless of whether the Legislative and Executive branch agree or disagree on a wall, we still have one other branch as a final check and balance - it will be interesting to see what the Supreme Court may have to add to the conversation if our current state of emergency reaches the courts. In the meantime, remember that this is not about the wall, but about our Constitution. I hope my message has spurred some useful conversations and thoughtful consideration of why you are in favor or opposed to any particular action of your government.

Texas Born-Alive Infant Protection Act

Thank you Rep. Jeff Leach (HD-67) filing HB16 and State Senator Lois Kolkhorst (SD-18) filing SB23 - the Texas Born-Alive Infant Protection Act.

Please call their offices today and thank them personally.
Rep. Jeff Leach - 512-463-0544
Senator Lois Kolkhorst - 512-463-0118
Then call YOUR State Representative and State Senator and ask them to support these important LIFE giving measures. To find your representatives, go here.

Statement from State Representative Jeff Leach -

"Today I was proud to file House Bill 16, known as the “Texas Born-Alive Infant Protection Act,” which would strengthen protections for infants who survive abortion procedures to ensure that the highest standard of medical care is afforded to the baby. The collective conscience of our Nation has been shocked in recent weeks as we have witnessed elected policymakers advocate for and support measures that equate to legalized infanticide. Texans strongly reject this callous disregard for human life, and we will NOT remain silent. This bill is simple - it draws a line in the sand and proclaims loudly and clearly that Texas will continue to #StandForLife."

Shall We Defend Our Common History?
by Roger Kimball, Editor and Publisher, The New Criterion

Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterionand publisher of Encounter Books. He earned his B.A. from Bennington College and his M.A. and M.Phil. in philosophy from Yale University. He has written for numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times Book Review, and is a columnist for The Spectator USA, American Greatness, and PJ Media. He is editor or author of several books, including The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, and Vox Populi: The Perils and Promises of Populism.

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on board the Crystal Symphony on July 19, 2018, during a Hillsdale College educational cruise to Hawaii.

The recent news that the University of Notre Dame, responding to complaints by some students, would “shroud” its twelve 134-year-old murals depicting Christopher Columbus was disappointing. It was not surprising, however, to anyone who has been paying attention to the widespread attack on America’s past wherever social justice warriors congregate.

Notre Dame, a Congregation of Holy Cross institution, may not be particularly friendly to its Catholic heritage. But its president, the Rev. John Jenkins, demonstrated how jesuitical (if not, quite, Jesuit) he could be. Queried about the censorship, he said, apparently without irony, that his decision to cover the murals was not intended to conceal anything, but rather to tell “the full story” of Columbus’s activities.

Welcome to the new Orwellian world where censorship is free speech and we respect the past by attempting to elide it.
Over the past several years, we have seen a rising tide of assaults on statues and other works of art representing our nation’s history by those who are eager to squeeze that complex story into a box defined by the evolving rules of political correctness. We might call this the “monument controversy,” and what happened at Notre Dame is a case in point: a vocal minority, claiming victim status, demands the destruction, removal, or concealment of some object of which they disapprove. Usually, the official response is instant capitulation.

As the French writer Charles Péguy once observed, “It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.” Consider the frequent demands to remove statues of Confederate war heroes from public spaces because their presence is said to be racist. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, for example, has recently had statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson removed from a public gallery. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has set up a committee to review “all symbols of hate on city property.”
But it is worth noting that the monument controversy signifies something much larger than the attacks on the Old South or Italian explorers.

In the first place, the monument controversy involves not just art works or commemorative objects. Rather, it encompasses the resources of the past writ large. It is an attack on the past for failing to live up to our contemporary notions of virtue.
In the background is the conviction that we, blessed members of the most enlightened cohort ever to grace the earth with its presence, occupy a moral plane superior to all who came before us. Consequently, the defacement of murals of Christopher Columbus—and statues of later historical figures like Teddy Roosevelt—is perfectly virtuous and above criticism since human beings in the past were by definition so much less enlightened than we.

The English department at the University of Pennsylvania contributed to the monument controversy when it cheered on students who were upset that a portrait of a dead white male named William Shakespeare was hanging in the department’s hallway. The department removed the picture and replaced it with a photograph of Audre Lorde, a black feminist writer. “Students removed the Shakespeare portrait,” crowed department chairman Jed Esty, “and delivered it to my office as a way of affirming their commitment to a more inclusive mission for the English department.” Right.

High schools across the country contribute to the monument controversy when they remove masterpieces like Huckleberry Finn from their libraries because they contain ideas or even just words of which they disapprove.

The psychopathology behind these occurrences is a subject unto itself. What has happened in our culture and educational institutions that so many students jump from their feelings of being offended—and how delicate they are, how quick to take offense!—to self-righteous demands to repudiate the thing that offends them? The more expensive education becomes the more it seems to lead, not to broader understanding, but to narrower horizons.

Although there is something thuggish and intolerant about the monument controversy, it is not quite the same as the thuggishness of the Roman emperor Caracalla, who murdered his brother and co-emperor Geta and had statues of Geta toppled and his image chiseled off coins. Nor is it quite the same as what happened when Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin exiled Leon Trotsky, had him airbrushed out of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, and sent assassins to Mexico to finish the job.

Iconoclasm takes different forms. The disgusting attacks on the past and other religious cultures carried out by the Taliban, for example, are quite different from the toppling of statues of Saddam Hussein by liberated Iraqis after the Iraq War. Different again was the action of America’s own Sons of Liberty in 1776, who toppled a statue of the hated George III and melted down its lead to make 40,000 musket balls. It is easy to sympathize with that pragmatic response to what the Declaration of Independence called “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” It is worth noting, however, that George Washington censured even this action for “having much the appearance of a riot and a want of discipline.”
While the monument controversy does depend upon a reservoir of iconoclastic feeling, it represents not the blunt expression of power or destructiveness but rather the rancorous, self-despising triumph of political correctness. The exhibition of wounded virtue, of what we now call “virtue-signaling,” is key.

Consider some recent events at Yale University, an institution where preening self-infatuation is always on parade. Yale recently formed a Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming and a Committee on Art in Public Spaces. Members of the former prowl the campus looking for buildings, colleges, faculty chairs, lecture programs, and awards that have politically incorrect names. The latter police works of art and other images on campus, making sure that anything offensive to favored groups is covered or removed.

At the residential college formerly known as Calhoun College, for example—it’s now called Grace Hopper College—the Committee ordered the removal of stained glass windows depicting slaves and other historical scenes of Southern life. Statues and other representations of John C. Calhoun have likewise been slotted for removal. Calhoun, an 1804 Yale graduate, was a leading statesman and political thinker of his day. But he was also an apologist for slavery, so he has to be erased from the record.

Of course, impermissible attitudes and images are never in short supply once the itch to stamp out history gets going. Two years ago it was Calhoun and representations of the Antebellum South. More recently it was a carving at an entrance to Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library depicting an Indian and a Puritan. The Puritan, if you can believe it, was holding a musket—a gun! Who knows, perhaps he was a member of the NRA or at least could give inspiration to other members of that very un-Yale-like organization. According to Susan Gibbons, one of Yale’s librarian-censors, the presence of an armed Puritan “at a major entrance to Sterling was not appropriate.” Solution? Cover over the musket with a cowpat of stone—but leave the Indian’s bow and arrow alone!

Actually, it turns out that the removable cowpat of stone was only a stopgap. The outcry against the decision struck a chord with Peter Salovey, Yale’s president. “Such alteration,” he noted, “represents an erasure of history, which is entirely inappropriate at a university.” He’s right about that. But if anyone has mastered the art of saying one thing while doing the opposite it is President Salovey. He spoke against “the erasure of history.” But then, instead of merely altering the image, he announced that Yale would go full Taliban, removing the offending stonework altogether.

In the bad old days, librarians and college presidents were people who sought to protect the past, that vast storehouse of offensive attitudes and behavior that also just so happens to define our common inheritance. In our own more enlightened times, many librarians and college presidents collude in its effacement.
Someone might ask, “Who cares what violence a super-rich bastion of privilege and unaccountability like Yale perpetrates on its patrimony?” Well, we should all care. Institutions like Yale, Harvard, and Stanford are among the chief drivers of the “progressive” hostility to free expression and other politically correct attitudes that have insinuated themselves like a fever-causing virus into the bloodstream of public life. Instead of helping to preserve our common inheritance, they work to subvert it.
Spiriting away stonework in the Ivy League may seem mostly comical. But there is a straight line from those acts of morally righteous intolerance to far less comical examples of puritanical censure.

Consider the case of James Damore, the now former Google engineer who wrote an internal memo describing the company’s cult-like “echo chamber” of political correctness and ham-handed efforts to nurture “diversity” in hiring and promotion. When the memo was publicized, it first precipitated controversy—then it provided Google CEO Sundar Pichai a high horse upon which to perch, declare Damore’s memo “offensive and not OK,” and then fire him. For what? For expressing his opinion in a company discussion forum designed to encourage free expression!

In one way, there was nothing new about Google’s actions. Large companies have always tended to be bastions of conformity. Decades ago, everyone at IBM had to wear a white shirt and was strongly encouraged to espouse conservative social values. Today, everyone in Silicon Valley has to subscribe to the ninety-five theses of the social justice warrior’s creed, beginning with certain dogmas about race, fossil fuels, sexuality, and the essential lovableness of jihadist Muslims. If you are at Google and dissent from this orthodoxy, you will soon find yourself not at Google.

The violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 was a godsend to the self-appointed hate police. In its immediate aftermath, companies around the country took pains to declare their rejection of “hate,” and ProPublica, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and other leftish thugs expanded their witch hunts beyond such targets as the “Daily Stormer”—a vile anti-Semitic website. After Charlottesville, for example, “Jihad Watch”—hardly a hate group website—was dropped by PayPal until a public outcry induced PayPal to reverse its decision. There have been other such casualties, and there will be many more.

Let’s step back and ask ourselves what motivates the left-wing virtuecrats attempting to enforce their new regime of political correctness. Christian theologians tell us that the visio beatifica—the beatific vision of God—is the highest pleasure known to man. Alas, that communion is granted to very few in this life. For the common run of mankind, I suspect, the highest earthly pleasure is self-righteous moral infatuation.

Like a heartbeat, moral infatuation has a systolic and diastolic phase. In the systolic phase, there is an abrupt contraction of sputtering indignation: fury, outrage, high horses everywhere. Then there is the gratifying period of recovery: the warm bath of self-satisfaction, set like a jelly in a communal ecstasy of unanchored virtue signaling.

The communal element is key. While individuals may experience and enjoy moral infatuation, the overall effect is greatly magnified when shared. Consider the mass ecstasy that at first accompanied Maximilien Robespierre’s effort to establish a Republic of Virtue during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror in 1793.

The response to Donald Trump’s comments about the murderous violence that erupted in Charlottesville provides another vivid example. Trump’s chief crime was to have suggested that there was “blame on both sides” as well as “good people” on both sides of the protest. I am not sure there was an abundance of “good people” on either side of the divide that day, although Trump’s main point was to distinguish between lawful protest and hate-fueled violence. But forget about distinctions. The paroxysms of rage that greeted Trump were a marvel to behold, as infectious as they were unbounded. One prominent commentator spoke for the multitude when he described Trump’s response as a “moral disgrace.”

I didn’t think so, but then I thought that the President was correct when he suggested that the alt-Left is just as much a problem as the alt-Right. Indeed, if we needed to compare the degree of iniquity of the neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klanners, on the one hand, and Antifa and its fellow travelers on the other, I am not at all sure which would come out the worse. Real Nazis—the kind that popped up like mushrooms in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s—are scary. But American neo-Nazis? They are a tiny bunch of pathetic losers. The Ku Klux Klan was a terrorist group with millions of members in its earlier incarnations. Now it too is a tiny bunch—5,000 or 6,000 by most estimates—of impotent malcontents.

Antifa, on the other hand, has brought its racialist brand of violent protest to campuses and demonstrations around the country: smashing heads as well as property. I suspect that paid-up, full-time members of the group are few, but the ideology of identity politics that they feed upon is a gruesome specialty of the higher education establishment today.

I also thought that the President was right to ask where the erasure of history would end. At Charlottesville it was a statue of Robert E. Lee. But why stop there? Why not erase the entire history of the Confederacy? There are apparently some 1,500 monuments and memorials to the Confederacy in public spaces across the United States. According to one study, most of them were commissioned by Southern women, “in the hope of preserving a positive vision of antebellum life.” A noble aspiration, inasmuch as the country had recently fought a civil war that devastated the South and left more than 700,000 Americans dead. These memorials were part of an effort to knit the broken country back together. Obliterating them would also be an attack on the effort of reconciliation.

And what about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington? They both owned slaves, as did 41 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence. What about them? To listen to many race peddlers these days, you would think they regarded George Orwell’s warning in 1984 as a how-to manual: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified,” Orwell wrote, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.

Plato was right when he said that politicians are essentially rhetoricians. Rhetoric succeeds or fails not because of its logic or intellectual substance, but on the question of its emotional appeal.

By that standard, I’d say that Donald Trump, though often rhetorically effective, missed an important rhetorical opportunity at Charlottesville. He didn’t understand that the politically correct dispensation that rules academia, the media, the Democratic Party, and large swathes of the corporate world requires a certain ritual homage to be paid to its reigning pieties about “racism” in America.

Doubtless there are things to criticize about Donald Trump. But being racist isn’t among them. What infuriates his critics—but at the same time affords them so many opportunities to bathe in the gratifying fluid of their putative moral superiority—is that Trump refuses to collude in the destructive, politically correct charade according to which “racism” is the nearly ubiquitous cardinal sin of white America. He is having none of that, and his refusal to go along with the attempted moral blackmail is driving his critics to a fever pitch. They scream “racism” but, unlike other politicians, Trump refuses to cower in the corner whimpering. That he goes against their script infuriates them.

Back in 1965, the Frankfurt School Marxist Herbert Marcuse wrote an essay called “Repressive Tolerance.” It is a totalitarian classic. Marcuse distinguished between two kinds of tolerance. First, there is what he called “bad” or “false” tolerance. This is the sort of tolerance that most of us would call “true” tolerance, the sort of thing your parents taught you and that undergirds liberal democracy.

Second, there is what Marcuse calls “liberating tolerance,” which he defined as “intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”

So here we are. The old idea of tolerance was summed up in such chestnuts as, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The new dispensation is: “I disapprove of what you say, therefore you may not say it.”

The Marxist-tinged ideology of the 1960s has had a few decades to marinate the beneficiaries of our free-market society, steeping them in the toxic nostrums that masquerade as moral imperatives in our colleges and universities. Today we find the graduates of those institutions manipulating the fundamental levers of political and corporate power.

The monument controversy shows the susceptibility of “liberating tolerance” to fanaticism. And it reminds us that in the great battle between the partisans of freedom and the inebriates of virtue, freedom is ultimately negotiable—until it rouses itself to fight back. At stake is nothing less than the survival of our common history.

Join the Legacy Circle!

When you become a Legacy Circle member of the Republican Party of Ellis County you will be a vital part of helping us build a powerful and influential presence here.
Your contribution will help keep Ellis County and the great state of Texas, RED!

Your valuable contribution will go directly to providing a permanent location for our GOP Headquarters in Ellis County which allows us to do the following:

1. Hold our GOP monthly meetings open to all citizens
2. Have training for Precinct Chairman and volunteers
3. Host our ‘Get Out The Vote’ efforts at election time
4. House our resources such as our candidate campaign signs and literature
5. Be a center for town hall meetings to educate and inform our citizens

There are several levels of membership – please choose the one that is right for you!

Student level contribution - $15
Bronze level contribution - $100
Silver level contribution - $200
Gold level contribution - $500
Platinum level Contribution - $1000

To make a contribution, go to:
https://www.elliscountygop.org/contribute.html

“The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty."
- James Madison

CALL FOR ENTRIES
We want to hear from you!
If you would like to submit an article or
Op-Ed column to The Elephant's Ear,
please email Kristina Blake, thinkkristina@gmail.com
Let your voice be heard!

UPCOMING EVENTS

Ellis County GOP Meeting
Tuesday, April 2nd
7pm
610 Water St.
Waxahachie
All are welcome!

Ellis County GOP Fundraiser
Full Auto Gun Shoot!
Saturday, April 13th
10am - 2pm
878 Airsoft
4020 FM 878
Waxahachie
BBQ Lunch provided
Tickets $35 per person
Magazines start at $75
Bring your friends, your neighbors and your earplugs!

ELLIS CO.FUN FACTS

Midlothian Wine and Arts Festival
Saturday April 27th
2pm - 9pm
Downtown Midlothian

PRECINCT SCOOP

Become A Precinct Chairman!
If you would like to become a Precinct Chairman for your precinct, contact Ellis County GOP Chairman Randy Bellomy
randy@bellomyheatingandair.com