How
Fun fact: I am one of the most radical conservatives you know. I want to conserve not just the recent past (say, Jim Crow) but also the Age of Enlightenment, which inspired the liberation of billions.
A conservative is not the same as a reactionary: the person who says “no” to every thing that is new. Words have meanings — another thing that conservatives affirm.
A conservative is also not a fascist: the person who embraces “men of action,” to replace ideas and elections with lies and violence.
(And, yes, you can enact violence with a keyboard. Ask the drone pilots. Can’t very well ask their targets, can you?)
You might be tempted to think my claim to being a radical conservative is still a rhetorical flair, but a few of you will recall that my blog 20 years ago was called outis, the answer that Odysseus gave the Cyclops.
Speaking of words in other languages: autogolpe.
That’s what we are living through: when an elected government abuses its own power to rule in illegal and undemocratic ways.
It’s important that this word, like coup, does not yet exist in the American English. Because y’all don’t know how to live in the reality that you’ve created for yourselves.
But my father does. Golpe de estado. A blow against the state.
When you feel you can’t embrace the truth – that we are living through a coup, an autogolpe, a putsch — because it makes you feel lonely, as none of your friends, colleagues, family members are willing to acknowledge the truth, I want you to remember that my father spent weeks in solitary confinement for affirming the truth that Castro was a dictator, and his Make Cuba Great Again movement was a lawless power grab.
Believe me, your transient loneliness on LinkedIn or on Instagram or at the supermarket, is incomparable to spending a minute, let alone two thousand of them, in a literal hole.
Moreover, you’re not really alone, are you? There are millions of Americans who can not only parrot the words of the pledge of allegiance but actually, you know, understand them.
How many times have you pledged allegiance to the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all?
You made the pledge: now act on it.
That’s the “how”.
You keep the faith. You honor your word.
You tell the truth.
Be a conservative. Save our country.