The MCRP held a successful fundraising BBQ on Labor Day, with remarks by several local candidates.  Chair James Buchal's remarks at the BBQ on "Winning the War Against the Constitution are reproduced below.  A video of the speech is available on YouTube (click here).

John Adams, our second President, once wrote that:

“. . . we have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

We are seeing a war now underway against the Constitution, and I want to suggest that it is the product of political leaders who display all of these evils, and then focus on the more important and difficult question is how we win the war against the Constitution.

The Importance of the Constitution

Most of us here today understand that there is something great about America, and that greatness arose from a vision of government crystallized in the Constitution. The great concepts of inalienable rights, equality of opportunity, and a government put in chains to prevent the avarice and ambition of officeholders from destroying the country, were drawn from the learning of all human history.

We understand that a critical part of the Constitution is limiting federal powers to a specific and narrow list, with nearly all power reserved to the States, or to the People. When unprincipled and corrupt Congressmen insist on federalizing local law enforcement, local education, and or even forest management, our judges were supposed to strike those laws down. But we now have a majority of judges who think the federal government has unlimited power to control everything, even stopping states from trying to prevent election fraud by illegal aliens. Our elected officials, including a lot of Republicans, think they were born with boots to ride us, or milk us as tax cows for their pet projects.

The New York Times now says that restrictions on government in the Constitution “serve as the foundation for a government that rules over people”. This is a diabolical reversal of the real problem: we have a government lording over us because it is unrestrained, and the Left says the problem is the Constitution.

Constitutional limits on government powers are in the way of the plans of Leftists to take control of American and Americans. To hold on to America, we must hold on to the meaning of the Constitution, and respect that it means what it says.

But the Left has been winning the war to water down the Constitution my whole life. We say free speech is the foundation of a free Republic; they say that it is an instrument of white supremacy. We say that the Second Amendment is the second foundation of a free Republic, because citizens without guns are not citizens, but subjects of a sovereign power. But now we have a majority of judges who don’t believe that the First Amendment or the Second Amendment mean what they say.

In our time, one side defends the Constitution and the other side will stop at nothing to replace it. That is why the Democrats fight the appointment of any good judges like rabid badgers, and have completely corrupted the appointment process here in Oregon so that a good judge can’t even make it to President Trump’s desk. 

The forces of the Left also took over public education a long time ago. Even Ronald Reagan, who campaigned on shutting down the unconstitutional Department of Education, failed to stop the rise of the education professionals who are now bankrupting Oregon and every other state.

The public schools ruthlessly downplay all that is good about America, and weaponize young people as mindless leftist mobs.

Fifty-one percent of students now think that it’s acceptable to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. About 20 percent of students hold that it’s acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking,

Think about what the young people of Portland are chanting:

“No borders, no walls, no USA at all”

“Cops and Klan go hand-in-hand,”

Having a generation of young people run around calling people fascists is just the beginning. The Left is trying to create a climate where the Leftist mobs will accept Leftist commands to physically attack anyone deemed to be a fascist.

One of the reasons the Left is so unhinged now is that with the election of President Trump, they lost the power to appoint judges dedicated to destroying the Constitution. With President Trump in office, the Left is resorting more and more to violence and intimidation to advance the destruction of the Constitution.

We have taken some of heat for standing up for Joey Gibson and his Patriot Prayer protests. I don’t approve of everything his followers are doing. We don’t need people wearing T-shirts glorifying a leader like Pinochet who killed communists without a trial, any more than we need people wearing T-Shirts glorifying a mass murderer like Che Guevara.

But these Patriot Prayer folks have got guts, and they are like a magnifying glass that brings out the true nature of the Left. And as they do that, the American people get to see what the Left is really like. And they don’t like violent or disorderly conduct. Richard Nixon won his election in 1968 because a silent majority of Americans were fed up with what the Democrats were doing to the country, and the worse things get, the more that will happen again.

Even the large corporations, one by one, now turn to the Left. Facebook and Google are now weapons of the Left, diabolically restricting conservative views, while pretending to offer a neutral platform. Facebook's algorithms have even flagged the Declaration of Independence as hate speech.

A United States Senator from Connecticut recently tweeted:

Infowars is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to tear our nation apart. These companies must do more than take down one website. The survival of our democracy depends on it.

When you hear a Leftist talk about “our democracy,” they are talking about what they will make after they destroy the Constitution and the Republic, and replace it with a national socialist regime with all the power the Nazis ever had.

The elite scum like Senator Murphy who have risen to the top in this country are united in one view: too much free speech helped President Trump get elected, and we must do everything we can to shut down free speech.

They call the opinions they disagree with “hate speech” and seek to shut down that speech by any means necessary. If they can’t outlaw it, they will suppress it by violence and intimidation.

Winning the War

Despite all of these attacks on the Constitution, we are still fortunate. Unless we work for the government or a large corporation that depends on the government, we can still say what we think. We still have enough to eat. We can look beyond the struggle to stay alive for a higher purpose.

Many of us here are Christians, or trying to be, and we know the Constitution was written by Christians who believed that the Kingdom of Heaven was certainly not going to be the product of government. The Christian view, and the truth, is that left to their own devices, people are immoral and wicked. It is a constant struggle, that must be won by each generation of parents, and each generation of voters, to hold the line between a civilized society, with good norms of behavior, and lawlessness where might makes right. When we are winning that struggle, the Constitution is safe, and when we are failing, the leaders who interpret the Constitution will twist it to their own selfish ends.

And as Christianity declines, more and more people are filling their need for higher purpose with belief systems that are not grounded in reality and truth.  Doctrines like communism, or political correctness, or intersectionality.  They say on the one hand that people are inherently good, but they also insist that people must be improved and controlling so they behave the way that elites want them to, and think the things the elites want them to think.

We cannot forget that these people waging war on the Constitution think they are motivated by a higher purpose: they want to make the world perfect, and their quest for this purity and perfection makes them into dangerous extremists. Because people are imperfect, the only way they can realize their goals is with a government of absolute power.

And perhaps the greatest risk we face, is that as the Left works day and night to destroy morality and religion, it brings about more and more disorder so that even Republicans begin to say the government must have more power to keep order.

The Followers

So we are going to have to restore something like old-fashioned morality and religion, or we will lose everything. That does not mean what the Left thinks it means, that as Republicans we seek some kind of theocracy. It means we see a return to good old American values, including the right to be left alone, and believe what we want to believe if it’s not really hurting anyone.

The old Chinese proverb is that one third are following the path of light, and one third are following the path of darkness, and one third are just following. We see this in the Oregon voter registrations, with one block of Republicans, one block of Democrats, and one block of non-affiliated voters.

We can’t worry about the one-third following the path of darkness. We need to learn to quickly abandon any attempt to change their minds. They are lost.

But because we live in a democratic Republic, our whole future depends on how that one-third who are just following decides to vote. And so there is nothing more important than persuading them to follow us, and not the forces of darkness.

We know that they don’t like political parties because they didn’t register for one. They are repelled by anything that smells like partisan politics. They want to see Americans coming together to solve problems, not attacking others with labels.

How do we win the hearts and minds of this group? What would the moral and religious people John Adams was talking about do? What does Christianity teach? It tells us to accept the holy spirit, and act in a way motivated by the two core principles: truth and love.

So if we are going to win this War, we are going to have to spread the truth, but do it in a loving way. What do I mean by proceeding in a loving fashion?

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: we don’t win hearts and minds by acting like jerks. The first war we have to win is over our own morality, and self-control. The Bible tells believers to put on the “breastplate of righteousness,” but too often we have allowed a righteous attitude to repel the followers.

The forces of evil have been laying the groundwork with the one third that are just following for a long time. For decades, the Left has attacked Christianity as judgmental or shaming. And now, the Left is now far worse than Republicans; they are the ones behaving like the Spanish Inquisition or the Salem witch hunters. People lose their jobs or suffer massive government fines for mere political differences of opinion.

And many of us, myself included, want to rail on and on and on about the Left when we are talking to non-Republicans, instead of focusing on the policy issues the mushy middle cares about. When your mind is full of the truth, and righteousness, it often gets in the way of listening patiently and respectfully to other human beings, particularly when they are repeating their Leftist programming. We have to be gentle, and bring people to the truth with gentle questioning to lead them to realize errors in their thinking.

I know you guys can do it. As I look out among you, I see a Party that has been far more accepting and tolerant of difference than the Democrats or the Left. I see a Party that may see some people as sinners, but doesn’t get in people's faces about it because we are all sinners, struggling in our own way to improve.

Spreading Moral Truth

Once we have ourselves in that good loving frame of mind, what does it meant to spread moral truth?

What stirs people up to go to the polls is not some dry, abstract argument about tax efficiency. What stirs people up is questions of right and wrong.

And that’s why we can win: people who aren’t really evil, and that’s most of them, still have some moral sense. They can tell when people are behaving well, or behaving badly. If they tell you Republicans are too judgmental, say both sides have their faults; the Left are behaving like the new Puritans, and the new hypocrites.

We can win because the Republican side is the side aligned with the great moral truths. Let me give you an example: a fundamental moral code is in the Ten Commandments. The Tenth Commandment says: “You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's.”

Nearly all Leftist politics is based on inciting covetousness. The core of their appeal is the evil of stirring up one group to vote to take away the property of another.

Here’s a horrifying statistic. More than half of young people have a positive image of socialism, as do 57% of Democrats. In the last two years, the support of younger Americans for capitalism has declined 12%.

The mushy middle is moral enough to know that if your neighbor has a nice car, it’s not right for you to steal it. And if they think about it, they know it’s not right to pass a tax to transfer money to people who don’t really need it. And they know that we have more and more income transfer programs, with more and more people who don’t really need the money, and are parasites on the working classes. This just isn’t sustainable.

We are the party of equal opportunity that wants an economic system that lets individuals be all that they can be. The Left imposes more and more and more regulations and controls that treat economics like dividing up a pie until there is no more pie, like Venezuela.

And if the mushy middle points out that some Republicans have been looting the government too, or bailing out the banks, the answer is simple: two wrongs don’t make a right. We’re trying to move forward here and MAGA.

The moral truth perspective works for all the issues. No Leftist can tell you why it’s fair for illegal immigrants to cut to the front of the line, ahead of all the people who followed the rules. No Leftist can explain why we should feel more sorry for the children of illegal alien criminals than American criminals.

No Leftist can explain why it is moral to have such high taxes that rents in Portland must include hundreds of dollars a month to pay them. Where is the morality micromanaging every aspect of construction and land use until the costs of housing are doubled or tripled? And what is the morality of people who say the only way to solve this is to tax the people further so that their friends can get rich building subsidized housing, where further citizens will be corrupted by living at the expense of others?

Where is the morality of public school systems that tax parents to teach doctrines they would rise up against if they only knew what is going on. It is our job to help them understand what is going on.

What about racism, sexism, and bigotry? Again the Republican Party is the moral party, and the Democrats, underneath their façade of virtue signaling, have the same rotten core the Democrats did when they formed the backbone of the KKK and the Southern segregationists.

Over and over again, the modern Democrats push initiatives that are racist to the core. The truth is that people aren’t held back in this country because of their color or sex. The truth is that young women are outpacing young men in educational achievement; Asian-Americans are out-earning white Americans; black immigrants are out-earning native whites in the United States.

The Leftists are not using words like racism or sexism to describe reality, they are using them as a tool to get power. Even the one-third followers can see hypocrisy when the head of the DNC proves to be a sexist monster who abused his girlfriend, but the Democrats don’t have a problem with that, because any and all truth is subordinated to the quest for power. You can convince the people in the middle that the hysterical claims of the Left are diverge further and further from reality.

Conclusion: Resist Evil

And the final moral truth we need to spread is that many within our own Republican-controlled Justice Department and FBI and Congress are creating legions of swamp creatures whose evil deeds are not punished. You know their names: Clinton, Comey, Brennan, Rosenstein, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Ohr. Our own failings are serious. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote that “[w]hen we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

When you are out talking to the unaffiliated voters, help them understand that we recognize we’re not perfect, but there is only one solution for this and every other problem we have: getting rid of the bad public officials and replacing them with good ones. Nothing else matters. We can go to public hearings and town halls and write letters and lobby legislators about policy, and all that effort means nothing when the people in charge are bent on our destruction.

The stakes are very high this November, and it is up to each of us here today to educate that one-third of Oregon that is just following. The culture of ideas is here, now, among us. It is not telephone, it is not newspapers. It is you and I, talking to our neighbors in a loving way, spreading moral truth, one voter at a time. That is what is going to make a difference this fall.

Thank you.