The Limbaugh Letter - September 2013

Censorship. It’s taken the left 50, 60 years to get to this point — taking hold of the education system, the university, the media — conditioning people not to stand up for themselves, not to exercise freedom, not to speak outside the acceptable norms. After all, what is political correctness but speech censorship?

Liberal Seattle has just banned the use of two terms by government workers: “citizen” and “brown bag.” As ABC News reports, “According to the Seattle Office of Civil Rights, those terms can be deemed offensive or have a history of being offensive and therefore should not be used.” Here’s why: shut up, because racism. That’s the extent of the logic of the left.

Which is why most people, if left alone, will never be liberals. It has to be imposed, by intimidation. It has to be propagandized. It’s not a natural state. Freedom is the natural state of the human being, and liberalism is an imposition on that natural, inborn yearning to be free.

But liberals love imposing the shackles of leftism on others — it is what they live for — and they envy any strongman who has the power to do it. Libs in academia, Hollywood, and Washington were enamored with Hugo Chavez’s ability to control his society. For most of my life, the American left has been absolutely besotted with Fidel Castro. They loved the Soviet Union. The American left thought the U.S.S.R. was a far superior system, hated Ronald Reagan and anybody who looked at the Soviets as an enemy.

Of course, much of the conservative movement in the 70s and 80s was oriented toward defeating the Soviet Union. That was unacceptable to the left in this country. Democrats believed the Soviet superpower was needed to counterbalance America, the focus of evil. So in their minds, Gorbachev was the savior of the world, literally: he was going to save the world from the evil Ronald Reagan.

It hasn’t changed. There is and has been, longer than you and I have been alive, a battle for who will define this country. The left does not believe the United States is the solution to the world’s problems, but the cause. Though intellectually I do understand it, in my heart I can’t comprehend how anybody can hate this country. But they do.

Control. They’re not just opponents. The left has designs on
the country, to “fundamentally transform” it. They don’t
believe in the country as founded, the Constitution, or the
concept of individual liberty. They don’t trust it. They don’t
trust that people, if left alone, will do the “right” thing — not
in terms of traditional morality but in terms of what liberals
approve. If left alone, people will eat the wrong foods and
drive the wrong vehicles and live in the wrong areas and associ-
ate with the wrong groups and teach their kids the wrong
things and believe the wrong ideas. And they can’t permit that.

Liberals must control as much of everyone’s life as they possibly can in order to create the society they approve. That leads to an all-out assault on individual liberty and freedom. And that’s the battle that has been waging in this country from the beginning. Liberals are threatened by liberty. Even the rank-and-file leftists, the average, ordinary, nonelected, non-leadership liberals who post anonymous comments on websites, simply do not trust you to behave — and they’re not content to let you behave the way you want. You must kowtow to the way they want you to live and believe.

Now, you and I are not like that. We conservatives are perfectly content for everyone to live their lives, as we enter the arena of ideas and try to persuade others to join us in the way we view life, liberty, and freedom. But it’s not in our constitution — or the U.S. Constitution — to punish anyone for the way they believe, think, or live. To libs, on the other hand, any person they perceive as a threat — and they do perceive me this way — must be destroyed. Their reputation, character, credibility must be impugned. It’s all about protecting liberal ideology from challenge, which it cannot withstand. This is why I’ve had this fervent desire to try to help everybody in this country understand what liberalism really is. It is not a philosophy. Liberalism is the denial of liberty. It’s the rejection of freedom. It is the imposition of restrictions. You must do everything libs want, think the way they think — and if you don’t, you’ll be punished, because you represent a threat.

Which is precisely what I represent, happily. Liberals attack me because they can’t stand competition for your mind. They don’t want anyone persuading you that they’re dead wrong. They don’t want anyone effectively telling you who they really are — which I do each and every day. With confidence on loan from God — exercising the unalienable right to liberty endowed by the Creator.