Liars (2 page)

Progressivism works at both levels of the unique duality of the human psyche. Progressives first succumb to their own fear, and then they utilize that fear by instilling it in others. They helpfully identify the saber-toothed cats—the things that threaten us and will ultimately lead to our demise—hoping to export their fears to the rest of the herd so that others can be more easily controlled.

The pattern is always the same. First, they construct elaborate enemies that they say will kill us: overpopulation, global warming, gun violence, pornography, public health epidemics, bullying, SUVs, recreational drug use, or even masculinity itself. These are the saber-toothed cats. Then, having convinced us that we should be afraid of the predator in the brush, thereby filling our brains with adrenaline, anxiety, and stress, they offer us the “solution” that will allegedly kill the beast before it can kill us.

It's a never-ending cycle by progressives: introduce fear; exploit it; introduce hope; exploit it.

♦

This book will present a
clear, concise, and documented picture of progressives as they really are: eugenicists, racists, misogynists, terrorists, and authoritarian tyrants. We'll dig through their own words, most of which have been airbrushed out of the official histories by liberal historians who'd rather we not know the truth about their intellectual forebears and the men and women they hold up in our children's classrooms as heroes of democracy. We'll unveil the progressives' methods. We'll puncture their lies, both the ones they tell us and the ones they tell themselves.

But more than that, I want you to walk away with the
why
and the
how
that animate the sordid history of progressivism and the perils it presents to a free people. Understanding this is vital to understanding the roots of the progressive impulse, seeing it for what it is, and freeing yourself from it.

Political movements—particularly the most pernicious ones—have always used fear as a selling point. Hitler used fear of the Jews. Hitler and Mussolini whipped up fear of the Communists in Russia, citing Mongolian-tainted blood. The Communists told their followers to fear the Fascists, the church, God, and capitalism. The progressives we'll study aren't all that different.

But wait, you say, there
are
differences. There was, for example, no racial component to how progressives employed fear to sell their program.

Think again.

Progressives used fear of nonwhites as a big part of their own particular “fear factor.”

Exhibit A: Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. She
advocated contraception as a tool to control inferior populations, whether African-Americans (“We do not want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro”) or lower-class whites.

The eugenics movement—a major component of the early-twentieth-century progressive movement—did much the same thing. “The emergency problem of segregation and sterilization must be faced immediately,” Sanger warned in 1922. “Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period. Otherwise, she is almost certain to bear imbecile children, who in turn are just as certain to breed other defectives.”

Nah, no fear-mongering here!

But back to the outright racist elements of progressivism—and of its country cousin, populism. Woodrow Wilson was unfortunately only the tip of the iceberg. South Carolina's Senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, Georgia's Senator Tom Watson, Mississippi's Senator James K. “The Great White Chief” Vardaman (“The only effect of Negro education is to spoil a good field hand and make an insolent cook”), and Mississippi's Governor Theodore Bilbo were populist/progressives and also racists, often advocating violence and lynchings.

Virginia's Senator Carter Glass, coauthor of the Glass-Steagall Act and Woodrow Wilson's secretary of the Treasury, boasted, “Discrimination! Why that is exactly what we propose, to remove every negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate.”

Outside the South, Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 Progressive Party running mate, Hiram Johnson, played on anti-Japanese hysteria. In 1913, Johnson signed the California Alien Land Law, which effectively barred Japanese persons from owning land in the state. During World War II, California's progressive Republican governor Earl Warren helped implement Franklin Roosevelt's forced internment of Japanese-Americans.

Progressives stirred up incredible hysteria before, during, and after World War I. Theodore Roosevelt exploited anxieties over “hyphenated-Americans,” largely Americans of German or Irish birth who didn't share his enthusiasm for American participation in the conflict. After the United States joined the Allied cause in April 1917, Roosevelt's progressive rival, Woodrow Wilson, further stoked the fires of fear by banning certain publications from the U.S. Mail and imprisoning numerous antiwar figures, including Socialist Party presidential nominee Eugene V. Debs. Under Wilson's Espionage and Sedition Acts, even mainstream outlets were suppressed or outright banned.

Of course, there was a lot more to the progressive and populist fear factor than racism, xenophobia, and wartime crackdowns on free expression. A few decades ago, scholars Nathaniel Weyl and William Marina provided a pretty succinct summary of what the populists were peddling. It bears repeating:

In terms of ideological characteristics, Populism was not merely a mode of organized political expression, but a mood and an attitude of mind. It covers a broad spectrum of movements, ideas and writings, characterized, to a greater or lesser extent, by common views and preconceptions about American society. Among these was the conviction that history was a conspiracy of rich against poor, of idlers and parasites against productive businessmen, farmers and workers, of bloodsucking finance capital against creative agricultural and agrarian capital, of sinister, subtle, sophisticated English and Jewish manipulators of world power against simple, upright American ordinary folk. The Populists tended to believe that the two great political parties of their country were a sham, essentially identical, both corrupt tools of the interests, engaged in loud but spurious battles as a means of diverting the attention of productive America from the fact that it had been deprived of its political birthright.

Sound familiar?

Progressives, meanwhile, were filling in whatever gaps existed in the fear factor game: food and drug safety (were you being poisoned?), workplace safety (were the bosses deliberately working women and children to death? would workers lose limbs or even their lives?), economic security (would the unemployed or the elderly starve?), big business (were the big guys squeezing out the little guys and jacking up your prices?), big-city corruption (what were those Irish saloon keepers up to in the political back rooms?).

It's no accident that among the most memorable phrases in all American rhetoric is Franklin Roosevelt's “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.”

FDR may not have been a great economist, but he was a
brilliant
politician. Most politicians will subtly (or maybe not so subtly) play upon your fears. But in Roosevelt's case, he laid it all on the line:

You're scared silly. You're afraid of losing your jobs, your savings, your homes. You're scared of empty pots and starving children. I will save you from hunger. I will save you from bankers. I will save you from the saber-toothed cat! Just hand over your gold and your future income, and let me plan your retirement for you.

And so, before a terrified America even knew it, FDR (who was soon about to frighten radio audiences with talk of “high finance” and the “malefactors of great wealth”) produced the CCC, the AAA, the WPA, the PWA, the NYA, the NLRB, Social Security, Medicare, and on and on and on.

Fear + Progressives = Government Control.

The progressive cure to
your
problems always involves giving more power to
them
. Always. They are the experts. They know best. They know just how big a business should be allowed to get before it becomes dangerous. They will write regulations and collect taxes and
generate debt to pay for their programs. They know just how much of your income you should be allowed to keep. The free market, the
free individual
, operates recklessly and wastefully, creates imbalances and unfairness. Freedom of choice should be feared because some people, most people, will choose badly.
They
will run things scientifically, nonideologically. And whatever their new programs might cost, somehow they will all magically cost less—and even more magically,
someone else
will pay for them.

Trust them. They're from the government, and they're here to help.

Or maybe not. More than a century later, after more than a hundred years of progressive “solutions” (Square Deal, New Freedom, New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, Great Society, Hope/Change), progressives are still sounding the alarm about basically the very same fears. We've moved from Upton Sinclair's
The Jungle
to genetically modified foods, from outlawing booze to banning Big Gulps, from the Sixteenth Amendment to bashing the one percent. From banning the word
sauerkraut
in World War I to censoring “offensive” speech on today's college campuses. It never ends, the same cycle of fear on the one hand and salvation-can-be-yours on the other.

The three parts of this book will present progressives, from the left and the right, and help you understand them—their stories, experiences, and motivations—more deeply and completely than any book has done before.

Part I discusses the history of the progressive movement in America from the early days of William Jennings Bryan through four pivotal “waves” of progressivism led by Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Barack Obama. It also includes profiles of some key figures during those eras who adopted the damaging progressive mindset as a means to protect themselves from personal traumas. For example, you'll see how the deep depression and losses that Eleanor Roosevelt suffered as a child emboldened her to support
a movement that hoped to bequeath to all Americans the parents she never had.

Part II examines some of the lies that progressives like to tell would-be recruits, for example, that progressivism means being open-minded and supporting freedom and diversity.

Part III discusses the future of the progressive movement while also laying bare its playbook. Most important, it gives us a road map for how to finally wake people up and convince them that fear is their friend. It doesn't need to be defeated—especially by lying, power-hungry politicians—it needs to be harnessed.

The saber-toothed cat may look a lot different today from how it looked seven million years ago, but it can still be defeated in the same way: not by cowering in our caves but by pledging our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to one another. Reliance on our creator, ourselves, our families, and our communities is what's kept people safe and hopeful and happy since the beginning of time. Putting your faith in government and politicians instead is chasing fool's gold.

I hope that by the end of this book, you'll realize that FDR was mostly right but he left one important thing out. There is nothing to fear except fear itself . . . and the progressives who exploit it.

Looking into the future we can contemplate a society . . . in which men shall work together for a common purpose, and in which the wholesale cooperation shall take place largely through government.

We have reason to believe that we shall yet see great national undertakings with the property of the nation, and managed by the nation, through agents who appreciate the glory of true public service, and feel that it is God's work which they are doing, because church and state are as one.

—EARLY AMERICAN PROGRESSIVE RICHARD T. ELY, 1894

Chicago Coliseum

July 9, 1896

Moses ascended the mountaintop.

Mount Sinai was the podium rising above a sea of delegates. The two stone tablets decreed that the U.S. government's monetary supply be backed with reserves of silver instead of gold, along with a zealous commitment to heal the wounds that America's “one
percent” had inflicted on everyone else. Greedy idolaters had worshipped capitalism's golden calf for far too long.

That's why God, in his infinite mercy and wisdom, had finally sent a prophet.

Thirty-six years old, his name was William Jennings Bryan.

The seething mass of humanity inside Chicago's enormous, brand-new coliseum looked up at Bryan, the Democratic Party's nomination for President of the United States, whose imposing height, massive head, aquiline nose, and piercing brown eyes made him a striking figure. As Bryan held forth on the Democrats' proposed national platform, they shouted and cheered,
frantically waving red bandanas in a sign of solidarity with the global workers' movement that had been sweeping Europe for decades.

For the first time at this convention the delegates saw a man of presidential timber on the stage above them.

And, for the first time in generations, they saw a savior.

The sweltering Chicago heat and the stench of thousands of sweating bodies inside the convention hall threatened to overcome him, but Bryan steadied himself for his moment atop Sinai. His knuckles turned white as he grabbed the sides of the lectern. He had never lacked for confidence, so now that thousands of eyes among the party faithful were upon him, now that reporters were furiously scribbling his every word in their notebooks, now that the moment he'd been waiting for all his life was upon him, William Jennings Bryan knew he would not falter.