The lawless events of the last few weeks (months, counting the overreach of many state governments in the COVID panic) have left me acutely aware of my own human desire for order, and I have to take a deep breath whenever I find myself wishing Trump would just whip out the military and put a stop to it all. But that’s what the desperate Democrats want -- the Rules for Radicals vindication -- create so much chaos that the masses beg for someone to take control. But we can’t let that happen. So I would like to suggest a new motto for conservatives and libertarians alike. It comes from Ken Kesey’s novel, Sometimes a Great Notion -- “Never give a goddamn inch.

We don’t have any inches left. We can’t compromise or concede anything. They’re destroying our history, our economy, our connections with God. They want to tear apart our families and they’ve already made mockeries of our schools. This last spate of riots has to be the end. We can tolerate this Mad Hatter’s tea party no longer.

“Black Lives Matter?”  Whoever said they didn’t? What does that even mean? Two hundred years ago when most American blacks were slaves -- even then -- black lives mattered -- they were money. There’s nothing even remotely rational in that slogan. What would they have chanted had Floyd been white? It looked to me like a terrible miscarriage of justice no matter what the color of his skin, so had he been, say, Jewish, would the rioters have been stealing TVs and torching cop cars? Would they have been chanting, “Jewish Lives Matter?”

So what does it mean? Not much. We abort black babies more often than babies of any other race, but those lives evidently don’t “matter.” The cruelty of the abortion procedures evidently isn’t an issue to these miscreants. The black cops on the street are treated with even worse disrespect than the white cops, so it’s not their lives that matter. Republicans, ever since there were Republicans, have done everything we could to make black lives not only matter, but make them better, so what are these folks (a large percentage who are white) fussing about?

And, since we all agree that black lives matter -- as do all other lives -- then what’s the point? There isn’t one. Blacks in this country are doing well -- under this president, financially better than they ever have. We’d all like to see black families put back together, but that’s not anything a riot will fix. We’d like to see school choice so that black children have a better shot at an education, but the left is adamantly against that. So, what? It’s never been clearer that this has been fit-throwing for fit-throwing’s sake -- and for the sake of stealing the coming election.

Which leads me to conclude that the wrong side knows that it’s losing. The left will try to cheat its way to the White House, but all they have to offer is a hollow shell of a man who never amounted to much in the first place. So, they will have to continue throwing fits, throwing up a smoke screen so no one notices that they have no candidate. This will be a long hot summer, a marathon of ugliness and lying and danger. And we have to be up for it.

This week I had a heated discussion with an ex-student -- a previously sweet, pleasant, Christian young woman, but she’s gone off the edge. The discussion was set off by a meme she had posted that attempted to draw a parallel between 1960s segregationists and Trump supporters -- a totally deceptive and pernicious message. Out of teacherly habit and newfound fury I tried to get this young woman to see the duplicity of her post, but all I got for my trouble was a long list of books I should read (I’m old enough to be her grandmother and was once her professor) and a dribble of links to articles from Huffington Post and NPR.  

I bring this up because we’re all having to face the fact that “agreeing to disagree” is no longer applicable to our national experience. I’m generally a nice person -- too chicken to be otherwise, but I’m done now. These are rocks on which I stand henceforth:

• God and His commandments for both national and personal well-being cannot be 1. Denied, 2. Ignored, or 3. Twisted.  We can no longer give in to the arrogance of atheism. Darwin has had his day and now, if you’re keeping up with microbiology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, geology, or archeology you know that evolution is not a bucket that holds any water.  The idea that blind, purposeless chance produced this world has cost hundreds of millions of lives. We cannot continue down this path. We must fight to put God back into public life, to support and encourage Bible study and application. This nation was built on Judeo-Christian principles and cannot sustain any amount of freedom without that foundation.
• All human beings are flawed and any society we put together is going to have problems, but we must make sure that everyone in this country understands that Americans have built the best society in history -- and that lots of trial and error has gone into that accomplishment. The left assumes that people are all basically good (if they aren’t white); it’s only society that’s at fault and if we just tear it apart, we can make it perfect. That is a lie right out of hell -- and I mean “hell” literally. Only a recognition of Jesus Christ as the “way, the truth, and the life” can substantially improve living, for He is the only door through which we can connect with our creator, and with our personal destiny.
• Free enterprise is the best economic system ever established. The freer it is, the better it works. We must stand up for it -- learn, read about economics, be able to explain it to the deluded souls out there who are confused and fueled by pure envy. We cannot tolerate disdain and hatred for the successful among us. We can no longer stand by while property, public and private, is being destroyed.
• The Constitution is without a doubt the greatest human document ever penned. Only the Bible outshines it. It is all that stands between us and utter misery, but it can’t defend us if we don’t defend it. We must insist on following its guidelines, on courageous, conservative judges, on basing all of our government on its structure. I have been proud of Trump’s choices during this time of crisis because he has, as the Constitution requires, left the states to figure this out on their own and he has, by so doing, allowed the leftists to expose their hopeless helplessness. We must push against any effort to take from us our rights to assemble, to worship, to speak, to defend ourselves and our property, to “become what we can become.

On Independence Day my husband and I are going to drive in a 4^th of July cruise through our little town. We’ll lift an American flag up through the sunroof and join our neighbors in the best we can do to celebrate being a part of this amazing nation. And we will be armed.

Deana Chadwell blogs at www.ASingleWindow.com. She is also an adjunct professor and department head at Pacific Bible College in southern Oregon. She teaches writing and public speaking.