Progressives, be they politicians, the rabid rank-and-file voter or the embarrassingly biased legacy media, are light-years removed from caring about the overriding good of the country. They care only about grabbing and retaining power, by any means necessary. Whether it’s rigging elections, pandering to fringe voting blocs, lying outright about economic and foreign policy issues, rewriting history, turning every single negative domestic occurrence (train derailments, school shootings, severe weather, product shortages, etc.) into an anti-Republican cudgel, progressives always look to gain political advantage and put their opposition in a negative light. What’s best for the country as a whole is never a consideration for them.

Some recent examples:

The Norfolk Southern Ohio Train Derailment

The recent train derailment and subsequent release of toxic gases in East Palestine, Ohio was a truly disastrous event. Innocent people had their health impacted and their lives upended. But progressives stayed away from this event like the plague. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg avoided visiting for as long as he could. When the enormity of the disaster couldn’t be denied any longer, the entire progressive machine -- politicians and legacy media alike -- did their best to blame the accident on Republicans’ dismantling of Obama-era safety regulations.

That was an outright lie, of course, but it succeeded in making an impact on some of the casually attentive public. Progressives weren’t interested in helping the residents of East Palestine. Progressives were only interested in leveraging the accident to gain political advantage over Republicans.

Recent Mass Shootings

Predictably, progressives always go right to their favorite boogeyman: Gun control. “When will we learn? How much more will it take?”

No new gun laws would have prevented any of these shootings. The cause is far deeper, having more to do with the shifting/diminishing sense of personal responsibility, the distorted and totally unjustified feeling of entitlement amongst the young, and the growing dissolution of the traditional two-parent nuclear family that is no longer present to impart the time-tested values of right-and-wrong the way they did two or three generations ago. These are the major deep-rooted causal reasons of mass violence and band-aid gun law “fixes” will have no effect.

Enacting knee-jerk gun laws that restrict lawful gun ownership is akin to making it extremely difficult for qualified drivers to obtain a driver’s license and own a car, simply because some totally unrelated, irresponsible individual was drunk behind the wheel and killed someone. Regrettable though drunk driving deaths are, they are not the fault of either lawful drivers nor Honda.

Progressives don’t care. Hollering, “Ban AR-15s now!” grabs headlines and wins the votes of the uninformed. “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” as presidential advisor Rahm Emanuel said so famously early in Obama’s first term.

Weaponizing the Justice System

This one is particularly dangerous. Progressives do not care about the long-range, damaging precedent this sets for our legal and political systems. Part of why America functions as well as it does is because of the confidence that the citizenry has in the fairness of the electoral process and the equal and fair application of the law.

But progressives have turned that completely upside down in their misplaced zeal to garner short-term political advantage. With the astonishingly partisan and shockingly clueless Merrick Garland at the head of the DoJ, this administration is tagging school moms as “domestic terrorists” for wanting their kids’ education to concentrate on traditional academics and steer clear of inappropriate “adult” matter that has no place in the publicly funded 6^th-grade classroom. The DoJ now arrests and jails political rivals to the current administration on the flimsiest of non-existent reasons, while completely ignoring actual felonious crimes committed by administration members, their families, and their political allies.

And the progressives’ legal weaponry extends all the way to our time-honored religious freedom, to the point where Catholics attending the traditional Latin Mass are put on a government watchlist and pro-life advocates defending their family from personal physical attack have their doors broken down by the FBI and are arrested.

It’s all fine with current-day progressives, if doing so intimidates, minimizes, marginalizes, and otherwise neutralizes any action taken by a conservative.

There are many other examples. Does wokifying the military with DEI and drag queen shows on military bases improve and strengthen the national security standing -- which is the military’s only mission -- of this country? No.

Does it help progressives’ election efforts with fringe voters? Yes.

Does establishing completely illogical and unobtainable requirements for EV (electric vehicle) ownership help the country, the environment, or the economy? No, obviously not. Mining for the rare earth metals used in EVs is far more destructive to the earth than safe, reliable American fossil-fuel extraction. The rare-earth materials and battery production comes from other countries, including Communist China, so it hurts our economy and makes us more vulnerable to and dependent on bad actors.

Assuming that progressives even know any of this (many are likely totally ignorant), would it matter? No. They think that pushing the Green agenda helps their short-term electoral power grab and that’s their end game.

Every public utterance, every policy move, every new regulation from today’s progressives is designed to further their ability to obtain and hold power and control the American populace. The closer one pays attention, the more apparent this is. “For the good of the country” never enters the picture.

Image: National Archives