OPINION:
Last week, I visited Anchorage to headline the kickoff event for the new Alaska chapter of the free-market group Americans for Prosperity. Alaska is spectacular. If you haven’t yet been there, add it to your bucket list. The breathtaking majesty of unspoiled nature is all around you.
So, apparently, is the left and its insidious influence.
Democrats, unions and sundry other leftist organizations and groups are pouring big money into Alaska, as they try to develop a significant foothold there. In the months leading up to this week’s Republican Senate primary, for example, an outside group backing Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Begich spent nearly $4 million in attack ads against the GOP front-runner Dan Sullivan (who won the primary on Tuesday anyway). With control of the Senate in the balance, Democrats were desperate to score an “easier” GOP candidate to run against in the fall. This is their standard operating procedure.
Beyond the Senate race, the left has been working to move Alaska from a solidly red state into more of a tossup. Its efforts there parallel similar efforts in states such as Texas, Colorado, New Mexico and others. They are integral to the left’s larger attempt to “fundamentally transform” the nation into a European-style socialist state by upending once reliably conservative strongholds.
Groups such as Americans for Prosperity and others are trying to counter this by mobilizing grass-roots activism on the side of individual liberty and economic freedom. If the left is allowed to move about in these states unchecked, it will succeed in flipping them, altering the Electoral College map, possibly forever, and ultimately locking in its long-sought permanent Democratic voting majority.
While in Alaska, I noticed something I’ve seen repeatedly as I’ve traveled around the country over the past 6 years. I’ve watched it grow exponentially since its first waves became apparent in 2009, and it’s only multiplied since 2012.
In the faces of those with whom I speak and visit is a profound, unshakable fear.
What began as deep concern over the direction in which President Obama, his administration and congressional Democrats were taking the country changed into fierce defiance, which then gave rise to a truly organic movement. The Tea Party — a set of ideas grounded in limited government, fiscal responsibility, lower taxes, economic liberty and a rejection of socialized medicine — grew out of this passionate resistance to statist policies.
This, of course, struck panic on the left, which could not permit its “transformative” agenda to be so threatened. Enter the Internal Revenue Service.
With the Tea Party movement sidelined, the left resumed its “transformational” mission, which now includes a manufactured border crisis, the intent of which is to flood the zone with millions of new illegal immigrants and, ultimately, new Democrat voters. It also includes helping to stoke a race war in Ferguson, Mo., to justify federal intervention and a new, ramped-up phase of the left’s destructive “divide and conquer” identity politics.
The normal Americans with whom I met in Alaska and elsewhere across the country see this.
They see the staggering lawlessness of a president who behaves as if his constitutional limitations are mere suggestions.
They see one major political party — overrun by the extremist left — in which very few, if any, members have the courage to oppose what their party is doing and becoming.
They see the other formerly great political party rudderless, lacking the leadership and bravery to tell the truth about — and truly fight — what the left is doing.
They see the chaos at the border and the invasion of their nation.
They see the destruction of the world’s greatest health care system.
They see astonishing abuses of power, from the corruption at the IRS and Department of Justice to widespread National Security Agency eavesdropping to the disarray at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
They see their leaders continuously lying to them about everything from the terrorist attack in Benghazi to their own health insurance.
They see the collapse of American power and prestige and a world in violent chaos.
They see America spinning out of control and into something they no longer recognize.
They see a world teetering on the brink of some new and yet unknown catastrophe.
As I stand before them, they search my face for answers. For hope. “What can I do?” they ask. “I feel so hopeless,” they say. “It’s going to be OK, isn’t it?”
I honestly don’t know the answer to that. I do know that we can never give up trying to save America. She is a sturdy gal. She has proven herself strong and resilient in the face of grave challenges in the past. However, what the left is so cleverly doing now is working to change her very nature, so that although the beauty of places like Alaska will remain, America as an idea will be over.
This is why we must fight, from Nome to New York, against the leftist onslaught. That’s what I tell these courageous but frightened Americans when I see them. America — as an idea — is counting on us.
Monica Crowley is online opinion editor at The Washington Times.
