Liver and onions.
My father loved liver and onions. He would fry them up in our tiny galley kitchen. The stench, er, aroma, would imbue the entirety of our humble abode and, I remain convinced, saturate me and my brother’s school clothes. Can you say “unpopular?” What did my mother think? She didn’t cook and didn’t care. One less thing for her to worry about, as she already had two insoluble problems on her hands: me and my brother.
One day, my father had enough—not of liver and onions, but of me and my brother complaining about it. He grabbed a fork, jabbed some liver, and extended us a sample. It was an offer we couldn’t refuse and a taste we’d never forget. To this day, I hate liver and onions. (As for my brother, who knows? He grew up to be a bass player.)
Never could I, in good conscience, proclaim how my taste buds lusted for liver and onions, nor could I ever implore others to share the culinary bliss of the dish. Even if my conscience could be momentarily smothered under a huge pile of cash to endorse liver and onions, my profession would ring flat and false and, rightly, fall upon deafened, disgusted ears.
But what if, from infancy onward, all I was ever allowed to eat was a plate of liver and onions? My taste buds and nostrils would not only become inured to the dish but would ultimately come to welcome it. A ravenous man with no recourse to other sustenance would believe a meal of liver and onions to be a godsend, no matter how incessantly served to him.
Yet, what if one day, a person who had been served liver and onions every waking meal of their lives somehow managed to ingest, say, steak and potatoes? Or a grilled cheese sandwich with a garden salad on the side? The person may well savor the taste and seek it out more often. Indeed, having discovered another culinary universe offering more than liver and onions, the person may spend their remaining days ensuring they partook of varied foods prepared in various ways to compensate for their enforced ingesting of liver and onions.
Or, perhaps, with their palates degraded to point of being able to distinguish any other dish, they may refuse to eat anything other than liver and onions.
This is the goal of the left’s early, incessant, and often tax-subsidized indoctrination.
It is why the left enforces its DIE* (diversity, inclusion, and equity) secular religion within private and public institutions, such as schools and corporations.
It is why the left demands the power to inculcate its ideology within children over the objections of parents and, in fact, is bent upon eroding parental rights.
It is why the left no longer supports free speech, deeming it dangerous, and instead calls for “content moderation,” i.e., censorship, by Big Tech and the government both separately and in collusion with each other.
It is why the left, which has routinely lied and dissembled to subvert a duly elected president, interfere with a presidential election, and keep Americans “locked down” during a pandemic, claims unto itself the power to decide what is disinformation, misinformation, and truth (even though the post-modernist mind does not believe in objective, eternal truths).
It is why the left seeks to censor and silence any dissenting media, social media sites, or community and political organizations and their members.
Not content with one travesty of justice, it is why the left has weaponized the police powers of the state, including colluding with non-profit leftist hate groups, to repress all dissenting views to its radical, extreme, and dangerous “fundamental transformation” of America.
It is why the left has politicized the justice system with politics and, despite its laughable claims to be “democratic,” it has jailed the presumptive nominee of the opposition party based upon the kangaroo court proceedings instigated by the current president and conducted with the support of past members of his administration and supporters.
Simply and despicably, the Left agenda has failed and will continue to fail the American people as a practical matter, for it is based upon an intrinsically abstract and absurd ideology that is an affront to human dignity, independence, and freedom.
The left is not progressive. The left is regressive, repressive, and rejectionist. Rejecting America’s foundational principles of liberty, equality, pluralism, and tolerance, the left’s “fundamental transformation” of America (and the world) constitutes the erasure of the American revolution and a reversion back to the soul-crushing collective found in medieval feudalism’s serfdom, scarcity, repression, and barbarity.
It is why when Democrats say “our democracy,” they are talking about their party, not our country. As close-minded as any cult, the left wants to ensure no one has any recourse to anything but leftist ideology and policies. The left must “cancel the messenger,” because it cannot withstand even a smattering of dissent, because such will help empower the public to unite to reject and replace the left’s (once more) failed experiment in elitist social engineering.
In short, the goal of the left is to ensure Americans are force-fed liver and onions for their entire lives, lest they crave something more appetizing.
An American Greatness contributor, the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) served Michigan’s 11th Congressional district from 2003-2012, and served as Chair of the Republican House Policy Committee. Not a lobbyist, he is a frequent public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars; and a Monday co-host of the “John Batchelor Radio Show,” among sundry media appearances.