Let your voice be heard

Mark Greathouse

(11/2020) There’s an old adage in the advertising business about how businesses that fail to advertise give the marketplace away to those that do. Permit me to present a parallel. Citizens who fail to vote give their voice in government away to those who do. Think on that.

Having voted in every election since I was old enough to vote (that’s been a lot of elections!), I’m incredulous when I hear of some middle-aged person announcing that they’re going to vote for the first time in their life. What could they have been thinking? Oh yeah, they weren’t thinking at all.

News media pundits, social media, and politicians are all screaming about how critically important the 2020 elections are to our nation’s future. Hello? Every election is critically important. But yes, this one turns out to be especially important at local, state, and national levels. At stake are major national issues with long-term impact such as the composition of the Supreme Court, the nature of keeping and bearing arms, freedom of speech, state rights, taxes, environment, federal budget largesse, and unbridled power of social media oligarchs. Important state and local issues include taxation, nature of law enforcement, education choice, and reining in government retirement plans.

What should be our biggest concern? Communism. We dare not forget Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev’s promise in 1956, 'We will bury you.' And never lose sight of Josef Stalin’s starvation of millions of Ukranians and still more millions in murderous gulags across Russia. Since about the time of the Bolshevik Revolution and the deception of many Americans by Vladimir Lenin’s 'Potemkin Villages,' the United States has been struggling with the metastasizing creep of socialism into our own government (a.k.a., Communism). For the uninitiated, a Potemkin village is a fake settlement that was originally the creation of Russian minister Grigori Alexsandrovich Potemkin and later adopted by Lenin and Stalin to serve their purposes in illustrating the supposed great 'success' of their Union of Soviet Socialist Republics system. International visitors were shuttled to the Potemkin villages, so they wouldn’t see the squalid failures of Communism throughout the Soviet countryside.

To hear many of today’s university professors teach today, one might think that they too have been sucked in by Potemkin villagesÉreal and imagined. Many of President Franklin Roosevelt’s key advisors were duped by Potemkin villages into recommending communist-style New Deal solutions to the Great Depression. John Dewey, the ÒfatherÓ of our public education system, was a victim of the Potemkin villages. President Barack Obama’s mentor, card-carrying Communist Party USA member Frank Marshall Davis, was duped by the Potemkin village scheme. Bernie Sanders was a ‘dupee.’ Many Hollywood A-listers also fell for the Potemkin Village trap over the years.

Now we’re lasering in on why it’s so important to vote on why your one little vote looms very large. The United States is in the midst of what the intelligence community terms a ‘color revolution.’ It has nothing to do with skin pigment. A color revolution has four components: an active counter-state (think bureaucratic deep-state swamp and bought-and-paid-for politicians, judges, and lobbyists), a compliant media (think 90+ percent leftist leaning, as supported by big-tech social media oligarchs), influential foreign opposition (think China, Iran, Russia), and violent protests in the streets (hmmmÉAntifa, skinheads, etc.). The latter is the ÒkineticÓ aspect that directly gets the attention of otherwise complacent citizens.

An example of a color revolution was the Muslim Brotherhood takeover in Egypt a few years back. The Muslim Brotherhood was a Sunni Islamist movement that at one time was considered the largest political force in Egypt. Following the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, the Muslim Brotherhood enjoyed a compliant Egyptian media, active internal counter-state, and riots in the streets; plus leveraged the foreign influence of the United States which delivered the coups de gras as then President Obama convinced Egyptian President Hosni Mubarek to step down. The Muslim Brotherhood won nearly all the seats in Parliament. However, their chosen President Mohammad Morsi was overthrown within a year thanks to mass protests. In the ensuing counter-revolt hundreds of members were killed, and hundreds, including Morsi and most of the Muslim Brotherhood's leadership, were imprisoned. Among the general Egyptian population, a "huge hostility" arose against the Muslim Brotherhood and, by September 2013, an Egyptian court banned the Brotherhood and its associations.

So, you’re likely thinking 'come on, this color revolution thing can’t happen here. This is America!' Wrong. It’s been going on for several decades. A color revolution has been happening right under our noses. They’ve recently begun to get bolder as the tentacles of a compliant media and the bureaucratic counter-state have grown and billionaires have felt bold enough to throw money at creating riots in the streets of major cities. (Oops. I should have used ‘unrest’ rather than ‘riots’ as advised in the latest Associated Press Style Manual. We apparently must cow-tow to the proponents of Orwell’s Newspeak and the tender feelings of the cancel culturalists.) All of those aforementioned issues of the judiciary, guns, education, and more are inextricably linked to this color revolution.

Bottom line, you the voter must make decisions. Breaking down key issues into manageable bites, determining which are most important to you, and then deciding which candidates support your views is a viable step toward your vote having meaning. It requires homework. Politically, it’s up to voters to decide whether they want ever-more-powerful central-government controlling their lives as touted by the color revolutionaries or do they want the rights and freedoms protected by our Constitution. What about free stuff from the government? Hello, it’s not free!

Is a dynamically-growing economy important? Should the Supreme Court adjudicate or legislate? Can we keep our guns? Should we have school choice? Do we want a metastasizing central government controlling our lives? Which candidates can be trusted to deliver on their promises? Decisions, decisions, decisions.

Now, whether you believe the counter-state’s color revolution threat is real or not, you need to haul yourself out to the polls and vote on November 3. Uh-oh. There’s all this mail-in ballot crap to contend with. The not-so-reassuring recent testimony of FBI Director Wray aside about the supposed absence of voter fraud, I strongly urge you to not hide under his rock. Serious instances of ballot harvesting, non-citizen voting, fake voter addresses, deceased voters, trashed ballots, and more have already been uncovered. Indictments are already underway. You need to be able to trust that your vote will count, once and only once. Either request an official absentee ballot or – preferably – vote in person. It's far too easy, as exacerbated by downright lazy thinking, ignorance, fear, or mind-bending confusion, to not vote. It does take initiative. Let your voice be heard. Do vote. You do make a difference.

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