The present, nominally federal administration of Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Elon Musk and company has moved so far to the right that I now realize that I am a whole-hearted conservative, a person of distinctly conservative values. Let me explain:
Retaining the function of Social Security Administration so that people can retain access to the benefits for which they have paid their entire working lives is a conservative value.
Preserving a functioning Veterans’ Administration that looks after the needs of American veterans is a conservative value.
It hardly seems necessary to say, but conservation itself is a conservative value. Slashing staff positions from the Forest Service and the National Park Service just ahead of wildfire season is insane and dangerous.
Maintaining the traditional hands-off distance between the president and the federal punitive, potentially partisan, powers of prosecution (Department of Justice) is a conservative value.
Maintaining the federal system of checks and balances in which the actions of the president are limited by the rulings of the federal judiciary is a conservative value.
Not invoking Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a law that has never before been put to use in peacetime by claiming an “invasion”, then using that law to declare an “emergency” that supposedly justifies summary deportation without due process, that, too, is a conservative value.
Using, as required by law, a highly secure federal communication system developed to protect our service members—rather than switching to the use of the entirely breakable and automatically erasable Signal texting app—that, too, is a conservative value.
Preserving, by law, those same secure communications in order to have a record to evaluate and learn from in the event of a failure is a conservation value.
Maintaining security relationships like the North Atlantic Treaty Association (NATO) that have keep the world at relative peace for the last eighty years is a conservative value.
Maintaining the alliance, friendship, and cooperation with Canada, our northern neighbor, with whom we have had an exemplary relationship of cooperation that has lasted at least a century and a half—instead of threatening to levy massive tariffs or make Canada a “51st state”—that, too, is a conservative value.
Maintaining the checks and balances that the Judicial and Legislative branches were designed to impose on the power of the President rather bestowing potentially dictatorial powers of a “unitary executive” is a traditionally conservative value.
By any reasonable definition I am a staunch conservative. Moreover, the current federal administration under Donald Trump and the purveyors of Project 2025 is the opposite. This federal administration, rather than conservative, is properly labelled either radical revolutionary (the tech bros’ vision of themselves as the worthy ruling class) or radical reactionary (Trump’s longing for tariffs and the Gilded Age milieu of the late 19th Century).
If you are the sort of conservative I have described above and you object to the radical assault on our values under way in Washington, D.C., I urge you to appear (with or without a sign) at the northeast corner (Lacrosse Avenue and Division Street) of B.A. Clark Park this coming Saturday, April 5th, from 3-5PM for Hands Off. Hands Off is an organically grown, national (see map on this webpage). (If you’re not in Spokane click the dots on the map for time and place near you.) Join a peaceful gathering to express dismay and opposition to the radical revolution turning our country, and the world, upside down. This is a time to be awakened (woke?) to the threat. If you’re not profoundly concerned over the threat to everything about this country that you wish to be conserved, then you’re not paying attention.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry