By Gary Wickert
The very first words President Joe Biden spoke to the nation after being elected made clear his intention to bridge the deep and bitter political and racial divisions in American society. America is polarized, but it would be untrue to suggest we have never been this divided before. We fought a civil war over states’ rights, western expansion, and the future of slavery. Biden’s speechwriters were on target in the first Inaugural Address when they were able to get the president to charge us “to listen to one another again. Hear one another. See one another. Show respect to one another.” After all, he reminded us, “politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path.” Listening only goes so far when one party has telegraphed that its goal is to destroy America in order to build a “better” America, or when the police state has weaponized the FBI to attack its political opponents.
However, if there is something to be listened to, it is important to ask the right questions—questions which will bridge the divide and make both sides of America’s political struggle listen to each other and avoid the mistakes made by the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union, the National Socialism of Nazi Germany, the Maoism of Communist China, and the Chavez-Maduro socialism of Venezuela.
I thought a good first step would be to develop a set of questions which get to the core of a number of issues that divide us. Liberals praised the new president at his first inauguration, celebrating the tone that Biden struck. “Gone was the tension, defiance and grievance caused by Donald Trump” NPR reported. But they failed to mention that the woke left were the ones causing the defiance and grievance. When conservatives “defy” and “grieve” we are hauled into two months of January 6 Congressional hearings and some are put in prison for months, without a trial. When radical, woke liberals “defy” and “grieve”, 18 people die and billions of dollars in property damage and lost businesses result, but they are praised and exalted as “peaceful protesters.” Unequal protection and treatment such as this makes bridging political gaps difficult—if not impossible. But if we are to succeed, we must ask the right questions.
The following are 25 questions we must ask liberals in order to understand whey they hold the positions they do and act the way they act. Post them in social media and insist on factual answers.
1. Why did Democrats oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, the cheapest, safest, and most environmentally friendly way to transport oil across the U.S. and capable of carrying 800,000 barrels of crude oil per day, which even the Washington Post admitted killed 11,000 well-paying construction jobs, knowing that as a result the U.S. had to resort to importing 800,000 barrels of oil per day from Russia?
2. Ten thousand years ago, ice one mile thick covered much of the Midwest. Where did it go and why? Would you like to know?
3. Do you support the unprecedented raid of a former and cooperative U.S. president’s home by a weaponized FBI on a fishing expedition for something...anything that can be used against him months prior to a major mid-term election?
4. Why did your party support and actively fuel the baseless propagation of the Russia collusion hoax, suggesting President Trump conspired or coordinated with the Russian government, for which no evidence at all was uncovered by the Mueller investigation and report? Do you know of any evidence supporting this hoax which lasted for years but which Democrats did nothing to stop?
5. Following the shocking allegations by special prosecutor John Durham that Hillary Clinton’s campaign actually did pay tech experts to infiltrate a U.S. presidential candidate’s servers and spy on him, his presidential campaign and later the office of the president while he was commander in chief, why didn’t the Democratic Party insist that those responsible be prosecuted and sent to prison?
6. Why was Al Gore nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in global warming awareness and what does this have to do with world peace?
7. Why, since peaking in 1998, has the average global temperature decreased, not increased?
8. Why do you oppose the many positive effects of small increases in global temperatures when it would do so many good things, like lengthening growing seasons, feeding millions of impoverished people, and opening vast new lands for humans to live in comfortably?
9. Did you agree with the racist exclusion by liberals of former African American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from speaking on the campus of Rutgers University?
10. Why do you not support indictment and a criminal trial for Hillary Clinton, who it has now been shown (1) illegally utilized multiple “different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain”, (2) lied under oath when she said that she only set up the system so that she could use one handheld device, (3) transmitted classified, top secret information in 110 emails, (4) never complied by handing over all her work emails to the State Department, (5) deleted 33,000 emails from her personal server just prior to a State Dept. Investigation, and (6), illegally scrubbed and destroyed her devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery?
11. Why do you support the racist cancellation and erasure from history of the iconic symbol Lillian Richard, who portrayed Aunt Jemima for years, ignoring the objections of the descendants and family members of the African American woman who brought the character to life as a part of history for her family and the town of Hawkins, Texas?
12. Why do you support the racist destruction and removal by Democrats of the Emancipation Memorial statue in Boston (replicating the Freedmans Memorial statute in D.C. and depicting Lincoln holding the Emancipation Proclamation and a freed slave, shackles broken, looking forward toward his freedom), of which Frederick Douglass himself—who was proud of it and present at its unveiling in 1876—praised as a triumphant moment for liberated black people?
13. Do you support Democrat illiberalism and intolerance in preventing conservative speakers on university campuses by using violence and making threats?
14. Why was Supreme Court Justice nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson unable to define the word “woman” in her confirmation hearing despite having referenced “women” 14 times during the first two days of her hearings, and there were 34 instances in her legal opinions as a judge in which she used the word?
15. Germany and California’s rolling blackouts seem to clearly establish that wind powered turbines are unreliable, unpredictable, and harmful to the environment. Why are they being championed by Democrats?
16. Do you agree with the Democratic policy of “identity politics”, which sorts people by race, religion, ethnicity, sexual preference, gender identity, culture and has transformed from a policy of inclusion to one of division and exclusion?
17. Would it be acceptable for the next president to indicate he is only going to nominate somebody to the U.S. Supreme Court?
18. Democrats around the country have called for defunding the police, even in the most dangerous of minority communities, and even Joe Biden suggested withholding federal funding through Byrne grants and cop grants. Why do you think defunding the police is a good idea?
19. In 2008, the Supreme Court and U.S. News and World Report documented and admitted that election fraud is a real tactic actively being used to manipulate elections. In 2009, two veteran Democratic political operatives said voter fraud is an accepted way of winning elections. One of them who pled guilty, Anthony DeFiglio, told police that such fraud was a “normal political tactic” and normally involves poor, inner-city blacks, who ask fewer questions. Is fighting documented Democratic vote fraud important to ?
20. It took five decades, but the Democratic Party has finally realized it was wrong on nuclear energy. In its recently released party platform, the Democrats say they favor a technology-neutral” approach that includes “all zero-carbon technologies, including nuclear power. How do you make sense of this given that Congressional Democrats want no part in expanding nuclear energy, even as they contemplate large-scale and radical measures to tackle climate change?
21. Total federal tax collections in 2021, including payroll and other taxes, reached an all-time high in nominal terms of $4.05 trillion, yet the federal government still ran a deficit and President Biden is creating 87,000 new IRS agents to target regular, everyday Americans. Are we spending too much or collecting too little?
22. Is the Merriam Webster dictionary wrong when it defines a woman as “an adult female human being”?
23. Why does the Democratic Party approve of a government organization such as the Minneapolis Public Schools selecting a particular race and targeting them for being fired, regardless of tenure, seniority, or performance criteria? Would it be permissible for a teachers’ union in Mississippi to do the same thing?
24. Was it racist for Democrats to insist on canceling a proud symbol of Native American heritage and history by causing the NFL’s Washington Redskins to abandon their name and a logo of a Native American warrior which the Blackfeet Tribe chairman, who dedicated much of his life to advancing Native American civil rights, had convinced the team to adopt in place of the team’s “R” logo, considering 8 out of 10 Americans wanted to preserve an 90% of Native Americans were proud of and were not offended by the name or logo?
25. Do you believe that the U.S. Constitution contains a guaranteed right of privacy or can state and federal laws limit some individual privacy rights when there is a compelling government interest? If so, where is it found in the Constitution?