People Control

In less than a week, I’ve encountered an identical phrase from two separate sources that I believe defines the unfortunate condition of where we are as a nation.

People control.

For some reason, this simple expression has completely escaped me when trying to explain to people why I believe in the conservative message. Too many of us become so absorbed in the minutiae of each political issue in order to intelligently debate those from the liberal side of the spectrum that we fail to recognize the simplest explanation of all.

Liberals and statists love people control and an enormous centralized government is the best way to achieve it.

In considering two of the most contentious issues in our country right now, gun control and Obamacare, neither subject is really about guns or our individual health care, but rather about our government controlling the citizens of this nation through legislation that limits our freedom and economic choice.

Too many times, conservatives attempt to over-analyze complex issues but by the time we disseminate the mass quantities and excruciating details of the information we have diligently obtained, we sometimes lose the argument because we can’t condense our message to digestible sound bites that resonate with voters. Or, as related by a speaker at our recent Smart Girl Summit, Dan Bongino, former Secret Service agent and current Congressional candidate from Maryland, if your message won’t fit on a Wheaties box, you’re explaining too much.

But if we start with expressing the premise that the left wants to control ALL of us, conservative and liberal, black and white, male and female, young and old, it isn’t difficult to point out example after example of how the current policies are designed to achieve that goal. Unfortunately, there are also far too many big government Republicans enabling the behavior which makes the battle to restore liberty even more challenging.

After contemplating Bongino’s message in the days after our Summit, I once again heard the “people control” illustration mentioned in reference to the now infamous rodeo clown episode. I, like so many others, am amazed at the uproar, especially given the fact that presidential masks as well as mockery from the opposite political side have been in vogue for decades. Not content with economic control and manipulation, the left’s “people control” in the form of political correctness surrounds us at every turn. And once I heard radio host Andrew Wilkow’s analogy of political correctness being nothing other than “people control,” I realized that this just may be the message that we need to articulate on a larger scale.

Let’s face it – the world in which we live provides far too many distractions for most Americans to stay politically engaged and adequately educated in the issues that truly matter for extended periods of time. So if conservatives are going to be successful in communicating what we are fighting to save, perhaps we need to adopt a Wheaties’ box message that clearly expresses what we see happening. The bottom line is we’re battling an administration that is focused exclusively on economic control and manipulation.

As Bongino told us at Summit, “We’re in an epic battle for the locus of control of your liberty that’s being taken from you and placed in D.C.”

It’s really not very complicated; our government is fully entrenched in “people control” and unless we share this underlying agenda with everyone we know and express the urgency for their engagement in the political process, it will only escalate in ways that we have yet to comprehend.

And as far as the rodeo clown situation, I’m having a difficult time getting the words of an old Judy Collins’ song out of my head as they sadly fit the majority of our representation in Washington:

“Send in the clowns. Don’t bother, they’re here.”

Marcia Chambliss is the Alabama State Coordinator of Smart Girl Politics, a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to the education and training of activists and candidates, and Smart Girl Politics Action, http://sgpaction.com/, a 501(c)(4) which focuses on conservative issues. She can be reached at Marcia@sgpaction.com. Her views do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Smart Girl Politics Action.