Political Violence in America

Since the signing of the Democrats’ healthcare monstrosity, and before, polls have consistently shown that Barack Obama is taking his party down the road to annihilation.  Those same polls show that the party is now more unpopular than at any time since its founding in the 1830s.

In an attempt to avoid what promises to be an unprecedented political thrashing in the mid-term elections, Obama and other Democrat leaders have adopted a policy of painting all Republicans and all Tea Party participants as violent racial bigots.  Yes, several Democrat congressmen have reported receiving threatening phone calls and a number of Tea Party participants have vented their anger on Democrats as they made their way through the crowds outside the U.S. Capitol.  That is indicative of the level of anger that they have created, but it simply is not possible to make the giant leap from a few isolated incidents of “venting” to real threats of bodily harm.    

In American politics there are three distinct kinds of people.  First, there are those who make little or no effort to evaluate the issues or the candidates; they simply go to the polls on Election Day, weather permitting, and pull the lever for every Democrat on the ballot.  Second, there are those who feel they’ve done their civic duty when they have evaluated the candidates and the issues and they’ve cast what they feel is an informed ballot on Election Day.  And finally, there are those who are the foot soldiers of our republic… those who not only study the issues in great detail, but who recruit the candidates, contribute the money, walk the precincts, man the phones, manage the campaigns, run for office, and get out the vote on Election Day.

Anyone who wishes to know where political violence takes place in America, and by whom, it is the latter group of people who should be consulted… not the liberal propagandists of the main-stream media.  So please allow me to relate some of my own experiences as a conservative political activist.

My first tentative steps into the political arena occurred in the early ‘60s when I became a card-carrying member of the Draft Goldwater Committee in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  It was then that I learned how Democrats had maintained Oklahoma and other states across the South as one-party states since the 1850s.  In Oklahoma, Democrats maintained iron-fisted control by simply denying voters the right to a secret ballot.

In 1963, when I arrived in the state from New York, forty-four of the state’s seventy-seven counties had no voting booths and no voting machines.  When a voter walked into a polling place on Election Day he found a single table in the room with three Democrats seated behind it.  And when the voter was handed a paper ballot and a pencil he had no choice but to place the ballot on the table in front of the poll workers and mark it.

If the voter crossed over to the Republican side of the ballot, even once, some really bad things could happen.  In some counties they kept a trash can sitting next to the ballot box.  The only ballots that went into the ballot box were straight Democrat ballots.  And when it came time to count the ballots at the end of the day, the Democrats had some very creative ways of mutilating and invalidating ballots that contained Republican votes.

When I learned of this in the fall of 1963, I immediately volunteered to form a committee to provide voting booths for every county in Oklahoma.  The electoral reform group I created was called Operation: Secret Ballot.  It took three more years, but by the 1966 General Election our all-volunteer committee had built enough voting booths to supply from 800 to 1,000 precincts.

Unfortunately, when word of our project spread across the state we began to receive threats.  We were told that if we went into certain counties with our voting booths, they would be waiting for us with rifles and shotguns and we would be “going back to Tulsa in pine boxes.”  Accordingly, in late October 1966, to keep Democrats from assassinating a group of people who wanted nothing more than for voters to be able to cast a secret ballot, it was necessary to have National Guard troops deliver our voting booths all across Oklahoma.  In that election we elected our second Republican governor in the history of the state, and our first Republican attorney general.

In the fall of 1964, when Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) stopped off in Tulsa for a campaign speech, I was part of a small group of about a dozen people who picketed his arrival at the Tulsa International Airport.  Shortly after arriving at the airport, and after being directed to a rope line outside the south concourse, our small group of protesters was attacked by an angry mob of some 300 Democrats.  I was attacked by five or six burly steelworkers… two of whom attempted to wrest my picket sign from my hands, while three or four others stubbed out their cigars and cigarettes on the back of my neck and elsewhere on my bare skin.

But then, when they had wrestled me to the tarmac with the left side of my face pressed against the concrete, I saw my opening.  I smashed one of my attackers across the face with what was left of my picket sign staff.  Then, with my left jaw pressed tightly against the concrete, a fist struck me heavily on my right jaw and I was knocked unconscious.

Four years later, as voters across the country were going to the polls to elect Richard Nixon, I was assigned to ballot security in the Tulsa County GOP headquarters.  Early that day, we had a call from a Republican campaign worker in Cherokee County, Oklahoma who reported that all of the Nixon ballots for that county had been stolen.  And when our campaign worker insisted that he knew who had stolen the ballots and that he planned to retrieve them, we cautioned him to stay where he was; we would have two attorneys on their way to his county within minutes.

Unfortunately, our Republican campaign worker was right about who had stolen the Nixon ballots.  He was found later that day in a ditch along a remote county road.  He had been beaten almost to death with heavy log chains.

Four years later, in 1972, I served as a regional chairman for the Committee to Reelect the President in eastern Pennsylvania, an area crucial to a landslide Nixon victory. 

One Sunday evening in mid-August I received a telephone call from a man named Tony with a distinctly Italian surname.  He informed me that he represented a group of South Philadelphia Democrats who wanted to do some campaigning for President Nixon.  He would need a large sum of money to accomplish what he wanted to do and asked that I place the money in a plain envelope and take it to my office the next day.  He would have an “associate” stop by my office the next day to pick up the envelope.

When I advised “Tony” that I had access to no cash, that all of my approved invoices were paid by a regional finance office in Philadelphia, he became very angry.  He described in great detail what he and his “associates” had recently done to an uncooperative person.  Basically, he told of smashing kneecaps and elbows with baseball bats.  He was quite emphatic that, if I did not wish that same fate to befall my wife and my three children, I would accede to his demands.

When I reported the details of the call to my immediate superior, then-Philadelphia District Attorney Arlen Specter, he recognized the names immediately.  They were members of a South Philadelphia organized crime family.  They were longtime Democratic activists who specialized in the kidnapping of prominent individuals and their threats were not to be taken lightly.  When “Tony” began calling my office, insisting that my secretary convey his threats to me, word-for-word, she was so terrified that she quit her job.

It became necessary for my family and me to have 24-hour-a-day armed protection for a period of time… until the threat passed.

In the year 2000 I served the first of two consecutive terms in the U.S. Electoral College, an assignment that had always been quite benign.  However, because of the closeness of the race in Florida, and the brazen attempt by the Gore campaign to steal the presidential election, 2000 was far different.  When the U.S. Supreme Court intervened to prevent a renegade Florida Supreme Court, comprised almost entirely of partisan Democrats, from interfering in the election, the Florida vote was certified and the matter became the responsibility of the Electoral College.

However, in the days after the Florida Republican electors were certified, the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of all 271 Republican electors, from every state in the nation, were published on the Internet.  From that day on, until the Electoral College met on December 18 to elect a president and vice president, Bush-Cheney electors across the country received numerous death threats… by mail and by telephone.  The threats were so widespread that the eight Oklahoma electors were advised to travel to the state capital a day early and that it would be wise to travel with a handgun at our side.  For our own safety, we were domiciled in an undisclosed location until the morning of December 18.

These are but a few of the experiences of a Republican activist, spanning the thirty-seven years from 1963 until 2000.  But I am just one person.  The incidents described can be multiplied thousands of times over by other Republican activists.  And lest anyone suggest that “both sides do it,” that simply is not the case.  Having begun my political career fighting fraud, violence, and intimidation in the political process, I have always been keenly aware of all reports of such un-democratic, un-American activities and I can testify that I have known of few such incidents being perpetrated by conservatives or Republicans.  The fraud, violence, and intimidation that is endemic to our political process is essentially an all-liberal, all-Democrat phenomenon.

If anyone should doubt that assertion I would suggest a simple experiment.  As the 2010 General Election approaches, construct a large picket sign with some very unflattering comments about the Democrat Party or its candidates.  Then, on the occasion of the next major Democratic rally or fundraising event, parade up and down the sidewalk in front of the building where the event is being held… just to see what happens.

Then, after you’ve been released from the hospital, do the same at the next major Republican event… just to see what happens.  The answer is, nothing will happen to you.  The Republicans may not like what you have to say, but they will respect your right to say it.  They will look at you as if you dropped off another planet, but they will not lift a finger to harm you.

It is just one of the major differences between Democrats and Republicans.  And now that Obama has imported Chicago-style thuggery into the White House, we can all look forward to a major increase in political violence between now and November.