Wednesday, September 25, 2019 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon The Bunkhouse Chronicle Craig Rullman Columnist Civil Disobedience If you are one of those rarified Americans who still believe that natural rights are bequeathed to us by our creator, rather than granted to us by government masters, you will perhaps appreciate the gift of Robert Francis O9Rourke. During the last presiden- tial debate, O9Rourke did us all a great favor by pulling back the curtain on progres- sive thought, exposing their willingness to seize by force the legally held and protected property of law-abiding American citizens. Beto was the dodo who actually admitted what many of us have suspected for years: Modern progressives are camouflaging an agenda that is inherently confisca- tory, punitive, and authoritar- ian. Moreover, it is clear that resistance to this agenda will be met with endless char- acter assassination, smear campaigns, violence, and threats of violence, which the DNC, ANTIFA 4 and now Beto 4 have demonstrated repeatedly. And isn9t it bizarre to see an audience of aging hippies, decades after Vietnam and the Civil Rights era, openly applauding Beto9s call for government-sanctioned vio- lence against innocent peo- ple? How quickly that gen- eration flipped. Beto came out in favor of outright gun confiscation, but it would be foolish to doubt, even for a second, that every candidate on the debate stage supports it. The likely nominee, Elizabeth Warren, was strategically intelligent enough to keep her mouth shut, but if her redistributive agenda for your 401k serves as any indication you can rest assured she9d be perfectly happy to kick down your door and seize your property, too. Which is weird com- ing from a self-declared Native American, her apol- ogies for that deception notwithstanding. One would presume that Warren is aware of Wounded Knee, which is where the 7th Cavalry attempted to disarm the already impov- erished Lakota and mur- dered 300 men, women, and children with a Hotchkiss gun. One would also hope that the senior senator from Massachusetts is at least tan- gentially aware of Lexington and Concord, where British soldiers attempted to disarm American colonists 4 mostly farmers 4 by brute force. America9s flirtations with prohibition and outright con- fiscation have never ended well because something in the American character despises that kind of despo- tism. Or at least it did, once. And even a cursory glance at history shows that there can be no public-safety reasoning behind these tyrannical ide- ations that isn9t rooted firmly in the pursuit of absolute power. We shouldn9t be surprised. The Democrat Party, after all, is the home of American slavery. Democrats fought tirelessly for slavery, which resulted in a catastrophic Civil War. After losing the war they created Jim Crow laws to enforce segregation. Every democrat in Congress voted AGAINST the 15th Amendment, and every Southern democrat voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Beto9s progressive uto- pia requires that every run- away be dragged back to the plantation 4 disarmed and muted, to suffer reeducation by government bullwhip. Beto 4 and this both thrilled and horrified his colleagues on the dais 4 revealed that progressives are feeling bold enough to enforce their dys- topian fantasies by chain- ing innocent Americans to a post and whipping them into obedience. While the Democrat Party is the birthplace of burning crosses, the contemporary shift to radical leftism is omi- nous. It9s ominous because millions of Americans have come to believe that sheep somehow make good citi- zens, and because the his- torical evidence points to the known result. One need only look at Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, Ecuador, the permanent economic stagnation of the EU, the entire continent of Africa, or the former Soviet Republics, which remain impoverished authoritarian backwaters. The economic, physi- cal, and spiritual bankruptcy of the slave cabin remains the operating prescription for Americans who flee the plantation, and Beto has now admitted they would enforce that vision with stormtroop- ers. All to uniform applause and while making emotional appeals to a