In the aftermath of the events of January 6, 2021, the narrative is becoming more and more fixed. Simply stated, it claims that the vast majority of Americans who voted for Trump were gun-waving, white supremacist, insurrectionist, Christian nationalists, who need to be marginalized, if not purged from society. For many reasons, we need to continue to challenge that narrative. And recent world events involving Russia, China, and Canada provide a perfect opportunity to push back against that misleading and caricatured narrative.

To be clear, having voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, I do not want him to run again in 2024. And I am sympathetic to the argument that, in many ways, did Trump more harm than good, especially in his post-election behavior and in the damage that was done to our Christian witness when he looked to him as some kind of political savior. (I know that strong Trump supporters find this perspective utterly outrageous, but that’s a battle I am not here to fight.)

But the purpose of this article is not to offer a retrospective analysis of the Trump presidency. Rather, it is to respond to those who cannot possibly understand how God-fearing, Bible-loving, morality-espousing people could vote for Trump. We actually had some very good reasons.

Let’s start with the recent events in Canada and Prime Minister’s invoking of the Emergencies Act in an attempt to crush the Freedom Convoy protesters. According to reports, he “invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in the country’s history to crack down on protests against his vaccine mandate — just days after the Biden administration urged him to use ‘federal powers.’”

How much of this came directly from President Biden? Only those involved know for sure.

But if true, an obvious question arises: Could you imagine the Trump administration encouraging this kind of extreme crackdown against freedom-loving, peaceful protesters? Could you imagine Trump telling Trudeau, “Yeah, you really need to crush this resistance”?

I think not.

Yet, when it came to international policy and America’s role in the world, those of us who voted for Trump felt far more confident in his leadership than the leadership of Biden. Does this make us violent white supremacists? Or, put another way, when it came to the massive implications of our international policies, was there no justifiable reason to vote for Trump?

As for Russia, while Trump’s critics claimed that he was either too friendly with Putin or actually admired him, others saw things quite differently.

Writing for the Jewish Press on July 24, 2018, Daniel Greenfield claimed that, “Trump Stood Up to Putin, Obama Appeased Him.”

He wrote, “The architects of Obama’s appeasement of Putin have been some of the most militant voices denouncing Trump. . . . Instead President Trump has steadily reversed Obama’s tide of concessions to Putin.”

He continued, “The media is outraged over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But when that happened, Ukraine asked for weapons and the only aid that Obama offered their country was MREs. It took months for Obama to come through with boots and tires. Meanwhile Trump has delivered actual weapons.

“Why did Obama refuse to provide Ukraine with weapons? According to senior officials, to avoid antagonizing Moscow. Trump isn’t afraid of Russia. Obama however was shaking in his loafers.

“While Trump approved anti-tank missiles for Ukraine, Obama slow-walked shipments of boots, putting them on trucks instead of planes so that they took months to arrive, so as not to upset the Russians. Meanwhile the Trump administration cut the red tape by dipping into its own European stockpiles.

“In the time it took Obama to ship boots to Ukraine, Trump shipped Javelin missiles.”

And he closed with this: “Unlike Obama, President Trump sold weapons to Ukraine. Unlike Obama, he bombed Assad and took on Russian mercenaries. Unlike Obama, he provided Poland with working Patriot missiles. Unlike Obama, he didn’t base his foreign policy around fearing to offend Moscow. Unlike Obama, he stood up to Russia.”

The fact is that many of us who voted for Trump felt that he would do a better job of standing up to the world’s strongmen than Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden would do. (For a relevant Twitter poll, see here.)

As for China, allow me to share two personal anecdotes. While in Australia in early 2020, shortly before the COVID travel restrictions, I was picked up at the airport by a Chinese national who was now an Australian citizen.

When I asked him for his views on Chinese President Xi, he told me plainly that he thought he was dangerous. When I asked him for his views on President Trump, he said, “He’s a hero.”

In fact, a colleague of mine who has spent almost all his adult life living and working in China, and who is well-connected to the underground Chinese church, told me that every Christian he knew in China was praying fervently for the reelection of Trump. And when Trump lost, many of them wept.

More broadly, a Bing search for the words how Trump stood up to China (not in quotes) yields pages of articles and videos with headlines like this: “It Takes a Trump to Stand Up to China” (The Hill, December 6, 2016); and “Finally, a President Stands Up to China” (Townhall, August 28, 2019).

To be sure, Trump had more than his share of critics when it came to his Chinese policies, with CNN claiming in July 2020 that, “Trump blasts Beijing in public, but privately Trump org imports tons of Chinese goods.”

But the fact remains that America just competed in the Beijing Olympics, with our athletes being urged not to protest and our official diplomatic protest seeming quite tepid, even with its reference to China’s “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity.”

Really now, if we truly believed that China was guilty of “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity” shouldn’t we rather boycott the Olympics? Why not put teeth in our words?

Obviously, I cannot imagine the pressures President Biden is under, and the purpose of this article is not to throw stones at him. (How many Biden-bashing articles have I written?) And, to repeat, I do not want to Trump to run again in 2024 for quite a few reasons.

I’m simply reminding those who broad-brush and smear all of us who voted for Trump that international policies were a major consideration for many of us, with those policies potentially affecting hundreds of millions of lives. (And I’ve not said a word here about our policies with Iran.)

That is hardly a matter of white supremacy or dangerous Christian nationalism. This is matter of worldwide humanitarian concern.

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This article was originally published at AskDrBrown.org.

President Boris Badenov and his prickly assistant Vice President Natasha Fatale have devised yet another inept scheme to try to salvage their feckless administration. They decided to pretend that the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol was analogous to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the coordinated Islamist attacks on 9/11. Boris and Natasha hope Americans will be so beguiled by these analogies that they will turn their attention away from the insuperable failures of the Badenov administration.

Further, Boris and Natasha are using the unfortunate Jan. 6 riots to inflame a race conflagration their party started and fuels in order to secure the votes of persons of color, especially blacks. They’re counting on Americans of color not looking too closely at how Democrat policies have ravaged impoverished communities.

Read yesterday’s words from Kamala Harris who will live in infamy—or if she’s really lucky, maybe she’ll live just in irony:

Certain dates echo throughout history, including dates that instantly remind all who have lived through them—where they were and what they were doing when our democracy came under assault. Dates that occupy not only a place on our calendars, but a place in our collective memory. December 7th, 1941. September 11th, 2001. And January 6th, 2021.

I’m likely not alone in remembering exactly where I was when radical Islamists hijacked planes twenty years ago, killing 2,977 innocent people, including 8 children, and wounding 6,000. I have no idea where I was when the shameful U.S. Capitol riots took place one year ago, during which no rioter/trespasser killed a single person.

Flailing futilely about to make her warlike analogies plausible, Harris said,

On that day, I was not only Vice President-elect, I was also a United States Senator. And I was here at the Capitol that morning, at a classified hearing with fellow members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Hours later, the gates of the Capitol were breached.

I had left. But my thoughts immediately turned not only to my colleagues, but to my staff, who had been forced to seek refuge in our office, converting filing cabinets into barricades.

Take note, Harris wants the nation to know that she wasn’t concerned about the welfare of only her elite colleagues but also her lowly staff.

As the “gates” were “breached,” her staff sought “refuge” behind their filing cabinets. Sounds exactly as I imagine sailors doing on Dec. 7, 1941. Her staff need not have worried. Although Harris had already left, she was doing what Congressional leaders do best: She was thinking about her staff, quivering as they awaited certain death.

Harris continued her imaginative retelling:

What the extremists who roamed these halls targeted was not only the lives of elected leaders.

What they sought to degrade and destroy was not only a building, hallowed as it is. What they were assaulting were the institutions, the values, the ideals that generations of Americans have marched, picketed, and shed blood to establish and defend.

How does Natasha know the insurrectionists/terrorists/enemy combatants “targeted” the “lives of elected leaders”? Wait! Could she have been colluding with them?

What enrages many Americans is how differently hypocrites like Harris treat January 6th as compared to the months of rioting, arson, looting, and assaults on American institutions, values, ideals, and law enforcement officers committed by Antifa and BLM in 2020. Harris even urged Americans to contribute to a fund to bail out of jail those who assaulted that which “generations of Americans have marched, picketed, and shed blood to establish and defend.” Harris tweeted this in June 2020:

If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.

Harris, second-in-command of the party committed to court-packing, illegal immigration, voter fraud, and filibuster-busting, and fervent supporter of setting leftist criminals free, apparently doesn’t see the irony in this statement

On January 6th, we all saw what our nation would look like if the forces who seek to dismantle our democracy are successful. The lawlessness, the violence, the chaos.

Suddenly Harris cares deeply about the U.S. Constitution, the First Amendment, and the rule of law:

What was at stake then, and now, is the right to have our future decided the way the Constitution prescribes it: by we, the people — all the people.

We cannot let our future be decided by those bent on silencing our voices, overturning our votes, and peddling lies and misinformation; by some radical faction that may be newly resurgent but whose roots run old and deep.

You see, the strength of democracy is the rule of law. The strength of democracy is the principle that everyone should be treated equally, that elections should be free and fair, that corruption should be given no quarter.

If she’s truly committed to the U.S. Constitution, maybe she should encourage her party to stop attacking the Second Amendment. If she truly opposes the silencing of voices, maybe she should encourage her fellow leftists to stop canceling speaking engagements, stop trying to get people fired for expressing their views on race and sexuality, and stop trying to force Americans to use Newspeak when referring to men and women. If she believes the “strength of democracy is the rule of law,” then as the border czar, maybe she should try to stop border lawbreaking.

Next came one of the central goals of the Badenov administration, -the only hope Dems have for winning elections in 2022 and 2024:

And the work ahead will not be easy. Here, in this very building, a decision will be made about whether we uphold the right to vote and ensure free and fair election.

Let’s be clear: We must pass the voting rights bills that are now before the Senate. …

Who knew suffrage was under assault right now in the U.S. Capitol?

Democrats, practiced at the art of deception—particularly through the redefinition of terms—have redefined efforts to ensure free and fair elections and reduce voter fraud as racist efforts to suppress the black vote. They’re doing this, not to help communities of color, but to help Democrats maintain their positions of power.

But increasing numbers of blacks and Latinos now see the Democrat charade of altruism for what it is: a selfish, grasping effort to acquire more power for an entrenched bureaucracy who have little to no regard for those who have trusted them and given them that power for decades even as their communities of color die.

Black and brown communities see that Democrats have destroyed their babies, their families, their communities, and their schools.

They see that Democrats are destroying the bodies and spirits of their children. Democrats have created a hyper-sexualized, morally untethered America that robs children of fathers and leaves mothers alone to try to piece together the broken lives of their children.

They see the decaying and dangerous communities that fatherless boys create.

They see that wealthy, powerful Democrats send their children to the most expensive private schools in the country while denying educational choice to families trapped in dangerous, poor-performing urban schools with union teachers who refuse to work.

They see wealthy powerful Democrats aiding and abetting lawless border crossing in order to import votes. And persons of color know that it will be their urban communities that will suffer most from illegal immigration, while the wealthy and powerful are inoculated from the worst of those effects.

Yes, Americans of color see that Democrats spread government money to buy votes. They see the division Democrats sow in order to grow their power and the lies they tell to maintain it.

Kamala Harris should live forever in infamy.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/The-Vice-President-Who-Will-Live-in-Infamy.mp3

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