Do I Want to Be Associated with Nazis and the KKK?

The 1924 Democratic National Convention
Affectionately known as the Klanbake!

There is a fiction that all conservatives are somehow allied with white supremacists and Nazis. I had one gentleman honestly ask me if I really wanted to call myself a conservative and be associated with Nazis, white supremacists and the KKK.  He said it as if I had some kind of choices. First off, I choose to be a conservative, not any of those three vile things. To associate conservatives with Nazis and the KKK is patently false.

The truth is the Nazis, KKK and alt-right are closer to the radical left than they are to people like me.  The left doubles down on Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals in that they label their political enemies  as extremists. I am a solid conservative, not an extremist.  I love everybody. I believe in free enterprise, equal opportunity for all, personal freedom and that the government should serve the people not vice versa. I believe in small government because power attracts the corruptible.  I'm a strict constitutionalist. I believe in freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. I believe in freedom of speech, assembly and the rest.

I constantly get called racist, a Nazi, etc.. While there are those kinds of people out there, I find just as much of it on the far left as on the far right. The prejudices are simply different. About the only prejudices they seem to have in common though is that they both hate the Jews for some reason.

I don't hate anybody, but my politics are thoroughly conservative. In all my time with the Tea Party, I never met a racist in the bunch, although I met more than a few fake racists pretending to be Tea Party folk. I worked for years with bipartisan advocacy groups, so I knew the local leftists and recognized the little buggers.

I find "progressives" paternalistic, divisive in the way they promote what they call "diversity", and their foreign policy and military policies to be misguided if not downright dangerous.  But I don't call liberals "communists" unless they've actually signed up on the party and I don't appreciate being called a Nazi or white supremacist if I have given no evidence that I am.

Do I like being "associated" with Nazis or the KKK?  Hell no, but then I'm not the one doing the associating. It's liberals who insist on associating perfectly lovely people like me with Nazis and the KKK.

Besides Nazis were socialists and the KKK were Democrats. I'm a free market capitalist and Republican and therefore neither of those.

© 2017 by Tom King