I watched the interview of my friend and former political opponent, Sen. Mike Braun, Republican of Indiana, on "The Tucker Carlson Show" earlier this month regarding the topic of BLM and police reform.

I know Braun because we are both from Jasper. He attended my children’s bar and bat mitzvahs. He is an immensely successful businessman whose company employs more than 600 individuals.

Mike and I ran for the state representative seat for the 63rd district in 2014 in the primary. We spoke before the same audiences and sat at the same tables. We discussed issues and philosophies. He defeated me handily.

He cannot be described as a movement conservative, which means after winning the Senate seat in 2018 he was likely to move leftward once ensconced in D.C. He favored lower taxes and large deductibles for health insurance coverage. All well and good, but limited. Beyond that, I felt he was not well-grounded on national or international matters, or on energy or immigration. Nor on cultural issues, which Republicans have ignored for decades to the nation’s detriment.

Braun provided a clue of the direction he would take when in his first year he joined with Sen. Chris Coons, D-DE, to form the first Senate bipartisan caucus on “finding solutions to ‘climate change.’” Not a good start, Mike. Still, I thought, in most ways, at least, he would have conservative, common sense instincts as a Jasper man, Midwesterner and successful businessman.

I could not have been more wrong. Braun’s response to the post-George Floyd rioting was to introduce a bill named the Reforming Qualified Immunity Act. This bill would have taken aim at “qualified immunity,” which protects police from frivolous lawsuits pursued in the regular discharge of their duties.

Braun, in so doing, was accepting the leftist premise that one of the significant problems confronting blacks in America was the statistically invalid claim there is widespread police brutality targeting blacks. He neglected to mention the exploding rates of black out-of-wedlock childbirth, welfare dependency, drug addiction, criminality, incarceration and the formation of an entrenched black underclass since Great Society.

Braun felt police needed to be held accountable. He brought up the cases of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks and Breonna Taylor. He signaled his support for Black Lives Matter, a Marxist organization that has called for the killing of police and the abolition of the “Western prescribed nuclear family.”

We also learn of the efforts of Sen. John Cornyn, R-TX, who sponsored a bill to make “Juneteenth” a federal holiday. This day, June 19, marks the anniversary of the last slaves officially liberated in Texas and the Confederacy in 1865 after the Civil War had already ended.

Senators Ron Johnson, R-WI, and James Lankford, R-OK agreed with the bill but went a step further by recommending exchanging it for Columbus Day, effectively eliminating that holiday, a position advocated by BLM Marxists.

In the aftermath of the George Floyd incident Republican Sen. Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky told reporters on Capitol Hill that “we are still wrestling with America’s original sin [of slavery].” 

Joining a protest against police brutality, Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah stated “We need to stand up and say that black lives matter.” A GOP led Senate Armed Services Committee approved a proposal to strip Confederate names from military bases. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-California, said he was “not opposed” to renaming bases.

These Republican efforts come as avowed Communist activists pull down statues, deface monuments, loot, burn and pillage their way through the land, undertaking to destroy our economic and political systems and erase our history.

The tactic of destroying memorials of Robert E. Lee and other confederates moved at lightning speed to engulf the founders and other historic American heroes, including Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Grant and Frederick Douglass. Columbus also became a favored target. He, after all, began the Age of Exploration, and thus the expansion of European powers into the New World, bringing Western civilization in its wake.

For Leftist book burners, Columbus is a genocidal racist, responsible for Western colonialism, slavery, and oppression of “indigenous people.” Their cultural jihad has now moved to our churches, synagogues and Jesus himself. Statues and images of Jesus represent, to the Left, not a middle Eastern Jew of two millennia ago, but a white European and a “form of white supremacy.”

The goal of the anarchist-communists is not limited to the overthrow of the American republic, this most successful exemplar of Western civilization. No, that would be insufficient for the nihilists who reject all things that occurred before yesterday. Rather, they seek to take their scorched earth revolution to Europe and beyond, to ancient Israel, Athens, Jesus and the Cross. Their objective is the obliteration of Western civilization.

So in the face of this cultural onslaught by the Left supported by our dominant institutions, including academia, the media, the Democrat Party and corporate America, the Republicans speak of “police reform,” renaming military bases and eliminating Columbus Day. But then Republicans begin every confrontation with the Left by accepting their premises and narrative, fighting, in effect, on their own territory and disagreeing minimally if at all, seemingly oblivious to the threat.

Wars, however, are not won by playing defense. Republicans should begin by defending our culture, institutions, and history, which is more than they currently do. They should extoll our legacy of human rights, liberty, Constitutional governance, and Western achievements in art, music, literature, science, and technology. Our unparalleled standard of living and material, moral, and spiritual riches should be proudly brandished and upheld.

Republicans must go on the offensive, and attack the decadent, degenerate Left, within our country and without, their immorality and social dysfunction and the pure evil of their ideology, their doctrine of enslavement. Point out their record of poverty, oppression, and genocide.

Describe the devastation of the Soviet Union, Red China and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Underscore the colossal failures of Marxism, the hundred million deaths that occurred at the hands of socialist dictators. Wrap the Marxist record of destruction around the necks of their successors in the American Left and the Democrat Party who now openly embrace that corrupt system.

Draw inspiration from a previous Republican leader, Ronald Reagan, who, in another era, confronted tyranny and defended liberty. Reagan lambasted the Soviets as the “evil empire,” and demanded Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev “tear down this wall” to the chagrin of RINOs and Democrats of his day.

But that is not what you will get from the BLM Republicans, our chest-less Republican boys. They are averse to political warfare or lack the stomach for it. A new political vehicle is required, or the party drastically reformed. It must become a party and movement that will unabashedly defend our institutions and history. Only when we have such a party, capable of attacking the Revolutionary Left, can we save the country.

Richard Moss, M.D., is a surgeon practicing in Jasper. Contact him at richardmossmd.com or Richard Moss, M.D. on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.