Judd Dunning, a political author, host, pundit and producer, has penned a book, “13 1/2 Reasons Why NOT To Be A Liberal: And How to Enlighten Others”.
In an interview with Sputnik, he explains how verbal attacks against conservatives go largely unnoticed by US mainstream media, what it’s like to be banned on social media and lose investors because of “different” views, and why he believes that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election and “energised” conservatism in the United States.
Sputnik: Your book is titled “13 and 1/2 reasons why not to be a liberal”. What motivated you to pen this book? Why, in your view, should people drift away from liberalism?
Judd Dunning: Well, honestly, you know, my father passed away and we owned a property in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina that we were going to sell, and it was a historical property. It was a civil war cabin that had gone back to the American Civil War that my uncle had owned. My dad had always said something simple. He said: ”Government can stay the heck out of my business”. And then he would always say: ”If the government isn’t working, then you shouldn’t hear about it, it should just be in the background, is we’re making a living”.
So my father had a couple, you know, core belief systems when I was young. And so I grew up in a Republican household. But in the 70s and 80s, people didn’t talk about their politics the way we do now. Politics are now the reality show, entertainment of the world. It was much more private in those days. Your bedroom and your politics were your own business and you didn’t choose your friends. At his passing, I just thought it would be a great moment to go up there. I’d already been in politics for 3 or 4 years, I guess.
And we went up there and I took a writer by the name of Eric Ghaleb, who had done 5 books, who had been on a number of my panels at Politikon, the Comic-Con of Politics and Entertainment in America. And he had a gruff bottom line truth to him. So we sat there together for 13 days and we woke up at six in the morning and we worked until the end of the night. So, you know, I think, partially it was saying goodbye to the legacy of my father and his small government influence on me.
As far as liberalism itself, if you go back to its roots, our roots were free from religious oppression and governmental interventionism and military despotism from Britain. To be a liberal until the 1930s, meant to be free. Liberalism itself is a way for the government to keep expanding is anti-American. And as Dennis Prager says, and we use this in the beginning of my book: “The Bigger the Government, The Smaller the Citizen”.
One of the things that are happening with all the politics and all the fake news, fake science, disinformation, the vitriol of politics is, I think, a lot of people get nervous to know their facts on every issue of why they stand, where they stand. And a lot of people just get influenced because they’re scared to argue, because it’s so easy to take one fact, repeat it, isolate it, gaslight people and make them think they’re wrong. But the truth is, history and context liberate people.
So I wrote this book as a reason for people not to be a liberal is to anchor into each chapter. We look at the facts of liberalism versus conservatism and then how to argue. So that’s really I mean, why should someone not be liberal – because history and facts would say otherwise.
Sputnik: You write that “conservatives often find themselves in situations where liberals relentlessly hammer them with insults”. Why does the mainstream media ignore such incidents?
Judd Dunning: So if you look at the dialogues that have been created since the 1960s in America and all the way back to the 1930s. But if you go back to nineteen twenty-nine, Joseph Stalin said “the Heresy of American exceptionalism”. Communism did not go so well, a lot of people lost their lives. There were positive elements of communism. A lot of people were protected and lifted out of poverty, too. But unfortunately, a lot of people lost their lives, lost their freedom. It didn’t work as a model. It generally caused a lot of pain. So in the 1960s liberals in America, they packaged the emotionality of what was good about socialism and communism, which was four platforms:
- We should save the planet.
- Life should be fair.
- We should be part of a global peace, homogenized culture.
- We should educate our people.
But for you to say, oh, well, life is not equal inherently. We’ll never have world peace because of the tensions inherently and of human nature that the planet is doing just fine. We already are taking care of it, we just need to wait until technology liberates us from fossil fuels rather than spending trillions of dollars in shifting power to the government.
When you say all these unpopular things, they don’t have an argument. So what they can do is they can argue with you that you are bigoted, uneducated, racist, elitist, repressive, traditional, patriarchal. It’s very easy to go after the conservative right and call it old-fashioned. But here’s the catch.
Conservatism is actually progressive. Progressives are regressive. It’s all a media flip of the information.
They’re the ones trying to shift power away from the individual. They’re the ones trying to oppress those that have free speech. They’re the ones that are actually racist and have used minorities for political power. They’re the ones that opposed the Civil Rights Act. They’re the ones that opposed women’s suffrage. They’re the ones that are stoking the flames of racism for political power.
So the attacks on conservatives are attacks really on individual liberty, and they don’t have a good argument, so what they do is they attack. So if you’re talking to someone and if someone doesn’t have a real argument, then they will lower the bar and they will get personal. And this is pretty much the playbook of the American liberal left.
Sputnik: How polarised is American society right now? Joe Biden has repeatedly called for unity and “healing”, but can the current administration actually provide a solution to the problems and issues people in the US are faced with today?
Judd Dunning: It’s very polarized right now, I’d say it’s the most polarized in my lifetime. That being said, there’s a great book about this that every time somebody says the Republican Party is dead or the Democratic Party is dead. We’ve got over two hundred and forty years of a two-party system that has had periods of great, bombastic tension. So for people who don’t believe in history, this is the worst time in American history.
And you know, that’s not true. We have a pretty dynamic system. But Joe Biden called for unity when [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] FDR pushed through 30 executive orders during the Great Depression. And he was the most executive order dictatorial president that we’ve had. Joe Biden beat him. Joe Biden actually had twenty-eight in the same time that FDR had three executive orders and now he’s into the 40s.
So what is, if I may use the word weak or calculated, because when you use executive orders, what are you doing? The executive branch is overriding the legislative branch and the judicial branch in order to push through a policy. And he did it aggressively, called for unity, and then meanwhile, his base was saying that Trumpers should be put in reprogramming or reformation camps.
The Lincoln Project that you contacted me originally has two mission statements: to defeat Trump and then to turn around and to eliminate all things that are Trumpisms. So that’s almost got the languaging of cleansing in it. Right? And so what’s happening is there are two forces that have come to pass at the same time: we have a cancelling media, a big tech media, all owned by extreme liberals, and you’ve got academia and Hollywood in America all supporting the liberal left.