My perception and interpretation of the truth is irrelevant to the truth itself since I exist independantly of the truth I am perceiving. If I think it’s an apple on the table, that has no effect whatsoever upon the orange that’s actually sitting there. It may have an effect upon me and upon the apple-lovers who I tell about it though.

If truth is such an easy concept to grasp, why is the truth at times so difficult to find? I have been wondering this for several years now. This has been in the context of finding spiritual truth as well as the truth of world events such as 9/11, etc. Through my interactions with people who are seeking truth as well as looking at myself seeking the truth, I have found several things that have kept me and others from finding the truth.

Pride

“I don’t know.” It’s such a simple phrase, why is it so difficult to say? … “I was wrong.” Also very simple. The inability to say these things hits at the core of why pride keeps me and others from finding the truth. It forces me to make up the parts of the puzzle that are missing instead of admitting I don’t know the answers.

Some examples: Instead of saying “The government is out to get me.” I could say, “I don’t know what’s in the hearts of other people (or the government).” “I don’t know how many columns were severed in each building on 9/11.” “I don’t know if there are chemicals in the contrails or not.” “I don’t know if the government is plotting to get me” “I don’t know how hot the fires were on 9/11.” “I don’t know what caused debris to shoot out of the windows on 9/11.” “I don’t know where the sulfur in the samples came from.”

If we can simply accept the fact that we don’t know everything like God does, the truth will not continue to be hidden by the false reality I have painted in its place.

Fear, Selfishness, Consequences, Vested Interests

Sometimes masked as apathy, fear keeps me from wanting to see the truth… “If the government did 9/11, I’m not safe!” “If the muslim extremeists did it, then I’m wrong and people will think I’m not important.”

“I’ve put my career on the line – I have to make this work or I’ll loose my job and/or my reputation.” “I’m selling DVD’s so in order to make money, I have to sell this theory.”

Hatred

Hatred seems to make people want to do the opposite of what the person they’re hating wants. This manifests itself as teenage rebellion and arguing just to argue, for example. I have been in situations where I hate the person enough to just want to win an argument – nothing else matters, not even the truth. The truth can even be bent just a little so that we can rationalize our lack of integrity. We can cut and paste just certain parts of a quote to make a point that will surely put the other guy in checkmate and we’ll win the argument!

Self Worth / Savior complex

“If I uncover this, I’ll be important and famous.” “If I’m the only one who has figured this out, I will save everyone else from their ignorance – that will prove that I’m important.” “If I can figure this out, people will think I’m smart.”

The desire to derive self worth from saving others is one of the strongest desires I have encountered. If I feel worthless or unworthy, I can temporarily help myself feel better by saving other people from their own ignorance. Warning people is fine as long as it’s not an addiction. If it’s an addiction, people tend to invent information and invent crisis in order to have an excuse to go around saving people and feeling worth while. Self worth can only come from the Atonement of Christ. If I truly believe that He died for me – for me – then I will not have to derive my self worth from anything else.

Love

This is what everyone thinks their motivation for seeking truth is: love for their fellow beings. Sometimes it actually is their motivation and it could in reality be a mix of love and hate and fear and the other things above. Regardless of the truth of our motivations, most people I’ve run into, including myself, think we’re doing it out of love for our fellow man – uncovering something that everyone else needs to know so that they’ll not be harmed by their ignorance. This can be linked to pride in that we hide our true motivation (deriving self worth from saving others, etc.) under a false covering of doing it out of love for our fellow man.

How do we hide from the truth?

Sometimes when my motives are not completely based in love, I and others I have seen use a pattern to avoid the truth from being exposed. We many times ignore or minimize the point at hand and bring up several other points instead. This leaves the point at hand unresolved and shrouded in mystery while keeping our opponent off balance and overwhelmed.

Sometimes we blindly trust what we already agree with and blindly reject what we don’t already agree with. This is called confirmation bias.

Talking to people who can’t get us closer to the truth. For example, discussing among like-minded people the details of a situation instead of talking to the person who was actually there or an expert who could explain how things really work.

Logical fallacies – Sometimes instead of debating the evidence, we attack the person we’re talking to. This is an ad hominem logical fallacy and it’s common but the argument should be about the evidence, not about the people arguing. Sometimes we use association fallacy – or guilt by association, which would be like saying, for example, that since some religious people are wrong, you must be wrong as well since you’re a religious person. Appeal to fear is another logical fallacy where a person uses fear to persuade their opponent instead of the facts. Wikipedia has dozens more fallacies that can be used to hide from the truth.

Now what?

So, now that we can see some of the motivations behind seeking truth and how most of those can actually keep us from the truth, how do we honestly figure out which motivations are driving us? Since many of us pridefully think that our only motivation is love for our fellow man, how can we find out the truth?

One way is to see how a person acts when given true evidence that goes counter to their current theory. If they take it in, see what’s there, and are willing to throw away their theory if that evidence in fact is true, then they are more likley driven by love.

“… I decided to find more conventional work for a year, to pay off my student loans and maybe even save a little bit. I would need the money later, I told myself. Organizers didn’t make any money; their poverty was proof of their integrity.

Eventually a consulting house to multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal, checking the Reuters machine that blinked bright emerald messages from across the globe.”

Hmm. Perhaps that’s why much of what he does to “help” the economy has been proven in the past to hurt the economy. If he were to cut taxes and get out of the way, he’d see Americans fixing the problems he’s complaining about and promising to fix. But if he did that, he’d be helping the “enemy” right? It appears to me that we have an enemy of the private sector in the white house claiming to want to help his enemy and then providing anything but help. It all makes sense now.

Abstract: Despite decades of repeated failure, President Obama and Congress continue to promote the myth that government can spend its way out of recession. Heritage Foundation economic policy expert Brian Riedl dispels the stimulus myth, lays out the evidence that government spending does not end recessions–and presents the evidence for what does end recessions. Hint: It’s not another “stimulus package.”

It’s kind of like pulling money out of the bottom of your piggy bank and then stuffing it back into the top and fooling yourself into believing that you just made a bunch of money.  Why is this so hard for some people?  Go read the article and enjoy some common sense.

Socialism Illustrated

In the spirit of Obama the Marxist winning and more and more democrats “coming out” as socialists now, I present this wonderful article entitled “Why Socialism Failed” by Mark J. Perry (blog), Ph.D. Professor of Finance and Business Economics, about why Socialism has failed in so many countries already. I think the practical reality of historical evidence is crucial in our day when it’s so easy to sell Socialism as a wonderful cure-all – in theory. (I also updated my Barack Obama and Global Warming articles if you’re interested.)

Please check out the article and comment on it. Thanks. Here’s a quote from the article just to whet your appetite:

Socialism is the Big Lie of the twentieth century. While it promised prosperity, equality, and security, it delivered poverty, misery, and tyranny. Equality was achieved only in the sense that everyone was equal in his or her misery.

In the same way that a Ponzi scheme or chain letter initially succeeds but eventually collapses, socialism may show early signs of success. But any accomplishments quickly fade as the fundamental deficiencies of central planning emerge. It is the initial illusion of success that gives government intervention its pernicious, seductive appeal. In the long run, socialism has always proven to be a formula for tyranny and misery.

A pyramid scheme is ultimately unsustainable because it is based on faulty principles. Likewise, collectivism is unsustainable in the long run because it is a flawed theory. Socialism does not work because it is not consistent with fundamental principles of human behavior. The failure of socialism in countries around the world can be traced to one critical defect: it is a system that ignores incentives.

Socialism Illustrated

Introduction

With all of the bailouts, automotive and bank takeovers, health-care reform, and wealth redistribution going on under the Obama administration lately, Socialism has become a popular topic.  I oppose Socialism because: 1) It doesn’t achieve its most important stated goals, 2) it is immoral and unchristian, and 3) for a bunch of other reasons (to be explained below).  First, let’s define some terms and then we’ll get to the details.

Socialism is defined as the government owning and controlling a country’s means of production (manufacturing, shipping, etc.) and allocation of resources (raw materials, property, etc.).  It concentrates a lot of freedom of choice to a small group of politicians.  Capitalism, on the other hand, allows individuals to control a country’s means of production and allocation of resources.  It distributes the freedom of choice across the people.  People choose which products to buy, which jobs to take, which companies to create, etc.  Then through a variety of prices (wages, prices of raw materials, prices of finished products, rent, etc.) agreed upon by millions of people through their individual choices, capitalism distributes goods, services, raw materials, risks, people, and wealth in the most efficient manner thus far discovered as evidenced by the per capita GDP of citizens participating in capitalist free markets vs. those using socialism.

One stated goal of socialism is to help the poor, and I agree wholeheartedly with that goal.  What I disagree with is the means by which that goal is achieved.  Often when a person opposes socialistic programs, they are assumed to be opposing the intentions of that program, “So you don’t like to help the poor then?” when in fact it’s not the intentions that are being opposed but the programs themselves, which have been shown not to work and almost always end up hurting the poor the most.  It would be similar to becoming a thief to make your way through college and someone tells you, “Hey, I don’t think you should be stealing from people.” and you reply, “What?  You don’t want me to go to college?”

It doesn’t achieve its stated goals

Some of the stated goals we hear each time socialism is brought up are helping the poor and punishing greed.  I agree with these goals.  They’re great goals.  The big problem is that the centralized planning of Socialism just doesn’t work – it doesn’t help the poor.  Take a look at the levels of freedom compared to the conditions of the poor in each country in the following maps as well as how well the poor fare in free market societies:

The poorest of the poor are in the least “free” countries.  This means centralized planning just doesn’t achieve its main goal of helping the poor.  The richest poor people in the world live in the U.S. where a free market has raised the standard of living of their poor well beyond any socialized or centrally planned system ever has.  There are simple reasons for this.  One reason is that you just can’t squeeze the wisdom and knowledge of 300 million people out of a few hundred central planners.  A central planner just doesn’t have the knowledge of the supply and demand of local markets that the people who live in those markets do.

A 2010 study on the correlation between economic freedom and prosperity has also found that the more free a country is, the more prosperous they are.  So why again is there a group of people who consistently wants to destroy the freedoms of prosperous countries to make everyone equally poor instead of freeing impoverished countries to let them prosper?  The same study also notes that government spending and “stimulus” has no effect whatsoever on a country’s growth.

The other goal is to punish greed.  The problem with that is that greed is a motive, not an action.  A wealthy person could be greedy or they could just be a hard worker.  So since there’s no way for government to measure the level of greed in a person, they assume that all wealthy people are greedy and then punish them all equally.  This has the unfortunate and destructive side effect of punishing and discouraging hard work as well.

This really should be enough, shouldn’t it?  If Socialism doesn’t help the poor - it hurts them – then why even consider it as an option for helping the poor?  Furthermore, if as it tries to punish greed, it ends up ignoring incentives that allow a good company to be rewarded with profits and a bad company to be punished with failure, should it be considered as a good greed punisher with no side effects?  It punishes good companies by taxing them (since they must just be greedy, not efficient or well-run) and rewards and keeps around bad companies (think teachers’ unions tenure rules, auto workers unions, failed bailed out banks, etc.).

Socialism also has another side effect of disconnecting people’s choices from their consequences.  If a company works hard to be efficient and thereby makes a profit which is then confiscated, the consequences of their choices have been removed.  If a doctor under socialized medicine gets the same pay and same patient load regardless of their performance, then the consequences have been disconnected from the choices they made.  If a patient under socialized healthcare pays a flat fee (or nothing) for services, then the choice of going to the doctor for every scratch in their throat is disconnected from the consequence of that choice, which is the cost incurred for treating them.  When consequences are removed, progress is slowed and efficiency and wealth are reduced.

The removal of consequences is like mercy robbing justice.  Justice treats all people equally.  It connects people’s choices to their consequences whether those consequences and choices are good or bad.  Mercy, which is appropriate at the right time, forgives choices and takes away consequences.  Mercy is essential but only in a case-by-case basis when the individual is truly sorry for their mistakes and who truly wants to improve.  If mercy is applied to everyone without regard to these things, it robs justice.  The government can’t administer mercy across all people at all times without robbing justice, bankrupting society, and giving limitless power to politicians who then have the option to abuse that power, which has happened several times throughout history.

It is immoral and unchristian

But Christ said to help the poor and take care of the sick and afflicted, to clothe the naked and take care of the widows!  Right, but he didn’t tell the government to force people to do these things - he told individuals to do it themselves.  The scriptures explain it quite plainly.  The war in heaven discussed in the scriptures was not about right and wrong, it was about freedom and slavery: Do we allow people to make their own choices or do we force them to do what’s right?  God’s plan was to give us agency.  Satan’s plan was to force us all to do what’s right by taking away our choices or agency.  And Satan wanted all of the glory and credit, of course, since he’d be calling all of the shots.  With freedom and choice comes power and responsibility.

Does any of this sound familiar?  Have you ever heard of a politician forcing the rich to give to the poor and then taking credit for the “charity?”

Furthermore, while Socialism puts forth the ideas of “equality” and “social justice” (and it actually does end up forcing most people to equal poverty as this and other forms of tyranny has done for millenia), it assumes that politicians are more moral than citizens are.  I don’t know of anyone who thinks politicians are generally more moral than the general public.  (One reason for this is that politicians generally have their choices and consequences disconnected – if they waste a bunch of my money on a failed project, they have no consequence especially if they can spin it right in the media.)  One group of people declares itself better than the rest, and then they rule over them – it’s an old storyline.  With Socialism, this is done to keep the “greedy” people from hording all the resources from the poor.  But aren’t we just putting greedy politicians in charge of greedy people at that point?  If we treat people differently by taking from some and giving to others then the door for corruption is wide open for favors, vote-buying, etc.

The way to cause charity while maintaining freedom is to preach the Gospel to people to motivate them to give and be generous of their own free will and choice.  Only among a righteous people can there be no poor and no tyranny in the same place at the same time!

“But people just won’t take care of each other unless we force them to!”  The ironic thing is that with all of America’s wealth, we have been the most charitable country in the history of mankind - to our own poor as well as to other nations.  That goes against what Socialists claim.  Also, when a politician or person from a socialist country argues against the greed of the rich in a capitalist country, they’re really just arguing against freedom.  Yes, freedom to do good or bad.  Freedom to choose what you want to do and to learn from the consequences.  To argue against freedom like this is to argue against the progression of mankind, and it’s ironic that modern socialists call themselves “progressives” when they’re just trying to take us back to the tyranny that has reigned in this world for thousands of years!  Do you realize that tyranny and centralized planning has been the norm for this planet throughout almost its entire recorded history?  The result has been widespread poverty and slavery – denying people of their God-given rights.  Purposefully and knowingly going back down that road again is immoral.

So, here we have the United States of America breaking free from 1000′s of years of tyranny into the light of freedom and the tyrants start to complain about this unmitigated greed!  They stir their follower-slaves up against it in the name of greed bashing – breaking the 10th commandment of covetousness.  Their plan is to grab free markets that are flourishing and drag them back down into tyranny through socialism.  The capitalists plan, however, is to free the rest of the enslaved globe.  “But won’t we need like 5 planets if everyone were living like Americans?”  Americans and other upcoming free market capitalistic countries are wallowing in wealth because they have a monopoly on freedom.  If the rest of the world were freed, then they’d compete with Americans and others for resources, products, etc. and through prices, people would automatically self-regulate.  That’s how it works.  And it works really well.  I would love to have the entire world liberated and free from the tyranny and oppression of socialism – based on history, this would truly help the poor.

A bunch of other reasons

People often complain about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer in the United States.  The reason for this is simple, and it’s a great example for us to learn from:  The rich are working under capitalism, the poor are working under socialism in the form of wealth redistribution and welfare.  What a great example of how socialism  hurts all those who use it and how capitalism helps those who use it.  You want to close the gap between the rich and poor?  Take the poor off socialism and welfare and put them into pure capitalism and let them be free to lift themselves to their full potential.  Of course there are situations where the poor need help and that can be done, and is being done, through charity.

Any time you want to force people to do something you want them to do, they have to give you a lot of power.  Any time you give a lot of power to imperfect human beings, they often, as history has shown us, abuse that power, which many socialists have done to the tune of murdering tens of millions of people throughout history once they have the power.  Just look at the list of socialist and communist murderers who have slaughtered hundreds of millions of their own citizens - usually the crippled, poor, elderly, Jew, handicapped, Christian, and others who couldn’t contribute enough: Hitler (17 million total through gas chambers, execution style murder, etc., not including the people killed in WWII), Mao (50 to 70 million through military slaughter combined with starvation brought about by socialist programs), Stalin (anywhere between 10 and 100 million), Pol Pot (only 1.7 to 2.5 million), Kim Il Sung (1.6 million, not including the 2.5 million killed during the Korean War), Mussolini (only 300,000), Che (“several thousand” citizens – but he, in his own words, liked to kill them himself execution style at close range and forced their families to watch the executions), etc.  What a strange pattern of mass murder from those who just want to take from the rich and give to the poor to level the playing field – of course, out of compassion for the poor.  Socialism is not just immoral, it’s satanic, according to how satan himself describes his plan in the scriptures and that seems to be backed up by the fruits of those who follow his plan of socialism and communism.

Government through taxation disconnects its choices from its consequences.  If it does a bad job, it still gets taxes.  If it throws money away on a bad program, it still gets taxes and has lost nothing.  Because of this disconnection, combined with its monopolistic nature, government should be kept as small as possible.  When it creates a program, it’s generally the only option and so free market controls, incentives and disincentives are not there to help it stay efficient and to minimize corruption.   It should be big enough to maintain order and protect its people.  The reason that the military is one of the only things a government does well, is because a government’s military is in competition with other countries’ militaries and so that competition keeps it in check whereas other government programs don’t have that competition.

I think it’s worth mentioning one other pattern I’ve seen recently in the environmentalist movement.  Parts of it appear to have been hijacked by the socialist movement.  With global warming scares (no global warming has occurred since 1998, by the way), the socialists have found a vehicle upon which they can achieve their wealth redistribution goals.  This is happening through cap-and-trade legislation, which will funnel trillions of dollars from the wealthiest countries to the poorest countries over the upcoming decades.  Why don’t we just free the poor countries and let them become wealthy like the U.S. and others have instead of stealing, redistributing, and keeping them poor all in the name of helping them?  Proponents of these socialistic environmental programs stir up support by encouraging people to break the 8th and 10th commandments in the name of injustice – stating that the injustice comes from freedom when it actually comes from slavery.  Don’t usher in “equality” by enslaving the free – do it by freeing the enslaved!

One other area that is worth mentioning is the housing and financial crisis.  Socialists like to blame those problems on the unregulated free market and by doing so, they suggest that what we need is more regulation and less freedom, thereby achieving their freedom destroying socialistic goals.  They’ve already taken over large portions of the financial and automotive industries through these crises in the name of saving us from our consequences.  If it weren’t so tragic, the hypocrisy would be quite funny.  The housing crisis happened because the government put pressure on banks to lend to minority groups.  They wouldn’t let banks open up new branches or install ATM’s or do other things that require government approval unless they met certain quotas.  The government also allowed Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to buy bad mortgages from banks, moving the risk from the banks onto the taxpayers.  So, with pressure to loan to those who would likely not repay and a removal of the risks involved with doing so, the banks were incentivized to make loans to anyone who was breathing.  This caused housing prices to skyrocket with all the new demand and money flowing into the market.  Once Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac started to crumble under the weight of all of these bad loans, the house of cards fell and there was the government, ready and willing to blame its own mess on the “free” market.  They bailed out (which equates to taxpayers buying these homes for the people who could not pay for them – which was the socialists agenda in the first place) and blamed and pushed forward with more regulation.  It’s actually quite disgusting – and of course it ended up hurting the poor once again.  I recommend reading “The Housing Boom and Bust” by Thomas Sowell for a more in-depth look at this socialistic wealth distribution housing mess.

Part of a socialist government’s power grab is to demonize the heads of the companies that the government wants to take over in the name of greed and then start to take away their rights and punish them.  We see this currently as the government currently demonizes the heads of banks and the American public sits by and watches this happen because, “well, they really don’t need all that money”, right?  If we allow the government to take the rights of some, we give them power to take away rights of all of us – all in the name of forcing people to do what’s right to help the poor and needy.

Profits are also demonized and losses are bailed out by the government – if they choose to.  Those two incentives are what cause a free market to be efficient.  Profits reward companies that are doing well, allowing them to reinvest those profits to increase the size of that good running company.  Losses shrink poorly running companies.  If the failing company doesn’t change something quickly, it will disappear.  This frees up the people involved in that failing company to go do something else that they’re better at.  It punishes waste and inefficiency.  It gets rid of things that people don’t want.  It rewards efficiency which allows more goods and services to be available to more people.

Property is the physical manifestation of our choices.  If we choose to get an education, then choose to work hard to contribute something of worth to our society, our employer choses to pay us for our efforts, then we choose to go purchase goods with that money.  The results of all of those choices is the property we own and the knowledge we have gained.  While the government can’t take our knowledge and give it to others, it can take our property and give it to others.  This boils down to taking the results of our choices – or really the choices themselves – after the fact.  This fits the pattern of taking choice away through confiscating property.

Socialism pretends that incentives don’t matter when thousands of years of history prove that incentives do matter.  Some day, when a group of pure people who can live together in love and who have good work ethics regardless of pay, they can help each other and there will be no poor among them and that would obviously be the best kind of society.  There have been a few examples in the scriptures of that happening, but those situations are rare and fleeting.  That kind of heavenly society is what we all yearn for, socialists included, but instead of letting people arrive at that place by their own refinement, free will, and choice, they seek to force all people into a fake form of that kind of society where all end up suffering equally.  Forcing people against their wills is slavery and it just doesn’t work in the end – it achieves exactly the opposite of its stated goals of helping the poor and punishing greed.  It’s been proven throughout history over and over but we, like Satan, try it again and again because of the power grab it provides as a side effect.

There are four ways to spend money: 1) Spending your own money on yourself – this is the best way to spend money because you look for the best quality and the lowest price, 2) Spending your own money on others – This is a little worse because you still look to save money since it’s your money, but you aren’t as concerned about quality because you won’t be using the item being purchased, 3) Spending other people’s money on yourself is worse still – you look for good quality because it’s for you, but you don’t care about cost because it’s not your money, 4) Spending other peoples’ money on other people – this is socialism and government spending in general, and is the worst form because you don’t care about either quality or cost.

Socialism goes against natural law. In “de Legibus“, Cicero expresses his belief in natural law, which talks about self-evident truths dealing with what’s “right” and what’s “wrong”. He says that a country’s laws must promote good behavior and forbid or punish evil behavior. If a country’s laws go against natural law, it will fail and you’ll get less good behavior and more bad behavior as a natural consequence. Socialism inadvertently rewards bad behavior and punishes good behavior.

Socialism breaks at least the eighth and tenth commandments that deal with stealing and coveting. We’re playing robinhood and stealing from the rich and giving to the poor because we don’t like how the rich person is living their life. I think you need to give me your bank account number so I can spend your money on my house because I think I know better how to spend your money than you do.

It almost seems that socialism is really just a clever and covert method of gradually turning a free country into an enslaved dictatorship in the name of helping the poor and providing social justice.  At least that’s what history has shown us.

Educate yourself.  Vote.  Get involved.  Talk to your friends, neighbors, family, and relatives about these things.  Oppose socialism now in all of its forms.  Fight for freedom - apparently it’s worth fighting for.

“In case you haven’t heard about Brian Baird a Congressman from Washington State, he is the one who said those at townhalls expressing their concerns about ObamaCARE were exhibiting a “lynch mob mentality” and “close to Brownshirt tactics,” a reference to Nazi stormtroopers. David William Hedrick, a member of the silent majority, decided that he was not going to be silent anymore. So, he let U.S. Congressman Brian Baird have it. He was one questioner out of 38, that was called at random from an audience that started at 3,000 earlier in the evening. Not expecting to be called on, he quickly scratched what he wanted to say on a borrowed piece of paper and with a pen that he borrowed from someone else in the audience minutes before he spoke. So much for the planned talking points of the right wing conspiracy.” – source

Video Transcript:

BRIAN BAIRD: Yes, sir.

DAVID WILLIAM HEDRICK: My name is David, and I’m from Camas Washington.

BAIRD: Hi David.

HEDRICK: And uh, first of all I want to let everybody know since this is the thing tonight that I’m a marine corp vet. [applause]

BAIRD: Thank you David.

HEDRICK: And like you, I swore an oath to defend my constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. [applause] Now, I heard you say tonight about educating our children, indoctrinating our children, whatever you want to call it

BAIRD: I didn’t say indoctrinating.

HEDRICK: Stay away from my kids. [applause] I also heard you say that you’re gonna let us keep our health insurance. Well thank you! It’s not you’re right to decide whether or not I keep my current plan or not. That’s my decision. [applause] Now I’ve heard recently in the media that you and some other people on the national political stage call us brownshirts because we oppose…

BAIRD: No I did not. No I did not. What I said was, and I’ve apologized for it.

HEDRICK: Ok, well thanks for apologizing, but let, uh, I won’t speak to you then, I’ll speak to others. But I’ll remind you, a little history lesson, the Nazis were the national socialist party. They were leftist. They took over the finance. They took over the car industry. They took over healthcare in that country. If Nancy Pelosi wants to find a swastika, maybe the first place she should look is the sleeve on her own arm. [applause] Now what I want to know is, you’ve done a lot of things that violate your constitutional oath as you know. What I want to know is as a marine, as a disabled veteran that served this country, I have kept my oath. Do you ever intend to keep yours?

BAIRD: Yes I do.