Guy Farmer: Defending American culture and values

My friend and fellow Foreign Service retiree, Fred LaSor, wrote an important column for the Appeal on Wednesday, comparing what's going on in some of America's biggest cities to the destructive Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Headlined "America's Red Guards," LaSor asserted that anarchists and thugs who are rioting, looting, defacing monuments and tearing down historic statues around the country "are reminiscent of the major political upheaval that rocked China from 1966 to 1976: the so-called Cultural Revolution. With the blessing of Party Chairman Mao Tse Tung, that nation's young people hounded the very people and institutions responsible for Mao's rise to power."

That's exactly what happened in China, and it could happen here unless a new silent majority — that's you and me, folks — speaks up to oppose the wave of destructive, Crazy Left political correctness that's sweeping the country. It usually happens in big cities but we've seen young people lying in the middle of Carson Street to protest alleged "police brutality" and "white privilege," whatever that is.

Former Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Gerard Baker, who was born in the United Kingdom, commented on this vital issue last week in a column headlined "Defend America's History, and Retake Its Institutions." "Much of the country's political leadership, almost its entire academic establishment… and a good deal of its corporate elite view America as an irredeemably malignant force for enslavement and repression, a uniquely evil power founded on an ideal of racial supremacy," Baker wrote.

When President Trump spoke at the majestic Mount Rushmore Monument over the Fourth of July weekend, a smug CNN reporter told us that our president "was appearing in front of a monument of two slave owners on land wrestled away from Native Americans," Baker continued. "If the self-image of Americans a generation ago was that of a smiling GI receiving flowers from liberated peoples, today we're told it's a police boot stamping on a human face…" What insidious nonsense!

So I think it's time for those of us who revere our founding document, the Constitution; respect the American flag, and stand for our National Anthem to rise up in opposition to this modern American version of China's Red Guards. Enough is enough! We can accomplish this by going to the polls in November to vote for candidates who share our very diverse American culture and our values. We know what it means to be Americans, and are proud to be citizens of this great country.

I lived overseas for more than 20 years in wonderful countries like Australia and Spain, but I was always happy when I drove over Duck Hill and down into Carson City, my adopted hometown. I've always felt fortunate to be an American and proud to have served in the military and represented my country abroad.

My late wife Consuelo, a legal immigrant from Mexico, knew what it means to be an American, transforming herself from an 11-year-old girl who worked in a Mexico City textile factory into an accomplished, beautiful woman who hosted diplomatic cocktail parties on behalf of her new country 20 years later.

Nevada's remarkable Laxalt family knows what it means to be Americans. After stalwart sheepherder Dominique Laxalt and his wife Teresa emigrated to America from the Basque Country between France and Spain, they became the proud parents of Nevada Gov. and U.S. Sen. Paul Laxalt, and our state's greatest writer, Robert Laxalt. That's another inspiring immigrant success story, in vivid contrast to what we're seeing in the streets of our major cities today. As Anglo-American journalist Gerard Baker urged, Let's retake America in November.

Guy W. Farmer, a retired diplomat, self-identifies as "American" on U.S. Census forms.