Since I turned 18, a lot of names have been used to ridicule and denigrate me.

• When my family moved to California, I was called “Okie” because I came from a place where people worked for a living and took care of themselves instead of being a self-centered consumer drone.
• When I signed up for the Army before I graduated high school, my aging hippie teachers started calling me “Killer” because I had decided it was better to serve my country than to go to Berkeley and get stoned for four years.
• When I was at Monterey during the Panama invasion and Desert Shield, more aging hippies and their proto-slacker companions called me “Baby Killer” and “Murderer” as they protested at the gates of the Presidio and Fort Ord.  Side note – I never saw a protest when I transferred to Texas just prior to the beginning of Desert Storm
• When I was stationed in Germany, I was regularly called “Auslander” by people who were too young to remember the famine that American money stopped or the rebuilding that the Marshall Plan paid for.  Side note – I’ve shared more than a few beers with German veterans of World War II who remembered being helped up from the ashes by American GI’s.
• When I lived in southern Arizona, I was sometimes called “Pendejo” or “Gringo” by illegal immigrants, who would show up at my door asking for handouts, because I told them to get off the property or I’d call the cops.
• After moving to Kentucky, I’ve been called a “Carpetbagger” or a “Yankee” because my family chose to go north after getting off the boat instead of south.  Usually this has been done jokingly, but sometimes it’s done in all seriousness.
• On several occasions throughout my life I’ve been called “racist” because I expect everyone, regardless of where they or their ancestors come from, to work as hard as I do, act like a civilized human being, and respect my property rights.
• I’ve been called “Bambi Killer” because I like to walk around in the woods in the fall on the off chance that I’ll bump into a deer. This is usually told to me by someone who has no problem buying milk fed veal at the butcher for her Saturday evening dinner parties.
• I’ve been called an “abuser” in public because I expect my children to act like something more than what they evolved from in public, and am not shy about correcting them no matter where we are.
• I’ve been called a “gun nut” and a “paranoid” because I believe that it’s my responsibility to provide safety, nourishment, and security to my family and not the governments.

Now, people who, like me, believe that the government has lost its way and needs correcting in the form of reform and pruning are being called terrorists for not folding like a bed sheet at the first disapproving glance from the White House.

To those who say that believing in the desirability of a smaller, more efficient government and fighting for that idea is the moral equivalent of being a member of Hamas or Al Qaeda, I have one thing to say:

Bring it.  I’ve been insulted by better people than you.

If you think I’m scared by the words of some pissant who thinks he’s one of the proletariat because he rode a train back to Delaware every day after wasting time in the Senate, think again.  And if you think I’m worried about what some over-botox’ed harpy from the Bay Area thinks of me, think again.  If you think a man who’s served in the military, been married three times, and thinks its fun to train soldiers by letting them shoot him in the chest is concerned about the opinions of talking heads from Los Angeles and New York, think again.

Middle America is waking up, and it is you who has woken the sleeping giant.  The shrill screeching of a political class that has grown fat sucking off of the government teat does nothing to keep us from knowing what is right, and who is wrong.  Insulting and denigrating the salt of the earth folks who actually get out of bed every day and produce in order to curry favor with the parasites who have never worked an honest day in their lives and keep re-electing you does nothing but make the electoral ass whooping you so richly deserve even bigger when it inevitably comes.

My one word of advice:  Live in fear of the power of those you attempt to chastise.  We are peaceful people, and you are in no physical danger.  But we will remove you from power using every legal, constitutional method we can find.  We have a long memory, and a vote, and we outnumber you.  We are not tied to a party.  Until we remove you, we will resist you.  We will protest, we will prosthetylize, and we will make converts out of those who realize how much you have betrayed us.  We are tied to principles, not party.  Republicans who look down their patrician noses at us for being part of the unwashed masses are no safer than Democrats who scream at us from the heights.

H/T for Larry Correia for writing something that helped to coalesce something that’s been going through my head for days.