Maybe it's a test. They have all kinds of tests on Facebook. You can find out which actresses from 1970 you recognize or how many scientific terms from Star Trek are real term outside the show. Maybe they invented two parties in 1854 to see who the smart people are.

     I'm not going to dwell on principles or philosophy here, just what they actually said and did.

     America is a republic and not a democracy, specifically emphasized in our founding literature and our social-studies classes. This distinction is important on several levels and understanding this is a basic test of citizenship knowledge in the United States of America. So naming the D party for democracy should lean people towards the R party standing for a republic.

     The D party was founded to preserve slavery. America's founders may have waffled on the slavery issue but six decades later the time was ripe for the R party and it's abolitionist movement. 1865 June 19, "Juneteenth," should have settled the choice once and for all.

     The D party formed the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a strong, violent, anti-Negro, anti-Jewish organization fueled by hate. The R party fought for all men who lived here legally to be citizens and for all male citizens to vote freely. Later on, the R party pushed an initiative for women to have the same voting rights as men.

     The D party created a culture of cult-science to advance their policies of political power. It started with eugenics, their scientific "necessity" to eliminate inferior and undesired races through humane methods of forced sterilization and abortion. The R party continued to fight for all races, religions, and ethnic groups to have a place in America.

     The D party embraced communism, socialism, and fascism. (I can use the traditional definitions where "communism" is full public ownership of everything with no private property at all, "socialism" is public (government) ownership of the means of production, and "fascism" allows private ownership of factories with government control over what they are allowed to produce. Alternatively, I am okay with calling countries "socialist" when they and other countries call them "socialist." That would include the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), National Socialism (NaZi), Castro's communism in Cuba, Pol Pot's government in Cambodia, and Mao's cultural revolution.) While the R party steadfastly resisted socialism in favor of a society based on personal freedom and human rights, the D party continued their support of this socialist vision as it killed 262 million of its own citizens, about five percent of all deaths in the past century. They continue that support through Democratic Socialism today.

     As the Ku Klux Klan faded from the national news, in my childhood years around 1965, the same D-Party hate became the Marxist, racist, violent, anti-Jewish Black Panthers who portrayed police with pigs heads in their newsletter's political cartoons. In our own time, the Black Panthers changed into a group called Black Lives Matter (BLM). The D party has moved its focus from racial hate to being anti-Jewish with groups like ANTIFA, BDS, and the group of four casually called "the Mod Squad."

     So here we have in our republic an R party supporting our republic with the policies that include all members of our community in the United States and a D party named for the democracy that undermines a society of law and supports the exclusion of several groups for race and religion along with supporting the socialist regimes that slaughtered 262 million of their own citizens.

     The R party supports freedom of speech not only as a matter of law but as a matter of social policy while the D party has restricted speech in entertainment, news, and social media. After seeing the history of what gun control does to people, both here and abroad, the D party continues to support it. Pretty much down the line, the R party supports our Bill of Rights while the D party has undermined it.

     More recently the D party did corrupt and evil things and impeached the R party for doing those things. The D party used a disease as an excuse to further diminish our Constitutional rights.

     As we proceed into the Twenty-First Century there is more and more a clearcut different between the good-guys R party and the forces-of-evil D party. So it's like a vending machine: Press the R button and Americans get jobs and financial security along with pride and joy in their country or press the D button and our rights go away, we live in a world of hate, and people of the wrong ethnic groups or opinions get punished. Press R for food or press D for electric shocks. Even a rat can figure it out, but somehow half of America keeps getting it wrong.

     What am I missing? Given the historical horrors and the recent hate sprees what could make somebody choose D over R?

     The R party supports some Christian values. Even though the Biblical Book of Genesis is pro-choice on abortion, most of them are pro-life on the issue and their politically active on the issue. While many R-party members are anti-gay, I've seldom seen or heard any of them actually criticize somebody for being homosexual. It turns out the D party openly supports Muslim values. While R-party people accept Muslims obeying Muslim law, the D-party people are openly intolerant of Christiany.

     So what is the motivation for an otherwise-decent person to side with all the evil and hate of the D party? What answers do I get when I ask them about it?

     The funny thing is they cite behavior where they did much worse. After a history of Klan brutality and Black-Panther riots, BLM has been burning down shopping centers and hurting people as they published anti-white and anti-Jewish web pages. A few ANTIFA people got into the Capital on 2021 January 6, they did some damage, and, of course, the R party is to blame.

     I figure a person's private life should be private, even in politics, but the D-party people are all over Donald Trump for sleeping with a porn star. What did they do about it? They elected a demented pedophile and a prostitute (maybe with a little help from voter fraud, maybe a lot of help).

     I see Facebook memes about how evil conservatives are, how they insist that black people work just as hard as white people for the same economic gains, how they reject enormous government spending for little gain, how heartless conservatives are when they don't wear cloth masks. I see memes asking how we can be against socialism when it's public schools (wrong!), the post office (wrong!), unions (transfering employer's wealth to union leadership) helping the poor (not!), and Social Security (turning needed equity into useless annuity). Did they forgot that socialism is also cute puppies? Just because liberals have freedom of speech, just because conservatives have given their lives and livelihoods for all of us to have freedom of speech, doesn't mean they should use that freedom to spit in our faces.

     The D-R choice is a test, half our country passed, and half our country failed.