I performed my civic duty and voted in the Virginia gubernatorial elections. My son, a sophomore in college, was home on Fall break and joined me in stopping by the Republican booth to express moral support. Fortunately, an increasing number of young people are embracing patriotism and traditional values, as was revealed in the 2024 presidential elections. It is also true that Generation Z is far more polarized than previous generations: some espouse radical leftism, and others turn to conservatism, but there are very few moderates.
My family lives in Fairfax County, which, unlike traditional rural Virginia, is heavily populated by left-leaning residents, many of whom work in Washington, D.C. I find it shockingly frustrating that numerous otherwise reasonable people disregard facts and common sense when choosing radical left policies, which most of them do not actually support on a rational philosophical level. Such voters are not even driven by financial interest. They act out of Trump-derangement syndrome or virtue signaling. Some of them vote based on pure emotional attachment to a party that has now completely lost itself in a dystopian fusion of socialist and jihadist sentiments, as the disturbing tendencies in the mayoral races in New York and Minneapolis reveal.
My voting experience reminded me of Ronald Reagan’s legendary speech “A Time for Choosing,” which was aired exactly 61 years ago — on October 27, 1964. The speech is remarkably prescient; it addresses multiple problems our country is currently facing as a result of unsustainable leftist policies. Reagan warned:
Today, 37 cents out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector’s share, and yet our government continues to spend 17 million dollars a day more than the government takes in. We haven’t balanced our budget 28 out of the last 34 years. We’ve raised our debt limit three times in the last twelve months, and now our national debt is one and a half times bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations of the world.
Regarding the proliferation and growing power of unelected bureaucrats, Reagan remarked:
Federal employees — … [t]hese proliferating bureaus with their thousands of regulations have cost us many of our constitutional safeguards. How many of us realize that today federal agents can invade a man’s property without a warrant? They can impose a fine without a formal hearing, let alone a trial by jury? And they can seize and sell his property at auction to enforce the payment of that fine.
The speech concludes with sentiments that closely resemble President Trump’s principled defense of American ideals and Western civilization, both internationally and at home:
You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” “There is a point beyond which they must not advance.” And this — this is the meaning [of] “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said: “The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits — not animals.” And he said, “There’s something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
To my fellow Virginians and my fellow Americans who have a chance to make a positive difference on November 4, 2025, I wish to say: it is a time for choosing. As Charlie Kirk recently wrote: “America must choose: MAGA or Mamdani-ism.”
Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.
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