Is there no end to the supply of ostensible Republicans who do nothing but echo the Left’s talking points and fall into line as Leftists set the nation’s political and cultural agenda? Abe Lincoln once observed that “God must love the common man, He made so many of them,” and He must love controlled opposition RINOs even more because the nation is positively inundated with them.
One of the latest claimants to be the chief rhino, er, RINO, is former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who actually seems to believe that he has a chance to be the Republican nominee for president of the United States in 2024. If he turns out to be right, we’re in even worse trouble than we already appear to be.
On NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday, Hogan was asked about DeSantis’ Parental Rights in Education bill, which attempts to counter the gender madness that is now being forced upon children at the earliest ages by forbidding teachers to engage in instruction about sexual orientation and identity in “a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate” for children in kindergarten and older.
As DeSantis himself said, he pushed for this in order both to protect children and to safeguard the rights of parents to raise their children without having them indoctrinated by woke gender-queer groomers: “This is inappropriate,” DeSantis said sensibly, “for kindergarteners and first graders and second graders, parents do not want this going on in their schools.”
WATCH: Potential GOP presidential candidates like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have made education a top issue and are cracking down on schools teaching race and/or gender.@LarryHogan: "I'm a small-government, common-sense conservative, and, to me, it sounds like big government." pic.twitter.com/XfHquu4BY3
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) February 20, 2023
But Larry Hogan would have us believe that this practically made Ron DeSantis into Barack Obama. “I’m a small government, common sense conservative,” he claimed risibly on Sunday, “and to me, it sounds like big government and authoritarian, ‘You have to agree with me, and I’ll tell you what you can and can’t do.’ But it’s an issue. It’s not the most important issue. Most people are worried about the economy, inflation, and they’re concerned about crime, but education is one of the things that we’ve got to talk about.” Yes indeed. But protecting the rights of parents to raise their own children is now “big government”? As Old Joe Biden, the man Hogan thinks he has a chance to replace, would say, “Come on, man!”
Predictably, Hogan was raked over the coals for his ridiculous statement. One Twitter user observed: “Republicans like Larry Hogan use ‘small government’ as an excuse for inaction. Perverts teaching kindergarteners about sex? Big Tech censorship? Corporations outsourcing jobs from middle-America? Can’t do anything … small government.” Mark Hemingway of RealClearInvestigations quipped: “Yes, not wanting your grade school kids taught gender ideology that everyone agreed was insane 15 minutes ago means you’re in favor of ‘big government.’ Go ahead and campaign on that, Larry.”
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Jordan Boyd wrote in The Federalist: “Hogan clearly has a flawed understanding of the role of elected leaders. Their purpose, according to the U.S. Constitution, is not to restrain the people but the government, so citizens can flourish under their God-given rights.” Patriot activist Vivek Ramaswamy noted the tiredness of Hogan’s “small government” rhetoric, tweeting: “It’s painful to watch Republicans recite tired slogans they memorized in 1980. The thing that made Reagan cool was he stood up to the orthodoxies of his time without fear. Sadly his disciples today think they honor him by parroting what he said, instead of thinking independently.”
That’s not to say that the concept of small government is tired; it is needed more than ever. But to enable the far-Left agenda on the grounds that to oppose it would be a “big government” involves a failure of analysis so catastrophic as to disqualify Larry Hogan from ever again holding elected office at any level.
What is Larry Hogan’s game in so eagerly falling into line with the Left’s most heinously destructive agenda? Is he really so caught up in the Beltway bubble that he thinks doing so will give him a chance to be president? Or is he running for vice president, or playing a different game altogether? Another Twitter user summed up what is most likely Hogan’s game: “Larry Hogan gonna run the ‘say stuff liberals like so they give my GOP campaign money’ campaign. Then get 2%, drop out after the 4th primary, and use the leftover money to to [sic] fund a PAC of some variety that pays him a handsome salary. He knows exactly what he’s doing.” That’s more plausible than anything Larry Hogan himself said.
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