LYNCHBURG, VIRGINIA — A man that one witness in the crowd described as a “wild-eyed socialist” stormed the stage Liberty University— one of the nation’s most conservative Bible colleges — and delivered a message that same witness described as “pure crazy”: Compromise.
“Who does this guy think he is,” asked Marcus Palumbozo, a 20 year old undergraduate at Liberty asked our reporter, “implying that we can agree to disagree on some subjects while doing great work for humanity by working on issues we all agree on. That’s just cultural Marxism right there, implying that conservatives and liberals could find any common ground at all.” Palumbozo told our reporter he’d be voting for “the least statist candidate” that “stops robbing me — and by me I mean my parents who actually have a job in the real world — of my — and by my I mean my parents’ — income.”
One member of the crowd said that while she “totally is inspired by the crazy guy’s ability to quote Bible scripture that shows Christianity has a far more progressive and liberal streak than we American Christians will ever admit” ultimately she “cannot in good conscience vote for a guy who suggests we stop calling liberals mentally diseased socialists and start finding common ground to fix just a tiny bit of what is so clearly broken about this country.”
“I totally understand what his point was about us doing as the Bible says,” Corey Ricardellia told the press after the speech, “and we should treat others as we want to be treated. But what if I don’t wan to do that, and instead want to insist that I signed no social contract and therefore shouldn’t be asked to give back into the system that I have richly benefited from, regardless of how much I insist I did everything all by myself? He doesn’t leave us much room to be ideologically obstinate when he says we should find common ground with one another.”
One freshman at the university said she was “confused” by the “crazy man’s ideas” because they “sounded an awful lot like Jesus Christ’s ideas.” She told us that her parents told her that “Jesus was most definitely a God-fearing, ammo-hoarding, red, white and blue flag waving patriotic Republican” and that since the man speaking to her said he was seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination, that he must be a “hair brained libtard commie socialist Devil-worshiper” like her mom and dad had warned to be careful about encountering. “So I don’t know how to feel,” she told us,”I’m conflicted about wanting to do what my Bible says versus what the guy in the suit on TV holding the Bible tells me the Bible says.”
“At the end of the day, I just don’t think that guy understood what America is all about,” said Calvin Ryan, a senior at Liberty who runs a libertarian Facebook page called Incredibly Biased. Ryan went on to say that to him, America is “built on the proposition that conservatives don’t have to yield to public sentiment until a judge or a war tells us we have to.” Ryan said “from slavery and the Civil War to Jim Crow to Women’s Suffrage and LGBT equality, you have to drag our asses kicking and screaming into modernity; we don’t compromise on our antiquated beliefs.”
“Sure,” Palumbozo said, “our history is filled with instances when people from all walks of life and all over the political spectrum stopped squabbling about the culture wars and came together to help solve a problem that needed solving. But unless I’m revising it, as a Republican I’m taught to ignore history — especially history taught to me at any institution of learning other than Sunday School,” he said while pausing briefly to conclude, “and no amount of level-headed, logical reasoning will convince me to compromise, because I don’t believe in the greater good. I believe in my good being greater than yours, because ‘free markets’ and ‘pie charts.'”
With just over a year before the general election is held, the crazy-eyed socialist who spoke at Liberty University is starting to overtake the presumed, predetermined, anointed Democratic front runner, and in many hypothetical match-up polls he comes out ahead of any Republican candidate put up against him. Still, that, says Palumbozo, is “irrelevant” because “socialism, duh.”
