Moving from Easter to “Bright Week,” time to assess our challenges – even as Easter and Spring deliver hope, renewal, and promise. Our challenges are many, but the first is “clear thinking.”

History teaches us to look back for perspective, see others have faced what we do. Nationally and at state level, we face a drive by power-centralizing, truth-denying “Progressives” to subvert reality, demanding we pretend untruth is true, kick truth to the side, and “converge” with them.

Of course, in places like Maine, we see out-of-touch “Progressive” leadership asserting power, against established laws, moral compass, even biology. We have a “Progressive” putsch against rule of law, hypocritically dressed up as “rule of law.” Makes the head spin.

Confusing but true, Maine “Progressives”  – who control the Democrat Party – push immorality as morality, violation of civil rights as “civil rights.” All this makes normal people crazy.

What is happening is that Mainers – and many around the nation – are being clobbered by a kind of hyped radical rage, a cudgeling by non-logical, emotional, transparently ideological wingnuts. They push “convergence” with what many would call evil, acceptance of untrue as true for “peace.”

Bluntly, this is anti-American, not just undemocratic, unconstitutional, and immoral, but properly described as evil. To ask moral people, whether of faith or conscience, to defy their faith and conscience – to do what they know to be wrong for some political reason – is simply evil.

Too strong? I think not. To illustrate my point – how “convergence” with evil is the embodiment of evil, and must be called out, disposed of as anti-democratic, anti-constitutional, anti-moral…Come take a journey back in time with me.

As early as 1968, the tyranny and oppression of Soviet Communism were viewed as a human trap, hard to escape. Academics tried to justify it, and then how to accommodate it.

Like untruths pushed by “Progressives” today, Soviet leftists despised religion, thought centralized power and decisions made for “the People” by an elite, suppressing rights, and economic control were the ticket.

Not unlike today, academics thought there had to compromise with evil, preferred to call it “another way of thinking,” or “another legitimate way to govern,” just “different.”

They called “convergence” the way forward, a compromise with Soviet oppression – and they winced when conservatives called it “evil” – and refused the idea of “convergence.”

By accepting obvious untruth, promoters of “converging” or “convergence” with the Soviets imagined “peace,” protecting Soviet sensitivities, were okay with a “different way of life.” 

That lives were destroyed by the hundreds of millions was just inconvenient, but in the name of ideological “convergence,” they said, that had to be endured.

Then, came a bold conservative, cut from the cloth of Edmund Burke, Bill Buckley, and our Founding Fathers sort, Ronald Reagan. By a miracle, he became president and survived. 

Seems these sorts of things happen every 36 and 44 years. A diehard anti-communist with no tolerance for Soviet lies, Reagan refused the “convergence” lie. He was called a madman, hated by the left.

He hardly gave any notice. In 1982, he got a draft speech calling the Soviets an “evil empire,” reflecting his own words, captured by longtime speechwriter and epic force in American history, Tony Dolan.  Before the speech could be delivered, others close to Reagan removed that phrase.

By 1983, Reagan was no longer willing to soft-pedal evil. When Tony said let’s use it in a speech before those who care, the National Association of Evangelicals, Reagan did that. Thus, the “evil empire” speech which had massive repercussions.

It immediately empowered all Russian citizens, delegitimized those in power. It empowered Moscow critics and gulags, Motherland citizens to the oppressed in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia – Suddenly, they all took heart. The truth was spoken.

The impact was electric! From that speech forward, the Soviet Union began collapsing, inside out. Evil had been recognized, called by its true name. It could no longer survive the light of day.

Point is simple: “Converging” with evil never works, represents a compromise with no good ending, is not a way forward, only backward. It is a dead end. To speak truth, to live truth, is freedom.

So, where are we today – in Maine and with radical protests across the nation for the sake of promoting what, in short, is evil? We are back there again, at another moment of truth.

In this wonderful Bright Week, let us all take stock of truth, as well as what we know to be evil, utterly untrue. Let us fortify each other in that knowledge. Let us resolve not to “converge” with evil or capitulate to evil – not in the bold way Maine “Progressives” push untruth, or in any other way.

Finally, let us resolve to abide by “clear thinking,” keep our hearts full, and “minds in the trim.” That is the way we win, individually and in every other way. Be glad in that resolve, and seize the day!

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC. Robert Charles has also just released an uplifting new book, “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024).