Former Democratic presidential primary contender Andrew Yang recently announced that his Forward Party has merged with two groups of former Republicans, forming a new version of the Forward Party. Or Forward Together. Or just Forward.
On the surface, a new viable third party sounds like a good idea to many people. Personally, I’m not a big fan of today’s Republican vs. Democrat politics. Instead of having, say, a half dozen parties to choose from like other Western democracies, we have only two real choices (sorry, the Libertarian Party doesn’t count as viable), and there’s no way only two sizes can really fit us all. I think that Yang is right that the system is broken, and leaves many Americans feeling like they have no real voice in government.
But this new party is shaping up to be a poor choice for gun owners, and perhaps a actual threat to our gun rights. To see this, we only need to look at who ran the groups that just merged with Yang’s to form Forward, the Renew America Movement (RAM) and the Serve America Movement (SAM).
Andrew Yang’s Insane May-Issue Federal Gun Owner Licensing Scheme
While Yang and the Forward Party have been pretty quiet about guns (probably because they’re trying to recruit more Republicans), let’s not forget Yang’s long, long list of anti-gun campaign promises he made in when running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.
You can find that here, but this a screenshot of just one small part of it . . .
That could have been substituted for Joe Biden’s own gun control platform and no one would have noticed.
RAM Stocked With Gun Control Supporters
Let’s take a look at RAM, a group of Democrat rejects and never-Trumper Republican Party refugees. A look at its about page (which will probably disappear soon with the merger) includes such luminaries as Bill Weld, a former governor of Massachusetts with a history of gun grabbing who briefly pretended to be Libertarian, and Christine Todd Whitman, who as Governor or New Jersey frequently expressed her avid support support for heavy-handed gun control (“I support 2nd Amendment, but…”).
RAM co-founder, Evan McMullin, supported the “Bipartisan gun package”:
We have a basic, moral responsibility to protect our children's lives. I shouldn't need to say that. Senator Lee must stand with Utahns, Texans and Americans everywhere – not the extremists putting cash into his campaign and our children's lives at risk. 5/5
— Evan McMullin 🇺🇸 (@EvanMcMullin) May 25, 2022
RAM’s other co-founder, Miles Taylor went out of his way just before the election to assure Americans that Joe Biden is no threat to their gun rights.
I am a gun owner. A Republican. And a former Trump official. @JoeBiden is NOT going to take away your guns & 2nd Amendment rights. Get real, people, and ignore this carnival barker. https://t.co/RNKMHBG4wf
— Miles Taylor (@MilesTaylorUSA) October 20, 2020
We all know how that turned out, don’t we?
The RAM Twitter account supported gun reform gun control on several occasions. Here’s a recent example (screenshot because it’s probably going to go away soon, too):
SAM Openly Supported Gun Control
According to the organization’s about page, Serve America Movement’s executive chairman is former Congressman David Jolly. Here’s what Jolly recently had to say on the subject of gun rights:
There’s plenty more where that came from if you click here.
I know some will argue that the executive director’s positions might not reflect that of the organization, so here’s some Twitter receipts (before they go ‘poof’) to disabuse people of that notion.
Bottom Line: The Forward Party Can’t Be Trusted on Gun Righs
While there’s some small chance that Forward, Forward Together, the Forward Party (whatever) could end up being officially neutral on gun rights to burnish its centrist image, I’m not optimistic at all that they would remain that way given who’s running the operation. The parts that make up the new whole all looked very favorably on “gun safety” and “gun reform” (read: gun bans, confiscation, and rights limits) to various degrees. We probably don’t want to see what happens if the whole ends up being greater than the sum of those parts.
Don’t get me wrong: the United States needs more political options, but we need parties that seek out win-win solutions to political issues while defending everyone’s rights. All of them.
The only thing Forward appears to offer is a Caspar Milquetoast centrist party that carefully positions itself half way between two wrongs, and the calculated average of two wrongs is still just as wrong. The only thing they’ve proven is that taking some of the worst castoffs of both legacy political parties gives you a new organization that’s just as bad, if not worse than the two-party system from which they all came.