Commentary

“America went from the freest country in the world in December 2019 to a repressive and frightening place by July 2021.  How did that happen?“

–Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness, July 18, 2021

Since writing my recent pleas to rouse you from your comfortable place on the couch to get active in local politics, I have been doing extensive reading; trying to find the answer to Victor Davis Hanson’s question.

As expected, Hanson’s piece, “The American Descent into Madness,” is filled with his deep thoughts on America’s past, but in his review of the last six months states, “we have seen absurdities never quite witnessed in modern America.

“Characteristics that are unsustainable. They must cease or they will destroy the nation as we know it,” noting that the left-wing political agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them.

“Our present, parlous state has not happened by accident or inanition,” suggests Michael Walsh, “Rather, it has been meticulously planned, step by step, for better part of a century.  One by one the bricks in the wall, laid by our Founders … have been removed: faith, tradition, and the Constitution itself.”

In his commentary in The Epoch Times, “The Rage Orchestrating the Transformation of America,” Walsh says conservatives wonder about those on the left, making statements like, “don’t they realize that …” and “surely they see the hypocrisy.”  They do, and they have a plan.

After chronicling a handful of events, Walsh writes, “How else to explain the events of the past nine months that led to the astonishingly fast descent of the United States of America from a muscular Republic confident of its history, purpose, and mission, into a mewling metrosexual stew of intersectional genders, military pusillanimity, overt contempt for the nation by its elected leaders, and a near-total loss of faith in its institutions?”

As a distraction to the problems we are facing – illegals flooding across our southern border and runaway spending and inflation, we are being exposed to the fabricated fad known as “wokeness.”

I wouldn’t have expected American Express, which made a $2.3 billion profit last quarter, to succumb to the “woke” crowd, but the New York Post reports that the company recently hired an outside consulting firm to train AmEx employees to deconstruct their own intersectional identities, mapping their “race, sexual orientation, body type, religion, disability status, age, gender identity, and citizenship onto an official company worksheet.”

Throw in Critical Race Theory, which Walsh says is masquerading as an academic discipline, and you see a sequence of events, brilliantly executed by the left since the election of Donald Trump interrupted the Democrats’ Obama era promise of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Along the way, the left has had the mainstream media helping them to make the new transformation.  MSNBC gave Eugene Robinson, the black columnist with the Washington Post, time to say, “There are million of Americans, almost all white, almost all Republicans, who somehow need to be deprogrammed.”  Yet, we are called racist.

Alex Parker, writing in the blog, Red State, admitted that he was stunned by the number of Democrats who favor socialism, asking, “but do they know what it is?”

Reporting on an August 7-10, 2021 Fox News Survey, Parker notes that 59 percent of Democrats favored socialism by ten points over capitalism.

I was unable to find an age breakdown on the Fox survey, however, college students are being fed a daily dose of socialism over capitalism.  A recent survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education survey 20,000 students on 55 campuses and found that 60 percent of student felt they could not express an opinion.  Hanson views today’s college education a con.

Expressing a bit of pessimism in our future, Walsh views “political disagreement settled peaceably, good will, personal autonomy, and bodily integrity now all things of the past.  Our economy is in tatters, welfare is a way of life, our constitutional freedoms have been willingly surrendered, our language has been mangled, and we all at each other’s throats.”

In an upbeat opposing view, Hanson sees the abrupt descent as “not workable and millions will collectively decide that they have no choice but to push back and conclude that in the 233^rd year of our republic, we tens of millions are not going to cede freedom of thought and expression to a mere thousands of Maoists.  Sorry, no can do.”

With my glass half full, I prefer to see conservatives in a battle over the kind of country we want it to be … great again.  We need to focus on restoring Republican control of Congress in 2022, but in the meantime we need to be awake to what the left is conjuring up.

Now, more than ever …. may God continue to bless the United States of America.