The Rage Orchestrating the Transformation of America

Protesters gather in Manhattan’s Foley Square to protest the recent death of George Floyd, an African-American man who killed after a police officer was filmed kneeling on his neck in Minneapolis, in New York City on May 29, 2020. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Commentary

One of the many traps into which conservatives routinely fall is thinking that their ideological opponents don’t fully understand the nature and the consequences of the ruinous policies they advocate. Cries of, “don’t they realize that…” and “surely they can see the hypocrisy” fill the air as the well-meaning but utterly naïve Right tries to make sense of the rabid, foaming Left and its dynamic plan for “direct action,” that is, force and violence.

How else to explain the events of the past nine months, 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?

Our present, parlous state has not happened by accident or inanition. Rather, it has been meticulously planned, step by step, for the better part of a century. One by one the bricks in the wall, laid by our Founders and pointed up ever since by patriots of both parties who took their responsibilities as custodians of their birthright solemnly and seriously, have been removed: faith, tradition, and the Constitution itself.

We can date the proximate cause of our cultural discontent—for, at root, our problems are cultural, and only secondarily political—to the arrival of the Frankfurt School, Marxist refugees from Hitler who roosted in some of the country’s top Ivy League schools, bringing with them their malcontent notion of Critical Theory, the Pandora’s Box of misery from which all evils have flown, including the now-notorious “critical race theory.”

In my 2015 best-selling book on the subject, “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace,” I wrote this: “Rage is the salient characteristic of Satan, and of the satanic in men.”

And what do we see all around us today? Rage against the Man, against the System, against Whiteness, against newly defined “bigotry,” against the existing order, against religion, against Western civilization, against history itself. Rage is curdling the blood of half our citizens, driving them mad with ersatz resentment, misplaced empathy, and frustration that their views of what ought to be and reality are irreconcilable.

Sequence of Events

All this rage—the cornerstone of Critical Theory, but masquerading as an academic discipline—has unchained a sequence of events, brilliantly executed by the Left since the election of Donald Trump interrupted the Democrats’ Obama-era promise of “fundamental transforming the United States of America.”

Consider the following:

* 2018. With Trump mired in a succession of imaginary scandals that sapped his political capital and exhausted many of his supporters, the Democrats stealthily engineered the practice of “ballot harvesting” in California and cleaned out the former GOP stronghold of Orange County in one fell swoop. The House Republicans, naturally, were caught flat-footed as Speaker Paul Ryan watched his majority vanish into the airy mists of election “reform.” Nancy Pelosi became Speaker once more.

* With the House gone, attacks on Trump now had teeth. A pudgy, foreign-born Army officer named Alexander Vindman was somehow allowed to make stick allegations that a phone call from Trump to Ukrainian officials regarding then-senator Joe Biden’s highly suspicious financial dealings in that country were an impeachable offense, with the result that the president was impeached for the first time in December 2019.

* As 2020 dawned, however, Trump had survived and his economy was still roaring along. What was needed was a soul-corroding, will-sapping national panic that would terrorize women and men without chests and tie Trump up in a microbial world he did not understand and elevate hitherto obscure federal employees into the position of de facto dictators of the Republic. And so, along came COVID-19.

* Almost certainly the result of a deliberate weaponization of a coronavirus by the Chinese Communist Party and its pet scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology seeking a lethal “gain of function” of bat viruses (in part funded by the United States under Dr. Anthony Fauci), COVID-19 was unleashed upon a largely unsuspecting world.

“Two weeks to slow the spread” and “fifteen days to flatten the curve” soon morphed into months and then years as unelected “public servants” seized control of public and foreign policy and the economy in order to unconstitutionally lock down the country with increasingly arbitrary but draconian edicts, and nary a peep out of the supine, indolent courts.

* Summer 2020. The country was roiled by widespread riots conducted by the Democrats’ shock troops, Antifa and Black Lives Matter. Cities burned, federal buildings came under violent attack, and a career criminal who died in police custody in Minneapolis was transformed into a secular martyr for the revolutionary Cause—a classic Marxist sequence of events. Trump’s notion to send in federal troops to stop the violence—something with plenty of historical precedent—was scotched by his own truculent Pentagon.

* November 2020. Although garnering more than 70 million votes, Trump could only stand idly by in the wee hours of Nov. 4 and watch his strong leads in such crucial swing states as Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona vanish in a welter of early voting, late voting, absentee ballots, harvested ballots, “cured” ballots and other chicanery—all “reforms” pushed through in response to the mild threat of COVID-19. For good measure, the Democrats’ reforms also delivered the crucial 50th senate seat to the party in Georgia, giving them narrow but total control of both houses of Congress as well as the White House.

* Jan. 6. For some inexplicable reason, Trump thought it wise to contest a lost election both in the courts—which adamantly refused to hear the cases—and in the court of public opinion. His supporters were sure they had been robbed, and the president whipped them into a fever pitch with one tardy, impotent challenge after another.

The time to have stopped voter fraud, a Democrat specialty since 1800, was in the weeks and months leading up to the election, but that thought never seems to have occurred to anyone in the White House, which instead staged a campaign of supererogatory rallies while Biden was behind his unreasoning mask, and the Democrat munchkins in the mail room executed their semi-legal heist.

Narrative Hijacked

And that was that. The unfortunate events of Jan. 6 were immediately pounced upon by the Left and transmogrified into the worst attack on the Capitol ever—conveniently forgetting that the British burned Washington in 1812, Puerto Rican terrorists (later pardoned by Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama) shot up the House in 1954, and the Weather Underground (led in part by Obama buddy Bill Ayers) bombed the Capitol and other federal buildings in the 1970s.

But the damage was done, the Narrative hijacked, the “arc” of history readjusted. Today, Trump supporters are viewed in the same light by the Democrat-Media Complex as card-carrying communists were by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s, except worse.

The various COVID vaccines, whose readiness was concealed by the drug companies until after the election, are now being used as yet another crowd-control measure, restricting international travel (and, soon enough, domestic travel as well) as well as entry into shops, restaurants, and other public spaces—all in the name of “health” and “safety,” of course.

Political disagreement settled peaceably, good will, personal autonomy, bodily integrity—these are now all things of the past. Meanwhile, 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 are all at each other’s throats.

Under the jackboot of “progressivism,” this is known as progress.

Michael Walsh is the editor of The-Pipeline.org and the author of “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace” and “The Fiery Angel,” both published by Encounter Books. His latest book, “Last Stands,” a cultural study of military history from the Greeks to the Korean War, was recently published.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.