Is it all over for America as the world’s one-and-only, unchallengeable, superpower?

Despairing thinkers on the Right think so.

Roger Kimball writes in part at American Greatness:

“Never forget [9/11].” “We remember.”  The sentiment [is] invariably bolstered with reminiscences of loss and heroism.

The loss and the heroism are real, no doubt, but I am afraid that admonitions about remembering seem mostly manufactured. How could they not? Clearly, we have not remembered …

We spent 20 years and trillions of dollars in Afghanistan—for what? To try to coax it into the 21st century and assume the “woke” perspective that has laid waste the institutions of American culture, from the universities to the military?

Certain aspects of that folly seem darkly comic now, such as our efforts to raise the consciousness of the locals by introducing them to conceptual art and decadent Western ideas of “gender equity”. The explicit cost for such gender programs was $787 million; the real cost was much higher because “gender goals” were folded into almost every initiative we undertook in Afghanistan. …

The dissolution of the British Empire—one of the most beneficent and enlightened political forces in history—took place for many reasons … Part of the reason for its dissolution was inner uncertainty, weariness, a failure of nerve. By the middle of the last century, Britain no longer wished to rule: it wanted to be liked.

The promiscuous desire to be liked, for states as much as for individuals, is a profound character flaw. …

When we ask what nurtures terrorists, what allows them to flourish and multiply, one important answer concerns the failure of authority, which is the failure to live up to the responsibilities of power.

Christopher Bedford writes at The Federalist;

How many are willing to confront the deep, decades-long rot that is the actual reason we lost in Afghanistan?

America is sick. …  If we don’t make the choice to confront [that fact] directly, it will kill us.

In his view the decline has been recent and rapid:

If all of these things — that riot and that disease, and the ever present specter of racism — were to disappear right now never to be seen again, this country would still be very, very sick. The United States — our home — would still be feeble compared to five years ago, let alone 10, 15 or 30.

Mark Steyn said in an address to the Gatestone Institute that China’s “moment” has come, and the “transfer” of superpower status has already begun:

We were told a generation or two back that, by doing trade with China, China would become more like us. Instead, on issues such as free speech, we are becoming more like China.

American companies are afraid of offending China. American officials are afraid of offending China. We are adopting Chinese norms on issues such as free speech and basic disagreements with the government of China. …

Everything we need comes from China. China not only gives us the virus, we are also dependent on China to give us the personal protective equipment ‑ all the masks and everything ‑ that supposedly protect us from the virus. …

We’re living in the early stages of a future that is the direct consequence of poor public policy over the last couple of generations. …

Right now, we are witnessing a non‑stop continuous transfer of power to a country that is serious about using that power. This is China’s moment. My great worry is that actually, the transfer to China has already happened. The baton has already been passed. We just haven’t formally acknowledged that yet.

America has been a benign superpower, as was Britain in the nineteenth century.

Communist China will not be benign.

If America’s decadence, its putrid sentimentality, its self-abasement, its effeminization allow China to become the next world-dominating power, the Leftists, the anti-white racists, the “woke” liars and cheats who now rule America will learn too late what “systemic” oppression really is.

Will the rest find that sufficient compensation for the loss of freedom?

The video in the post below this one ends with a quoted message from President George W. Bush.

But Bush has much to do with the final victory this year, 2021, of the jihadis whose fellow Muslim terrorists perpetrated the 9/11 atrocity.

Bruce Bawer explains why at Front Page:

On 9/11, the world was shown, in one horrific, indelible image, precisely what Islam is all about. Today, to write the previous sentence is to be guilty of Islamophobia. How did that come to be?

It began in the days after 9/11 itself, when George W. Bush – by repeatedly insisting that the cause of the jihadists had nothing to do with Islam – effectively ruled out of bounds any criticism of that religion, or any honest education and open discussion about it. Instead, Bush – who had gotten it into his head that all religions are basically good, and who was manipulated by advisors who wanted to project American power in a part of the world about which they knew very little – used 9/11 as an excuse to rein in Americans’ civil liberties and go nation-building abroad.

It was a massive folly, doomed to failure. Why doomed? Because Islam is utterly irreconcilable with American-style freedom and incapable of reform, at least not without a far more aggressive effort than America was willing to commit to. Unlike America, moreover, Islam has a long memory. Muslims recall their forebears’ foiled attempts to conquer the Christian West at Tours in 732 and Vienna in 1683; the attacks of 9/11 were part of a history of such actions that goes back to Islam’s earliest days. Yet few Westerners know about this history or are aware that 9/11 was part of it.

Indeed, how many Westerners know, even now, that the word Islam means submission? For a long time, America was the ultimate symbol of the refusal to submit: in World War II, we took on powerful enemies on two fronts and won; during the Cold War, we protected the Free World from Communist takeover. But the Muslim wars we entered into after 9/11 were different. We were hobbled by leaders who refused to name the enemy – and by a corrosive victim culture, born in the academy but rapidly spreading into the mainstream, that divided Americans into oppressed and oppressor classes. It was Muslims who had attacked us on 9/11, and had done so in accordance with their prophet’s directives; but even as our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan labored to overcome social ills in those countries that were the direct result of Islam’s baleful centuries-long influence, our elites began painting Islam as beautiful and peaceful while casting Muslims in the role of America’s ultimate victims.

So little did Americans understand about Islam as of 2008 that they elected as their president a man who was the son and stepson of Muslims and who’d spent much of his childhood in the Muslim nation of Indonesia, where he’d been registered at schools as a Muslim, taken Koran classes, worn Muslim garb, and attended mosque. … Delivering an address at Al-Azhar University in Cairo shortly after his inauguration, the new president hailed Islam’s purported contributions to human civilization, inventing an entire alternate history that replaced primitive violence with advanced learning and scientific discovery. If Bush had whitewashed Islam, Obama exalted it, shifting the Overton window even further away from candor about Islamic fundamentals in the direction of sheer fantasy – and deference. …

The only “misinformation” about Islam that persists in America is the kind served up regularly in places like the New York Times by way of prettifying what is, in reality, an exceedingly poisonous ideology.

By the Times’s highly dishonest standards … it’s an act of vicious bigotry to take Islamic theology seriously, to deal with Islamic terrorism responsibly, or to acknowledge the link between Muslim belief and violent jihad. As for that so-called surge in anti-Muslim violence, it’s as much of a canard as the bogus statistics on campus rape, spread by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and its comrades on the left, none of whom ever dare to speak honestly about the violence (largely anti-Jewish) committed by Muslims in the West – or about the bloodthirsty decimation by Middle Eastern Muslims, during the last two decades, of Christian and Jewish communities in that region. No, Muslims must always be portrayed as victims – and that includes portraying them, unforgivably, as the leading victims of 9/11.

The election to Congress of someone like Ilhan Omar – a vile anti-Semite and America-hater with terrorist ties – is not something to celebrate. …

 In Western Europe … Muslims are approaching 10% of the population [bringing] the rapid spread of no-go zones, the huge rise in violent crime, the destructive force of mass welfare dependency [and] the official persecution (and prosecution) of critics of Islam. [The Times does not] cite any of the many deadly jihadist attacks that have taken place since 9/11 on both sides of the Atlantic. …

In a saner world, needless to say, it would be considered risible for the Times to run an article bemoaning the “fear-based narrative around Islam” at precisely the moment when the Taliban, having retaken Afghanistan, is back in business destroying artworks and musical instruments, beating up journalists, forcing women back into burkas and girls into sex slavery, and beheading apostates (among others) and desecrating their remains in the gruesomest of ways. But the West today is not that saner world in which it would be admirable to speak frankly about such matters; on the contrary, it’s a world that’s been shaped since 9/11 by people like those who call the shots at the Times – a world in which it’s unacceptable to admit that the Taliban’s current actions are thoroughly consistent with the teaching of orthodox Islam, but where it’s obligatory to condemn as racist even a tame effort by Donald Trump to prevent entry into the U.S. by devout Muslims who support the Taliban’s actions.

This is where we stand, 20 years after 9/11: the West is awash in lies and cowardice; while the shady likes of Omar and Rashida Tlaib flex their muscles in Congress, while hustlers … brainwash students at our most prestigious universities, while degraded legacy media like the Times continue to sugarcoat Islam, and while a perfidious pol like British MP Stella Creasy feels obliged to say in the House of Commons that the Taliban’s iniquities are “not Islam”, brave truth-tellers on the topic, like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Lars Hedegaard in Denmark, are put on trial, even as another, Robert Spencer, is banned from the U.K., and still another, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, must live with bodyguards around the clock. …

Well, we rained down hell on Afghanistan and Iraq. By force of arms, we repelled the Taliban and ISIS and al-Qaeda, but we then failed in the absurd drive to turn those countries into simulacra of the free society that America had once been but was quickly evolving away from. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush said that the terrorists had lost, because the attacks had brought Americans together. Would Bush say now that the terrorists lost? Twenty years on, under the disgraceful Biden, America feels like a damaged and diminished nation – its power weakened, its alliances shaken, its once-unshakable core beliefs largely shattered, not least by the suicidal compulsion to speak well of Islam (as well as of our enemies in China and of the savage gang members who flood across our Southern border, and whom Nancy Pelosi defended with as much passion – “we’re all God’s children,” she gushed about MS-14 – as Hillary Clinton brought to bear in insulting the “deplorables” of middle America).

To many Americans, especially the young, patriotism now sounds quaint, if not outright offensive; in the view of those who hold the future of America in their hands, saluting the flag and singing the national anthem are for “white supremacists”.

The America that al-Qaeda struck at on 9/11 is no more; and 9/11 itself, and our tragically misguided response to it, are a very big part of the reason why. Islam plays a long game.

President Biden’s indifference to the parents of the thirteen American armed-forces members killed in Afghanistan spoke volumes. All too many of our elites now view GIs who’ve been wounded or killed fighting Muslims as an embarrassment – as relics of a benighted era when we resisted Islam instead of bowing to it.

All those firefighters racing up the stairs of the Twin Towers on 9/11? Todd Beamer shouting “Let’s roll!” as he and some of his fellow passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 rushed the cockpit to foil the Al-Qaeda thugs? In the eyes of many of our most bien pensant types today, these are wince-inducing images – now worn into corny, cloying clichés – that no civilized individual would dredge up any longer except out of sheer Islamophobia.

The other day, when Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CENTCOM commander Kenneth McKinsey actually praised the Taliban for its cooperativeness, it seemed clear that the mantra of “America bad, Islam good” had triumphed utterly over the values that the overwhelming majority of Americans of both parties once shared.

So it is that, after the fall of Kabul, many of us who, not so long ago, considered America almost immune to the ideological plagues of Europe and elsewhere find ourselves nothing less than shell-shocked, haunted by Ronald Reagan’s cautionary words about freedom never being more than a generation away from extinction.

The last generation that valued America and freedom is passing away. The generation of their destruction – led by some still extant but aged pioneers of hatred for both – has now arisen.

Could there be a picture that better conveys the primitive savagery of the Taliban than this?

Or that better symbolizes the decline and fall of our civilization?

From Jihad Watch.

Headline quoted by Mark Steyn:

Former British P.M. Tony Blair Rips Biden Afghanistan Withdrawal: Gives ‘Our Opponents A Belief Our Time Is Over’

On which Mark Steyn comments:

Well, our opponents aren’t wrong about that, are they? In fact … it’s not just “our opponents” who believe “our time is over”, but a significant percentage of the west’s ruling class. For why else would they have gone over to the other side? Our randomly selected Shill of the Day, Joe Biden’s jetsetting climate honcho:

John Kerry echoes China’s argument that human rights sanctions threaten climate talks

So many global A-listers are “echoing China’s argument” these days, don’t you find? Fauci and the public health gang, the stars and administrators of those crappy unwatchable corporate sports, Justin Trudeau, Hollywood, the WHO…

It suits China that climate change is the only Big Picture non-subterranean conversation we are permitted to have. Every minute we spend worrying about whether the Maldives will be washed away by rising sea levels in the twenty-second century makes it less likely we’ll notice that America is being washed away by China right now.

This Saturday [9/11] will provide, one would have thought, a rare glimpse of that subterranean reality. But tens of millions of Americans are so content being spectators in their nation’s eclipse that it may well be that the traditional cringe-makingly passive candle-in-the-windiness of 9/11 observances will for a few moments work its usual magic, and on its twentieth anniversary they won’t notice that the war on terror is over and America lost. The guys who toppled the Twin Towers have just been rewarded for their pains with a bazillion Humvees, Black Hawks, and more territory than they ever held back in the Nineties.

If by “us” we mean Western civilization, is our time over?

Joe Biden gave all this to a band of savages:

America has just been defeated in Afghanistan by a  band of Islamic barbarians.

How was it possible?

A new booklet by Daniel Greenfield, published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center,* explains how.

It recounts how America’s top military brass …

… have betrayed their oaths and imposed on the service men and women under their command an alien ideology that attacks our Constitution, preaches hatred for our country and sows racial division in the military ranks.

In his Introduction, David Horowitz asks:

If the troops tasked with fighting our Marxist and Islamist enemies in a dangerous world are indoctrinated with hatred for their country, their Constitution, and its values, who will defend us?

Having read the booklet, we are convinced that the outcome of the war in Afghanistan could not have been other than defeat.

No one could read it and believe that the fighting forces of the United States, under the “Biden” administration, are able or willing to defend us.

Unless there is a change of government soon, the Age of America is over.

*Disloyal: How the Military Brass is Betraying Our Country by Daniel Greenfield, David Horowitz Freedom Center, PO Box 55089, Sherman Oaks, CA 91499. $4.50

The twenty year war waged in Afghanistan by the combined armies of some of the militarily strongest countries in the world, led by America the strongest of all, against fanatical Muslim savages banded together as “the Taliban”, is over. 

The savages have won.  

From the Daily Mail today (August 14, 2021):

The Taliban seized its 17th major city on Friday as they raced to take full control of Afghanistan and inched closer to Kabul, with the main settlement in Logar province – just 40 miles from the capital – falling to the militants.

The blitz through Afghanistan’s southern heartland means the insurgents now hold half of the country’s 34 provincial capitals and control more than two-thirds of the nation – weeks before the U.S. plans to fully withdraw.

As Kabul looks to be on the brink of being taken by the Taliban, fears have also been raised of a refugee crisis and a rollback of gains in human rights. Some 400,000 civilians have been forced from their homes since the beginning of the year, 250,000 of them since May.

The loss of Helmand’s provincial capital of Kandahar in the past 24 hours comes after years of toil and blood spill by American, British and allied NATO forces.

Both Britain and the United States will deploy thousands of troops to evacuate their citizens from the capital city Kabul, which could fall within days as the Taliban continue their march to seize it from the [useless] government.

The defeat of America and its NATO allies by Afghan savages is perilous for the world.

From Debkafile:

The Taliban’s regaining of power in Afghanistan bodes a shift in the balance of power on the Indian subcontinent and the revival the terrorist threat to the Mid-East.

The return of Taliban to Kabul will mean the reinstatement of al Qaeda and Islamic State terrorists in their old lairs.

Yet the “Biden” administration is still denying that it has capitulated to the Taliban in Afghanistan!

From the Daily Mail:

DoD spokesman Baghdad Bob John Kirby said on Friday that the Pentagon does not believe Kabul is under imminent threat from the rapid Taliban advance.

Could America have won the war?

Who is most to blame for the defeat?

Could a withdrawal have been better managed?

What lessons for the future might be taken from this enormous fiasco, so costly in lives and money?

… and the thinker whose reputation it befouls.

1.The Monster

George Soros is a real-world supervillain and he is able to direct the law, constitutional and political culture of entire nations using his money and his vision of what society ought to look like. He is able to get away with it thanks to general ignorance of just how effective he is and a coordinated effort by the media to smear anyone who calls him out as a dangerous fanatic.

George Soros is a dangerous fanatic.

He is gunning for you, your property, your children, and ultimately your way of life.

So Sam Jacobs explains at Ammo.com.

George Soros is bankrolling and influencing public policy and opinion from the local level all the way up to the national level. Entire nations have been made to bow to the Soros agenda, but perhaps more importantly for us, key local officials in government are increasingly wholly owned subsidiaries of the Soros machine.

He distributes money to subvert governments and institutions mainly through The Open Society Foundations, an umbrella organization with many subsidiaries.

He spreads his destructive ideology through a “think-tank” called New America. 

Ever wonder why urban terrorists can burn down cities with no consequences but the McCloskeys are prosecuted for defending their home against the same? The answer is George Soros, his money, and his influence.

How does Soros go about his subversive work, his treasonous work in America?

We partly quote, partly summarize the article by Jacobs:

The Soros operation aims to abolish the police. It has invested $1.5 million in the “Community Resource Hub for Safety & Responsibility”, one of these blandly named organizations working to undo the American way of life.

Soros funded urban unrest in Ferguson in 2014.

He spent $33 million fomenting chaos in the formerly safe suburb of St. Louis, and another $33 million on Black Lives Matter (BLM) alone.

BLM is a communist racist organization.

And he has been quietly funding a campaign to place district attorneys amenable to his agenda across the United States.

As of September 2020, there were 31 Soros-backed DAs in the United States. That might not sound like a lot, but it includes the DAs of Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, and St. Louis. All told, tens of millions of Americans are now victims of the Soros racket in the form of their local top prosecutor.

Some examples of the Soros machine at work in America’s DA offices include:

• • After the last round of rioting, looting, and arson in St. Louis, Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner dismissed charges against all 36 people arrested. She’s on the take from Soros for $307,000. This is also the prosecutor who filed charges against the McCloskeys.
  • Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon got over $2 million from the Soros operation, he ended cash bail and is no longer prosecuting the crimes of trespassing, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, prostitution, or driving without a license.
  • Kim Foxx is the Illinois State’s Attorney and has received $807,000 from Soros. She also declined to prosecute rioters, saying “The question it comes down to is, is it a good use of our time and resources? No, it’s not.” Foxx likewise declined to prosecute hate crime hoaxer, Jussie Smollett.
  • Philly District Attorney Larry Krasner has received $1.7 million from Soros. He won’t be prosecuting rioters, looters, and arsonists. Krasner was very open about the ideology driving his permitting chaos in the city: “Prosecution alone will achieve nothing close to justice—not when power imbalances and lack of accountability make it possible for government actors including police or prosecutors to regularly take life or liberty unjustly and face no criminal or career penalty.”
  • Krasner is worth calling out for special attention because he filed 75 cases against the police and has represented both Occupy Philadelphia and Black Lives Matter. At his victory party, supporters chanted, “F*** the police! F*** the police!” He generally declines to call himself a prosecutor, instead labelling himself a “public defender with power”.
  • The results in Philadelphia are stunning as charges are dropped in 60 percent of all shooting cases – though we suspect your odds of being a conservative self-defense case and having your charges waived are rather slim. Shootings in Philadelphia were up 57 percent year after year from 2019 to 2020.
  • San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who’s working off $620,000 in Soros money, proclaims, “The criminal justice system isn’t just massive and brutal, it’s also racist.” He doesn’t prosecute crimes such as solicitation, public camping, or public urination. Homicide rates, burglary cases, motor vehicle theft, and arson rates have all hugely increased. He was formerly an advisor to Hugo Chavez and his parents were members of the Weather Underground, a far-left terrorist organization. [They murdered police officers – see here and note the 1981 killings.] Chesa Boudin’s victory party included obscene anti-police chants.
  • DA Mike Schmidt of Portland, who has received $230,000 in Soros money, also declined to prosecute rioters who burned the city for months and besieged a federal building. He openly sympathized with the rioters.

• The Open Society Foundations announced a plan to spend $220 million on “efforts to achieve racial equality in America”. What Soros deems “racial equality” might more accurately be called “racial revenge”.

Which is what the Left means by the term “racial equity”.

Soros has caused political upheaval in many other countries.

He has spent and continues to spend multi millions on trying to bring about Leftist revolutions that would turn existing open societies into closed societies. He promotes Marxism, communism, socialism. As a youth he helped the Nazis round up Jews to be mass murdered – although he is Jewish himself, and dares to complain that any criticism of him is “anti-Semitic”! And he is trying to destroy Israel.

Some of the revolutions he has promoted have succeeded not so much in overthrowing an existing government but in forcing it to accept radical concessions that dramatically remake the political culture in the country. Revolutions which were effectively regime change were those in the Republic of Georgia (twice), Ukraine, the Arab World, and Belarus.

There are some common themes to all these revolutions. A disputed election where there is widespread cheating generally kicks things off. There are then street rallies where violent operatives – actually terrorists using human shields – hide in crowds of otherwise peaceful protesters. The government then responds and there is outcry from [Soros funded] “humanitarian” organizations.

The playbook should look familiar to Americans after the summer riots of 2019 and 2020, and in the aftermath of the 2020 elections.

All of which is true and appalling.

2.The Great Thinker

But Jacobs goes on to say this:

So what is an “Open Society?” Well it’s based on a phrase used by Karl Popper, a somewhat obscure 20th Century thinker known best for his “paradox of tolerance” which essentially says that liberals should stop tolerating diversity of opinion when it begins to threaten liberalism.

NO, that is not what Karl Popper’s “paradox of tolerance” means. What it does mean is that tolerance cannot tolerate intolerance.

Jacobs continues to misunderstand and mislead:

There are some key takeaways about what an open society actually is. First, the open society is an atomized society. People are to be seen not as part of any kind of social organism, but rather as radically separate individuals. The individual is not an essential building block of society, it is the end to itself. Social norms and traditions are seen as necessarily oppressive.

That is not what Karl Popper meant by an open society. Certainly he asserted that each individual is an end in himself but not “radically separate” from others; and nowhere does he say or imply that “social norms and traditions are oppressive”.  He was a conservative, and the observing of norms and the keeping of traditions are what conservatism is all about.

Karl Popper is an extremely illustrious and famous (not”somewhat obscure”) political philosopher and philosopher of science. One thing he is famous for is his “fallibility test” of scientific theory. It distinguishes real scientific theory from pseudo-scientific theory. In the case of a real scientific theory, something could happen, something could be discovered, that would show it to be wrong. (Scientists test their theories by trying to disprove them.) But nothing could ever happen, or be imagined, that would disprove to believers the dogmatic contentions of (eg.) Freud, or Marx, or the propounders of catastrophic man-made global warming.  

It is as a political philosopher that Karl Popper is invoked in this context. His two-volume work titled The Open Society and its Enemies is a monumental defense of freedom.

An open society is one in which there are no government-imposed barriers to individual achievement. In an open society, government has limited powers and is the servant of the people; the members of an open society make personal decisions for themselves. A closed society is a collectivist society; all lives are regulated by government.

Popper critically examines the ideologies of closed societies from ancient Greece to the present, mainly those of Plato and Marx, and explains lucidly what is wrong with them. Collectivist ideologies  of our time are called Marxism, communism, socialism, national socialism (Nazism), international socialism (such as Trotskyism), New Leftism, or  – the most recently preferred “ism” on the Left –  “wokeism” (a term that became common after Popper died in 1994). All of them are tyrannies and all of them could also accurately be called Sorosisms.

Jacobs seems to be trying to find fault with Popper’s political vision as part of his criticism of Soros, finding Soros’s inspiration where it cannot possibly be found. It is unmistakably obvious that Soros uses the phrase “open society” cynically, sarcastically, as if it is his aim, while he tirelessly promotes the creation of closed societies, collectivist regimes, wherever he possibly can.

The Open Society and its Enemies is one of the essential political books of our culture. 

For more about George Soros, including lists of the many organizations he funds, see the entry on him in that excellent resource, Discover the Networks.

Wokeism is fast becoming the American state religion.

Ben Weingarten identifies it as such, writing – surprisingly – at (woke) Newsweek:

Should it overtake our government, in making identity politics paramount it will unmake any semblance of a unifying American identity.

In so doing, it will serve as the ultimate tool of cynical, radically leftist power-grabbers, who will be dividing and conquering under the guise of a fraudulent virtue, justice and morality.

It is the religion of the party that is now in power. The government is woke. It is making identity politics paramount.

The Woke’s core views have been bubbling up from elite classrooms to the commanding heights of society for decades.

What is different is that now such views have been legitimated by the authorities and mainstreamed in our culture. If you dare to challenge them, you are liable to end up excommunicated from American life—canceled. After all, dissenting from the Woke orthodoxy makes you a racist.

Consider some of the signs that indicate the fast-accelerating ascent of Wokeism.

In New York City, at the same time Mayor Bill de Blasio was preventing Jews and Christians from freely exercising their religions—including peaceably assembling—he permitted adherents of Wokeism to assemble en masse in protesting, rioting and looting with impunity. The Woke enjoyed First Amendment rights foreclosed to the [other] faithful.

Mayor de Blasio, Governor Andrew Cuomo and the relevant health authorities had argued the coronavirus-driven draconian shutdown of New York City, and the rest of the state, was necessary to save lives. If so, by permitting the Woke to flood the streets, were not New York officials conceding that public health was not really the number one priority? Were they not suggesting that they were willing to let people get sick and die because the right to practice Wokeism was absolute, sacrosanct and preeminent—this, incidentally, after instructing citizens to take to the streets in celebration of the Chinese Lunar New Year in February, coronavirus be damned, in context of a broader campaign against purported coronavirus-related anti-Chinese discrimination? Were they not affirming that Wokeism mattered more than the lives of the Woke—and everyone else?

Certainly, this view would seem to have been reinforced, as, in the face of the Woke, New York reduced police funding, and policing itself, which coincided with a dramatic rise in violent crime.

In St. Louis, menacing protesters by the dozens were able to threaten a couple, the McCloskeys, at their home, without consequence. The police did not rush to the McCloskeys’ aid. In fact, after the husband and wife were recorded brandishing firearms to deter those descending on their home, authorities left them not only defenseless, but threatened to disarm them and throw them in jail.

Did it not appear again as if privileging the Woke was now the highest responsibility of government, over and above protecting our natural rights, including those to life, liberty and property—all of which the Woke threatened?

The religion of Wokeism is the most extreme racist ideology since segregation.

While the “summer of love” may be over in Seattle, with CHOP/CHAZ—the ultimate symbol of government acquiescence to Wokeism—no more, its ideals persist. Seattle recently held a training session for white municipal employees—to be clear, a government training session for those of a specific race—called “Interrupted Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness.” Meanwhile, Washington’s state phase-in plan for public schools calls for giving priority to “students furthest from educational justice first,” specifically including “students of color”—that is, on the basis of race.

Tal Bachmann deplores it at Steynonline:

Wokism is now the official state religion of the United States of America.

By constitutional standards, this means something has gone wrong. The United States isn’t supposed to have a state religion. The First Amendment specifically prohibits the establishment of a state religion. Yet it now has one, and its name is Wokism.

Wokism is now celebrated or taught as Absolute Truth in every elementary school class, every middle and high school class, every university class, every corporate training session, every Capitol Hill political chamber, every Hollywood movie or cable show, every civic ceremony, every law, every political speech, every novel, every awards show, every sports league, every everything.

Government, its corporate allies, and cultural institutions all fund Wokism. They, along with their street troops, all demand Wokist belief and perfect compliance with Wokist commandments and rituals. They all punish those who question Wokist orthodoxy, often by completely ruining their lives. They fire dissenters, ban them from social media forever, initiate global social media pile-ons, and even threaten to kill them. Sometimes our officially Wokist government sends in goon squads to scare, or even arrest, those who dare criticize Wokism.

Wokism, the writer rightly says, is a “bellicose, uncompromising, ruthless, unself-critical, totalitarian movement“.

Does that remind you of anything else? If you say Islam, you win. The fact is that Wokism is now well on its way to becoming to American government and society what Islam is to Iranian government and society.

That this has happened means—can only mean—that something has gone terribly wrong in America (and the rest of the West). America’s original plan was to avoid funding and pushing any particular religious ideology or practice. It was to have full religious freedom. It was to keep government limited to solely protecting a few basic liberties. It was for Americans and their government to live and let live.

But things have changed. Why?

Maybe luxury spoiled us and made us fat and lazy and stupid. Maybe the Frankfurt School communists really did inject a lethal dose of philosophical poison into American thought. Maybe misguided government policies, and socially corrosive movements like sexual libertinism or feminism, really did start the implosion of the family unit.

Somehow or other, we’ve wound up in a total mess. And somehow or other, we need to find a way out of it. This is no way to live. I know I’m not the only one who doesn’t want to live in a society run by frothing ideologues who have declared war on human biology, logic, and mathematics; on unborn children, confused adolescents, and the traditional familial arrangements which raise them; on Shakespeare and Homer; on fairness and decency; on reality itself—on survival itself. These people are all manic, obsessive-compulsive nation-destroyers, community-destroyers, culture-destroyers, family-destroyers, individual-destroyers, love-destroyers, beauty-destroyers, everything-destroyers.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness:

If wokeness should continue and “win”, by now we all know where it will end up.

The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America.

The public is now increasingly bombarded by 360-degree, 24/7 wokeness in the fashion of the Maoist Red Guard gangs. There appears little refuge from it. Not in television commercials. Not from CEOs. Not from professional sports. Not from movies or television shows. Not from Wall Street, the internet, and social media. Not from the administrative state, and not from the military. Not from the K-12 teachers, much less the professors.

It is largely the well-off professionals, the “privileged” and the rich—CEOs, news anchors, actors, star athletes, college presidents, foundation heads, corporate board retired military brass, Wall Street grandees—who usually do the woke remonstrating (or fund it) to the supposedly non-privileged but guilty un-woke.

The most law-abiding of Americans now seem terrified of the law—the FBI of James Comey vintage, John Brennan’s legacy at the CIA, the same old IRS of Lois Lerner, the Justice Department once branded by Eric Holder, and the predictable court order of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Enlisted men fear their inquisitional officers.

Conservatives especially fear that the once-revered FBI can become analogous to the Stasi, the once indomitable CIA after 2015 began emulating the KGB, and the federal prosecutor has become a vindictive Inspector Javert. And just when you think they are crazier for such fears, another couple is rousted out of bed by agents for supposedly being at a riot they were not at.

The current madness is the stuff of history as we watch it predictably unfold. 

Roger L. Simon writes at the Epoch Times:

An iron-fisted, ideologically extreme minority has our country under its thumb—play along or face excommunication. This is stronger than anything in our history and almost identical to what we see and have seen in totalitarian countries.

All key aspects, most parts of them anyway, of our society “get it” … the media, the corporations, the government bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the military (yikes!), entertainment, the university system, the K-through-12 system, the medical community, the scientific community (incredibly), the religious, and on and on.

All, to one extent or another, believe in “woke” except—the people.

What the extremist ideology of “woke” actually provokes is talk of—and not just talk—secession and even civil war.

Few of us have heard anything like that in our lifetimes. But now it’s real. We have been driven apart as never before. We have been awakened indeed.

Anything can happen and some of us, who would never have considered anything like secession and civil war, suddenly do—highly disturbing to us as those thoughts may be.

How long will it be before “considering” comes to decision and “some of us”  – ideally most of us – act?