As comment on “The Great Reset”, and in particular on the post Advertisement for totalitarian communism, here is an extract from L: A Novel History by Jillian Becker.* It is set in England in the 20th. century, but is precisely applicable to this moment of political choice in the US:

Here the (fictitious) historian relates what one or two enthusiasts for totalitarian communism discover when they get it:

At first the Winsomes had rejoiced in the revolution. It was what they had hoped for, worked for, and, as long as they could, voted for. “I don’t mind not owning my own house if nobody else does,” Ted Winsome had written cheerfully in his Revolution Issue of the NEW WORKER (which came out six weeks after Republic Day, as his paper, like most others, had been ordered to suspend publication until all newspapers that were to continue had been nationalised, and permits granted to their editors). Had not his wife, in her capacity as Housing Committee chairperson on Islington Borough Council set an example, by compulsorily purchasing more private houses for local government ownership than anyone before or after her (until the revolution made purchase unnecessary)? He was proud that she had been an active pioneer, one of the avant-garde of the socialist revolution.

However, he was less pleased when three families were quartered in his house. And then another was sent by the Chief Social Worker (a sort of district commandant) when his own children, delighted to drop out of school, had left home to join a WSP group and vent righteous indignation on landlords, capitalists, individualists, racists and speculators. All of his fellow lodgers were, in his view, “problem-families” – drunken, noisy, filthy, careless, inconsiderate and rude. (“That,” said the Gauleiter, “is why they were chased out of their last lodgings by angry co-residents on a former Council estate.” She had thought the Winsomes would be “more tolerant”.) Before he could hand over his stereophonic record-player to the local community centre – as he assured those he complained to that he had fully intended to do – one of the problem-children broke it, threw his classical records away, and also deliberately smashed his high-speed Japanese camera. His furniture was soon broken too. Precious antiques which he had restored with his own hands in hours of patient labour, were treated like fruit-boxes, to be stood on, and spilt on, and thrown about. When cups and glasses were smashed, it was he who had to replace them if he was to have anything to eat or drink out of; which meant recourse to the black market, against which he had so often fulminated in his editorials in the NEW WORKER. He started hiding things away in his room, taking special care to keep his carpentry and joinery tools from the hands of those who would not understand how he had cared for them, valued them, kept them sharp, adapted some of them to his particular needs. One of the problem-fathers accused him of “hoarding private property”, and threatened to go to the New Police with the complaint, or call in “some RI people”.

He confided to a woman journalist at his office how he had begun to suspect that “when a thing belongs to everybody, it belongs to nobody”. And he even went so far as to suggest that “as people only vandalise things they don’t own themselves, there is something to be said for private ownership after all”. The woman with whom he shared this confidence was a Miss Ada Corinth, a WSP member. She was also a spy for L, as most WSP members were.

Soon Ted Winsome was no longer editor of the NEW WORKER. Nobody was. Everybody wrote what he was told to write. Ted Winsome felt a secret regret at his loss of power and pride in his position. He began to feel that hierarchies were not such a bad thing. They allowed promotion, advance, a sense of success and reward for effort. “I suppose I really am a bourgeois at heart,” he said, more wistfully than guiltily, to Ada Corinth.

Some weeks passed. The day of hunger descended on the city. The problem-families tucked under their arms as many of the things the Winsomes had once owned as they could carry, and set off to find survival where food grazed, roamed, swam or grew. And one night a WSP posse came and took Ted Winsome away to be treated in a special hospital for holding incorrect opinions.

Marjorie Winsome watched him go, calling out, “Don’t worry, Ted, I’ll go to Downing Street and see Ben or Jason or John Ernesto, or L himself if necessary. They can’t know about this. When they do they’ll have to let you go.”

She set out for Downing Street. Her old friends Shrood, Vernet and Ernesto would not see her; nor would Hamstead or Fist, or any of the others.

L was not at his office. So she walked to Hampstead Heath. As she approached his house, she was stopped by the guards, and she explained what she wanted. They didn’t seem to understand. They hardly seemed to understand English at all. She began to shout, “Comrade L is my friend! Don’t you understand?”

They told her to go away, and pushed her roughly. She shouted louder, “L! Comrade L – it’s me, Marjie, Marjorie Winsome. L, they’ve taken Ted! Can you hear me? L! L!….” and she struggled with the guards, trying to push past them to get through the gate and up the garden path to the front door. One of the guards pushed her away with his Kalashnikov sub-machinegun. She fell hard, but got up feeling stunned, bruised, and very bewildered. “But –,” she began. The man advanced again with his gun held in both hands, and she gave up.

Limping home, she “tried to think what had happened exactly”. She never did work it out, by her own account, though she survived the Republic, and lived to grieve and write a brief memoir. She became a heavy drinker, when spirits could be bought again. She mourned more for “the empty thing [her] life had become” than for her husband and children, all of whom she lost. She wrote sadly that “after the revolution, there was no way one could serve others any more. Except your family, but then families broke apart. You felt you could not build anything, whatever you did was just for that day, that moment.” She came to certain conclusions that her husband had come to: “You couldn’t achieve anything really, or if you did – say you discovered something or made something with your hands – there was no way you could get recognition for it, no feeling that it might be appreciated by other people, or that anyone would thank you or honour you for it.”

Read the book for a full and graphic description of what life would be like under totalitarian communist government as proposed by “The Great Reset”. 

*From Chapter 9: The Floodgates of Chaos pages 261-263

James Delingpole writes at Breitbart:

#WhyAreTheyDoingThis has become a popular hashtag on Twitter for the increasing number of people concerned at the extraordinarily draconian and often scientifically inexplicable policies being adopted by governments the world over to deal with Coronavirus.

The Great Reset may be the answer.

And if it is the answer — and so if so many world leaders are on board — then my view is that there is only one man in the world who can save us from it.

That man is Donald Trump.

It’s why, in my view, this presidential election is probably the most important political event anyone alive will live through.

On the outcome depend our liberty, our prosperity, our civilization.

Also at Breitbart, Delingpole tells us what The Great Reset is:

The Great Reset is not a conspiracy theory. But lots of useful idiots want you to believe that it is.

Here’s an example [from The Spectator (UK)]:

The phrase has shot throughout the fringes of Right-Wing Twitter like a virus through a karaoke bar. According to Pauline Hanson of the Australian party One Nation it is an attempt to establish a ‘socialist left Marxist view of the world’. James Delingpole describes it as a ‘global communist takeover plan’.

You get the idea. Anyone who imagines that the Great Reset is a serious threat belongs on the crackpot fringe. I hear this a lot and it’s a point that needs addressing because if we’re not careful the bastards will get away with it.

Just as the devil’s greatest trick was to persuade the world he didn’t exist, so it suits promoters of the Great Reset for people to believe they’re not serious about their plan — even despite the fact that every last detail is spelled out on the World Economic Forum’s website.

And in its tweets (unless, like me, you’re blocked).

And on the cover of Time magazine.

And in books like the one WEF founder Klaus Schwab published this year titled COVID-19: the Great Reset.

So why, given the weight of evidence, do so many wiseacres think they know better?

The first reason is cowardice — or squeamishness if you prefer. No-one wants to believe that totalitarian rule is just around the corner (as it will be if the Great Reset is allowed to happen) because that’s a scary thought which many people would prefer not to entertain. It’s the equivalent of burying your head underneath the pillow to make the monsters go away — and lots of people do it long after childhood.

In the late ’20s, for example, lots of supposedly intelligent and informed commentators pooh-poohed the notion that the funny little man with the moustache building a power base in Germany presented any kind of genuine threat. Sure he’d spelled out exactly what he planned in a 1925 manifesto called Mein Kampf. But c’mon — those Lederhosen, that hysterical oratory — no way was he going to lead a level-headed, war-chastened people like the Germans into another insane global conflict…

The second reason is tone policing. Tone policing is a game played mostly by the left but which has been unthinkingly copied by the squishier sort of conservative. It’s a way of closing down arguments you disagree with or which make you uncomfortable. Instead of actually addressing the argument itself, you focus on a rhetorical flourish you consider to be overly dramatic or a word you find inapt — and use that to imply that this invalidates your opponent’s case.

So, in the piece mentioned above, the author invokes the word “conspiracy” to imply that the whole notion is a bit tinfoil hat; and the word “communist” in order argue that the Great Reset is actually more of a “capitalist” endeavour — as if somehow these nitpicking debating points suddenly make the Great Reset OK.

But the Great Reset is not OK. It really doesn’t matter whether you want to cast its masterplan — which remember, ultimately includes the abolition of private property — as communist or fascist or technocratic. The much more important point is that it represents a totalitarian takeover by a small, powerful, oppressive, unelected elite which will leave the rest of us impoverished, immiserated, and deprived of our liberty. …

These people and their ideological confreres have been talking about it for decades. Sometimes it comes under the United Nations codename Agenda 21 (or LA 21), which has now been updated as Agenda 2030. Sometimes it comes under the catch-all phrase — at once vague and extremely dangerous — “sustainability”. Sometimes it’s known as the “fourth industrial revolution” (though “deindustrial apocalypse” would be more accurate).

It’s a plan whose blueprint you’ll find embedded everywhere — in local government policy plans, in speeches by prime ministers, at UN conferences like the annual COP events such as the one at Paris whose Paris Accord President Trump sensibly pulled out of because he knows a rat when he smells one…

The reason it has become so pressing and urgent and frightening and newsworthy now is simply that the pandemic of 2020 has been seized, Rahm Emmanuel style, as the crisis the globalists won’t let go to waste…

And again he writes:

“Build Back Better” is the slogan of the Great Reset and the man who invented it, Klaus Schwab. Schwab is a bald German in his early Eighties with a strong accent and the sinister air of a James Bond villain who in the 1970s founded what is now known as the World Economic Forum. The WEF holds the annual summit at Davos in Switzerland where, it has been said, ‘billionaires go to lecture millionaires on how ordinary people live.’

Up until recently, Davos has probably seemed like a harmless event: a sort of annual joke in which we all get to laugh at the absurd spectacle of the one percent of the one percent turning up in their private jets and their limousines to expound on the importance of sustainability and saving the planet.

But the events of 2020 have changed all that because COVID-19 has provided the perfect pretext for the kind of co-ordinated globalist takeover which might previously have been little more than an evil glint in Klaus Schwab’s eyes.

By Schwab’s own admission, the world must “act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies” — in short, he says, ever industry must “be transformed… we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism”.

In a warning of the rollercoaster of change we can expect if this plan goes ahead, Schwab continues: “The level of cooperation and ambition this implies is unprecedented. But it is not some impossible dream. In fact, one silver lining of the pandemic is that it has shown how quickly we can make radical changes to our lifestyles. Almost instantly, the crisis forced businesses and individuals to abandon practices long claimed to be essential, from frequent air travel to working in an office.”

As the WEF puts it of the coming technocracy that would rule our lives: “Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.” [See the post above, Advertisement for totalitarian communism.]

There is nothing new about the Great Reset. Schwab and his acolytes have been talking about it for years. Chinese Coronavirus – or rather the draconian, liberty-sapping measures taken by governments in order to combat it – has merely accelerated the process.

As I reported in an earlier piece, Schwab has written several books about his masterplan:

His latest, called Covid-19: The Great Reset, makes no bones about the fact that the chaos of the Coronavirus pandemic represents the perfect opportunity to accelerate the entire world towards a “new normal”. …

That’s why Joe Biden used “Build Back Better” as his campaign slogan. It’s why the UK Conservatives feature the website on their Twitter page. And why UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson inserts the phrase into his speeches.

How many of those who, by their own choice, voted for Joe Biden had the least idea of what they were voting for? Perhaps only those who are themselves members of Big Virtue – the billionaires, the princes, the technology giants. And the decision-makers of the Democratic Party – a cabal that may include Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff, Obama, Bannen, Clapper, Sulzberger, Soros. (But almost certainly not Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.)

All free men and women who want to remain free are in debt to James Delingpole for informing us of this. Though what we can do about it remains to be thought.

We would argue with only one thing Delingpole says, not because we think it is wrong, but because we think it is understated.  He says: “This presidential election is probably the most important political event anyone alive will live through.” We would go much further and say that this is the most important presidential election since the Enlightenment freed the Western world from the tyranny of the Roman Catholic Church and inspired the founding of the free American republic.

The case could not be put more succinctly and accurately than Delingpole puts it when he says of this election:

On the outcome depend our liberty, our prosperity, our civilization.

Questions to all those capitulating to the Communist revolutionary movement now overt, violent, and gaining ground in America:

Do you want freedom?

Do you want prosperity?

If your answer is yes, the time has come to fight for America, its Constitution and its capitalism.

Richard Higgins writes at American Greatness (see his bio here):

The Republic is in grave danger. …

The United States is faced with three enormous perils: an external threat, an internal threat, and a fulcrum on which the two interoperate to synchronize a multi-prong attack on America. 

The first peril is that China has emerged as a geopolitical and economic challenger to the United States. The simmering geopolitical threat from China is multilateral in nature. In fact, a geopolitical reordering on an historic scale is taking place.

Supported by financial stakeholders, China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” seeks no less than the unification of the Eurasian landmass. This geopolitical and economic reordering has seen China peel off NATO ally Turkey, make common cause with Iran, align with Pakistan, and subsume Hong Kong. Even European Union nations, beneficiaries of 75 years of American security, are drifting into the arms of the Chinese Communists.

The second peril, a domestic counter-state, has emerged pressing a Marxist revolutionary insurrection in alignment with China’s objectives. With a century of Marxist subversion in the making, this counter-state manifested as a silent or soft coup attempt in 2017, and subsequently has evolved into a Marxist revolutionary insurrection rising to a boil inside the United States.

This insurrection has both overt and clandestine components, and while the underground remains largely anonymous, much of it is hidden in plain sight and is clearly visible to anyone familiar with unconventional warfare tactics.

One hallmark of this emergent insurrection is the state-within-the-state: institutional control over executive branch function even when their affiliated political party is out of power, control over media organs, state employees elevated above citizens in the application of laws, selective enforcement of laws based on political affiliation or policy desires (i.e. sanctuary cities), and the abuse of intelligence, law enforcement, judicial and regulatory structures to punish or control political enemies.

It is important to note that all of the outcomes sought by this insurrection support Communist China’s ambition to see the United States displaced from her perch as global leader.

The third peril is a biological-economic crisis brought about by the Chinese, and exacerbated by the domestic revolutionary insurrectionists and their allies in the media and public health sector.

This public health crisis and its derivative economic calamity was spread intentionally throughout the world by China and its allies. COVID-19 has upended the global economic system and decreased the domestic productivity of most nations, thereby increasing governance challenges and opening the door to greater state controls.

That may seem a farfetched accusation, but it is borne out by the fact that the Chinese government, aware of the outbreak of Covid-19 within its borders, made no attempt to stop the possibly infected from traveling abroad. That alone, even if they had not planned to wage germ warfare on other countries, surely means they could see an advantage to themselves in spreading the sickness with its likely devastating economic consequences, particularly in America.

Inside the United States, the Marxist insurrection is capitalizing on the virus and the counter-state’s control of the public health system to enact draconian population control measures, extraconstitutional legal maneuvers, propaganda and psychological warfare operations, economic warfare targeting the middle-class business owner, and intermittent escalatory violence …

Any one of the three perils is potentially lethal in its own right. In the aggregate, this is a crisis of epic proportions.

Unfortunately, the underground revolutionary insurrectionists operating inside the government institutions interfere with executive branch function and make matters much more difficult to qualify, rectify, or even acknowledge. In so doing, these meddling government officials betray their oaths to defend the Constitution. …

The [danger] signs are everywhere; debt exploding, unemployment skyrocketing, currency uncertainty, the gold price rising, and record-high gun sales. The herd is nervous. Sides are being chosen. …

The Republic is at risk. …

Now defend it.

The Left has captured the culture. That’s well known and oft repeated. Education is now religiously Leftist from kindergarten to doctorate. The entertainment industry – stage, film, television –  faithfully carries the sacred messages. The media, both “mainstream” and “social”, are packed with acolytes.

Not only the guardians of the culture have converted en masse to the Church of Marx. Big panjandrums of our capitalist economy are dropping their checks for hundred of millions of dollars into the collection boxes of the Left’s terrorist curates – buying time, they foolishly hope. That would be more surprising if we didn’t have Vladimir Lenin’s (possibly apocryphal but highly plausible) prophecy that “the capitalist will sell you the rope you’ll hang him with”.

And now it is all too horrifyingly possible that the Left will re-capture the legislative and executive branches of the US government. As for the judicial branch, seven of the Supreme Court  justices – all nine of whom were formerly Jewish or Catholic which was not harmful to determinations of law – are dancing arm-in-arm leftwards through a side door into the C. of M., where doctrinal orthodoxy is strictly enforced. Could SCOTUS become the tribunal of the next Inquisition?

A dark age lies ahead. But need we despair? There is consolation to be found in the records of the fast fading era of free thought (roughly 1700-2000), that will still be available to us in books.

Or will they?

Oh, oh! It seems that books by or about the great  – mostly white – scientists, inventors, discoverers, philosophers, visionaries, economists, historians, educators whose ideas debunk the doctrines of the C. of M., are to be removed from libraries, bookshops, even probably our private rooms, and destroyed. Blotted out of human memory. They will not be published  again; or if published by some rogue publisher, not advertised;  or if advertised by some mischance, not sold; or if sold on a black market market of color, confiscated and destroyed.

On the other hand, books supporting the doctrine of the C. of M. (chiefly concerning anti-racism and the evil of being White) will abound. Vast libraries will be built to contain them. There’ll be at least one in every hotel bedside drawer. There’ll be cutely illustrated versions of some on the shelves of kindergartens; thousands to be checked out by students in all grades or else; and subterranean university bookstores will be chockfull of them.

Bruce Bawer, observing the trend, writes at Front Page:

Of America’s most powerful and prominent cultural institutions, it’s quick work naming those that aren’t entirely left-wing satrapies. TV? Fox News, although things are looking less and less encouraging there. Colleges? Hillsdale, I guess, though how many Ivy League faculty members would ever admit to having heard of it? Newspapers? The New York Post (sometimes), Wall Street Journal (kind of), and perhaps one or two others from sea to shining sea. Silicon Valley? Nothing. Hollywood? ¡Nada! Big business? Hmm: what is there, nowadays, honestly, other than that My Pillow guy?

One field in which there’s at least a soupçon of ideological diversity is the book trade. Yes, staffers at the major publishing houses are overwhelmingly on the left. Ditto bookstore employees. Plus the people who give out the major book awards. Not to mention that the heftiest advances for political books go to Democrats. Since the turn of the century, the biggest nonfiction book deal, amounting to at least $65 million, was for Michelle Obama’s Becoming (2018) and for an as-yet-unpublished opus by Barack; second – raking in $15 million – was Bill Clinton’s My Life (2004); third – at $14 million – was Hillary’s Hard Choices (2014).

One more thing about the reflexive leftism of the book scene. Thanks to today’s lethal cancel culture, even classics are at risk. Recently, in an article for the School Library Journal headlined “Little House, Big Problem: What To Do with ‘Classic’ Books That Are Also Racist”, Marva Hinton identified both Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird as racist. No, she didn’t just say that they contained racist language, which would have been fair enough; she asserted that these two books – both of them key texts in the history of the American struggle against racism – are in fact racist.

Hinton quoted Julia E. Torres, a Denver school librarian, as saying that when she’s consulted by teachers who want to assign Harper Lee’s novel to their student, she often suggests replacing it with Samira Ahmed’s dystopic novel Internment, “about a teen sent to a U.S. internment camp for Muslim American people”. Alternatively, Torres “suggests they teach To Kill a Mockingbird using excerpts or through a critical consciousness lens, which would include lessons on white saviorism and the weaponization of white women’s tears”. Check, please!

I’m not familiar with the novel Internment – just out in paperback from Little, Brown – but it’s part of a full-court press by the book business to normalize Islam and demonize “Islamophobia”.  Also in on this effort are the major pre-pub reviewing outlets, all of which gave Internment starred reviews that were short on praise for aesthetic values and long on PC drivel. (“Taking on Islamophobia and racism in a Trump-like America…” – Kirkus.  “A very real, very frank picture of hatred and ignorance…” – Booklist. “An unsettling and important book for our times.” – Publishers Weekly.)

In 2006 I published a highly critical book about Islam. Even then, it was savaged by bien pensant book-world types. But criticizing Islam has become so verboten on the left that I doubt any major publisher today would touch a book like While Europe Slept – even though the problems described therein have grown far, far worse.

Meanwhile, to peruse the latest catalogues from those same publishers is to discover a blizzard of dreary-sounding new or forthcoming novels that, judging from the plot summaries, are drenched in identity politics. (Two quick examples from Knopf, perhaps the most respected of literary publishers: Burning by Megha Majumdar, about an Indian girl who’s falsely accused of terrorism and turns for help to a trans woman; My Mother’s House by Francesca Momplaisir, a novel that takes on “the legacy of colonialism” and “the abuse of male power”. …

Amazon’s current list of top ten bestsellers includes several far-left books on racism: Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning, Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk about Race, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. You might think there’s a market for at least one book criticizing these authors’ views; but I’ve been assured by industry insiders that no major New York house would even consider publishing such a book.

Even in book publishing, then, the left is way ahead. But this isn’t good enough for Alex Shephard, a young staff writer at the New Republic, who in a recent article maintained that the book industry is “overdue” for a major “reckoning”. Here’s his article’s subhead (italics mine):

The industry is facing demands to live up to its stated values. That might mean ditching writers like Donald Trump Jr.

And later there’s this (italics again mine):

…these publishing houses are, like many corporations in the country, being asked by their employees and customers to live up to a set of values. And that would seem to be impossible while also publishing the likes of Tucker Carlson…

What does Shephard mean by “stated values”? Simple: left-wing ideological purity. In his view, conservative books are, with exceedingly few exceptions, “valueless”. (Shephard implies that “quality control” alone would eliminate most conservative titles.) Also by definition, they’re awash in “factual inaccuracies”. Because of course you can’t possibly mount a convincing non-leftist argument for anything without radically distorting the truth. (As Shephard puts it: “Being forced to tell the truth is not an existential issue for most of publishing; it is for conservative imprints.”)

Hence, if book publishers began to be serious about fact-checking, it would, argues Shephard, “make it impossible to publish a great many conservative books”. Indeed, even the “more ‘respectable’ side of conservative publishing”, as represented for Shephard by Jonah Goldberg’s 2008 bestseller Liberal Fascism (note, however, those scare quotes around the word respectable), would be challenged by a responsible fact-checking apparatus.

According to Shephard, another attribute of many conservative books is that their authors aren’t serious. He quotes Kimberly Burns, a book publicist: “I’m OK with books being published from different political viewpoints – in fact, it’s necessary for debate and being able to see a whole picture … The problem is when authors write things only to get themselves attention or to make news, instead of to enhance a dialogue…” Apparently this isn’t a problem with left-wing books.

Bottom line: Shephard really likes censorship of his ideological opponents. And he really admires his fellow “woke” types who put pressure on publishers to cancel books. He notes with obvious satisfaction that Henry Holt, the publishing house, “drew fire for its decision to continue publishing Bill O’Reilly after multiple accusations of sexual harassment were made against him”. (There’s no indication that Shephard believes multiple accusations of sexual harassment should affect Bill Clinton’s publishing career.)

Shephard approvingly mentions Simon & Schuster’s 2016 decision to drop the book Dangerous by Milo Yiannopoulos, whom he identifies as “a troll known for shallow publicity stunts”. And he tells us that he’s spoken to employees at another publishing house, Hachette, who “expressed discomfort about the company’s conservative imprint, Center Street, which publishes Donald Trump Jr., among others”.

Boy, I’ll bet they did. Since Shephard’s article appeared, Hachette staffers – largely lower-level Gen-Z brats – have said that they won’t work on J.K. Rowling’s forthcoming book because she’s criticized transgender ideology. Hachette is the same house that, in response to workers outraged over unproven quarter-century-old sex-abuse allegations, canceled Woody Allen’s about-to-be-published memoirs in March. Allen was never charged with any crime, let alone found guilty of one; years later he was permitted to adopt two children. Yet thanks to those junior Jacobins – every one of whom should’ve been fired – Allen was unceremoniously cut adrift.

And Shephard fully approves. He actually calls Allen a “pariah”. The ease with which this smug punk swats away the legendary writer-director is chilling. No matter what you may think of Allen or his films, the whole ugly spectacle is just too reminiscent of the way things worked under Stalin and Mao. And it’s all too representative, alas, of the atrocious attitudes of the rising generation of lockstep cancel-culture creeps who, like it or not, are well on their way to becoming our nation’s official cultural gatekeepers.

What are conservatives looking to, to stop the Marxist revolution now underway in America?

In what are we putting our hope and trust to save us from the national calamity that has not just begun but is gathering force and pace?

The November election.

We cling to the hope that Donald Trump will be re-elected to the presidency, both the House and the Senate will achieve Republican majorities, and then – hey presto! – the Left, its black-masked militant cohorts, its murderous thugs, it screaming mobs, its nasty leaders in Congress, its billionaire funders, its powerful propaganda media, the public schools and the universities teaching that the federal republic of America is too immoral to be allowed to continue, the governors and mayors authorizing insurgency, will give in, and all the revolutionary activity will subside like a spent summer storm.

They won’t. It won’t. If the Left loses the election, the mobs, the leaders, the funders, the media, the Marxist theorists, the little Stalins and Maos of the states and the cities will intensify their violent aggression.

If they win, the free republic of America will be finished, over, lost.

Either way, the election will not save us.

We have vaguely expected that a magic document we call “The Durham Report” will be published soon, and it will produce such facts, such accusations, such proofs of perfidy and corruption in the Obama administration that inevitably justice will be done, the guilty men and women who plotted a coup d’état against President Trump will go to prison covered with shame, and lo! law and order, constitutionality, safety and freedom will be restored.

It won’t. If this rumored report ever appears, it is unlikely to do so before the election; if it does appear before the election, it is unlikely to indict the guilty; if it does indict the guilty, they are unlikely to be brought to trial; if they are brought to trial, they are unlikely to be found guilty; if they are found guilty, they are unlikely to go to prison. Even if our hopes are rewarded, and before November the plotters are charged, tried, and condemned to long terms of imprisonment, it will not give the Leftist revolutionaries a moment’s pause.

Can we do anything to save our country and ourselves?

Mark Tapson writes at Front Page:

It is time for American patriots to turn the tide against the hateful race agitators, the masked anarchists, and the Marxist subversives terrorizing our nation and wreaking a destructive, “fundamental transformation” of the United States. That includes not just the demonic foot soldiers of the mob itself, but their enablers in academia, the news media, the entertainment arena, and political office.

It’s not enough anymore for our side to share snarky social media memes ridiculing social justice snowflakes; the time for joking about this cultural upheaval is over, because the other side has taken it very, very seriously for half a century, and those snowflakes are now waging a scorched-earth policy against every American institution and value.

What then do we do? …

First and foremost, get off our knees. … Free American citizens do not bow and scrape before any man, any mob, any tyrannical ideology. Forget trying to placate and to reason with the leftist mob; neither is possible. Simply resist and fight. If you give the left an inch, they will take mile after mile after mile. Do not give them that inch.

Speak the truth fearlessly, every day and everywhere, and never apologize for it. Teach your children the truth, and demonstrate to them what courage and integrity look like by standing up for it. Speaking of your kids: take them out of public schools (and even many private schools) at the earliest possible opportunity and commit, no matter the sacrifice, to homeschooling them – or you will lose them in the indoctrination mills of the left.

Do not kowtow to the power-lust of petty Democrat despots like governors Gretchen Whitmer, Andrew Cuomo, or Gavin Newsom, whose coronavirus strategy is to release felons from prison and allow mass, violent protests while cracking down on law-abiding citizens for singing in church. Commit to civil disobedience against their unreasonable dictates – and to uncivil disobedience if it comes to that.

Take a leaf from the Left’s playbook and community-organize. Organize to flood your representatives, local and national, with emails and calls demanding they take immediate, concrete actions to protect our heritage, defend the police, and enforce law and order. For that matter, take another leaf from the leftist playbook and pack their offices with noisy protesters who refuse to leave until our demands are met. Those demands are to stop hamstringing law enforcement and start protecting the community’s citizens, businesses, and monuments. Show up armed, if your state allows open-carry. Support law enforcement and other first responders in word and deed. Tell every cop you know and see that Blue Lives Matter and you respect and appreciate them for putting their lives on the line.

To trace our way back to some measure of sanity, civility, and security in America, the collectivist, racist, divisive mentality of identity politics that has spread like a cancer in this country must be eradicated. Reject this ideology wherever it rears its ugly head. Push back against your children’s teachers and administrators when it is taught in the schools. Call it out in the workplace, consequences be damned; silence and keeping your head down will no longer save you. Reject the ideology when you make your shopping choices. When corporations send you emails notifying you of the steps they’re taking to help achieve “racial justice,” email back and ask them how their virtue-signaling on behalf of anti-Semitic, black supremacist communists like Black Lives Matter helps ease racial tensions. Boycott and down-vote any entertainment featuring elitist celebrities who loudly proclaim their contempt for this country and for the people who love it. Boycott the NBA and protest their racial division outside their arenas at game time. Boycott the NFL, especially the Super Bowl. Boycott Nike and its hate-mongering spokesman Colin Kaepernick.

The time for smug complacency about our side “having all the guns” is over, unless we’re willing to actually use those guns in defense of our country and our freedoms, and not just our homes. If you are a gun owner (and if not, why aren’t you?), hone your skills and, as my friend the columnist Kurt Schlichter always advises, stock up on ammunition. Create networks of friends, relatives, and neighbors you trust and formulate a multi-stage plan for having each other’s backs in various scenarios in which the shit hits the fan – because if the mob hasn’t reached your neighborhood yet, don’t assume they’re not coming. When the lily-white, nose-pierced assistant professors of Antifa in their skinny jeans are confronted by organized resistance, they wet themselves.

Don’t sit back and expect this communist takeover of the United States to fizzle out; it will not. Don’t expect the current madness to ensure a Trump landslide in November, either; in fact, what you can expect is massive Democrat voter fraud, and if Trump survives that, there will be violent resistance surpassing anything we’ve seen so far. So the time to act is now.

It’s probable that the revolutionaries are not taking the November election seriously anyway; that they regard all the old white political traditions such as elections as empty rituals, their results of no importance, carrying no consequences. Which explains why they have put up a dummy as their candidate, a senile leftover from the Obama days, allowed to burble whatever nonsense oozes out of his poor old addled brain.

We must fight now. By all necessary means.

Those innumerable politicians, historians, journalists, television pundits and other opinion-dealers who allowed the Left to get away with the claim that fascism is the opposite of communism – despite their knowing better – made a devastating mistake. Because of it, new generations learning that fascism is bad logically assume that ergo communism is good. 

Communism and fascism are collectivist and aim to be totalitarian. Communism is fascist.

What is not fascist is freedom. Only freedom. Freedom includes the free market, which communists prefer to call capitalism, to them a pejorative term.

Soeren Kern writes at Gatestone:

In the United States, Antifa’s ideology, tactics and goals, far from being novel, are borrowed almost entirely from Antifa groups in Europe, where so-called anti-fascist groups, in one form or another, have been active, almost without interruption, for a century.

Antifa can be described as a transnational insurgency movement that endeavors, often with extreme violence, to subvert liberal democracy, with the aim of replacing global capitalism with [global] communism. Antifa’s stated long-term objective, both in America and abroad, is to establish a communist world order. In the United States, Antifa’s immediate aim is to bring about the demise of the Trump administration. …

A common tactic used by Antifa in the United States and Europe is to employ extreme violence and destruction of public and private property to goad the police into a reaction, which then “proves” Antifa’s claim that the government is “fascist”. …

Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence agency, in a special report on left-wing extremism, noted:

Antifa’s fight against right-wing extremists is a smokescreen. The real goal remains the “bourgeois-democratic state”, which, in the reading of left-wing extremists, accepts and promotes “fascism” as a possible form of rule and therefore does not fight it sufficiently. Ultimately, it is argued, “fascism” is rooted in the social and political structures of “capitalism”. Accordingly, left-wing extremists, in their “antifascist” activities, focus above all on the elimination of the “capitalist system”.

… In an essay, What Antifa and the Original Fascists Have In Common, Antony Mueller, a German professor of economics who currently teaches in Brazil, described how Antifa’s militant anti-capitalism masquerading as anti-fascism reveals its own fascism:

After the left has pocketed the concept of liberalism and turned the word into the opposite of its original meaning, the Antifa-movement uses a false terminology to hide its true agenda. While calling themselves “antifascist”  and declaring fascism the enemy, the Antifa itself is a foremost fascist movement. The members of Antifa are not opponents to fascism but themselves its genuine representatives. Communism, Socialism and Fascism are united by the common band of anti-capitalism and anti-liberalism. The Antifa movement is a fascist movement. The enemy of this movement is not fascism but liberty, peace and prosperity.

The modern Antifa movement derives its name from a group called Antifaschistische Aktion, founded in May 1932 by Stalinist leaders of the Communist Party of Germany. The group was established to fight fascists, a term the party used to describe all of the other pro-capitalist political parties in Germany. The primary objective of Antifaschistische Aktion was to abolish capitalism, according to a detailed history of the group. …

During the post-war period, Germany’s Antifa movement reappeared in various manifestations, including the radical student protest movement of the 1960s, and the leftist insurgency groups that were active throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

The Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, was a Marxist urban guerrilla group that carried out assassinations, bombings and kidnappings aimed at bringing revolution to West Germany, which the group characterized as a fascist holdover of the Nazi era. Over the course of three decades, the RAF murdered more than 30 people and injured over 200.

After the collapse of the communist government in East Germany in 1989-90, it was discovered that the RAF had been given training, shelter, and supplies by the Stasi, the secret police of the former communist regime.

It was “discovered” much earlier than that. My book, Hitler’s Children: the Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang*, first published in 1977, reveals that fact.

John Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, described the group’s tactics, which are similar to those used by Antifa today:

The goal of their terrorist campaign was to trigger an aggressive response from the government, which group members believed would spark a broader revolutionary movement.

RAF founder Ulrike Meinhof explained the relationship between violent left-wing extremism and the police: “The guy in uniform is a pig, not a human being. That means we don’t have to talk to him and it is wrong to talk to these people at all. And of course, you can shoot.”

Antifa and the RAF shared the same aim – Marxist totalitarianism. Ulrike Meinhof’s daughter, the journalist Bettina Röhl, sees “the modern Antifa” as “a continuation of the Red Army Faction”. She thinks “the main difference is that, unlike the RAF, Antifa’s members are afraid to reveal their identities”. But there are more important differences than that. The RAF never became a mass movement as Antifa has become. They were a small group – only a few dozen active members – and they used terrorist tactics: kidnapping and murdering individuals as “representatives” of the state or the “military-industrial complex” or capitalism; and putting time-bombs in department stores, a newspaper’s offices, a police station. Antifa (as Bettina Röhl rightly points out) threatens violence and attacks against politicians and police officers. But the movement has not (as yet) kidnapped or killed any of them. On the other hand, its riots have rocked a nation, while the RAF never managed to lead a riot though they would no doubt have liked to.

In sum, the RAF was more lethal than Antifa, but less politically effective.

Western governments are finding Antifa a major nuisance, a contributing cause of widespread civil unrest and what can even be called insurrection in America.

The Federal Republic of [West] Germany did not perceive the RAF as an insurrectionist threat. The government treated arrested leaders and members of the gang as the criminals they were. They were brought to trial, sentenced and imprisoned. The leaders committed suicide in prison – in such a manner as to indicate to their followers that they should claim they’d been  murdered. That, they hoped, would provide “proof” of the “fascist” nature of the state, and cause such an outcry that it would spark a revolution. But the country remained unmoved by the deaths except perhaps to heave a collective sigh of relief that the pests were gone.

Germany, now including the former Communist “Democratic Republic”, has changed since those days, and much for the worse. Its so-called “conservative” government is now well over on the Left, as are almost all the “conservative” parties of Europe.

Proof of its leftward drift is provided by Bettina Röhl, as Soeren Kern reports:

In a June 2020 essay published by the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, [Bettina] Röhl … drew attention to the fact that Antifa is not only officially tolerated, but is being paid by the German government to fight the far right:

The flourishing left-wing radicalism in the West, which brutally strikes at the opening of the European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt, at every G-20 summit or every year on May 1 in Berlin, has achieved the highest level of establishment in the state, not least thanks to the support by quite a few MPs from political parties, journalists and relevant experts. …

MP Renate Künast (Greens) recently complained in the Bundestag that Antifa groups had not been adequately funded by the state in recent decades. She was concerned that “NGOs and Antifa groups do not [meaning should not] always have to struggle to raise money and can only conclude short-term employment contracts from year to year.”  There was applause for this from Alliance 90/The Greens, from the left and from SPD deputies.

What can it mean if a state pays a rebel movement to destroy it? That apparently is what the German government is doing, or has done, and is being urged by some elected political leaders to do again more generously. We learn that the “conservative” dominated Bundestag  – not just lunatic-fringe Green and Alliance 90 members, not just the socialist deputies – has been (however “inadequately”!), funding Antifa.  

Do the Germans want to commit national suicide? Is their government trying to get the deed done in such a manner as to inspire all the nations of the West to do it too?

On the face of it the idea seems preposterous, impossible, absurd.

But Germany has already brought in its replacement population from the Middle East, Africa, and the Far East. It finances Antifa. Where Germany goes, there goes the EU. What Europe does, Britain and Canada do too.

Will America alone resist the rising red revolution?

Jillian Becker   June 19, 2020

*Click on the ad for Hitler’s Children in our margin.

The excellence of President’s Trump’s agenda for America is proved by the intensity of violence his totalitarian enemies are using against it. 

Many now are the rioting arsonists, shooters, smashers, looters, destroyers the totalitarian movements have gathered and mobilized. Fewer, but all too numerous, are the successful capitalists who provide the activists with money for their anti-capitalist campaigns.

Project Veritas secretly filmed interviews with organizers of the terrorist organization RefuseFa, an Antifa twin aiming at Communist revolution in the US. They say what they intend and why, and reveal two sources of their funding:

Adrian Vermeule is a Harvard professor of Constitutional Law who doesn’t like the US Constitution, is nostalgic for Roman Catholic statist totalitarianism, and proposes a new dispensation for Americans under “authoritative rule for the common good” which, he gleefully declares, requires the “overriding” of “the selfish claims of individuals to ‘private rights’”.

Vermeule is a convert to Catholicism. He does not mention Catholicism by name in this article, but his belief that morality is rightly defined and imposed by a central authority for the “common good” belongs to his religion. And the idea that self-sacrifice is the highest moral good is essentially a Christian teaching. A fear of heresy – people being allowed to voice an opinion that the state-as-church does not approve – suffuses his political philosophy.

“Free speech and free-speech ideology — that government is forbidden to judge the quality and moral worth of public speech,” he writes, “should be not only rejected but stamped as abominable, beyond the realm of the acceptable forever”.

The article in which he propounds these views appears in the Leftist journal, The Atlantic, as “part of the project The Battle for the Constitution, in partnership with the National Constitution Center”. (Go there to see how all the contributions to this project are actually against the Constitution.)

It is easy to see why The Atlantic likes his ideas. Stalin would have applauded them.

As for the structure and distribution of authority within government, common-good constitutionalism will favor a powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy, the latter acting through principles of administrative law’s inner morality with a view to promoting solidarity and subsidiarity. The bureaucracy will be seen not as an enemy, but as the strong hand of legitimate rule. The state is to be entrusted with the authority to protect the populace from the vagaries and injustices of market forces, from employers who would exploit them as atomized individuals, and from corporate exploitation and destruction of the natural environment. 

The close resemblance between Left statism and Catholic Christianity could not be more candidly displayed.

This Constitutional Law professor would not allow a thread of the Constitution to remain … Oh, wait! He does allow a few threads to remain, useful for the re-construction of the United States of America:

The general-welfare clause, which gives Congress “power to … provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States”, is an obvious place to ground principles of common-good constitutionalism (despite a liberal tradition of reading the clause in a cramped fashion), as is the Constitution’s preamble, with its references to general welfare and domestic tranquility, to the perfection of the union, and to justice.

And he could endure the retention of some words, provided they were re-interpreted:

Constitutional words such as freedom and liberty need not be given libertarian readings; instead they can be read in light of a better conception of liberty as the natural human capacity to act in accordance with reasoned morality.

“Reasoned morality” being the “common-good” morality such as was propounded by the Catholic Church and for many centuries enforced by the Papal and Spanish Inquisitions.

This imposed “common-good” morality will be resisted at first, but –

Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.

Notice that citizens have become “subjects” under this ideal regime. And the state run by bureaucrats has become “the ruler” – more pope than king.

If it can be taken that The Atlantic speaks for the Left – and surely it can? – we are being told in the strongest possible terms that the Left wants and intends to abandon the Constitution – which alone binds the states of America together into a nation – and substitute a federal government with totalitarian policies and absolute powers that would establish Roman Catholicism as a state religion, substitute central planning for the free market, and implement the “green” policies of environmentalists further to restrict our lives as “subjects” of the Moral State.

If it was just one Catholic religious nut pleading for the establishment of this utopia, we could laugh at it and forget it.

But it is not just one. It is millions of – mostly young, school-indoctrinated – Leftist religious nuts wanting dependence on parental government; the drowning of individuals in an ocean of common-good; the implementation of anti-industrial “green” policies with the hard forced labor and poverty they’ll entail; sacrifice of personal ambitions and talents; acceptance of chastisement for sin (you “will come to thank the ruler” for it) and life-long indebtedness for food, shelter, and apportioned health care; total loss of self-determination; obedience.

Obedience. Bureaucrats will tell you what to do. Do it!  It is for the common good.

Above all, obedience. 

Is America in the throes of a revolution? Are we sliding unstoppably into totalitarian communism?

Angelo Codevilla writes at American Greatness:

Some conservatives, rejoicing that impeachment turned into yet another of #TheResistance’s political train wrecks and that President Trump is likely to be reelected by a bigger margin than in 2016, expect that a chastened ruling class will return to respecting the rest of us. They are mistaken.

Trump’s reelection, by itself, cannot protect us. The ruling class’s intolerance of the 2016 election’s results was intolerance of us.

Nor was their intolerance so much a choice as it was the expression of its growing sense of its own separate identity, of power and of entitlement to power. The halfhearted defenses with which the offensives of the ruling class have been met already advertise the fact that it need not and will not accept the outcome of any presidential election it does not win. Trump notwithstanding, this class will rule henceforth as it has in the past three years. So long as its hold on American institutions continues to grow, and they retain millions of clients, elections won’t really matter.

Our country is in a state of revolution, irreversibly, because society’s most influential people have retreated into moral autarchy, …

Autarchy, or autocracy, is rule by a dictator. Has any Democrat proclaimed a desire for a dictator, or to be a dictator? If so, we missed it. The Democrats want absolute power in their own hands, but have’t yet wished up a Stalin or a Mao. It’s highly likely that Bernie Sanders would like to be an American Stalin, but has he admitted it?

Besides which, there is not a single Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States who could run a poll in Iowa, let alone the country. 

Moral autarchy? Not sure what that means. But okay, let’s accept the term in order to follow the writer’s argument.

… have seceded from America’s constitutional order, and because they browbeat their socio-political adversaries instead of trying to persuade them. Theirs is not a choice that can be reversed. It is a change in the character of millions of people.

Does character change? Does the character of a people – a nation – change? What characterizes any nation must by definition be what does not change about it. For a country to change its character it would have to have its population replaced by a different population – as is happening rapidly in Sweden, France, Spain, and Germany.  The Democrats seem to like the idea of America becoming more “Hispanic” than “Anglo”, but it hasn’t happened yet, and might never happen.

There has been a change in America over the last 70 years or so. It is not a change of character. In all their variety, Americans are recognizably the same as they were 100 years ago. What has changed in America are ideas about values and morals, about what matters and what doesn’t.

And that is what the article under discussion is really about.

The sooner conservatives realize that the Republic established between 1776 and 1789—the America we knew and loved—cannot return, the more fruitfully we will be able to manage the revolution’s clear and present challenges to ourselves. How are we to deal with a ruling class that insists on ruling—elections and generally applicable rules notwithstanding—because it regards us as lesser beings?

The resistance that reached its public peaks in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the impeachment imbroglio should have left no doubt about the socio-political arbitrariness that flows from the ruling class’s moral autarchy, about the socio-political power of the ruling class we’re forced to confront, or of its immediate threat to our freedom of speech.

Chief Justice John Roberts, presiding over the Senate’s impeachment trial, was as clear an example as any of that moral autarchy and its grip on institutions.

Pursuant to Senate rules, Senator Rand Paul sent a written question through Roberts to House Manager Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) regarding the extent of collaboration between Schiff’s staffer Sean Misko and his longtime fellow partisan, CIA officer Eric Ciaramella in starting the charges that led to impeachment. Roberts, having read the question to himself, declared: “The presiding officer declines to read the question as submitted.”

The chief justice of the United States, freedom of speech’s guardian-in-chief, gave no reason for declining to read Paul’s question. The question was relevant to the proceedings. It violated no laws, no regulations. The names of the two persons were known to every member of the House and Senate, as well as to everyone around the globe who had followed news reports over the previous months. But the Democratic Party had been campaigning to drive from public discussion that this impeachment stemmed from the partisan collaboration between a CIA officer and a Democratic staffer.

“Collaboration” is the polite term for it; “conspiracy” the more accurate one.

Accordingly, the mainstream media had informally but totally banned discussion of this fact, supremely relevant but supremely embarrassing to Schiff in particular and to Democrats in general. Now, Paul was asking Schiff officially to comment on the relationship. Schiff could have explained it, or refused to explain it. But Roberts saved him the embarrassment and trouble—and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) spared senators the problem of voting on a challenge to Roberts’s  ruling. The curtain of official concealment, what the Mafia calls the omertà, remained intact. Why no reason?

Just as no dog wags his tail without a reason, neither did Roberts wag his without reason. Neither the laws of the United States nor the rules of the Senate told the presiding officer to suppress the senator’s question. Why was Roberts pleased to please those he pleased and to displease those he displeased? In short, why did this impartial presiding officer act as a man partial to one side against the other?

This professional judge could hardly have been impressed by the ruling class’s chosen instrument, Adam Schiff, or by Schiff’s superior regard for legal procedure. Since Schiff’s prosecution featured hiding the identity of the original accuser—after promising to feature his testimony—and since it featured secret depositions, blocked any cross-examination of its own witnesses, and prevented the defense from calling any of their own, it would have been strange if Chief Justice Roberts’s bias was a professional one.

Is it possible that Roberts favored the substance of the ruling class claim that neither President Trump nor any of his defenders have any right to focus public attention on the Biden family’s use of public office to obtain money in exchange for influence? That, after all, is what Washington is largely about. Could Roberts also love corruption so much as to help conceal it? No.

Roberts’s professional and ethical instincts incline him the other way. Nevertheless, he sustained the ruling class’s arbitrariness. Whose side did he take? His dinner companions’ side? The media’s? His wife’s? Roberts’s behavior—contrary as it was to his profession, to his morals, and to his political provenance—shows how great is the ruling class’s centripetal force.

The sad but inescapable consequence of this force is that conservatives have no choice but to follow the partisan logic of revolution—fully conscious of the danger that partisanship can make us as ridiculously dishonest as Adam Schiff or CNN’s talking heads, into rank-pullers like John Roberts, and into profiteers as much as any member of the Biden family.

Do conservatives have no choice but to go along with “the revolution”, with the abandonment of the values that inspired the Constitution, with corruption as a matter of indisputable but unchangeable fact?

The writer then seems to change his mind. He suggests there is a choice:

And yet, revolution is war, the proximate objective of which is to hurt the other side until it loses the capacity and the will to do us harm. That means treating institutions and people from the standpoint of our own adversarial interest: controlling what we can either for our own use or for bargaining purposes, discrediting and abandoning what we cannot take from our enemies.

Opposing them by the means they choose, the weapons they use? That – so the writer suggests – is our best recourse?

Unlike our enemies, our ultimate objective is, as Lincoln said, “peace among ourselves and with all nations”. But what kind of peace we may get depends on the extent to which we may compel our enemies to leave us in peace. And for that, we must do unto them more and before they do unto us.

Which is true? Do we have no choice but to join “the revolution” – a change from a free open society of self-reliant individuals into a government-controlled, race and sex obsessed, doom prophesying, totally organized community? Or are we still in control of our destiny? And if we fight our revolutionary enemy, must it be with their weapons, or ours? On their terms, or ours?

We do not see that there has been a revolution – though the Obama administration tried to make one. We do not think the only way to save America from totalitarian one-party rule is by following the rules laid down by the Gramsci-Alinsky school of sedition and the Cloward-Piven blueprint for chaos. (See here and here and here and here.)

By great good luck we have President Trump leading us in another direction, showing us another way, prioritizing better (characteristic) values: freedom, individual enterprise, innovation, industry, competence, patriotism, strength, ambition, self-confidence, prosperity. For a few more years at least. During which the Left revolutionaries may, in the fury of their frustration, stamp themselves into the ground.

“Progressivism” – which is to say, Leftism – is a secular ideology, hostile to religion.

Doctrinaire and intolerant as it is, it can reasonably be classed as a religion itself – but essentially godless. (Which accounts for its superficial appeal to many atheists.)

Yet in recent years the Left has been in alliance with Islam. How can this be explained? How do the theoreticians of the Left condone it? How do the theologists of Islam excuse it?

In an important article for City Journal, republished in an expanded form for the Middle East Forum, Sam Westrop, Director of Islam Watch, discusses this weird phenomenon of political cognitive dissonance, examining it from the Muslim side of the illogical equation:

In 2018, the first two Muslim women elected to Congress – Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib – did so with the help of both Islamist and progressivist bases. For years, critics have thought the collaboration between Islamist groups and sections of the Left to be a cautious, temporary ideological alliance. In fact, a growing section of American Islamism has sincerely embraced progressivist politics, despite its clear contradictions with theocratic ideals.

Writing recently in the New York Times, Cato Institute fellow Mustafa Akyol argues that America’s “Muslim community”, far from campaigning for theocracy (as claimed by “Islamophobes”), is in fact being swarmed by a powerful, welcome “creeping liberalism”.

Liberalism now embraced by Muslims in America?

On the face of it, it seems he has a point. Prominent Muslim voices lead Women’s Marches in cities across America and argue for “intersectional feminism”. Groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) – just 10 years ago named by federal prosecutors as part of an enormous terror finance network – now spend a great deal of time publishing social media items about Black Lives Matter while also campaigning for “social justice”, prison reform and higher minimum wages. Leading Muslim clerics are to be found praising Malcolm X as “our prince”, and protesting Trump’s immigration plans at the southern border. And a few Muslim campaigners even express solidarity with transgender and “queer” activists, and publicly dream, as the prominent Islamist-linked activist Linda Sarsour puts it, of “a world free of anti-black racism, islamophobia, xenophobia, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, sexism, and misogyny.”

All of which would seem to be listed hypocritically. Is this a display of taqiyya – the lying that is permitted to Muslims if it benefits their faith? So merely a ruse, an expedient ploy?

If Sarsour is still a believing Muslim – and as she always appears in a hijab she surely wants us to know that she is – the hypocrisy is glaring. In Africa, blacks – even if they’re Muslims – are intensely despised by Arabs. Their anti-black racism  is enshrined in their language, the word for a black, “abd”, being also their word for a slave. “Islamophobia” – irrational fear of islam – does not exist, since fear of Islam is entirely rational. Islam, not America, is xenophonic. And Islam is doctrinally antisemitic. So homophobic is Islam, that Islamic law requires homosexuals to be killed. As women are subordinate – virtual slaves – in Islam, it is systemically misogynistic, quintessentially sexist. And its homophobia and sexism implies intolerance of “transphobia”. As for “ableism” and “ageism”, they are probably thrown in to accentuate how totally tolerant these deeply intolerant liars are.

Sam Westrop considers the question of Sarsour’s sincerity – at least in wanting to sing the same song as the Left. (Which is itself intensely hypocritical – for instance when it claims to be against antisemitism).

This is not, however, a broad creeping liberalism; it is, more specifically, a creeping progressivist narrative – and it is changing the face of American Islamism.

But is this genuine progressivism? Or is this just part of the perennial debate among Islamists living in the West: in the effort to advance a theocratic agenda using lawful means, to what extent should Islamists dilute their message to fit Western political narratives?

The conversion, or concession, of some American Muslims active in politics to the “progressivist narrative” is opposed by some outspoken imams. Do they represent only a minority opinion?

Standing against the march of progress, Akyol observes, is a minority group of “conservative” Muslim clerics. He quotes a few from extreme Salafi circles, but there is in fact a much broader array of contending ideas among America’s Sunni Muslims – and its Islamists – on the question of whether progressivist politics pose a threat or afford an opportunity.

Many of those who oppose the progressive trend are not bearded Wahhabis in Arab dress. Ismail Royer, for instance, is a former jihadist who claims to have moderated and now works for the multi-faith Religious Freedom Institute in D.C. Although he claims to regard Islam as a “vehicle for social justice”, he firmly rejects progressivism, and urges an Islamic alliance with conservative Christian movements – even writing pieces in Christian publications in support of the evangelical opposition to gay marriage.

Islamists will, however, find a limited supply of sympathy from American evangelicals.

Sections of the Left, meanwhile, have a long history of welcoming Islamist activists into their tent. But it is the very eagerness of the Left to co-opt American Islam that concerns certain leading Islamists.

Traditional, purist Salafi and Wahhabi clerics condemn those modernist Salafis trying to “westernise Islam” by appealing to progressivist impressions of Islam. The modernist Salafis use progressive rhetoric about Islamophobia and the Black Lives Matter movement, but also warn about the dangers of support for feminism and homosexuality within Muslim Students Associations, which are supported and funded by organizations tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. Meanwhile, the Muslim Student Associations (when taking a break from those intersectional solidarity marches) debate fractiously whether to “de-platform” either the “regressive” Salafi clerics, or those extra-progressive Muslims who seem just a little too committed to working with Jewish groups or advocating for gay rights.

There is no doubt that some of the more ascetic Islamists reject all ideological alliances. Some may engage in some barebones interfaith activities, but they do so while warning against accepting the “validity” of other religions and preaching that “Islam in the West is a resistance movement against totalitarian liberal ideology”. …

But there are many, especially within modernist Salafi networks, who have observed the growth of political activist Islamist movements in America, such as the Muslim Brotherhood or Jamaat-e-Islami, and partly ascribe their success to the adoption of modish political trends. Much of the progressivist rhetoric that emanates from these modernist Salafis, however, is manifestly deceitful.

In their private sermons before Muslim audiences, modernist Salafi clerics rail against the evils of apostate ideologies. Yasir Qadhi, a leading cleric of the AlMaghrib Institute, for instance, denounces the theology of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam (NOI) as heretical and “perverted’. In public, however, Qadhi’s clerical colleagues eulogize Malcom X – a progressivist darling — and praise NOI leader Louis Farrakhan as a great radical hero. This may be ideologically incoherent, but it is tactically shrewd.

Other duplicity is more plainly apparent. The Texas-based imam Omar Suleiman, for instance, has been an active voice in the protests against the Trump administration’s immigration. In March 2018, he was arrested at the Capitol after “civil disobedience” to demand “protection for young immigrant Dreamers”. And yet before a Muslim audience, Suleiman has warned young girls, without condemnation, that if they are “promiscuous” they may be killed by a family member.

Or look at Islamist media: Al Jazeera’s social media channel AJ+ broadcasts documentaries on transgender rights and the wickedness of misogyny, homophobia and other bigotries; while its Arabic parent station broadcasts sermons by Muslim Brotherhood clerics advocating the killing of gays, and offering husbands permission to beat their wives.

Some Islamists have sought to explain American Islamist institutions’ partial-embrace of progressivism as a response to “Islamophobia”. Shariq Siddiqui, an official of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), has written that “Islamophobia makes it difficult for ISNA and Muslim Americans to determine which positions are centered on their religious values and which positions are based on political necessity. … For example, in 2003, ISNA was opposed to gay marriages, but now ISNA is part of a coalition working in favor of gay marriage.”

Others have made it clear that non-Muslim progressivists are dispensable partners. As Counter Islamist Grid director Kyle Shideler recently discovered: newly-elected Virginia General Assembly Member Ibraheem Samirah (who was recently exposed as a virulent anti-Semite) has explicitly compared the Islamist alliance with progressivists to the decision of the Islamic prophet Muhammad “to form treaties with his enemies. He had to form alliances with people who weren’t necessarily believers of his message, who would later on become people who would be his enemies.” (Samirah also served as a senior campaign official for freshman Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib.)

So expediency is indeed a motive for Muslims echoing progressive – and essentially un-Islamic – ideas. And imams are not comfortable with the tactic.

… [A]n increasing number of clerics and Muslim thinkers have begun to regret their forays into progressivist politics. Leading modernist Salafi clerics such as Yasir Qadhi now appear deeply shocked that Muslim students have moved from carefully taking advantage of progressivist trends to openly supporting “LGBTQ” campaigns on campuses.

They can accept going along with the progressive Left hypocritically, but not sincerely.

And indeed, at one end of the spectrum, there is a rising group of activists from Islamist circles who seem to believe in this fused progressivist-Islamist creed. Across America, branches of the Council on American-Islamic Relations are today staffed with young hijab-wearing graduates of Muslim Students Associations, who appear to have reconciled working for terror-linked extremists while also publishing transgender rights petitions on their social media accounts. …

Such as Linda Sarsour:

Sarsour is a harbinger of a broader trend. Whether American Islamist movements intended to embrace progressivism authentically or not, many Islamist groups are now so firmly entrenched in the progressive movement that a generation of young American Muslims is growing up convinced that the progressivist social justice and sexual identity narratives are intrinsic components of the Islamist agenda.

No wonder some traditional Islamists speak out so forcefully against “liberal ideology”, or caution against too tight an embrace of progressivist allies – their own radicalism is being supplanted.

American Islamists are conflicted. Some reject the embrace of left-wing politics entirely. Others clearly exploit progressivist organizations to advance their cause. And then there are some, a new generation of intersectional Islamists, who seem to have found a genuine way to advocate for, or warily justify, “queer”-friendly politics. It looks like the progressivist rhetoric of Islamist activists such as Sarsour, or politicians such as Ilhan Omar, is sincere – even if it seems patently confused and inconsistent to any rational observer.

This poses a new sort of threat. These intersectional Islamists – these theo-progressives – are part of a broader radical undertaking that has a much greater chance of imposing extremist ideas on American society than the Muslim Brotherhood or Wahhabis ever did.

On their side, the Progressives have made concessions to Islam to secure the alliance – by, for instance, refusing to censure its misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and racism. The international Left in general supports the Muslim demand that criticism of Islam be banned, and the UN is working on it. (See here and here.)  Finding fault with Islam must be deemed “hate speech”. To protect Islam from it, freedom of speech can be – must be – sacrificed. The American Left endorses the demand.

But there is no hypocrisy in that. The American Left is in any case unhappy with the First Amendment.

At least on this issue Progressivism and Islam are in genuine accord: freedom is not to be tolerated.