The ‘New Normal’ and the Assault on Reason. By Glenn Ellmers.
It is obvious to me, and probably to you, that today’s “progressive” agenda is actually pushing our country back to a more primitive past.
Consider some of the most urgent priorities of woke ideology:
- Reinstituting racial segregation and replacing individual rights with group rights.
- Abandoning poor and minority neighborhoods to lawlessness by defunding the police and decriminalizing many offenses.
- Eliminating opportunities for women in sports by forcing them to compete against men.
- Impoverishing working-class American citizens by enriching a global oligarchy while flooding the labor market with illegal aliens.
- Eliminating due process and the rule of law by resurrecting pre-trial detention, extra-legal punishment, and the presumption of guilt for “political enemies.”
In each case, this agenda represents a return to a less civilized, even barbaric, past. More precisely, it is the return of tyranny — the default political system for most of human history, and the constant danger lurking in the shadows of freedom, threatening to overtake those who fail to guard their liberties.
Undoing Christianity:
It took two millennia for Western civilization to implement the revolutionary principles of limited constitutional government, equal natural rights, and the impartial administration of justice. Now those hard-won achievements are being swept away by a fanatical ideology which, ironically, is convinced of its own moral superiority and devoted to overcoming America’s allegedly racist, unjust history. Somehow, these bizarre and regressive causes have come to define the Left, which not that long ago prided itself on standing for “liberalism.” …
The new left is dangerous to civilization:
Even the Roman empire, for example, punished jury tampering with the death penalty — for obvious reasons. (There’s no point in having a trial if the jury can’t deliberate honestly and fairly.) Yet as we saw in the recent Kyle Rittenhouse case, public threats against members of the jury were tolerated and even celebrated by our ruling class.
Even as evidence grows that the FBI was suspiciously and perhaps illegally involved in instigating the January 6 “insurrection,” many American citizens caught up in the riots have been held in jail for months, sometimes in solitary confinement, awaiting trial, while others are being prosecuted — at enormous public expense — for such minor infractions as trespassing.
If you are sane, these developments are shocking and even a bit confusing. But if you are under the spell of woke ideology, this is all perfectly normal. In fact, if you live in the delusional leftist bubble, what’s shocking is that anyone dares to question this regressive and illiberal agenda.
The confusion sown among those of us who still dwell in reality is intentional. Psychological warfare is a common tool of tyranny. After all, most people don’t want to be slaves (presumably), and so have to be beaten or threatened into submission. Degradation, gaslighting, and arbitrary rules become standard tools of control.
What is more surprising — in fact, breathtaking — is how few Americans are being targeted with intimidation, and how many have instead become enthusiastic supporters of this new fanaticism. …
Has any despotism in human history ever persuaded so many people, so easily, to accept doctrines that are obviously irrational; to change their opinions instantaneously and without question on command; to deny the evidence of their own eyes, ears, and common sense? …
Some time around 2019-20, in the historical blink of an eye, free speech was simply . . . dismissed. It became obligatory on the Left to support systematic control of our public discourse by a handful of massive tech companies, in cooperation with the government. Liberals moved as if with a single will and became enthusiastic supporters of official censorship implemented by a corporate oligarchy. And yet only a tiny handful of (excommunicated) intellectuals on the Left have dared speak against this Great Leap Backward.
Can this assault on reason and nature last? The historical evidence is mixed. The Soviet Union brutalized its people for decades. But this current woke madness is so strange and internally inconsistent — so unprecedented — it’s safe to say no one really knows what will happen.
Something has to bust. This is not, to use one of their favorite words, sustainable.
