Welcome to the New War, Same as the Old War
The Revolutionary War began when the colonists and the Englishmen reached a point where they stopped talking because they had nothing they could talk about.
For many decades, the desire and taste for freedom has been shrinking around the globe and today, that decline seems to be rapidly accelerating here in America.
We can fight over Critical Race Theory all day long, but if we do not understand that this is only one front on a multi-front battlefield, any victory over its proponents will be fleeting and ultimately, inconsequential.
I believe the beginning of the decline can be pinpointed as January 25, 1988; the day President Ronald Reagan gave his famous “shining city on the hill” State of the Union speech before a joint session of Congress.
The global left has always sought communism and Reagan’s defeat of the Soviet Union, as memorialized by the fall of the Berlin Wall, is an unpardonable sin and revealed to them that to bring America to heel, their tactics must change. The fall of the wall represented the failure of Critical Theory, a Frankfurt School creation.
As Critical Theory was failing, the left having lost power in America after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and losing public support through their radical acts of killing police, attacking the military and indiscriminate bombings, the global communist movement began to look for another strategy to subjugate their greatest prize, the most free and independent nation on the face of the earth and the force that prevented them from fulfilling their dream of global communism.
It is no coincidence that the late 70’s writings of Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Cheryl Harris, Charles R. Lawrence III, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia J. Williams were turned into a movement in the 80’s, being weaponized via the inclusion of elements from radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s (Black Power, Chicano, and “third wave” radical feminist movements).
One must remember that even though this infection-laden pustule is burst in 2020/2021, this process began in the mid to late 70’s, a mere decade after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs enacted from 1964 to 1965.
One must also give the global left credit - and make no mistake - there is a “global left”, asymmetrical in nature - they are patient enough to play the long game and through their defeat in the 80s, they learned their lesson. They finally realized that Americans are not psychopaths, we feel deeply about both the good and bad of our history. Since America could never be defeated militarily or economically, they looked for an emotional soft spot in which to insert the knife.
That soft spot was America’s unresolved emotions over slavery and the history of racial strife.
They knew America was great because it was good, and borrowing from martial arts and military strategy, they would use her strength, our goodness, against her.
As F.A. Hayek noted, there is literally nothing a committed collectivist must not be prepared to do, so they began at the softest of soft spots – they began by capturing and seeding the minds of our children with emotional reasoning and injecting racial poison, creating a generation of adults who are susceptible to the message that America should be sorry for its history and sentenced to the death penalty.
The left in America has literally made generations of children into enemy combatants, child soldiers in a war of communist domination.
Even if they had to create some unreachable hypothetical standard that no country in the history of the world has ever achieved, they felt confident of success. Knowing if they could just convince enough Americans that their country was not really that good by focusing disproportionately on the bad, convincing the ignorant they had been fooled for their entire lives about the good things America did throughout her history, they could bring her down.
America’s history is our history and that cannot be changed, but through truth and context it can be logically dissected and understood in factual terms, but facts are of no use to an enemy if they do not tell the story one requires for an advantage, so the left turned to emotion rather than facts, and aided by postmodernist thinking began to drive the blade deep.
And they have.
Their agitprop and propaganda have been so effective that any rational defense of American history sounds like an excuse and best, or at worst, a lie.
But we must fight. You are going to be made to choose a side. I am sorry, but I don’t see another way. As I have long believed, there are no innocent bystanders.
My point is that we must see this as a war and be committed to more than just defeating CRT in our schools (mostly because I think we all know these types of cancers are never fully removed, some diseased tissue always remains to re-infect once we move on to another battle). We must be prepared to be called racists, bigots, and any handy insult the left uses as grenades these days.
We must have the conviction to see this through, even if it means burning down institutions we have relied on for our entire lives and rebuild them because that is what our enemy intends to do. The Revolutionary War began when the colonists and the Englishmen reached a point where they stopped talking because they had nothing they could talk about – I am of the opinion we are back to that point.
Welcome to the war. It is not coming, it is here.
Well stated, Michael.