“You know, you really don’t look well.” It’s so often the case that by the time a great number of people notice a man’s ill health, the disease ailing him is already quite advanced — perhaps even terminal. So it is with nations.
Thus should it be alarming that it’s now common for even “sober” pundits to warn of what once was considered tinfoil-hat wackos’ domain: a tyranny about to descend on the “Land of the Free.”
Three of these warnings have appeared in just the past week: Soul-of-serenity historian Victor Davis Hanson penned an April 6 piece titled “Our French Revolution.” Three days earlier, American Thinker ran the headline “Democrats moving in for the kill.” And commentator Dennis Prager of PragerU fame wrote in a Friday title, “Could it happen here? It is happening here.”
Prager confesses that while he majored in “Communist Affairs” in graduate school, he never in his “wildest dreams” thought “it” could happen here. Why, Marxist-like tyranny could only befall places such as the Soviet Union and Cuba.
In reality, however, the reason I wrote in “The defense against tyranny amendment” in 2004 of a “march toward … totalitarianism” — and spoke of this with those around me even decades before — is that the writing has long been on the wall. In fact, Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov warned back in the mid ’80s that the process of “demoralization” was already “more than complete” in America. Demoralization, mind you, is the first step toward a revolution that installs tyranny.
The second step is “destabilization.” It is because we’re in this stage (at least), and have been for quite a while, that more and more observers are taking notice. And what are they noticing?
“Communism — or if you will, left-wing fascism and totalitarianism — is coming to America and Canada, and (a bit more gradually) to Australia and New Zealand,” writes Prager.
I’m not so sure about the “more gradually” part above, and Prager certainly left out some places, such as Britain. Moreover, this reality is why I never liked the “American exceptionalism” pep talks we’d frequently hear some years back.
Oh, to be clear, traditional America was the greatest nation to ever grace this planet, bar none. There’s also a reason why I recently did not write a defense of the West, but mounted a 4,000-word offense for it: The traditional West was the greatest civilization to ever grace this planet.
The problem with “exceptionalism” chest-pounding is that it engenders a false sense of security. No one — no people anywhere — gets a special dispensation from the laws governing man. And one law is called “regression to type”; sometimes used in reference to animals, it’s when a creature reverts back to what’s natural for him.
Man’s historical default is to live under autocracy, if not tyranny. This is why Ben Franklin reportedly told a woman who asked in 1787 what kind of government the Founders had created, “A republic, if you can keep it.” It’s also why the apocryphal saying warns, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
But vigilant — especially about our moral foundation — we have not been. The result?
Western achievements “have come to mean nothing to about half of the American people and to virtually every one of its major institutions,” laments Prager. Most true. Yet there is one problem with this statement:
There is no “American people.”
Rather, there are peoples living in America.
This results from a balkanization, cultural and ideological, wrought by foolhardy and often maliciously contrived (im)migration policy and a prevailing, atomizing relativism that makes everyone his own god with his own “morality.”
Why, more than 15 percent of the United States is now comprised of immigrants, and approximately 40 percent of our population is of non-Western origin/ancestry. This raises a question:
Even if American exceptionalism were a reality, would it be magically bestowed via citizenship papers?
Prager goes on to say that our universities have become Soviet-like “moral and intellectual wastelands.” Ditto for our medical schools, in which, increasingly, “incoming doctors are instructed not to use the terms ‘male’ and ‘female,’” he writes.
Prager also mentions
- freedom of speech’s evisceration; half of college students today don’t believe in the freedom to use “hate speech”;
- how “half of our judges and our security agencies are well on their way to becoming … tools of the ruling party”; and
- how “mainstream media, with few exceptions, are as uncommitted to truth as were the organs of the Soviet Communist Party, Pravda and Izvestia.”
As for our destabilization, it was well reflected in the 600-plus left-wing riots of 2020. Prager points out that it’s also typified by elite-law-school students who’ll shout down conservative speakers Hitler Youth-style.
Prager closes his piece with: Given this, it “was only a matter of time until the Left would arrest a former president of the opposition party.” This brings us to the next subversion stage: “crisis.”
In the aforementioned American Thinker article, writer Eric Utter expresses an increasingly common theory: that the arrest and indictment of President Trump is designed to incite a passionate and possibly violent response among his supporters — which would be used as a pretext for instituting martial law.
This would usher in the final subversion stage: “normalization.” This is when the new tyranny cements control by squelching all opposition (including, do note, the “useful idiots”). If this happens, you’ll no longer be reading articles like this because entities such as The New American would be shut down and “dissidents” such as myself likely arrested.
However close such an eventuality may be, more traditional states can and must combat this totalitarian progression by nullifying unconstitutional federal dictates. They also must be ready to resist any cynical imposition of martial law.
It would be nice to now talk about an “ounce of prevention,” but that time is long past. Required at this point is not a pound but a ton of cure. It’s later than most think.
