George Rebane
[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 17 June 2020.]
Where were you and what did you do in the spring of 2020? The world has changed much during the last three months. When we look back, we will remember this spring as the historical milestone when Americans finally realized that they are no longer one reconcilable people. Where next we go from here is uncertain and up for grabs. The only certainty we have going forward is the coming Great Divide.
Our country has been subjected to a perfect trifecta of national crises, all layered onto an ongoing campaign to discredit and destroy the duly elected president of our democratic republic. Along with the rest of the world, we were blindsided by a viral pandemic which no one understood and for which no one had prepared. America, along with most other developed countries, initiated a lockdown mandating that people not travel, stay home, and not work. In consumer driven economies like ours, this caused economic collapse. And while we were sequestered, hearing reports of Covid-19 deaths, and wondering how we would pay our rent and bills, we witnessed three separate killings of black persons by incompetent, inept, and poorly trained police. And all of this during the most contentious presidential election year in living memory.
These unrelated deaths of African-Americans during a period of national stress was the perfect opportunity for extreme leftwing organizations such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa to regain relevance and make their move. Their clear message was that police brutality was endemic and racism in America was not only alive and well, but had grown more virulent under President Trump – in short, in spite of the landmark civil rights laws of 1964 and 1965, we have made no progress during the last half century in reducing racist discrimination and exclusion. The record of progress and the numbers that contradict those big lies have simply been buried.
George Floyd’s funeral was presided over by a press, racist activists, entertainment media, and an academe that over the decades have become dedicated institutions of collectivist propaganda, lending their voices to denouncing open markets, capitalism, and America, while promoting an agenda designed to usher in a global socialist governance. Those interested in the details can go online and read Agenda 2030, formerly Agenda 21, promoted by the United Nations and over 100 signatory countries including the United States.
But the more immediate result of the protests and riots launched by the police killings was the birth of a movement that has attracted millions of Americans whose education focused on the diminution or outright rejection of European culture within a wholesale revision of American history. To these millions of mis-educated exiting our public schools, America was no longer the shining city on the hill, but the benighted nation that did not outgrow its birth defect of slavery, and instead became the global scourge of the world at whose feet could be laid all the problems of humankind over the last two centuries.
The riots of the last month, coordinated with encouraging reports from the news media, Hollywood, and the nation’s universities, have now made the message clear. We are no longer to be satisfied with reformed and retrained police, or even wholesale defunding of police departments. Not at all. Now it is the time to launch the final drive to fundamentally transform America from a constitutional republic to a progressive socialist nation, restructured to join the coming global collective of countries dedicated to do away with today’s centuries old world order of sovereign nation-states. This is pretty heady stuff, and it gives our culture-deprived fellow citizens a new purpose and direction, something to fill the empty space formerly occupied by xenophobic patriotism in a racist America. Now people, many of whom can’t find the Atlantic Ocean on a map, have something to believe in again, a reason to strive, sacrifice, and work for a better world that is promised by the most strident and loudest demogauges in the land.
The Democrat Party, with a marginal candidate and no discernible program for the future, has embraced the demonstrations and riots during this election year. The party has moved markedly leftward to promote the chaos, knowing that if it can be sustained until November, they will have to do nothing more than blame Donald Trump, and then sweep the field on election day. But the account Democrats will draw down will have to be repaid, and it cannot be repaid within a country that is irredeemably divided. America must then attempt to peacefully implement a totally unknown future to replace what we have had for the last two centuries. It will no longer be one land.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
[Addendum] This time it really is different. In the past we’ve had protests and riots in the streets, usually in opposition to some outrageous events, a particular law, public policy, or even war – e.g. the 1968 Chicago riots. But all of these social disturbances have been focused on a specific issue people could get their arms around. None have been against the general structure and history of our society as expressed within our nation by its state. Today the protests and riots have assumed an elevated purview wherein the state and the nation it governs are the targets of nothing less than revolutionary change.
By this we mean that the protesting cohort has now become the weaponized political arm organizations that have structured and publicized objectives for transforming America, objectives which are embraced by the country’s dominant political party and rapidly becoming a part of its policy platform, while the opposing party either conceded or cowers quietly in various doubtful redoubts.
The Republican Party has gradually, and now at a gallop, become the sorry-ass sham conservancy of classical liberalism, open markets, capitalism, fiscal responsibility, entrepreneurship, and liberty in the large. At the grass roots level, Nevada County Republicans are poster children of the fearful and timid with the motto of ‘we’ve gotta go along to get along’. They have lost the historical perspective that to get along with a bound-for-autocracy party does nothing more than confirm and invite more rapacity from them.
An easy litmus test of this is virtue signaling. The various organizations and political factions of the Left must needs do such signaling to insulate themselves from intranecine attack and to pledge verifiable solidarity. All one need do is read all their much publicized statements admitting a history of racism, condemning discrimination, embracing inclusivity, and promising to be future champions of social justice. However, more telling are the so-called non-political organizations such as non-profits, charities, service clubs, et al who are rapidly falling in line by drafting their own mea culpas and promises of better behavior, and inserting these into their formational document files. Most reprehensible to people like me is when Republicans and Libertarians also scramble to fall in line.
Here are some points to ponder about why this time it is different –
- When half of a nation is sanguine and/or participates in the wholesale destruction and tearing down the sacrosanct totems of the other half.
- When the revolutionary thought leaders are able to convince their more sober comrades that the path to social justice leads through abolishing society’s law enforcement apparatus, and substituting their own ad hoc committees of public protection.
- When half the nation agrees that occupation of others’ private and public properties is a legitimate expression of 1A rights.
- When those who destroy, pillage, and burn are given a free pass by police made fearful to act by demogauging politicians seeking favor with the rioters.
- When a major constituency has become so inured, complacent, and compliant to a political party that has done nothing for the last fifty years but maintain them in squalid and murderous neighborhoods with pittance handouts so that their neighbors’ lives no longer matter nor do the dismal prospects delivered to their children by what some still call schools.
- When the above constituency firmly and overwhelmingly believes that their desperate straits and lack of opportunity is caused by the other political party that is nowhere to be seen in their midst.
- When now almost half of the country’s under-educated believe that the economy is a zero-sum game and the wealthy have gotten theirs by depriving the poor.
- When the country’s cohort that did not create the wealth, now demand its redistribution at gunpoint.
In sum, our schools and propagandizing politicians have convinced half of America that open market capitalism over the last two-plus centuries is NOT the engine of wealth and growth that has lifted all global classes and continues to increase their quality of life, but is instead the belief system of the undeserving greedy and evil who spread misery across the globe, and must now be stopped. That is the stuff of revolution. (In this regard, see also Bob Crabb's most timely and appropriate observation that I posted here.)
So pay attention dear reader, and make note of where you were and what you did this spring so you can tell your grandchildren, assuming the little darlins won't then denounce you to the authorities.
rebanesruminations.com 
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