On August 22,, 2020, a group of about 250 people gathered at Normandale Park at Northeast 57th Avenue and Northeast Halsey Street. Photo courtesy of Portland Police Bureau.
Civil wars do not develop overnight. It takes years, even decades, for revolutionary movements to grow, sapping the morale of the established order and concealing their ultimate goals until they reach enough strength. Then the pent-up political bubble bursts. And when that happens, events move very, very fast. Many people cannot process the unpleasantness and rapidity of what’s happening and go into massive denial. In our current situation that translates into: “Yes, many people are acting crazy, but they don’t represent the vast majority of Americans.”
We are at that final stage today. The bubble has burst and revolution in the form of civil war has come to America. You can deny it but that doesn’t stop it from happening. Or, as the saying goes, you can run but you can’t hide.
I see four main stages that have led to our present situation:
Stage 1: The revolutionary Left grows methodically and largely unnoticed over a period of decades
It concentrates on capturing two segments of the population that will prove invaluable at the end—the schools and the media. Rather than seeking to turn most of them into hard-core revolutionaries overnight, it appropriates righteous-sounding causes that can be captured with bumper-sticker slogans and phrases—“civil rights,” “end racism,” “democracy now,” and such. And the targets—teachers, professors, and students, including those in our journalism schools—are indoctrinated in the message that there is “no enemy to the Left.” The enemies of these righteous aspirations are always to the Right.
This process has been going on since the beginning of the twentieth century—a long time. It has met with no effective opposition from the vast majority of Americans, who are too busy with daily life to notice. Marriage, children, jobs, and all the diversions of daily life (sports, gadgets, community life, and yes—“politics” itself) keep them occupied. But over those many decades the education and media institutions are growing more and more leftist, and more and more alienated from traditional American values.
It’s not that the “silent majority” is totally oblivious to what is going on. There are periodic political realignments (Nixon and his Sunbelt Strategy, the “Reagan revolution”) but they are surface skirmishes, concentrating on the next election. There is no effective long-term strategy to counter the leftist capture of the education and media establishments. This leads to…
Stage 2: Growing partisanship and realignment
Most noticeable is the political partisanship. The two dominant parties create legal barriers that prevent competition from any new party. And without effective competition, conservatives migrate to the Republican Party and liberals to the Democratic Party. This is the realignment that has captured the headlines.
With the growing pervasiveness of the media in our lives, media alignment becomes important. With their capture of the journalism schools and other educational institutions, liberals get virtually all of the mainstream media—the TV networks and cable channels, and what’s left of print newspapers and magazines. Conservatives get part of Fox News but are mostly relegated to Internet and social media sites. Those areas are basically a “No Man’s Land” where Left and Right battle it out for influence.
Less noticed is the realignment in daily life and where we reside. At first it was conservatives moving to the suburbs, leaving liberals to dominate the cities. But then the suburbs became a battleground, and the big geographical division today consists of the East Coast and West Coast (the Left) against the Heartland (the Right). The Left has the population advantage, the Right is left with a few precarious institutional advantages such as the Electoral College.
The scene is set for the next stage…
Stage 3: Donald Trump’s election leads to open, nontraditional political warfare by the Left
Nobody expected this to happen. Certainly not on the Left—their institutions, notably the media and the polls—assured them that Hillary Clinton would become the first female president of the United States. And not on the Right either—it was thoroughly demoralized since it absorbed the same media onslaught and the same polls, and in addition was perplexed by its strange candidate, who had no traditional political background and who said things that supposedly had made him unelectable.
But it did happen, thanks to fed-up voters in the Heartland and to the Electoral College. With that epochal upset, all political hell broke loose. The Democrats, now effectively captured by the Left, no longer accepted the traditional notion that elections decide who wins and who loses. Even before Trump took office, they refused to accept his political legitimacy and declared no-holds-barred warfare under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi. In collusion with the Deep State, which saw its dominance threatened by some of Trump’s stated positions, the Democrats created the myth of “Russian collusion.” That didn’t fly with the facts or the public. Then they tried impeachment, but that stalled in the Senate and also didn’t fly with the American public. They tried a gutter smear campaign against his appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and that worked against them.
Totally frustrated, they realized that the economy was Trump’s strongest argument for reelection. And with the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, they saw their opportunity to crash the American economy. But they are haunted by memories of how they were totally blindsided in 2016. They see this 2020 election as their last chance to drive Trump and his supporters out of political contention forever. So, anything goes, which brings us to…
Stage 4: Open revolution now leads America to a new civil war
The revolutionary Left is the Democrats’ Frankenstein monster. They nurtured it and coddled it all along, for decades, out of ideological sympathy and perceived political advantages—all those harmless crazies brought constituencies and fervent energy to a soulless party now dominated by Wall Street billionaires, Silicon Valley billionaires, the Deep State and the Pentagon, and, at a less lofty altitude, self-enriching bureaucrats.
But now the monster has broken loose from his chains, bringing fire and destruction to Democrat-led cities from Portland to New York, from Minneapolis to Atlanta. And the Democrats are now the servant of the monster, not its master. They dare not defy it, lest the monster turn its wrath on its creator.
It is now clear that no matter who wins in November, the civil war will continue.
Thus we have Hillary Clinton instructing this year’s Democratic presidential candidate: “Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances”—even if he doesn’t win on Election Day. The fight will “drag out, and eventually I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch” (by conceding the election).
And we have Nancy Pelosi declaring outright that President Trump and the Republicans are “enemies of the state.” And you know what happens, or should happen, to enemies of the state.
We also have the word of Kamala Harris, who as Joe Biden’s running mate has her own visions of being president within years, or perhaps months. In an interview with Stephen Colbert, she promises that the “protests” are “not going to stop.” She explains that “this is a movement,” and the riots “are not going to let up and they should not and we should not.”
Hillary, Nancy, and Kamala are backed by the likes of Vicky Osterwell, promoting her new book In Defense of Looting. (You can’t make up stuff like this. Check out the new book on Amazon.) Looting, she explains, is just a “method of direct redistribution of wealth, from the store owners and capitalists to the poor.” Indeed, “It attacks the idea of property” and “the very basis of property in the U.S. is derived through whiteness and through Black oppression.” NPR (funded by you dumb taxpayers) predictably gave her a very respectful hearing. So did the leftist Huffington Post.
The “educated” revolutionaries and the “educated” media. No enemy to the Left. See what I mean?
Finally, now, after months of growing rioting and violence, we actually have guillotines in the streets (mock guillotines, at least for the present). In homage to their bloody ancestors in the French Revolution, Portland rioters roll a mock guillotine with a stuffed bear (a Trumpy Bear?) into the street, as they burn American flags. And if you still don’t get the message, in Washington—outside the White House—they parade a life-sized Trump doll with its head under a guillotine.
Do you still believe the revolution is a fantasy?
[All hope is not lost. There’s the possibility their civil war may tear apart the Democratic Party. That’s the subject of my next article, “The Civil War Inside the Democratic Party.”]
Learn more about BLM and the Marxist agenda to transform America in 2020 and burn the place down from Rudy Giuliani and Ron Paul. And read about how many Americans have been duped by the BLM movement and its terrorist leaders.
