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At the end of my last column for SteynOnline, I asked: "What can patriots do to retake their beloved nation?"
Space permits only a few quick thoughts today. I hope to add more in the future, but just for starters:
We could do worse than getting to know our enemy. Not just know them, but really get inside their heads to understand where they're coming from, and why.
This is what I see.
The strange figures known as Wokists currently destroying America aren't just reprises of earlier enemies. They represent something rather new. The political cult of Wokism combines the worst aspects of every political cult in history.
Whether they realize it or not, Wokists themselves combine the lunatic loyalty of the Manson family with the hollow pseudo-joy of Jonestown residents, the racism of National Socialists, the inhumanity of Mao Tse-Tung, the bratty tantrums of Veruca Salt, the nihilism of Bakunin-style anarchists, the totalitarianism of Stalin's Soviet Union, the child torture and sacrifice of the Mayans, the derangement of Heaven's Gate followers, the sadistic violence of the Jacobins, and the ruthless control-freakism of the current Chinese Communist Party.
Now add to that noxious syncretic blend the Wokist use of powerful communication technologies to shape narratives and meta-narratives, destroy opponents, and recruit new converts, and you've got yourself a thing.
Through it all, a counterfeit moral imperative with a deceptively appealing name ("social justice") drives the cult. That counterfeit imperative casts all existence as one great battle between Good (Wokism) and Evil (everything that is not Woke). It denies any constraints on efforts to win that battle. It entails an obsessive totalitarianism. It forbids critical self-examination of itself. Adherents of the cult are Knowers of the One True Truth. They are crusaders in righteous battle. Only victory matters. Anyone so much as questioning the One True Truth, inside or out, must be destroyed.
Although this is often denied to outsiders, Wokist theology requires hatred of America. It teaches that America was conceived in sin and remains insufferably sinful. It therefore decrees that America deserves execution and cremation into nothingness. Into that newly-created void, Wokism itself must move. Only then will righteousness prevail. Making this happen is a sacred obligation for all cult members. Their great success shows their sincerity.
It's worth mentioning that while Wokists want to destroy the United States of America, they don't mind the name. For now anyway, they want to keep it. Retention of the name "The United States of America" works as a kind of soporific: it helps obscure what they're actually doing.
And what they're actually doing is something like an Invasive Parasite Play: While keeping the outer forms (like the country's name, like "elections", etc.) intact, they move in to co-opt and control the structures and institutions which really run the country (which is to say, the structures and institutions which control us). As a result, millions remain oblivious that Wokists are destroying and replacing everything that ever constituted the country—that is, that they are changing what 'The United States of America' actually is.
Among many other things, that means first targeting public order, buildings, cities, fair trials, public trust, careers, police forces, education, laws, educations, freedom of speech and religion and assembly and press, codes of ethics, corporate practices, borders, political boundaries, the military, the economy, demography, religious beliefs, customs, music, books, myths, movies, family dynamics, sexuality, heroes, villains, history, aspirations, everything, and then, wherever possible, either destroying them or replacing them with Wokist substitutes.
I mentioned above the analogy of an invasive parasite, but this play is really something even more ambitious. It's a metamorphosis play, where infiltration, destruction, and replacement is followed by transforming the United States into some completely different entity altogether. That different entity is on track to resemble the former East Germany—a totalitarian puppet-state run by a lawless secret police, subservient to a greater foreign power—far more than any iteration of America throughout its history.
How did we get here? How have so many people—especially Millennials—fallen for a cheap, Marx-inspired, totalitarian deception?
In the case of the Millennials in particular, many have grown up, thanks to their groovy, "post-religion", "non-judgmental" Baby Boomer or Nirvana-nihilist Gen X parents, without any awareness of traditional moral thought and practice (whether Christian, Jewish, Greco-Roman, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, or anything else).
That is, they grew up spiritually deracinated, spiritually vulnerable, and spiritually needy—so of course they'd be attracted to Wokism. They're human. They still possess all the spiritual intuitions and yearnings and desires and needs their ancestors possessed. They still yearn for belonging and tribal membership and sacrifice, righteousness and ritual and commandment, meaning and guidance and purpose in life. They still crave identity. They still crave some transcendent framework to help give them a sense of why they exist, what they should do, why it matters, and what it means to be a good person. They still want to know, what is the point of it all?
When you're starving, miles from anywhere, and you find an old bag of potato chips by the side of the road, that's what you eat. You don't read the ingredients list and you don't wonder if there are better alternatives out there. You have an urgent need for food, so you eat.
And that is where "meeting the enemy" brings us back to ourselves: All the institutions and practices which once met the needs I just described, and in largely salutary fashion, have been degenerating for decades. And they degenerated either at our hands, or in the face of our complacence.
This degeneration provided space for—and frankly, a need for—a new movement. Tragically, a psychotic, psychopathic Wokism filled that void first. We deconstructed, we allowed degeneration, but we not only didn't fill that void with something better—we didn't fill it at all. So, others did. That's the way it works.
Yes, it is true that Wokism's progenitors actively warred against all those institutions. But that doesn't absolve us. We could have, and should have, done more to conserve what required conserving, create what required creating, improve what needed improving, and along the way, destroy whatever popped up which required destroying. But we didn't.
Instead, as I say, we either enabled the destruction, or participated in it. Among other things, we broke up our families. We departed from traditional social codes ourselves, or said nothing when others did. If we even noticed at all, we contented ourselves with merely complaining as nutjobs took over our local school boards. We didn't fight back.
We even continued to send our children to those schools, which we now knew were being run by nutjobs, because it was easier and cheaper than the alternatives, or because we vainly imagined that a twenty minute chat over dinner (if we even still had family dinners) would be enough to flush the previous six hours of Wokist brainwashing from our children's heads. In most cases, obviously, the dinnertime chats were no match for the Wokist imams down at the local middle school madrassa.
We also voted for idiots. We voted for idiot mayors, idiot governors, idiot senators, idiot representatives, idiot party leaders, idiot presidential candidates, idiot everything. We allowed mega-donor fatcat globalists to take over the Republican Party. We sat by as they neutralized the Tea Party, and then resumed pushing for endless corporate tax breaks, endless job exportation, and endless scab labor via illegal immigration.
And we sat by while that same party—at least until Trump arrived—usually didn't even bother to mention an opioid epidemic which has killed tens of thousands, or the cultural problems with extreme levels of illegal immigration, or a hundred other meat-and-potato problems, let alone try to solve them.
All the while, those of us who are Christians pushed our churches away from preaching James, who insisted on the necessity of right action, and toward Paul, whose language (notwithstanding Romans 6: 1-2) usually seems to suggest that Christianity reduces down to a perpetual "Get Out of Jail Free Card". Paul's creedal religion was so much easier than James's action religion. Why, it felt just as good as a Hallmark card poem. For too many of us, that's all that mattered.
And those of us who are Jews pushed our synagogues away from the weekly renewal of covenants with the God of Abraham, and toward becoming just another self-congratulatory social club for neighborhood Democrats.
I could go on, but there's an even deeper level to all this which includes us. I want to turn to that next. Unfortunately, I'm out of space for this piece, so...next time.
Talk to you soon.
Tal Bachman will be among Mark's special guests in October on the third Mark Steyn Cruise, setting sail down the Mediterranean from Rome. Kick back with Mark, Tal and others including Conrad Black and Michele Bachmann by booking yourself a stateroom. Mark Steyn Club members can let Tal know what they think in the comment section. Join the conversation by picking up a membership in the Mark Steyn Club for you or a loved one.
