The New Puritans The Woke Left wants to put all of us on trial. by Kenneth R. Timmerman
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-new-puritans/
When was the last time you watched MSNBC or CNN – or any of the broadcast networks? I am not suggesting that one should do this often; but like taking cod’s liver oil or boiled spinach, watching the opposition is an essential ingredient to building character.
Because no matter which of the smug Woke left hosts you happen upon, they are all preaching the same sermon, over and over, so often in fact you would think they would tire of it: we are the virtuous ones, the vigils of Democracy. We are the ones who command history, art, culture. We are America. And them? They are the enemies of democracy.
This is what we have come to. We are no longer a nation divided, but two separate and distinct nations, each with its own culture, its own history, its heroes and villains, its own aspirations, its fears. Even its own language. (Here is Joy Reid telling us that Republicans “taught people the word ‘inflation.’”)
Some have suggested we are witnessing a repeat of the 1960s. But the drug-laden counter-culture of the Strawberry Statement and Abbe Hoffman and the Chicago Seven was quite distinct from today in significant ways. The sixties were about an awakening – an awakening of the mind and a liberation of the body from the shackles of generations of predominantly Anglo-Saxon Puritanism.
Today’s Woke Left are the new Puritans. They do not seek to liberate our minds from habit, or challenge us to innovation, but to enslave us in new doctrines far more rigid than anything earlier generations of Americans could conceive, from redefining biological sex to re-engineering freedom itself.
They have already held dress rehearsals of their Salem Witch Trials: the Mueller hoax, two impeachment fantasies, and the phantasmagoric January 6 inquisition. Now they want to put all of us on trial.
In the 1960s – as today – the media played a key role as a vector of change. Then, it was television bringing the horrors of war out of the shadows and into the living rooms of a nation of women. Before television, twentieth century war was something fought over there, whose gruesome evil was anaesthetized into newsreels and magazine articles that focused on big picture battles, with rare but sanitized glimpses of individual heroes. When the Greatest Generation returned from Europe and the Pacific, they largely nursed their wounds quietly, among themselves.
Vietnam changed all that; indeed, it made war dirty and present and dangerously real. The natural reaction of all but the martial spirits among us to televised war was revulsion – revulsion at our capacity for evil, and fear that we might be called upon to engage in it. Vietnam made cowards of many.
Today it is social media that acts as the enforcer of the new Alinsky-ite norms of behavior, shaming those who dare to defy the Woke Left.
This is why we must pay attention to what they are saying, because they no longer disguise their intentions. They believe they have won the battle for the soul and direction of America, and all that remains is to clean up the bodies left on the field.
According to the president of the United States:
“The MAGA Republicans don’t just threaten our personal rights and economic security. They’re a threat to our very democracy. They refuse to accept the will of the people. They embrace, embrace political violence. They don’t believe in democracy.”
So-called ‘presidential historian’ Michael Beschloss went even further: “We’re on the edge of a brutal authoritarian system.” If Republicans win on Tuesday, “our children will be sentenced to death and put in prison.”
It’s too easy to say that Biden and the others have lost their minds. They believe every word of it. Even a red tsunami on Tuesday will not cure them of their conviction that they alone stand up for truth, and that their opponents are the embodiment of evil.
Because they are convinced they have definitively won the battle for the soul of America, the Woke Left is now treating their political enemies as a vanquished population — to be slowly starved, silenced, and banned from social intercourse.
They are telling this to their supporters every day: they are evil, they are corrupt, they want to destroy America, destroy democracy.
Thee Woke Left sees us as players in the Hunger Games. But I believe this over-reach will be their downfall.
I predict they will soon discover that we have our own District 12, our sanctuary cities and free states where the dream of America’s better angels still thrives and Justice still wears her blindfold as she holds the scales. They might not admit to it, but they will know it. They will fear it.
You may even see the truth dawn on them during their election night coverage, as we saw in 2016 once it became clear Donald Trump was going to become president.
Even in defeat, they will not give up. But watch them, listen to them; know them for who they truly are.
They have been waging a (not-so) civil war on the American center-right for decades, and we have rarely fought back.
Now it’s time to take our victories at the ballot box and use them judiciously, cutting off the Woke Left from the levers of power – not just in Congress, but in our culture. And it starts by declaring their project for a socialist America illegitimate, un-American, throwing it out of our schools – and most importantly, defunding it.
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