The Issue is the Revolution

“There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” mobs of college students chant at terror rallies.

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

What is there to ‘revolt’ against in New York City, Los Angeles or Chicago? The Hamas rallies like the BLM, environmentalist and other radical rallies take place in cities run by mayors and city councils who support their efforts and sometimes even show up to their events.

Even before New York City and other municipalities paid out millions in voluntary settlements to the BLM rioters who had assaulted police officers, the dirty secret of the radical mobs was that the authorities were on their side. And will continue to be on their side no matter what they do.

The revolution is also the thing that it’s revolting against.

Democrats secured control of the country’s major cities only to be faced with the timeless leftist challenge of making the intensification of their rule look like revolution rather than totalitarianism. The USSR and Cuba directed the ‘revolution’ outward by invading, conquering and intervening in other countries. Democrat cities nationalized their politics, building entire campaigns around Trump, abortion and (to their eventual regret) declaring themselves to be sanctuary cities.

As long as Republicans existed anywhere, urban Democrats could not sleep soundly at night.

Democrat control of cities and states didn’t end bipartisan politics, just turned it into a somewhat real and somewhat fake grudge match between the party’s really crazy and less crazy wings. Craziness was a variable like ‘X’ that was defined not by the common sense brakes of intellectual diversity, but by how far the really crazy wing could push the less crazy wing.

In 2010, open borders, freeing all the criminals, men pretending to be women and support for Hamas were fringe positions of the really crazy wing. By 2024, they’re Democrat positions.

The difference between the really crazy wing and the merely crazy wing is not that they have fundamentally different beliefs, but different tactics and comfort zones. It didn’t take long for the next generation to come home for winter breaks and win over the Democrat moms and dads to police defunding, drag queen story hour and the mass murder of Jews. But first the cultural establishment had to make these horrifying things seem respectable and normal.

Had to fit banning cars and Hamas on a lawn sign right under “in this house, love is love”.

What will the really crazy wing of the party normalize next? Check the academic calendar for the next year, social media for the year after and then the protest calendar for the next five years.

The ‘revolution’ is just about the radicals running the streets getting the feckless ex-liberals running the actual show to adopt some horrendous policy derived from the ravings of a 19th century philosopher and then given a glow up by activist academics and public intellectuals.

Classic town hall politics, limited constitutional government, and checks and balances in a bipartisan system would have prevented American cities from turning into the Paris Commune, but urban politics had made a rapid transition from Tammany Hall political machines to corporate consultants to Marxist struggle sessions with little democracy to be found in any of it.

Cities aren’t run by voters but by ‘stakeholders’. Lifelong community activists and their community groups, municipal unions and their members, and a few political clubs harvest ballots, turn out votes and then end up running cities. That 1% actually runs our lives.

A new generation of young radical activists with dot com money backing and social media savvy like AOC found it easy enough to harness the power of hipster grad students living in $3K a month walkups to disrupt the system and carve out their own extremist slice of the pie.

The new red guard, like the old, however had to find something to do besides stealing money.

The lofty promises of universal health care require more money than is available even if the wings of the old crazy party and the new really crazy party stopped stealing all the money. Defunding the police by moving money from law enforcement to their leftist activist social allies is easier. And a good pogrom against Jewish stores and synagogues is a great distraction.

The revolution isn’t about killing Jews (or not just about killing Jews) but wiping out entire classes of people, reactionaries, shopkeepers and whoever else ended up in the killing fields of Siberia, Guangxi and Choeung Ek for the power and profit of a rising new political elite.

The less crazy party thinks it will never have to come to that, but as with its views on men showering with girls or exposing schoolchildren to violent pornography, this is subject to change.

Life as an urban/suburban bourgeoise with regular stops at Starbucks, Crate and Barrel, and Whole Foods before charging the Tesla in the driveway is pretty comfortable, but being a pol commissar with a dacha in the Outer Banks and the power to gulag your enemies might just be better. All of that will require not just one revolution but a cycle of intermittent revolutions.

The causes matter less than the trajectory. One day it’s the police, the next day it’s car owners and then it’s the Jews. (Say what you will, but the Jews are always a popular one.) The issue, as a certain Marxist once said, is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution.

Causes provide narratives. Berkeley professors and Wall Street personal assistants who have no idea where the river or the sea may be are chanting for the destruction of Israel because it’s a nice change of pace. Like all of us, leftists like to feel that they’re growing as people by embracing new murderous causes. Freeing all the criminals didn’t work so well, but freeing all the terrorists to kill Jewish people thousands of miles away feels both heroic and safe.

But the exoticism of chanting for an “intifada” boils down to a call for revolution here and now.

Students for Justice in Palestine tweeted that the ultimate purpose of the anti-Israel BDS movement is “eradicate America as we know it.” Eradicating America as we know it might seem a bit off-putting to the suburban soy dads and wine moms who make up the middle class base of the party, but they’ll come around just like they did on turning Tim into Tammy and Tammy into Tim. What else are they going to do anyway: become Republicans and have people sneer at them in Whole Foods and risk their kids refusing to come home for the holidays?

The revolution is about eradicating America as we know it. A lot of it’s gone already, but there’s still plenty of work of destruction to be done until we’re all on the right side of history. Or dead.

Revolution is all about being on the right side of history. And the revolution consists of old liberals who are terrified of being on the wrong side of it, stammering their way through pronouns and handling popular critical race theory texts like they were the sacred scriptures of a religion they don’t believe in, and young radicals certain that they are on the right side of it.

But ‘revolution’ is also just dictatorship misspelled. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” The dictatorship in urban and sub Democrat areas is already here.

The stream of monthly revolutions make the deepening totalitarianism, the higher confiscatory taxes, the daily government scrutiny of everything from trash content to social media posts (in cities where violent muggings earn thugs no more than a free therapy session) and the ideology tests for employment, seem like liberation. But that’s what the Russians called it too.

Each revolution makes us more enslaved and less free. We are not free to walk the streets, not free to think for ourselves and not free to even work for a living. We are however free to protest.

But only as long as it’s for the revolution of the political machine taking away all our freedoms.

The issue isn’t drug dealers shot while assaulting police officers. It’s not Israel. It’s not oil or illegals. Those are just the levers which make the dictatorships running our lives more extreme. They are also how those dictatorships pretend that there’s a vibrant system of political dissent.

The issue is not the issue. The issue is that the fake revolutions are a tyranny. The issue is that we have become the slaves of a system that keeps promising to liberate us from our freedoms.

The issue is that we cannot go on living this way.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

The Real Reason Trump is a Threat

Matthew G. Andersson

The 45th president of the United States, Donald John Trump, is a particular kind of president, out of all the previous presidents in modern history, and a specific kind of threat to established political organizations.  He is not a threat per se to voters, or to Americans, but rather to the current political party system. But there is a fascinating reason why this is so, and I’d like to suggest that it stems from the most powerful element of America itself, including its founding: individualism..........

But that may be just the opposite of what actually happened: over time, American institutions grew and grew, and grew, and now have grown out of control so that they dominate the private sector of individual interests. This includes our nation’s university system that has such influence over young adult minds. Universities are complete corporate, political institutions, and they follow, obey, and carryout all institutional signals, orders and directives (the “Covid" program is an example, which depends entirely on group obedience and group ideology: the individual is by contrast deemed “unsafe”)..............  To Read More....

Failed institutions

Are things really worse now, or do we just notice it more?  

  Michael D. Shaw Apr 11, 2022 

These days, it seems like a cynic’s paradise. Record prices are being set for food and fuel; political corruption is all around; a company that was founded on providing wholesome family entertainment is now embracing the interests of pedophile groomers; and too many people are intimidated from speaking their minds.

These days, it seems like a cynic’s paradise. Record prices are being set for food and fuel; political corruption is all around; a company that was founded on providing wholesome family entertainment is now embracing the interests of pedophile groomers; and too many people are intimidated from speaking their minds.

Some days, it feels like virtually every aspect of life is affected by speech codes, and the absurd notion that what a few misfits say on Twitter is representative of a major trend.

Take the recent tragic death of struggling NFL quarterback Dwayne Haskins, hit by a truck as he was walking across a Florida Interstate highway. Truth be told, Haskins had made a series of bad decisions, starting with leaving Ohio State early to turn pro, and demonstrating a less-than-impressive work ethic with the then Washington Redskins.

While his death inspired the usual amount of sympathy and overpraise, there were a few football types who expressed sorrow, but also did mention his history of poor attitude and bad decisions.

Evidently, though, such commentary is not to be tolerated, as it is “hurtful.” Indeed, those who dared voice these thoughts were roundly attacked.

But, here’s the point: While there is nothing we can do to bring Haskins back, we CAN possibly save some other gifted Black athlete from going wrong by invoking a negative example. That was surely why his faults were mentioned, but naturally in the wake of the woke mob, the commentators groveled and apologized.

Whatever happened to standing your ground? Of course, this phenomenon also works in reverse. You may recall that when the Hunter Biden laptop revelations were published by the New York Post, the findings were condemned by a Hallelujah chorus of “experts,” who identified them as “Russian disinformation.”

Now that the information promulgated by the Post is widely regarded as accurate, not a single one of these experts has apologized for their remarks. Why should they? Paul Ehrlich made a career of failed environmental predictions, and he is still admired by many. On the other hand, no one can deny how worthless their insights really were.

Perhaps, that’s the takeaway here. As William Goldman famously said, “Nobody knows anything.” Goldman was referring to the fact that no one could predict what would—or would not—be a hit movie.

I would expand this into applying to expertise in general. Even though institutions were failing long before the Vietnam War, “genius” defense secretary Robert McNamara assured the nation that on paper, and by any measure, we would destroy the enemy. Instead, the US suffered a humiliating defeat, and has never won a war since. (Not that Korea was a great success, either.)

The sad fact is that institutions always fail, because they are composed of fallible humans. Certainly, given some success, humans will be promoted, and their opinions will be given greater credibility—until they are inevitably wrong.

When you add politics to the equation, institutions become corrupt, and once they approach a certain size almost always act against the original interest of their founding members. (cf. AARP and the AMA) Making it worse is that some crusading individual may come in, only to eventually become part of the establishment they were originally fighting against.

It goes without saying that government officials—especially those holding federal office—consider their “service” to be a career. How far have we strayed from the Founders’ vision of a successful citizen giving something back for a limited amount of time.

Thus, we are left to our own devices—rugged individuals, if you like. We must focus on ourselves and those close to us. Saving the world or our country is way too tall an order. Worse, it can be misdirection and an excuse.

If there ARE any real experts, you’ve probably never heard of them since they are selling their services to private clients, and I don’t mean to trial lawyers.

Sadly, times are always bad, and it is only by selective memory that we recall the “good old days.” Every generation worries about its children, and every generation hates its political leaders. Exceptions occur when these leaders develop a cult of personality, and that only makes things worse, since we are blinded to their flaws.

It’s really simple. We can keep complaining about current events, or we can focus on those matters over which we have some control. Institutions will always fail, but as individuals we can pursue excellence and what is right. 

 

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Trust Is Gone, Institutions Are Corrupt, It’s Now Up to Us

A free people cannot survive where there is no trust whatsoever left between the citizenry and those of its institutions responsible for upholding civil society.

January 17, 2022 by Tom Shepstone

Trust is the glue that holds civil society together and it is being lost everywhere we look today. Trust is lost whenever politicians ignore the rules they impose on everything else, when the likes of Boris Johnson and Gavin Newsom attend parties maskless while mandating intolerable Wu-Flu restrictions on their constituents. Trust is lost whenever Big Tech and media outlets shut down debate over government policies. Trust is lost when agencies such as the DRBC take money from special interest groups lobbying the agency for rules they want. Trust is lost when politicians mandate vaccinations for individuals who already have much superior natural immunity. Trust, in fact, is being lost in a thousand ways today and iit will continue to rapidly undermining our civil society until we rise up and say we will no longer live by lies.

The trust issue is captured in this outstanding video from Neil Oliver, a commentator on GBN out of Britain:............To Read More....

 

The Left’s Long March Through The Institutions Is Now Pretty Much Complete, And It’s A Disaster.

May 19, 2019  by Bradley Thomas via erasethestate.com - Antonio Gramsci, Communism, Institutions, Revolution The Long March

 

There’s little debate that modern-day American universities, public education, mainstream media, Hollywood and political advocacy groups are dominated by Leftists. This is no accident, but part of a deliberate strategy to pave the way for communist revolution developed more than eight decades ago by an Italian political theorist named Antonio Gramsci.

Described as one of the world’s most important and influential Marxist theorists since Marx himself, if you are not familiar with Gramsci, you should be.

The Italian communist (1891 – 1937) is credited with the blueprint that has served as the foundation for the Cultural Marxist movement in modern America.

Later dubbed by 1960s German student activist Rudi Dutschke as “the long march through the institutions,” Gramsci wrote in the 1930s of a “war of position” for socialists and communists to subvert Western culture from the inside in an attempt to compel it to redefine itself.

Gramsci used war metaphors to distinguish between a political “war of position” – which he compared to trench warfare – and the “war of movement (or maneuver)” which would be a sudden full-frontal assault resulting in complete social upheaval...........To Read More....