“But civilization, I really believe, is on the brink because if these forces come to full power, they’re going to be taking names and they’re not going to want a union of thought. They’re … not gonna be gracious about their victory,” said renowned history professor Victor Davis Hanson in a September interview. “They’re not going to want unity and healing. They’re gonna want to hunt out and eradicate their opponents,” he continued. “That’s what cultural revolutions always do. They’ll do it again.”

It’s a sign of the times, oh these desperate times, that even “sober, serious” commentators such as Hanson are speaking the way, let’s say, “less mainstream” figures such as this writer did some years ago. For something has become obvious: Less and less is the Left trying to convince you. 

More and more, its minions have resolved to kill you, if necessary, as they embrace Mao’s sentiment, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” — or a mail-in vote-fraud scheme, a cancel-culture cowing, rioting, or Big Tech manipulation. 

This is not surprising. Of what, after all, can leftists convince you? Is there, even at this late date, a comprehensive, cohesive, and compelling Democratic platform on which to campaign? Can you think of much other than “Orange man bad!”? The most notable Democratic proposals are ones that sell on Main Street like ice in the Arctic: The economy-rending Green New Deal, dismantling the police and ICE, free healthcare for illegals, and an “Equality Act” that amounts to putting boys in girls’ lavatories and locker rooms.  

A study had suggested that, as of September 5, the United States had “experienced nearly 550 violent demonstrations since May 26,” the day after George Floyd’s death, reported the Daily Caller. More distressingly, we’re seeing political assassinations, of bodies as well as character. The 2019 demonization of the Covington Catholic High School boys — notably Nick Sandmann — and the 2017 congressional baseball shooting, perpetrated by Bernie Sanders acolyte James Hodgkinson, were earlier warnings. Now we’re seeing Trump supporters actually being hunted. In late August, for example, 39-year-old Patriot Prayer member Aaron Danielson was shot to death in Portland, Oregon, after being specifically targeted: “Bystander video showed two men approaching Danielson and a friend, one saying ‘Hey, we got one over here, we got a couple over here,’ and another ‘Pull it out,’ before two shots were fired,” reported the Mirror online September 5. Danielson’s murderer, 48-year-old Michael Reinoehl, was later killed himself by U.S. marshals and the FBI after resisting arrest and drawing a gun. 

But the hapless Danielson isn’t alone. As Townhall’s Bronson Stocking related September 5:

In July, Bernell Trammell, a black, 60-year-old boisterous Trump supporter was shot and killed by an unknown assailant outside his business in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Charlie Chace, an 82-year-old Air Force veteran, was attacked and beaten by a 27-year-old liberal man in June. Chace was displaying a pro-Trump sign when the liberal man allegedly stopped his car, ripped the sign from Chace’s hands, and body slammed the elderly vet to the ground. The liberal then allegedly kicked Chace several times in the ribs and legs with leather-pointed shoes.

Earlier this year, a group of Republicans in Jacksonville, Florida were targeted by the driver of a van who accelerated and plowed into the group’s voter registration tent. According to the arrest report, the 27-year-old suspect told police that he targeted the tent because he didn’t like President Trump.

And a 15-year-old Trump supporter in a MAGA hat was attacked outside a polling site in New Hampshire earlier this year. 

Unhinged: Bernie Sanders fan James Hodgkinson, member of Facebook group Terminate the Republican Party, perpetrated the 2017 congressional baseball shooting. A troubled man who’d had previous run-ins with the law, he fit the profile of the type of person attracted to left-wing ideology. (Photo credit: AP Images)

Fair Game

Yes, even kids are fair game. Another example was an adult woman who attacked a 12-year-old Colorado boy carrying a Trump sign in early September. Then there were the two 21-year-old females who tore up Trump signs outside the Democratic National Convention August 20 and stole a MAGA hat from a seven-year-old boy, making him cry. 

This isn’t new, though, nor truly reflective of the evil lurking in some leftist hearts. Just consider how the parents of then-eight-year-old Ava Martinez, better known as “Mini-AOC” — who did spot-on satirical impressions of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) — deleted all her social-media accounts in July 2019 after she was doxxed and threatened with death. A similar fate befell a six-year-old boy featured in the 2012 YouTube video “10 Reasons NOT to Vote for Obama!” Responses under the presentation (commenting has since been disabled) included, “Can someone kill that child… to teach his parents a lesson”; “This child and his parents need to be euthanized”; and, obviously from a member of the literati, “Shoot tha kid Kill tha Parents!!!” 

Whatever the threats’ or actions’ nature, just as shocking is that prominent Democrats’ responses range from tolerant denial to wink-and-nod encouragement to open endorsement. Providing examples, the Spectator USA’s Amber Athey wrote September 1:

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler called antifa violence in Portland a “myth” when approached about the subject in June. Mayor Muriel Bowser bragged in her Democratic National Convention speech about creating “Black Lives Matter Plaza” in Washington, DC for the protesters, but did not mention some of those protesters torched the historic St John’s church outside of the White House. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan described her city’s “autonomous zone,” which was forcibly taken over by armed protesters and where a black teenager would later be shot dead, as a “block party atmosphere.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi responded to the toppling of a statue of Christopher Columbus by giving a wave of her hand: “people will do what they do.” Rep. Ayanna Pressley went several steps further than her peers, encouraging “unrest in the streets” during an MSNBC interview in August.

Moreover, Athey also reminds us that Joe Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris,\even “promoted a bail fund intended for protesters [rioters] in Minnesota.” And Harris actually said in a June interview on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert — almost giddily in what could be GOP campaign commercial gold — that the “protests” “should not” stop. 

Harris will get her wish, too, because there’s always another rationale for violence. Just consider the reaction to Republicans’ intent to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Even before Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, GQ and Washington Post journalist Laura Bassett said that if Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “jams someone through, which he will, there will be riots.” Other notable pseudo-elites met her prediction with prescription. As the Daily Mail reported September 20:

Reza Aslan, a religious scholar and former CNN host, tweeted to his 293,000 followers: “If they even TRY to replace RBG we burn the entire f****** thing down.” 

... Beau Willimon, a screenwriter who produced the U.S. version of House of Cards and the president of the Writers Guild of America, East, told his 164,000 followers: “We’re shutting this country down if Trump and McConnell try to ram through an appointment before the election.”

… Author Aaron Gouveia, whose latest book is about toxic masculinity, tweeted: “F*** no. Burn it all down.” 

And a professor of political science repeated calls for arson attacks on Congress.

Emmett Macfarlane, who teaches at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, tweeted: “Burn Congress down before letting Trump try to appoint anyone to SCOTUS.”

A member of the Wisconsin Ethics Commission, responsible for administering state laws regarding campaign finance, ethics and lobbying, echoed the urging for violence.

When Ed Markey, senate candidate for Massachusetts, said that McConnell should not nominate a replacement in an election year, Scot Ross tweeted: “F****** A, Ed. If you can’t shut it down, burn it down.”

Note that “religious scholar” Aslan’s comment was mild — for him. An Iranian immigrant who once ate human flesh on television (really), he also proclaimed in an August 2019 tweet that Trump’s “supporters — ALL OF THEM — are by definition white nationalist terror supporters.” “The MAGA hat is a KKK hood,” he continued. “And his evil, racist scourge must be eradicated from society.” 

While the above reflects serious movement toward civil war (you can only hit so long without being hit back), it also signals, ironic in a time of often mandatory physical masks, a dropping of the metaphorical one. Consider a 2016 Project Veritas sting operation in which Democrat operatives were caught on hidden camera admitting that they tried to spark trouble at Trump campaign events. In one video, a leftist agitator named Scott Foval can be seen saying that he calls this “conflict engagement … in the lines at Trump rallies.” He even stated, “We have mentally ill people that we pay to do s**t, make no mistake” and had boldly proclaimed, “We’re starting anarchy here.” 

This was with the tacit approval of Hillary Clinton, who once said, while debating Donald Trump, that even just questioning our elections’ integrity “denigrates” our system. As Project Veritas wrote in 2016, its “undercover journalists reveal key players [anti-Trump agitators] coordinating clandestine operations in support of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The video, supported by emails recently released by WikiLeaks, shows that the dirty tricks, lines of communications and the money trail lead all the way to the top.”

“The video discloses numerous examples of behind-the-scenes shady practices with consequences most Americans have seen on national television at Donald Trump campaign rallies across the country,” Project Veritas continued. “What the media hasn’t reported is that the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee has [sic] been directing these activities with, at very best, a very thin veil of plausible deniability.”

Yet there’s something undeniable: Left-wing insurrectionists, emboldened, have since 2016 greatly ratcheted up their violence and threats. Strikingly, they’re now even using guillotine imagery to send a message. As the Law Enforcement Charitable Foundation reports, in “August, a guillotine was wheeled up to the police bureau in Portland. The same month, protesters put a life-size doll of President Trump inside a guillotine outside the White House.” This is more than just threatening, too: It harks back to leftism’s dark birth, during the French Revolution, when the guillotine was a preferred tool of terror. In point of fact, the political senses of the terms “Left” and “Right” actually “originated with the French Revolution, with supporters of the king seated to the right of the president in its National Assembly and republicans (those wishing to create a republic, as they called it) situated to his left,” as I wrote in “The Bloody Left: The Dark History of Untrue Believers.” “Today, of course, rightists aren’t monarchists because monarchy isn’t the status quo…,” I continued. “As for leftists, well, they’re still tearing the status quo down, which usually means tearing down civilization. And this still involves a ‘demolition of the Bastille,’ as destroying institutions, whether physical or social fixtures, is their specialty.”

Destroying people went along with this, of course. Thus did the French revolutionaries kill thousands in their “Reign of Terror.” A Reign of Error continued from that point, too, with the USSR’s Stalin, China’s Mao, Cambodia’s Pol Pot, and others adding approximately 100 million corpses to the leftist total.

Moreover, German philosopher Georg Hegel observed that the “only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history,” and with leftists, it really is wash, rinse, repeat. The French revolutionaries sought to erase the past with their new calendar, whose first year was 1792, as did the Marxist Khmer Rouge in 1970s Cambodia with their “Year Zero.” Our leftists do the same today, though their current lack of absolute power prevents them from erasing the past so absolutely. So they tear down statues, engage in revisionist history, and eliminate traditional Western curricula using the pretext of increasing “diversity” (e.g., eliminating white male authors). 

The French revolutionaries’ calendar also omitted the Lord’s Day, as its main purpose, confessed its chief architect, Charles-Gilbert Romme, was to “abolish Sunday.” This attacking of Christianity became a pattern, with, for example, leftist pre-Spanish Civil War (1936-’39) republicans demanding public renunciation of the Catholic faith as a requirement for a civil marriage and happily killing priests and nuns (known as the Red Terror). Our Left also has never been a fan of Christianity, and they’ve now taken their Christophobia up a notch, with recent months seeing “numerous acts of vandalism and destruction at Catholic churches across the United States, including arsons and graffiti,” reported the Catholic News Agency September 25. Note that our Democratic Party establishment has condemned this the way it has the rioters: with crickets.

Leftist governments, such as in the Soviet Union and Cambodia, were also known for “re-education camps,” where under pain of punishment people were forced to mouth falsehoods. Likewise, those refusing to submit today to leftist lies — on global warming, “transgenderism,” etc. — can suffer reputational and career destruction. Taking more direct action, leftist miscreants blocking a road in Portland forced a motorist to give the black power salute and say “black lives matter” (his truck ended up partially smashed, anyway), reporter Andy Ngô related September 20.

For an even greater taste of what awaits should the Left attain enough power, note how Gawker wrote in 2014, approvingly, that “discussed seriously in some circles” is that climate-change “deniers” (read: realists) should be arrested. This is tame, however, compared to University of Graz, Austria, humanities professor Richard Parncutt’s suggestion. He wrote in 2012 “that the death penalty might be an appropriate punishment for influential GW deniers and possibly also the Pope” (for opposing artificial contraception).      

Doing Violence to Truth

“Thou shalt not bear false witness” is a commandment because lies kill. It’s as with a computer: garbage in, garbage out. How can people make correct decisions on what policies and politicians to support if they’re fed misinformation concerning them? Of course, politicians were never known for honesty. But the degree matters, and, today, it’s no exaggeration saying that our Left tells lies, all lies, and nothing but lies. As commentator Ronald Holman wrote September 10 in his op-ed “Eroding our culture with lies”:

One of the most famous cases of how Democrats view facts came to light when recently the former speaker of the House, Harry Reid, was asked if he regretted saying that Mitt Romney didn’t pay his taxes and he had been told so by a “friend.” Speaker Reid never hesitated. Reid responded to the question thusly, referencing Romney, “He didn’t win; did he?” In other words, on national television and retired from a high position in government that required the people’s confidence in his pronouncements, Harry Reid pretty much said he didn’t regret lying about Romney because that lie helped the Democrats defeat Romney. In other words, the ends justify the means. And you will note this attitude among Democrats constantly once you start looking for it.

Nothing sacred: From 1920s Mexico to civil-war-torn Spain to Stalin’s USSR and beyond, the Left has ever and always attacked Christianity. Our Left is no exception. St. Patrick’s Cathedral (shown) is just one of many churches that in recent months have been targeted with arson or graffiti. (Photo credit: AP Images)

You don’t have to look hard. Just consider an admission vice presidential candidate Harris made while speaking to the aforementioned Stephen Colbert June 17. Asked how she could possibly be Biden’s running mate after her harsh criticism of him onstage — she’d strongly implied he was a racist and sex abuser — Harris replied, “It was a debate!” She delivered the line numerous times while chuckling, as if to say, “Are you an idiot?” Apparently, defamation for personal advancement is as natural to her as breathing. 

Then there are the big lies. While Democrats were perpetrating the Trump/Russia collusion hoax, Project Veritas caught CNN figures on hidden camera in 2017 admitting that they knew it was nonsense, but were pushing it anyway. Of course, it’s now known that the Democrats had the ties with Russia, used the FBI to frame the president, and that the idea was likely cooked up by Hillary Clinton. 

The Democrats also impeached Trump over a phone call with the Ukrainian president, falsely claiming he demanded a quid pro quo. Biden and other leftists have called Trump’s nomination of Judge Barrett to the Supreme Court an “abuse of power,” even though the action is constitutionally prescribed and presidents have nominated SCOTUS candidates during election years 29 times in our history. Democratic politicians preach about wearing masks and mandate such, then are caught unmasked themselves (Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Maxine Waters, etc.). They locked down the country and lectured us about saving lives, then encouraged massive Black Lives Matter protests. They also claimed Trump called the Wuhan virus a hoax, thereby only vindicating what he actually said: that the Democratic politicization of it is a hoax. Of course it is: Leftists’ hypocrisy reveals that they don’t really believe their own prescriptions. 

This is just the tip of the iceberg, too. As columnist Kevin McCullough wrote at Town Hall in March, Democratic leadership lies “to everyone, at nearly every moment, about almost everything, all the time.”  

Doing Violence to Our System

Another destructive leftist lie, that vote fraud “hardly ever happens,” brings us to the next form of leftist coercion. Insofar as a civilization is healthy, problems are resolved via reasoned analysis and logical argumentation and electoral systems are safeguarded. Insofar as “It’s not the votes that count, but who counts the votes” becomes status quo, the system is corrupted. The Left is making this reality, too.

The Democrats aim to steal the November election, partially via mail-in vote fraud. They justify this electoral innovation by claiming it’s a COVID-19-inspired safety measure and assure us that concerns about fraud are tin-foil-hat paranoia. But this vote fraud is already a proven reality. Consider:

• In late September, Project Veritas released undercover video showing supporters of Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) perpetrating a large-scale vote-harvesting scheme. 

• Uncovered mail-in vote fraud was so bad in Patterson, New Jersey’s May 12 city council special election — a contest between two Democrats — that a judge ordered a new election be held.

• A man described as a “top Democratic operative” by the New York Post, speaking to the paper recently under the condition of anonymity, outlined the mechanics of mail-in vote fraud and admitted that he’s been committing it “on a grand scale, for decades.” Stating that there “is no race in New Jersey — from city council to United States Senate — that we haven’t worked on,” he also revealed that such efforts extend far beyond New Jersey and “could be enough to flip states.”

• A study by the News21 project at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, covering the 2000 to 2012 period, indicated that mail-in vote fraud is the most common type of electoral fraud.

• The Heritage Foundation provides an (incomplete) vote-fraud database\that has swelled to 1,298 proven case — including at least 1,121 convictions.

Vote fraud is monster, not myth, and is almost exclusively the handiwork of the party that has fought voter ID tooth and nail — and this monster is devouring the people’s will. 

Giving the Lies Center Stage

Mainstream media spin has long plagued us. In fact, UCLA political science professor Tim Groseclose wrote in his 2011 book Left Turn that media “bias aids Democratic candidates by about 8 to 10 percentage points in a typical election.” Yet this is nothing — compared to Big Tech manipulation. 

Just ask Democrat-favoring liberal Dr. Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology. Having studied the matter, he warns that if the whole of Big Tech favors the same candidate, it can shift up to 15 million votes in November. This is more than enough to sway a modern election.

How is this accomplished? Put simply, entities such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter identify Truth as “fake news” and suppress it while pushing actual fake news to the forefront. As an example, The New American’s online articles are routinely placed lower in Google’s search results than our website’s size and the pieces’ relevancy to various search terms would dictate. This reduces the site’s reach. And if you’re beyond page three on Google, well, that’s Internet Siberia — a place few search engine users venture.

The game here is to sway the undecided voters who’ll determine the election’s outcome. Note that a majority of Americans now get a good percentage of their news from Big Tech, and by feeding just the right input (misinformation) into the system at just the right time, GoogTwitFace can manipulate the output (opinion and votes).

Doing Violence to Truth-tellers  

One thing the Republicans have going for them November 3 is the “hidden” Trump vote, people who’ll cast ballots for the president but won’t reveal this intention to pollsters or even, sometimes, friends and colleagues. But troubling is why they’re hiding: the aforementioned “cancel culture.”

Authoring anarchy: Fomenting and facilitating, leftist state and local governments’ wink-and-nod encouragement of rioters makes them complicit in the revolution. When you allow the burning of even police stations, as shown above, the message is: “Nothing is off limits.” (Photo credit: AP Images)

In fairness, every time and place has had its social codes which, when violated, could bring scorn and ostracism. Being revealed as communist didn’t do you much good in 1950s America, for example, and ancient Greek philosopher Socrates was executed for, the allegations went, “corrupting the young” and “mocking the gods” (it wasn’t just Christians who had “heresy” laws). But the problem today is that, increasingly, it’s not espousing vile lies, but truth (objective by definition), that brings consequences. 

Consider evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, who wrote last summer about how refusing to agree that there are multiple  human sexes existing on a continuous “spectrum” (the “transgender” agenda) derailed his college-professor career path. Then, “NBA announcer Grant Napear was\fired from his sports talk radio program and resigned as the Sacramento Kings announcer after tweeting ‘all lives matter,’” wrote The Federalist June 11. ※A professor at UCLA was placed on leave after refusing to cancel a final exam following the death of George Floyd. A reporter in Wales was forced to step down as Wales Book of the Year Judge after complaining that a BLM protest violated the government’s social distancing rules,” the site continued, emphasizing that its examples constituted only a short list. And professional “soccer player Aleksander Katai was ‘released’ by the LA Galaxy\not for anything he wrote or said, but because his wife criticized BLM on Instagram.” 

The goal here is obvious: Liars can’t compete directly with Truth, but they can prevail if their lies can’t be challenged. So you silence those daring to oppose you by doing violence to their careers, reputations, and dreams — if not to their person. 

It’s the leftist default. For, “Violence is the only way, of course,” as BLM sympathizer Michelle Taylor put it in an August 27 tweet. This fire-breathing radical is, mind you, a “frequent guest lecturer at prominent American universities,” related the College Fix September 25. But is this surprising? Nancy Pelosi, Mrs. “People will do what they do,” gave a 2014 speech at the University of California Berkeley and told graduates to “be disruptors.” Oh, San Fran Nan probably wasn’t thinking of rioting and looting, but do these oh-so-clever establishment types know what they sow? Because they’re coming for you, Nan. 

In January, Project Veritas unveiled undercover video from socialist senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign. One staffer, Kyle Jurek, talked about how he wanted the Clintons dead via a “reign of terror.” Of the “billionaire class,” “media,” and “pundits,” he said, “light them on fire in the streets.” 

“Liberals,” he explained, “get the f*****g wall first.” I don’t think he meant Trump’s wall, either. 

It all brings to mind John F. Kennedy’s line (I’m paraphrasing), “Those who foolishly seek power by riding the back of a tiger end up in its belly.” For another thread running through leftist movements, from Versailles to Venezuela, Cuba to Cambodia, is that they ever have their useful idiots. Of course, such people always think they’re useful but not idiots; Machiavellians, not the manipulated. And only by learning the hard way do they discover who really is the tiger — and who is the meal.