The decade-long French Revolution that broke out in 1789 soon
devolved into far more than removing the monarchy, as it became
antithetical to the earlier American precedent. American notions of
liberty and freedom were seen as far too narrow, given the state, if
only all-powerful and all-wise, could mandate “equality” and force
“fraternity” among its subjects.
Each cycle of French revolutionary fervor soon became more
radicalized and cannibalistic—until it reached its logical ends of
violent absurdity.
Originally, the idea of curbing the power of a Bourbon king through a
parliamentary republic became lethally counter-revolutionary.
Soon even attacks on the Catholic Church and the abolition of the
monarchy entirely were deemed insufficient. The king himself and his
consorts had to be beheaded. Monasteries and churches were to be
ransacked, and priests exiled or lynched.
The sometimes moderate Girondins, who favored constitutional
government, were mostly executed by their former friends among the
Montagnards. In turn, the latter were soon deemed too conservative for
the emerging crazy Jacobins. So they, too, had to be decapitated. The
ensuing year-long reign of terror guillotined thousands of innocents,
deemed guilty of being guilty of something.
By 1793, the revolution had turned nihilist and suicidal. The
foundational date of France was recalibrated (not as 1619 but) as
1789—or “year one.”
Jacobins sought to wipe out religion, both materially and
spiritually. They replaced God, first, with the atheistic “Cult of
Reason” and then a stranger still “Cult of the Supreme Being”—a
dreamed-up, living, humanistic god that only the murderous Robespierre
could fully envision, but eerily similar to our own Green New Deal
deity.
The months of the year themselves were renamed, the days of the week
renumbered and relabeled. Statues were toppled, first at night, later in
shameless daylight. Place names were erased and renamed. The original
revolutionary heroes were not to be mentioned; their uncouth successors
deified. Money was printed to “spread the wealth”—until it was
worthless.
Murderous cancel culture ran unchecked. Yesterday’s French
revolutionary became today’s counterrevolutionary—and tomorrow’s
decapitated.
Almost everyone who originally had opposed the absolute monarchy,
and, like the Americans, wished for a constitutional replacement, was
eventually executed by revolutionaries who were then executed by more
radical revolutionaries. The longer and more radical the revolution ran,
the meaner, dumber, and more deadly the revolutionaries who emerged
from the woodwork.
Finally, what could not go on, did not go on, as French society
unraveled. Then the so-called Thermidors put an end to the madness of
the Robespierre brothers and their sidekick, the 26-year-old Saint-Just,
and did to them what they had done to thousands.
The final revolutionary correction saw a Directory, then a Consulate,
and finally the dictator Napoleon—the self-described emperor who
claimed he was the final absolutist manifestation of the “Revolution.”
A Revolution of the Disingenuous
We are swept up in similarly scary revolutionary times, after the
perfect storm of the 2020 rioting, the COVID destructive lockdowns, and a
radical socialist takeover of the old Democratic Party.
Decades of successful and legitimate efforts to ensure equality of
opportunity, a safety net for the poor, and increased civil liberties
have transmogrified into an “equity” agenda, or state-mandated equality
of result—or else!
“Diversity” is now an Orwellian word for racial essentialism to the
one-drop degree. Jim Crow racism was not eliminated permanently. It now
has resurfaced as woke or “good” segregation. Racially separate
facilities and events are apparent “reparatory justice.” Black activists
are calling for $800 billion in reparations from San Francisco, a city
that is melting down as we speak.
The old precivilizational tribalism and monotony of thought are now
deemed “diverse.” “Inclusion” means replacing one racial hierarchy of
the 1950s with a newer one of the 2020s. Woke leftists prove “inclusive”
by excluding as “haters” and “denialists” any who disagree and cannot
be easily refuted.
Opportunists Abound
The Nike admen Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James ended up with
millions of dollars in endorsements ultimately derived from Communist
Chinese exploiters of servile labor—a fact that all their
pseudo-revolutionary performance art cannot mask.
Like the rich and elite Montagnards and Jacobins, well-off, degreed
suburban grifters suddenly became “woke” arbiters of the “correct.”
Thousands of diversity, equity, and inclusion czars bloated
administrations, broke university budgets, and terrified faculty and
employees with their panopticon surveillance. And yet did any of them
result in a single better student reader, or at least one more
accomplished university math major? Have K-12 scores soared with DEI
monitors on hand?
We have not descended to the guillotine yet, but we are getting there
with online cancel culture, doxxing, deplatforming, boycotts, mandatory
diversity statements, indoctrination training, ostracism for an
incorrect word, and violence redefined as activism.
Black Lives Matter ended when its supposedly Marxist architects all
vanished into comfortable bourgeoise estates and cushy retirements—along
with the millions of dollars they shook down from guilt-ridden
corporations.
#MeToo sputtered out once the mantra of “believe women” turned its
attention to candidate Joe Biden and Tara Reade. It turned out that she
most certainly must not be believed when she swore the Delaware Democrat had sexually assaulted her.
Supposed transgendered heroes vie for profitable TV endorsement
commercials that are as lucrative to them as they are ruinous to their
employers.
In our revolutionary times, mediocre biological male athletes
“transition” into female sports and suddenly become rich and famous.
Women who transition to males, for some reason, find no such profits
from male competitions.
A black transient with 42 arrests and three assault convictions is
accidentally killed by a would-be Samaritan bystander who takes action
to stop his threats on the subway. The tragedy becomes a rallying cry
for “activist” leaders, eager for continuous notoriety and profits,
while 10,000 black people murdered per year, mostly by other black
people, do not earn a snore from these same “civil rights” leaders.
The World Upside Down
Like Revolutionary France, our woke revolution was contrary to human
nature and therefore had to be imposed by force or coercion.
Merit is the great enemy of wokeness. One day SAT tests were blind
mechanisms to allow the less privileged to compete on the basis of
talent rather than parentage. The next day such tests were deemed
counterrevolutionary, racist enemies of the people. Universities boast
of rejecting 60-70 percent of those who scored perfect on SATs, as if
their excellence was proof of their “privilege.”
Jurisprudence was tarred as racist, as if laws against shoplifting,
looting, smash-and-grab, car-jacking, and arson were created only by
elite white men who never had the need to steal or loot and who
therefore made silly, arbitrary laws against them.
Like the Jacobins, our woke elite deem prisons arbitrary detention
centers. So thousands of those arrested for committing violent crimes
have either never been charged, never convicted, never sentenced, or
never incarcerated. These exemptions rest on the principle that the
revolutionaries who destroyed the enforcement of law have the
wherewithal to protect themselves from the dystopia they created.
Borders disappeared, apparently on grounds they were 19th-century racist relics. Yet sanctuary cities prove the least welcoming of the tens of thousands they all but invited into distant other towns and counties.
The homeless were no longer deemed vagrants, or selfish in their
take-over of public spaces, but the victims of an oppressive society.
So public defecation, urination, fornication, and injection were
rebranded as mere lifestyle choices of the unfortunate, not to be judged
wrong or unlawful by the victimizers who supposedly made thousands
homeless. Ancient laws of hygiene and municipal cleanliness were thrown
out as bourgeois, as cities reverted to the protocols of their medieval
forebears.
Leftists who created these Frankenstein-like monsters, like the
fictive Dr. Frankenstein himself, became targets of their own
experiments. It was no longer enough to support civil rights for the
transgendered. Suddenly any questioning of the wisdom of biologically
born males competing in women’s sports or of teenagers with penises
undressing among teenage girls in locker rooms, or of state-sponsored
drag-queen shows with children in attendance condemned one as
transphobic and worse.
Advocating a secure border and strictly legal immigration was proof
of nativism. Equal opportunity for all races was racism. Advocacy for
the use of natural gas as a needed transitional fuel indicted one as a
climate “denialist.”
As our woke version of the Jacobin revolution accelerated, society
itself began to unwind—as expected given America relied on meritocracy,
free expression dissent, the rule of law, forbearance, and tolerance.
In less than three years, our major cities became filthy to the point
of unhealthiness. Violent crime and thievery drove businesses and
commuters away. Subways at night became the domain of the homeless and
criminal. Vacancy rates in San Francisco or downtown Portland shot up to
25 percent or more. Millions began leaving Jacobin blue cities and
states, and headed for sanctuaries in more suburban and rural red
states.
Once-trusted and familiar government agencies became weaponized—and
inevitably incompetent. The FBI was not interested in the organizers of
120 days of violent looting, arson, murder, and rioting in summer 2020,
or the threatening mobs who showed up at the homes of Supreme Court
Justices. Instead, it fixated on parents at school board meetings, Latin
Mass Catholics, former Trump Administration officials, and anyone
daring to question the Russian collusion or Russian disinformation
laptop hoaxes.
The Pentagon brass oversaw a flight from Afghanistan, in the greatest
military humiliation in modern American history. Yet at the same time,
it focused on rooting out white rage and white privilege despite
presenting no data to substantiate its accusations. Former intelligence
officers and “authorities” misled the country and warped an election, to
ensure Americans did not take seriously the incriminating evidence in
Hunter Biden’s laptop of the Biden family’s widespread corruption.
So, the world became topsy-turvy. Throwing a firebomb into a
police-occupied patrol car earned a light sentence, while protesting
illegally at the Capitol won a decade in prison.
An American who did not get vaccinated was to be thrown out of the
U.S. military; an illegal alien crossing the border unlawfully without a
vaccination might earn a free phone and free lodging in a big-city
hotel.
The more the government printed money it did not have, the more the
country was slandered as cruel and mean to its underclass. The more
standards were dropped for admission, hiring, promotion, and retention,
the more employers were deemed unfair and bigoted.
As the American Jacobin phase accelerated, the more it, too, seemed
to pursue its own destruction. Few now trust that the graduates of the
Ivy League and marquee universities know what they once did. And why
not, when students are admitted without test scores, but are assured
passing grades, watered-down classes, and graduation to be synonymous
with admission?
The U.S. military fell short by thousands of recruits. And why not,
when it advertised for manpower with invitations from drag queens, and
hounded those as racists who had died at twice their numbers in the
population in Afghanistan and Iraq?
A Counterrevolution Is Coming
At peak woke, our reign of terror is beginning to lose momentum
because its continuation would erode all the work of 247 years of
American progress and sacrifice.
Former and current liberals—an Elon Musk, Bill Maher, Matt Taibbi,
Bari Weiss, Glen Greenwald, Naomi Wolf, or a Richard Dreyfuss—are deemed
counterrevolutionaries for questioning the excesses of wokeism, and so
began questioning the premises of wokeism itself.
New polls showed scant public support for open borders, for
multiple sexual identities, and for biological men competing in women’s
sports. Reparations from an insolvent government to black Americans—on
the principle that those whose ancestors might have been enslaved eight generations ago were owed money from those whose ancestors might have owned slaves eight generations ago—is widely rejected by the general population.
When corporations like Anheuser-Busch or Disney tried to ingratiate
themselves to the woke Jacobins, they lost billions in revenue—just as
the woke Pentagon has lost thousands of recruits.
Woke networks like CNN have smaller audiences than some one-person podcasts.
A desperate and woke NBA now brags that its recent playoff televised
audience reached over 4 million viewers. A quarter-century ago, when the
U.S. population was nearly 60 million smaller, the pre-Jacobin NBA won
over 70 million viewers who watched the 1998 finals.
Joe Biden, the thin veneer of the woke revolution, polls below 40
percent. Even that favorability is propped up by the consensus that he
has no idea where he is or what he is saying—and thus at least is
deserving of 40 percent support for not being responsible for what he
has empowered.
A counterrevolution is building, not just because people are angry at
what has become of their country, but because they now are learning
that if they do nothing, they will have no country—and soon.
