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November 17, 2022
Indeed, there was a red wave but not the one conservatives had hoped for. It was, however, the continuation of the leftists’, Marxists’, and communists’ eternal obsession to destroy America and obliterate her values—and Ayn Rand predicted it in her 1965 seminal book titled The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.
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Frighteningly prescient, Rand understood the beginnings of the “intellectual disintegration” that is now front and center in most colleges. Fifty-seven years later, the Left is “cashing in” on its quest for ultimate power.
Ground Zero was the “so-called student ‘rebellion’” that started at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964. Billed as a Free Speech Movement, it was anything but. William Peterson, a professor of sociology at the time, wrote:
The first fact one must know about the Free Speech Movement is that it has little or nothing to do with free speech . . . . If not free speech, what then is the issue? In fact, preposterous as this may seem, the real issue is the seizure of power.
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Now living in a woke United States, it is no longer preposterous at all as we realize that “the Free Speech Movement is reminiscent of the Communist fronts of the 1930s” wherein “the key feature [was] that [of] a radical core that uses legitimate issues ambiguously [emphasis mine] in order to manipulate a large mass.”
Thus, we see students from Ivy League schools overwhelm vacillating university administrators who cave to their demands and dis-invite speakers or cancel professors. We watch students whose wanton destruction is met with no resistance whatsoever, thus setting the stage in which “each provocation and subsequent victory [leads] to the next.”
Consider that the riots in 2020 were not met with absolute pushback but instead destroyed entire communities.
As students dismantled university buildings, where were the administrators firmly stating that “there can be no such thing as the right to an unrestricted freedom of speech or of action on someone else’s property”? In fact, “[t]he owners of a state university are the voters and taxpayers of that state.”
Image: Ayn Rand.
In essence, the “technique of the rebels, as of all statists is to take advantage of the principles of a free society in order to undercut [these very principles].”
Rand explained that “some of these activists liken their movement to a revolution and want to be called ‘organizers.’”
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Fast forward five-plus decades and Barack Obama, organizer par excellence, promised to “transform the country.” Few understood the seismic communist changes he would usher in, and that Biden continues unabated.
Rand wrote that “mankind could not expect to remain unscathed after decades of exposure to the radiation of intellectual fission-debris, such as ‘reason is impotent to know things as they are—reality is unknowable…logic is a social convention [and] ethics is a matter of subjective commitment’” [.]
Therefore, men can be women; women can be men; babies are expendable up to the day of birth; cutting off healthy body parts is absolutely acceptable; and sexual grooming of young children is fine.
Sadly, there are the students “who are too intelligent not to see the logical consequences of the theories they have been taught—but not intelligent nor independent enough to see through the theories and reject them.” It is sobering to realize that, if not for voters under 30, who have been thoroughly indoctrinated, there really could have been a Red Wave.
And as an added bonus, the left has diligently worked hard to inculcate students who have been deliberately dumbed down. They are “unable to answer or withstand the flood of modern sophistries” that make no sense but have been repeated ad nauseam since kindergarten.
In a civilized society, a student’s declaration that he rejects reason and proposes to act outside the bounds of rationality would be taken as sufficient grounds for immediate expulsion—let alone if he proceeded to engage in mob action and physical violence on a university campus. But modern universities have long since lost the moral right to oppose the first – and are, therefore impotent against the second.
And who stands to gain from this chaos? Who are the leaders? Any and all of the statist-collectivist groups that hover, like vultures, over the remnants of capitalism, hoping to pounce on the carcass—and to accelerate the end, whenever possible. Their minimal goal is just ‘to make trouble’—to undercut, to confuse, to demoralize, to destroy. Their goal is to take over.
In fact, when Rand wrote her essay, she posited that the taking over of the universities was “a miniature preview—in the microcosm of the academic world—of what [was] to happen to the country at large, if the present cultural trend remain[ed] unchallenged.”
Consequently, “once a country has accepted the obliteration of moral principles, of individual rights, of objectivity, of justice, of reason and has submitted to the rule of ‘legalized brute force’ there is no turning back.”
Consider the mandates for Covid jabs. Consider the “legalized brute force” against the January 6th protestors who languish in the American gulag. Consider the student who has a conservative perspective but who fears for his grade. Consider the outright fraud of elections.
In fact, the continuing battering of every institution in America is an “attempt to make the country accept mass civil disobedience as a proper and valid tool for political action.”
Certainly, it was meritorious when it came to the civil rights movement but “there is no justification, in a civilized society for the kind of mass civil disobedience that involves the violation of the rights of others – regardless of whether the demonstrator’s goal is good or evil. No one’s rights can be secure by the violation of the rights of others”—be it the baker’s or the landlord’s rights.
Instead, what occurs is that “the partial victory of an unjust claim, encourages the claimant to try further; the partial defeat of a just claim, discourages and paralyzes the victim.”
Consequently,
in the absence of intellectual opposition, the rebels, activists, and community organizers’ notions will gradually come to be absorbed into the culture. The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by precedent, by implication, by erosion, by default, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other – until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology.
As a result, wokism has infiltrated schools nationwide, as well as the legal and medical professions, the entertainment field, and even candy and toys.
When Rand wrote her piece, people were beginning to understand the horrors that communism wrought upon nations, but American Marxists and their ilk have deliberately kept that information from American students. The Left will massage the language so socialism which is always the precursor to communism will be re-labeled democratic socialism as if that erases its core dastardly values.
As Bruce Bawer explains in his updated book, The Victims’ Revolution, it
is a guidebook to – and a genealogy of – the most noxious of the strange new ideas that now suffuse our mainstream culture. How lamentable it is that conservatives, moderates, and classical liberals weren’t able to keep these ideas from taking over the colleges and universities; and how alarming it is that the sensible majority of citizens weren’t able to keep them from conquering society at large, where they are now reshaping our culture and rewiring our children’s minds.
Are we on our way to “become [a] dispirited, demoralized and an embittered majority” or will we take Bawer to heart when he writes
But there’s only one way for a small minority of totalitarian ideologues to win in the long term – and that’s if the reasonable, common-sense majority allows itself to be scared into silence. So if this woke madness is affecting your life in any way, that means that there are people in your life who are pushing it. And the only response to that is to push back – and push back hard.
It echoes Rand, who wrote “[y]ou would be surprised how quickly the ideologists of collectivism retreat when they encounter a confident, intellectual adversary. Their case rests on appealing to human confusion, ignorance, dishonesty, cowardice, and despair. Take the side they dare not touch: appeal to human intelligence.”
Eileen can be reached at [email protected].
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