Reclaiming Our Culture from the Left

My latest in the American Thinker:

Everyone knows it: the death of George Floyd was just a pretext. The rioters who continue every night to wreak havoc in Portland, and who are poised to engage in new orgies of destruction all over the country don’t know much and care less about Floyd. They’re quite open about engaging in a “revolution” with the goal of destroying the existing order and replacing it with an authoritarian Marxist regime. But what we are seeing today is not new. Its seeds were planted decades ago. Now the question before us, if we want to preserve the United States as a free society, is what we must do to counter this violent, hate-filled movement.

There will be no easy fix. The Left’s long march through the institutions began in the 1960s and has ended in total victory; only a reverse march through the same institutions will ultimately overcome the catastrophic effects of the Left’s advance. The leftist stranglehold on the educational system is a big part of the problem: the Antifa and BLM barbarians of today learned their hatred at our colleges and universities. Our children have been taught to hate the land of their birth. Who didn’t think this would bear bitter fruit? There was some indignation among conservatives over the 1619 Project, which portrays the entire American enterprise as racist, oppressive, and hateful, winning the Pulitzer Prize, but that was just the culmination of decades of miseducation and propaganda disguised as education. I wrote Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster as an antidote, to remind Americans, or show them for the first time, the heroes who made America great — and the failures and sellouts who got us into this fix.

But the education most of the rioters have received has made them abjectly incapable of thinking rationally and evaluating claims on the basis of their logical coherence and supporting evidence. No amount of careful reasoning, no amount of evidence is going to convince most of the rioters that their rage is based on false premises, because they have been carefully educated throughout their lives to feel rather than think, and to believe that America is a nation of deep injustice with a shameful history and an equally condemnable present. It doesn’t matter that the claims that the rioters and their defenders are making are false. It doesn’t matter that police brutality affects people of all races. It doesn’t matter that thoroughgoing civil rights legislation has made “systemic racism” a thing of the distant past.

There is much more. Read the rest here.

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