July 21, 2020

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

NANCY PELOSI and the Stormtroopers

Friends,

It showed up in the news, almost unannounced, on Friday (July 17), just one small snippet which, no surprises, didn’t show up as a headline on NBC, CNN, or MSNBC. I suppose it shouldn’t have shocked me, indeed, the accusation made by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was not the worst or the most insane thing she’s ever said (she has a long and illustrious history of lunatic statements). But this time, in this current climate of extreme social and political unrest—revolution in the streets with a large majority of our political leaders either tacitly supporting it or remaining silent—it just struck me. And all last night I thought about its meaning.

Regarding the order by Attorney General William Barr (at the behest of President Trump) to send in Federal agents to protect endangered Federal buildings in Portland, Oregon, and eventually other major cities, Pelosi blasted those agents she called “squads” Friday as “stormtroopers ... kidnapping protesters.” In other words, Pelosi, the third ranking functionary in the national government is comparing legitimate Federal agents doing their legal and constitutionally-mandated duty to protect Federal property as nothing more than vicious Nazi Brown Shirts.

I know, this is supposed to be hyperbole…but is it really? Isn’t this the real narrative now the American Left has taken upon itself? For nearly four years we’ve heard that (1) Donald Trump’s election was invalid and null and void, (2) that he is a dupe and an agent of Vladimir Putin, (3) that he was unfit mentally for office, and (4) that he “wants to destroy our democracy” [sic!]. Hilary Clinton declares that he won’t leave office peacefully after the election in November, assuming the vote goes against him; and dozens of other Democrats and Never Trumpers are repeating that mantra to prepare for their own program of election fraud and voter manipulation, in a rather thinly-disguised exercise in projection.  And to accomplish this, anyone who in any way dissents or questions this strategy must be demonized, and the reductio ad Hitlerum mode of attack, which has worked in the past, is now deployed full bore. You oppose me and what I do in the streets (or in Congress)? You must be a Nazi! A Brown Shirt! Probably a white male, maybe a five-day a week tradesman, who goes to church, has a nuclear family, believes in the old fashioned concept of sin and hard work…in other words a bigoted racist, a white supremacist who stands in the way of Progress and the new socialist Utopia that would make Orwell’s 1984 seem like a virtual paradise…and Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag seem like summer camp.

In fact, you accuse your enemies of the very same skullduggery you are doing. Thus, the violent rioters and revolutionaries in the streets, and their handlers in high political office—those enablers who make the revolution palatable to viewers of CNN or NBC—are the very ones who have lost whatever belief they ever had in the American republican system, assuming that these post-Marxist militants ever had any real faith in that system, a highly dubious proposition. They are the true Brown Shirts, the new Red Guard, and they are protected and encouraged by our leaders, including far too many timorous Republicans.

But a majority of Americans who only catch a few minutes of the evening news at night, or who go to a “mainstream” church, or work at a business or corporation now converted to “wokeness,” will never see what is happening, they will not see the riots and looting in major cities, they will not hear of the violence and the real goals and objectives of the Black Lives Matter revolutionaries. Rather, they will be like a close relative of mine who is convinced after a constant diet of network television and social justice sermons at church, that we inhabit a thoroughly racist society, wracked by historic “white supremacy,” a society in which literally hundreds, maybe thousands, of poor unarmed black men, without civil rights, have been ruthlessly assaulted and murdered by those horrible fascist police.

That’s her view, and no amount of factual information or data can convince her otherwise. She and her husband are convinced that Donald Trump is a Russian agent (despite what has happened, the revelations of the past three years), that he is a fascist dictator wannabe who won’t permit a fair election. They believe that the thousands of rioting revolutionaries in the streets are, to quote CNN and dozens of leftist mayors and congressmen, “mostly peaceful demonstrators” who are targeted by—yes—Trump’s Brown Shirts.

Ten years ago I would have considered the present upheaval something that our November presidential elections would quieten down, that getting a job and reaching maturity might cure. How is it possible, I keep asking, that millions of Americans have now bought into this new “Big Lie,” that they have literally fallen into the hog wallow of leftist madness, apparently swallowed it hook, line and sinker?

In 1972, as the Vietnam protests began to wane, by an overwhelming majority the American citizenry voted for law, stability and order. But since then—nearly fifty years now—the Marxist apparatchiks in our schools and universities have been feverishly busy, educating at least two generations of fanatical and indoctrinated social justice warriors…our children. Far too many of our Republican and conservative legislators, for fear of being called “anti-education” or “not concerned about our children,” have thrown millions of dollars into sink hole universities. There in those festering nests of vipers, Marxist professors with half-million dollar salaries who live in gated mansions frantically inculcate generation after generation of newly-minted revolutionaries, youthful totalitarians, badly educated (except in Twitter, Instagram and “social justice” frenzy), but ready to emerge out into the streets and take down symbols of our collective history, and go online and into the corporate boardrooms to get you fired or banned if you murmur the slightest demurrer.

Back in 1971, preparing an MA in history at the University of Virginia, I knew some of these future professors and teachers. Back then it was them praising Cuban terrorist Che Guevara and Afrocentric Frantz Fanon (and his attack on “European colonialism”). What they spouted then has been transformed now and has taken hold in almost all of our college and universities, and has seeped deeply into our public schools. And trusting parents, confiding their children into the hands of educators and eventually to “the best college education money can buy,” are like parents who turn their children over to pedophiles.

I have a friend whose daughter teaches history (AKA “social studies”) in a public school down the road from me in a nearby rural county; she is the only openly conservative faculty member there, and she has to follow the “woke,” state-mandated curriculum in her classes or lose her job. She copes the best she can, but in this climate that’s not saying a lot. Each year she watches the newly-infected senior class go off to the college hothouses and eventually out into the streets, filled with an unquenched  and unquenchable fervor…the advance formations of revolutionaries intent on destroying and totally remaking what’s left of this nation.

Those Federal agents in Portland are “Stormtroopers”? No, Nancy, you and your wealthy plutocrats who attempt to use the present unrest and violence politically are guilty before God and your fellow men of crimes of worst sort, against the republic and its constitution, against the students and future generations, and against common decency and the truth that never changes.