Speech that contradicts the leftist narrative is violence and must be punished.
Academic meritocracy and standardized academic tests are racist and unfair.
Those who challenge or question the leftist narrative must be excised from public life.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the leftist worldview is the demand that we be judged not as individuals, but by our various group identities—skin color, gender, sexual orientation, religion (or lack thereof), ethnicity, political beliefs, and on and on. You are not you. You have a share of group rights, but no individual rights. Hence the obsession with “equity”—proportional representation of every group in every area of endeavor.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a very different, and powerful, message calling for the celebration of the individual transcending what we now know as the scourge of identity politics, in his transformative 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”20 Woke and identity politics, and the racism on which they rely, are also the antithesis of the ideals that animated America’s founders when they approved our Constitution.
Considered discretely, each of the fear tactics being employed by the progressive establishment and its handmaidens in the media, business, and academia might be considered an irritation that can be overcome. But taken collectively and dished out day after day against an unsuspecting population, the result is the slow cooking of the minds and souls of the American people.
The victory of the radical left and the triumph of fear over reason, group entitlements over individual rights, and lies over truth are not inevitable. We can fight and win the battle for the American soul and America’s future if we understand the challenges we face and how to overcome them. I wrote this book to help guide you, my fellow Americans, in this vital task.
I said earlier I have a secret for you. Actually, I have two, both of which are revealed in this book. Our way to victory over the heinous forces working to destroy our nation starts with us but is different than what you have been told in the past. This book provides you with knowledge that is kryptonite for the left. The first step—knowing the history, strategy, and details fueling the left’s assault on our country and our futures—sweeps aside the carefully constructed but false curtain of lies and fear. The first step in getting a loved one out of an abusive relationship is letting them know that you know they are in crisis. Admitting what is happening is empowering, and knowing you are not alone is vital as it unlocks the desire and ability to confront what’s happening.
Your second step, I discuss at the end. It is personal and powerful, and it is the thing that most terrifies the left here at home and around the world. It is an inspirational and transformative act we each have in our toolbox for life—courage. This is the thing the left and their disciples work to crush in each of us every single day. We can find safety in numbers, but for those of us who have been overcome by it, what I also know is that fear is a weak state, weak enough that it is a constant occupation of the left to maintain its influence on us.
For us, or those in our lives who seem lost and think turning to extremes is the answer, our influence can make the difference. The good news is that it takes very little to crush fear’s control over us; something as simple as looking up, noticing, being aware of our environment. Choosing to take control of how we perceive and interact with events, situations, and even the rhetoric of others can change everything.
In the aftermath of World War II and the development of the nuclear bomb, C. S. Lewis addressed the concern of many in the public about the new threats to life, peace, and safety human beings face. Like most of what Lewis wrote, it is prescient and serves us as well in the twenty-first century as it did his readers in 1948:
What the wars and the weather (are we in for another of those periodic ice ages?) and the atomic bomb have really done is to remind us forcibly of the sort of world we are living in and which, during the prosperous period before 1914, we were beginning to forget. And this reminder is, so far as it goes, a good thing. We have been waked from a pretty dream, and now we can begin to talk about realities.21
So let us awaken, turn the page, talk about reality, influence and encourage our friends, and make a difference for ourselves and others by looking up and regaining our minds!
Chapter 1 The Terrible, Obscure Bioweapon
To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes. . . . Those despotic governments, which are founded on the passions of men, and principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief as much as may be from the public eye.
—EDMUND BURKE1
The eighteenth-century Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke reminds us that tyrants know they can’t control us completely by themselves; they rely on invisible hazards allowing the dirty work to be accomplished by our own imaginations, expanding on the fear of the threat exponentially.
We’ve all experienced fear, the emotion of self-preservation that keeps us alive but that can also scare us into irrationality and inaction. Fear sits at the core of our instinctual mind and at the forefront of our everyday lives. It is as familiar to us as love, just as confusing, and just as important. It can be both a gift and a curse.
This book is about fear and how it has been weaponized by today’s unrecognizable Democratic Party, the left, and their sycophants in the self-obsessed progressive media to crush your spirit, fill you with self-doubt, and convince you to give up control of your life. It’s time to expose, explain, and debunk this foundational strategy driving the reprobate “progressive” agenda. Read on, and you will see how we can conquer what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”2 Roosevelt spoke in his first inaugural address as America was gripped by fear in the depths of the Great Depression. Today, we are gripped by fear of a different sort, a depression of the soul amplified by a Democratic Party that is very different from the one Roosevelt led. While fear can be a natural ally, we have seen it manipulated as a bioweapon designed by the progressive bureaucratic establishment. It is now everywhere, serving as a controlling foot soldier for a political machine contemptible of the citizen and incapable of empathy or functional leadership.
For generations, we have all been targeted by the political and attendant cultural establishments to ensure that fear controls our minds. The schemes and agendas put forth by the entrenched political establishment are designed to keep us ignorant, anxious, and feeling unable to control the present and future. The leftist elite want us to feel helpless and hopeless and dependent on Big Government to tell us what to do and how to do it to solve our problems. I am determined to help us smash that plan.
Make no mistake: there are legitimate and frightening crises and events deserving of our attention, concern, and action. This book exposes how the powerful exploit our natural and beneficial emotional reactions for the political benefit of the ruling class.
The manufactured climate change hysteria is a perfect example. It encompasses an issue we all care about—a healthy environment—and weaponizes it as a vague, changeable, and frighteningly massive threat requiring us, through intimidation and government edict, to dramatically alter the way society operates and how we live our lives. It can be molded into whatever the powers that be want it to be at any given moment. Most ominously, its framing as an issue relies on injecting into each one of us the lie that our very existence—your existence—is the problem.
Dissent from progressive “truth” is deemed heresy. With climate change, the left tells us that “settled science” dictates that we must end the use of fossil fuels and throw everyone in the oil, gas, and coal industries out of work; stop eating meat and devastate the agricultural economy; destroy tens of thousands of acres of land to generate unreliable and costly solar and wind energy; and raise taxes sky-high to fund a multitrillion-dollar transformation of our entire economy.
In the children’s story, Chicken Little screams out, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” when an acorn lands on her head. In today’s world, progressives scream just as hysterically that life on Earth is ending. If you disagree, in the view of the left, that makes you an evil and ignorant corporate stooge who denies reality and wants to see life on Earth destroyed.
Much to the frustration of the left, neither failed Democratic presidential candidates Al Gore and John Kerry, nor Climate Kid Greta Thunberg, compelled us to surrender.
The use of fear is designed to make us afraid to speak our minds about the political issues of the day and about changing cultural standards because we might lose our jobs or be shunned by leftists controlling Big Tech, academia, and business. Like Russian nesting dolls, these civil institutions are also captive within the larger schema with another brand of fear meant just for them and controlling those mechanisms of power.
The Few Gaslighting the Many
The key here is that few people are managing this effort—and it is a managed effort—using a form of psychological warfare to degrade our confidence, pride, and optimism about America, its history, and its future. That, you see, is the only way the left can win, by tearing down our people and customs because America’s greatness depends on the greatness and confidence of our people. The majority of us don’t agree with the far left agenda.3, 4, 5 And the farther left the agenda goes, the more Americans see the scheme for the fraud it is. “Progressives” (a laughably absurd euphemism) have not persuaded and cannot persuade the American people to accept a suicidal level of social engineering, so all they have is smoke, mirrors, and a few people strategically placed throughout our institutions implementing the most complex gaslighting in human history.
You hear many references to “gaslighting” these days. It is an apt colloquialism brought to us by the classic film, 1944’s Gaslight.6, 7 In the movie, Ingrid Bergman’s character is victimized by her husband, who manipulates her environment to make her think she is losing her mind so he can control her and her inheritance. In our case, gaslighting is a form of abuse and manipulation being used by the left as part of its effort to convince you you’re something you’re not—subconsciously racist, for example—while making you question your confidence, sense of self, and reality to the point where your denial is said to be proof you’re guilty of the accusation du jour. Manipulating us in this way relies, in part, on our fear of abandonment, fear of loss, fear of not pleasing others, or fear of not fitting in. This book will discuss the gaslighting technique in detail and tell you how to protect yourself against it by recognizing the signs, being consciously aware as it is happening, and immunizing yourself from its intended effects.
Gaslighting allows bureaucrats to dictate everything from the smallest details of our lives to massive government spending that facilitates the associated development of an even more controlling bureaucracy. All the while, we are told such government excesses and erosions of our freedom are really designed to save us from our poor, unsure, gaslit selves.
Their argument is always that they know better. They understand what’s happening. The rest of us don’t have the capacity, education, or basic ability to function in the manner required by these gaslighters of government and society. Contempt for us is a necessary part of this malevolent agenda. In the following pages, this repulsive tactic, and those who implement it, will be exposed in detail and debunked entirely.
I’m here to tell you that our progressive would-be overlords will fail. By exposing their methods and intentions, this book will give you the information and power you need to crush the fraud of the forces determined to punk you into retreat, convinced that they can scare you into surrender. They’re wrong, and my goal is to make sure you’ll know exactly how to stop this charade of wokesters, fraudsters, the disturbed, and the craven.
A Tantrum of the Disturbed
Part of this book’s mission is to expose the contrived and deliberate nature of the “social disturbances” we have suffered from for years, such as the riots following the George Floyd murder, not as organic but rather as calculated efforts by the American left, and its handmaiden, the Democratic Party. It’s understandable to mistake what’s happening in general to the country as a side effect of the woke agenda. But it is much larger than that, with “wokeness” being but one thread focused on making millions of Americans afraid to speak candidly about politics and culture. It is the cancerous result of what started as “political correctness,” the first step in an indoctrination strategy meant to make nonconforming speech a crime.
Wokeness is just one front in the war against American culture, society, free markets, classic liberalism, and personal freedom. As those on the left are exposed as frauds and abusers, the last weapon they have available is to crush the country through psychological warfare and direct violence—a tantrum of the disturbed.
In the following pages, I will show you how all the leftist absurdity we see consuming American campuses, which we mistakenly thought was a phase and would at least be contained in the academy, was vomited out into society. With the election of Donald Trump, an axis of the academies, Big Business (including Big Tech and media), and government realized the American people had not been neutered. The overclass has not yet rendered the “little people” helpless. Since we had not succumbed to the left’s earlier attempts to break us, a new, unforgiving blitz of punishment would have to begin.
In the eyes of the left, the biggest “crime” of all was committed by the American people when we handed the White House to Donald Trump and the whole of Congress to the GOP in 2016.
The progressive, enlightened class failed to convince Americans to hate themselves as racists, sexists, homophobes, and deplorables through fear and intimidation. As a result, they falsely indicted the nation as irredeemably evil by condemning law enforcement, unleashing direct violence in the name of “racial justice,” and attacking cultural icons. The goal was to gaslight Americans into hating each other through fear and suspicion, and to see each other as members of Balkanized groups rather than as individuals. Americans were also condemned for “microaggressions” that were invisible to all but the most woke among us.
On top of this, woke and whiny college students would demand “safe spaces” to protect their oh-so-delicate sensibilities from the marketplace of ideas, and colleges would cave to their absurd and infantile demands by barring speakers from campus and books from courses that dared challenge the progressive dogma, while firing professors who dare to challenge the leftist status quo or simply do not comply with absurd woke rules.8 In the process, schools and colleges have been transformed from places of learning into leftist indoctrination camps.
Meanwhile, the Black Lives Matter group advances its Marxist and anti-American agenda by hectoring us with accusations of racism that have become a staple in their fear-porn theater. We are told that if you are not black, you must be a racist, that our nation is “systemically racist” and irredeemable, and that America’s founders were racists who fought the Revolutionary War to preserve slavery. We are also told we must atone for the genuinely evil institution of slavery that ended before most of our great-grandparents were born, and before the ancestors of some of us had even come to America. And Black Lives Matter and other leftist agitators tell us our government must pay trillions of dollars in reparations to the descendants of slaves.9 Raise objections to any of this and you’ll be asked why you haven’t dealt with your own internalized racism.
