It was said during our Mideast military adventures, and has been considered a truism of war, that you can’t really win a conflict without “boots on the ground.” For it’s difficult to completely subdue a people from afar. It may not be too different with battles for civilization.
I stated in 2012, addressing a long-developing reality, that the culture war was over as the Left had achieved social dominance. “What is occurring now is a pacification effort,” I wrote — one designed to stamp out the “conservative” guerrilla-group diehards.
Other than its intensification, the only thing that has changed about this effort in the last decade is that it has a new name: “cancel culture.” With GoogTwitFace (Big Tech) having upped its bias and dropped its mask and corporate America joining academia, the media and entertainment on the Dark Side, these entities act as a malevolent monolith silencing dissident voices from Maine to Maui. But it would be naïve to think the Left, which craves power and wants total control, will be satisfied with its current soft authoritarianism.
This brings us to two developments that could cause the raising of eyebrows if not militias. Consider: If you heard about a Third World country in which the leadership was purging the military of political opponents, would you assume it was just an exercise in ideological nepotism? Or would you suppose the leaders wanted a military of devoted fellow travelers who would, when asked, unflinchingly turn their guns on domestic opponents of the regime who couldn’t be cowed by other methods?
Now, should the assumption be different just because the military purge occurs in a developed country?
Just such an event has been taking place in the U.S. for at least a decade. It began under Barack Obama, who not only tried to socially re-engineer the military but also engaged in a widely noted purge of top military brass.
President Trump didn’t (couldn’t?) do enough to reverse this process, and now it has been kicked into high gear. Having largely corrupted the armed forces’ upper echelons, the Left now aims for rank-and-file ideological conformity. Thus do we hear about how we must stamp out the imaginary boogeyman du jour, “white supremacy,” from the military. Preposterously, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin even issued, in early February, a 60-day stand-down order to address the alleged internal threat it poses.
Of course, white supremacists are about as common as straight, happily married women at a NOW convention; why, I’m well into middle age and I don’t know that I’ve ever met one. This isn’t to say there aren’t liberals delusional enough to believe the threat is real; that they’re detached from reality is partially why leftists are so dangerous.
Yet it’s clear there’s a different motivation among the Machiavellian leftists. It hasn’t escaped the Left’s notice that the military traditionally leaned Republican. Moreover, even if this has changed somewhat, having armed forces that are obedient to the ruling party to the point of wickedness isn’t possible with dissidents in the ranks. (Besides, “fragging” is a real thing.)
So you need a purge. You do this by conjuring up a boogeyman — in our case “white supremacy” — and then characterizing it as a widespread, existential threat. This now means defining Trump support, patriotism, opposition to illegal migration and, really, any deviation from the Left’s agenda at all as reflecting white supremacy.
It’s an old tactic: Portray already persecuted minorities or political opponents as the persecutors so you can leverage even more control over them. It’s how you create your own Enabling Act moment.
