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In many respects, Victor Davis Hanson, the esteemed historian and classicist, was my primary model for blogging.  For some time, I wrote responses to his erudite articles in the comments section.  Other commenters apparently liked my scribblings and encouraged me to strike out on my own.  With other influences I did, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I have, of late, begin to wonder when our own little red book, the American Marxist template parallel to, and the inspiration of, Mao’s extermination of untold millions, would appear, and who would write it?  One might think books on critical race theory—I won’t bother to name such dreary and destructive tomes written by racist, stunted intellects—are serving the contemporary purpose, empowering and encouraging the contemporary equivalent of Mao’s vicious and inhuman Red Guards, but they’re not quite there yet.

To be sure, our current Red Guard—BLM, Antifa, every CRT/Woke bureaucrat and educrat and the Media—are filled with revolutionary fervor, eager to strike down and destroy the enemies of wokeness, but something is lacking.

Hanson, in Who Eventually Won the Cold War?, fixes us in time, on the path to the kind of ideological destruction the Soviets and Chinese once imposed on themselves.  Unfortunately, they’ve learned their lesson, at least to the extent they recognize the benefits of education, merit and scientific rationality in the pursuit of totalitarian power and domination of others, while we are falling, with ever-increasing speed and determination, into their Cold War mentality, a mentality that allowed us to surpass them in every way that matters.  Hanson argues the Cold War is not yet won, and we’re well on the way to losing it.

Pause for a minute to recall the recent past: Did the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff unlawfully intervene in the chain of command to reroute decisions of nuclear weapon readiness through himself? Did he really contact his Chinese Communist counterpart to promise him that China would be warned of possible U.S. aggression?

Did the lead medical authority on America’s COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, deny under oath the fact that he routed U.S. aid money, through a third party, to the ground-zero Wuhan virology lab to enhance gain-of-function viral research?

Did Attorney General Merrick Garland sic the FBI on parents complaining about critical race theory—on the concocted accusation from a school board group, in part cooked up with White House staffer help, that the parents were likely ‘domestic terrorists’?

The point, of course, is while China is stealing our scientific and military secrets and steadily approaching economic and world domination, we’re committing national, cultural, suicide.  As is his forte, Hanson returns to history:

In the ancient days of the Cold War, the United States relied on its open society, political tolerance, the Bill of Rights, and meritocracy to outproduce and out-arm both the far larger Soviet Union, and Red China.

In other words, the Soviet commissariat and ideological watchdogs of Communism were drags on Russian and Chinese research and development. Apparatchiks were not only unproductive but expensive. They even hampered the pursuit of science if they believed it challenged the monopoly of Marxist-Leninist ideology and control.

In the case of Mao’s Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, Communist China destroyed entire cadres of scientific and intellectual research teams for generations by unleashing the Red Guards who applied Orwellian revolutionary litmus tests to the most productive elements of society. And they usually found them worthy of death, imprisonment, or forced nonexistence for their supposed lack of correct Maoist fervor—as proven by reading the wrong books, wearing the wrong clothes, saying the wrong slogans, or belonging to the wrong faction.

And now, our self-imagined elite are focused on illusions like Climate Change.  In fact, the Pentagon is hiring a Climate Change Tzar.  Of course.  What could be more important?  Certainly not winning wars. Could they be so stupid as to actually believe we have the means to change the planetary climate, when we can’t even accurately predict weather a few days hence?  Are they so stupid as to fail to understand the climate change scam is non-falsifiable, therefore, not science, that there is no condition or lack of any condition that does not prove their scam?  Hurricanes?  Climate change.  No wind/”global stilling”?  Climate change.  Some are that stupid, but most see it as an authoritarian means to amass and wield power, while suppressing any potential resistance.  “Climate denier!  You want to murder little children and fuzzy animals!  You’re destroying the planet!”  Among the most Maoist practitioners of wokeness are our universities, many of which have more diversity staff than tenured faculty, and the rest are rushing to catch up:

Most American universities are now madly rushing to institutionalize expensive, unproductive, and dangerous commissars to warp research, restrict free speech, and monitor instruction and expression. They are euphemistically deemed diversity, equity, and inclusion administrators and human relations directors. Like French Jacobins, Russian Bolsheviks, and Chinese Maoists they justify their anti-Enlightenment and totalitarian means by their supposedly exalted ends of ‘equity.’

A social media lynch mob, born and bred in America, equates incorrect thought with felonious behavior. Our online American Red Guards act as judge, jury, and executioner canceling out careers and lives in the manner of a virtual online gulag—in hopes of deterring all incorrect thought and expression. Ministries of the U.S. government sic the FBI, as if it is the KGB, on incorrect expression at school board hearings. The IRS both targets and exempts the elite on the basis of ideology. The CIA and Pentagon are likewise weaponized, as attuned to the dictates of social justice ministers at home as thwarting enemies abroad.

I’m sure Dr. Hanson would not mind my observation that our military and intelligence forces, as most recently demonstrated by the execrable General Milley, are more attuned to the dictates of social justice—much more—than national security.  Just as Hunter Biden, a coke-addled “artist” is now bringing in higher prices than Monet and Picasso for his “art,” the woke-industrial complex rewards its own:

Does anyone really believe that Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.)—serial sexual harasser and virtual killer of thousands of elderly who were the victims of his insane policy of transferring the COVID-infected into rest homes—deserved an Emmy award for his talents?

Or was it his daily anti-Trump agitprop and race and gender virtue-signaling that delighted his Hollywood aficionados? Can a comedian still joke about anything he pleases, a professor lecture without fear of disruption, or a CEO publicly doubt critical race theory?

Cuomo was a useful idiot, nothing more.  When his anti-Trump usefulness expired, so did he.  Inevitably, for each action there is a reaction; for each act of societal debasement, there is a consequence:

As we learned from the impoverishment of the Soviet Union and Maoist China, eventually the ideological pandemic results in poverty in the streets. Or in our current terms, nine months of constant woke bullying and government ideological recalibration really do result in internecine racial animus, empty shelves, sky-high gasoline and natural gas prices, stagflation, soaring debt, high labor non-participation, military mediocrity, international humiliation, and a national state of fear and paranoia.

When merit no longer matters, when it is an enemy of the state, we end up with dangerous mediocrities in leadership positions:

Do the COVID-19 public-health policies of Admiral Rachel Levine, or the administrative talents of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in solving supply-chain hold-ups, define their media coverage, or do we hear more about their sexual identification and status?

Will we soon issue “The Hero of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Revolution” medals?

We already have, in the elevation of the male Levin to four star admiral rank.  And upon what is this promotion from the civilian based?  What accomplishments would justify elevating anyone, in an instant, from civilian to our highest general officer rank?  Levin is trans; a man pretending to be a woman and demanding everyone else share in his delusion and praise him for being deluded.  Now, he can order his underlings to pretend, and the wokesters can try to force everyone else.  There are more of us then there are of them, and they’re beginning, to their horror, to understand that.  Which has given Vladimir Putin(?!) the moral standing to lecture us on history and reality:

‘The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead.

It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones—all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today.’

Does anyone think Joe Biden—or any of the rest of the “adults in the room” –capable of standing up to Putin or China?

China just about every month displays some new sort of frightening strategic weapon or boasts of yet another stratagem of destroying Taiwan. Meanwhile, at about the same pace, our defense secretary, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, chief of naval operations, or CENTCOM generals offer another reassurance that Afghan refugees arrive in correct gender ratios and with culturally sensitive food awaiting them, or that advocates of white supremacy and white privilege are systematically being rooted out of the military, or the military is busy fighting climate change and white rage.

And depleting the ranks of patriots and American daring to think they have some choice about what government wants to inject into their bodies.

So, the new Communist-state capitalist Chinese naturally gloat over our wokeness. Whereas a Putin sees fundamentalist diversity, equity, inclusion religion as suicidal Bolshevism worthy of celebration, the Chinese are more adroit. They prefer not to mock but to tap into what they see as our fatal strategic disadvantages. In other words, rather than boasting that even the former Soviet Union is tired of destructive ideological wokeism, Beijing eggs it on—albeit in America.

The Chinese are ever more subtle, more invested in the long game, the game of centuries rather than presidential terms.  The Chinese not only infiltrate our Congress, universities and scientific and defense industries, they buy our land and media outlets and slowly, patiently, help us commit societal suicide—not that we need much help.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs either hated his former president so much or was so enthralled or terrified by his Communist Chinese military counterparts, that he called them to reassure them that the U.S. military would warn them beforehand should Trump consider any preemptive action directed at China. After that, China likely felt it had already won the propaganda war.

In a not too distant past, any CJCS acting as Milley has admitted acting would have been fortunate to escape the hangman’s rope.  Now, it’s almost impossible to imagine anyone being prosecuted for treason.  Rather, Congressional D/S/Cs, and their media propaganda arm, have praised Milley for saving “democracy.”  This too is an important distinction.  In a Democracy, 50.00000001% of the electorate rules.  There is no restraint on what they may do.  This is the tyranny of the majority.   They can vote away the rights and privileges of the minority, they can vote away their very lives, which is why D/S/Cs, masters of warping language for political ends, virtually never utter the word “republic,” which is actually our form of government: a constitutional republic.  The distinction is vital, because in our constitutional republic the rights of the minority are protected.  Regardless of which political party is in power, the People retain unalienable rights—among them, life, liberty and property–which cannot be voted away.

Hanson concludes with this:

The Cold War has been over for over 30 years. But who really won that war of ideas may be the real question of the new millennium.

After all, America is now seeking to emulate the crude modalities of the old Soviet Union and Maoist China that the now-gleeful autocratic Russians and Chinese at least realize nearly destroyed them.

The Russians and Chinese see our government led by a doddering, senile fool, a mere puppet manipulated by feckless fools possessed of unlimited and undeserved self-regard, and they calculate.  Unlike our self-imagined elite, they live in the real world, not a world they have manufactured.  They intend to force the rest of the world to live not in a socially just, equitable, diverse and green world, but in a world ruled with very real weapons and will, weapons technology in large part stolen from a once great America, and a will the self-imagined elite never had and never shall.

Russia and China only lacked the means.  They’ve always had the will.  We—our self-imagined elite—don’t, and are knowingly giving them, their Marxist brethren, the means.

By all means, gentle readers, take the link and read the whole thing.  Hanson’s writings are always more than worth your time, but this article is outstanding, even by his standards.