By DEXTER DUGGAN
A nation’s descent into disaster needn’t begin with the outburst of a horrific war. At least not a conventional war with aerial battles and troops massing on the ground.
Indeed, in a nuclear-missile age, these sorts of confrontations may be bypassed. Think of sudden-death threats from North Korea. But a giant of a nation like the United States can be crippled in other ways, too.
On the non-military front, the removal of checks and balances in a system can dangerously overload its proper functioning.
And lack of social restraints can unleash the forces of mob psychology, inducing people to do what they wouldn’t if held to account for their individual actions. Think of photos of lynchings, with crowd members remorselessly facing cameras while victims hang from limbs in the background.
Political lynching has its own mob scenes, with the crowd members and cameramen working as one to destroy a victim who challenges their cozy cliques. It’s ironic if their reputed concern over racism leads them into inexcusable behavior that they might otherwise reject.
Boiling with resentment when outsider Donald Trump defeated the establishment-anointed leftist Hillary Clinton for president last November, neighbors in the dominant-media hood have been tightening their coils on Trump ever since. They escalated any word, any action of his that they disliked into an unlikely outrage.
How different from real outrages, like left-wing goddess Planned Parenthood’s massively selling the body parts of unjustly killed preborn babies. That kind of chilling scandal quickly was laughed off by dominant media. Someday the mob psychology of the pro-abortion crowd will make an arresting historical study.
And when Trump’s own presidential campaign had been hit by leftists’ blockades or blood-shedding beatings against his supporters, notably in Chicago, Fountain Hills, Ariz., and northern and southern California, dominant media didn’t shed many tears.
Amid demands in mid-August by liberal Democrats and their editorial allies that Trump and other Republicans bear the blame for Confederate Army officers in the 1860s, the dominant media thought it best to avoid recalling the overwhelming presence of racists including Ku Klux Klan officials and eugenicists among, yes, Democrats in the 20th century.
The Confederates, by the way, had fought against a U.S. Army commanded by the first Republican Party president, Abraham Lincoln.
Meanwhile, in an interview with The Wanderer on August 16, a native of suffering Venezuela focused on the mass devastation imposed on his homeland by the far left, socialists, and Marxists, likening them to a “boa constrictor (that) has squeezed the life out of the country . . . a Cuban-style regime, and the world knows it.”
The man, who moved to the United States in the 1980s, asked to use the pseudonym Carlos Rodriguez because he still has family members in Venezuela who could be targeted by rulers there.
The late revolutionary Venezuelan socialist strongman Hugo Chavez said he was going to make everyone equal, Rodriguez said, but now they’re all poor. “You have a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
Around the world, it seems, leftists stress the need to impose “equality,” but the result is decline and misery.
“You have a regime that destroyed a beautiful country. Not a perfect country and not a perfect system,” Rodriguez said, but a nation with a substantial middle class where life was enjoyable.
Venezuela has “one of the highest murder rates in the world, in a country of 30 million people,” he said. “. . . You need to be looking over your shoulder because the possibility you will be robbed, shot, or killed is pretty darn high.”
When he left Venezuela, Rodriguez said, the nation’s bolivar unit of currency traded at 4.5 to the U.S. dollar, but after hyperinflation it’s 4.5 billion bolivars to the dollar.
There’s no reason to try to save for the future, he said. “There’s no savings. The paper (currency) is more useful to use it as toilet paper than money.”
People have to take entire packages of the devalued money if they go shopping, he said, and merchants don’t count it, “they weigh it.”
In 18 to 19 years, “they have destroyed a country completely,” he said. A nation with the largest oil reserves in the world has become a place where it’s routinely hard to get food.
A regular diet of meats, vegetables, and fish has disappeared, replaced by having to stand in line for eight to ten hours for corn flour, he said.
Venezuelans “have lost an average of 19 pounds,” he said.
But such misery beyond U.S. borders doesn’t seem to be a warning to left-wingers who prefer to tear down a society rather than build on achievements.
When President Trump dared tell the truth about battling between politicized crowds over racial grievance in Charlottesville, Va., on August 12, dominant media raged at him some more for daring to supply facts they declared off limits.
They preferred a misleading picture where white racists beat peaceful protesters.
After all, these media had lied and contrived about their favorite issues like massive abortion literally for decades. Why shouldn’t such propagandists think they could shove around Trump, like other Republicans, too? But Trump had not only the courage of pro-lifers but also the “bully pulpit” of the presidency and a contempt for cowering political correctness.
Go On Saying It
Nationally prominent conservative blogger John Hinderaker posted on August 15:
“Why does the press go crazy over a statement by President Trump that is patently true? ‘(T)here is blame on both sides.’ Because left-wing violence is becoming a prominent feature of our political scene, and the Democratic Party press wants to cover it up. Murderers inspired by Black Lives Matter have attempted to kill, and in several instances have actually killed, policemen.
“Antifa fascists, doing their best Nazi brown-shirt imitation, have rioted in cities around the country, smashing windows and attacking passers-by,” Hinderaker said. “And, of course, Democratic Party activist and Bernie Sanders campaign worker James Hodgkinson attempted to assassinate congressional Republicans, grievously wounding the House majority whip, Steve Scalise….
“This is, I think, a winning issue for President Trump and his allies. Any time the Democrats scream, ‘You can’t say that!’ the best policy is to go on saying it,” Hinderaker said.
Sanders quickly disavowed Hodgkinson’s attack, and dominant media were careful not to dwell on it anyway.
Something else that dominant media had shown no interest dwelling on by mid-August was the rich array of highly placed, openly racist Democrats in the 20th century, including President Bill Clinton’s late mentor, Arkansas Sen. J. William Fulbright, and West Virginia’s late Sen. Robert Byrd, whose name is memorialized all over that state.
Clinton hadn’t been asked to do groveling penance for his slick maneuverings among Southern segregationists, but Trump, an entrepreneur with Jewish family members in hyper-liberal Manhattan, was treated as though he virtually wasn’t even a human being.
And who, aside from dominant media, might overlook the fact that no less than Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt put a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, Hugo Black, on the U.S. Supreme Court?
Even though the successful civil rights acts of the mid-1960s are just over a half-century old, and the Civil War ended 152 years ago, the boiling grievances being stirred in 2017 by leftists would leave one thinking Southern U.S. harbors still are filled with slave ships, with auctioneers going aboard to size up manacled human cargo.
The point of civil rights laws was to move toward a better future, not cast in iron the corpses of the past, to be dragged out daily as if they’re a living presence.
Who could have believed it in 1965 if he were told that despite the passage of rights laws then, people in the 21st century would have far rawer resentments than Civil War veterans from both sides who got together in the 1890s to reminisce over their battles?
However, when the ever-more leftward Democratic Party of today yearns to recover the majorities it willingly tossed away, it seems to think its only hope is firing up mob battles and hostilities best put to rest.
What should be examined about the Charlottesville violence is how the very partisan Democratic governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, and his high command allowed the antagonists to battle each other instead of having the necessary police presence to keep them apart.
During left-wing Barack Obama’s eight years as president, there were serious enough racial confrontations, including Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore. But Obama’s adoring media didn’t come howling after him to repeatedly make him the guilty centerpiece of the rioting and demand his groveling before cameras, as they do Trump.
Obama, moreover, did nothing to remove Civil War statues that suddenly are supposedly so offensive after he has left office that they must be yanked down or scooted away during the dark of night. This is only raw left-wing politics amplified by the dominant media echo chamber.
A Lost Generation
As for the future of Venezuela, Rodriguez told The Wanderer he isn’t hopeful.
The government confiscated people’s guns, he said, and “Cuba is just sucking the life out of Venezuela. They are leeches. . . .
“I see oppression, I see hunger, I see death,” he said. “I see a country that has lost close to a generation now,” with its children being indoctrinated by government propaganda. “I see Cuba. It’s grim.”
Dramatic contrasts in well-being have been plain between socialist and non-socialist systems next to each other, like North and South Korea, and East and West Germany, but leftists “still hang on to failed systems and failed ideas,” Rodriguez said.
The Venezuelan dictatorship “has taken control of all the means of communication . . . the Castro, Cuban model of misinformation, control, and repression,” he said.
However, he said, people are so disgusted by the government that they don’t hide their attitudes. “People are not afraid. . . . You see people just insulting the heck out of this government” on YouTube.
“. . . People are open. They are not afraid to say it like it is.”
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