Where have all the crazies come from?
A long time passing, they were swarming everywhere — hippies, radicals, pacifists, appeasers, native-born haters of America, protesters all. Then, like noisome cicadas, they seemed — but only seemed — to fade into the welcome silence of obscurity.
Now they are back, with renewed vengeance. Ugly echoes of anti-war curses and childish chants ricochet from the 1960s.
It’s the same new same old, all over again.
Today’s inheritors of those earlier cults of subversion, clad appropriately in pink, gain entry to Capitol Hill hearings not to observe and understand but to take turns making braying asses of themselves, delighted to be hustled away. They migrate around the country as ranting rent-a-mobs. They giddily cheer front groups intent upon vilifying the best of America by smearing it as the worst of America. They knowingly publish falsehoods furthering the radical agenda, to make lies by repetition appear accepted truth. They get elected to Congress, where they dance like jumping jacks when multimillionaire radicals who fund their pockets say so.
Is it really war that has them all so hot and bothered? No doubt some of the newbies honestly believe this is what gets them out of bed in the morning . . . well, late in the morning.
However, the string-pullers of these willing, unhappy, frustrated, screwed-up puppets, have far-deeper depths of calumny and sedition coursing through their aortas. Those marionette strings trace back over three-quarters of a century to a trio of sources: academia, masscomm and the failed, elitist, vicarious revolutionaries of the angry Marxist movement in the 1930s-‘60s who couldn’t revolt their way out of a wet paper bag.
To grasp what’s transpiring in leftland today it’s necessary to recall what it was like then.
By the 1930s, even in the Great Depression, the heyday of the pitifully few syndicalists, who advocated seizing the means of production by violent means, had passed. In their place sprouted the bitter harvest of Marxism, imported from abroad, where hardcore communists, disciples of Marx, Engels and Lenin, were busily “building socialism in one country,” the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Only in closets of “progressivism” was Marxism stylish. Very few blatantly and loudly proclaimed themselves communists, or even socialists. They found safe haven in the American labor movement, some Ivy League campuses and the Democratic Party’s New Deal. They hid behind the skirts of a “united front against fascism.”
Impressionable college students found it thrilling to drink beer with professors who, when not looking nervously over their shoulders, were egging on the new generation furtively to attend clandestine meetings and soak up how vile was the country that gave them those privileges.
Certifiable foreign agents of Moscow worked diligently on American campuses to recruit card-carrying Reds. By the early 1940s, the fashion was to oppose Nazi Germany by supporting the USSR. Then, when Hitler and Stalin surprisingly signed their nonaggression pact, the Communist Party line did an abrupt 180. College radicals were hard put to sell that. And when Hitler tore up his pact with Uncle Joe and invaded the Soviet Union, pure-bred communists went to ground.
The next blow came when Stalin’s hideous crimes were laid bare to the world. The penultimate crusher was when the Berlin Wall came down. The coup de grace was the collapse of the USSR. Radicals were left homeless.
In what would have made Charles Darwin proud, American leftists learned to survive by mutation. Communist Party membership cards became museum pieces. What were once ideological, if not actual, communists became “respectable.” They affected the costumes of radical environmentalism and passionate pacifism. With no socialist state to suck up to, they sublimated by indirectly excusing and in effect supporting America’s newest enemy, global radical Islam.
They emerged from their holes, assuming places of comfort and influence in university faculties, left-leaning newspapers, magazines, movies, television, and Internet blogs.
Today’s new crop of college students may think they are all wrapped up in the latest pop culture. Poor dears; it’s the same garbage by different names.
Running like soiled threads through this disgraceful tapestry are a couple of warmed-over ideologies that exercise enormous influence in contemporary leftist dogma.
Although actual anarchists are scarce as hen’s teeth, there is still a strong compulsion among contemporary leftists to assail, malign, defame, weaken, and tear down foundations of American society, especially religion.
These nihilists are to be found flocking to replace free-market capitalism, broad liberal education, and democracy based on individual independence and responsibility with — what else? — taxpayer-funded dictates.
They behave as though they want the state to do it all, but in their honest moments what they really mean is they want it all, everything, displaced not even by a socialist government but by total anarchy — the absence of all moral values and institutions of accountability.
If you are into niche marketing, you will have noticed yet another segment of radicals at work in this country today. They are latter-day closet disciples of the old Trotskyites, enemies of Stalin within the Marxist camp who believed in worldwide socialist revolution as opposed to Stalin’s concept of solidifying it first in one country.
What really distinguishes these inheritors of Trotskyism is their devotion to making things worse before they can be made better (by their definition of “better”).
This sneaky dogma is what lies not far below the skins of those radical university professors and their graduates who have gone on to greater things — editing publications, polluting movies and television, making war on religion and electing and influencing “liberals” in Congress. That’s why you see them wishing, and laboring for, America’s defeat on every hand, abroad or at home. They can’t wait to say or do something outrageous against their own country.
Is that fantasy? Not at all. You can see these maggots burrowing into the halls of Congress and standing in line on debate platforms, waiting to be tossed a contrived question that might help them wind up in the White House.
When Vice President Dick Cheney came to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville to address a public audience his remarks were repeatedly interrupted by a handful of students’ profane shouts alternating from the balconies on either side of the hall.
Cheney kept right on reading from his text. Eventually, campus cops escorted them out. Nothing unusual about any of that. Such obscenities occur every day on campuses.
During and after the students’ outbursts, the university president resembled a wax dummy on the platform a few feet from the vice president of the United States of America. Moving nary a muscle, he sat mute, not once rebuking the disruptors or apologizing publicly to his honored guest or to those in the audience. Yes, that kind of craven silence also transpires every day in this country.
Do parents who send their children off to college for an education — at considerable price and sacrifice — not know this stuff is going on? They rarely stand up and say, “Hold everything! That’s not why I’m paying this outrageous tuition.”
Those students’ acting out in the hall was no accident. Somebody put them up to it. Even money it was a radical faculty advisor hiding behind tenure. That’s how it works.
Where have all the crazies come from?
That’s where. That’s how they got here again. And that’s why.
John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is a regular columnist for NewsMax.com.
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