A couple articles you should check out from John Wilder (the Wilder, Wealthy and Wise blog) and from Sam Jacobs (Ammo.com).
Wilder lays the background by describing how the communists intended to destroy America, as explained by Yuri Bezmenov (a Soviet defector) in the 1980’s. Bezmenov was a KGB agent, and the strategy he described was the one being followed by Soviet intelligence. The steps to be followed were demoralization (removing the moral underpinnings of the society), destabilization (economy, social relations, defense), a crises forcing acceptance of a new government, and normalization (or consolidation of power). Each step was anticipated to require a different amount of time to accomplish, and Wilder explains each step and the time frame in more detail in his article.
The article by Jacobs, "Woke Capitalism: How Huge Corporations Demonstrate Status by Endorsing Political Radicalism," is a fascinating read in its own right, but it ties in here because it discusses the demoralization and destabilization phases. I'll just quote from Jacob's article:
Before going any further, we should spend some time defining what “wokeness” means.
Wokeness is a kind of shorthand for an area of the American political left that is obsessed with identity politics. This is, as the name would imply, the politics of identity. Thus, people are not rational actors, nor are they necessarily economic units. Rather, they are little more than a collection (or, in the parlance of this ideology, the intersections) of skin color and séxuality.
Socioeconomic class might enter into this, but if it does, it’s generally as an afterthought. While Marxism might play some influential role, the wokeists are far more likely to locate the revolutionary subject in, for example, trans-identified black men than it is the working class.
One can understand the hostility of the “woke” to the Bernie Sanders campaign in this context: it is much more revolutionary under the guidelines established by wokeism, to put more racial minorities with unusual séxual identities on the board of Lockheed-Martin and Goldman-Sachs than it is to provide for greater economic equality on behalf of their workers.
The bedrock of wokeness is not classical Marxist socialism, but something called “critical theory” and in particular its variant “critical race theory.” This has its roots in the Frankfurt School and an early 20th-century Italian philosopher and politician named Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci’s big idea was that cultural power preceded political power. Thus, to have a Marxist political revolution, one first needed a Marxist cultural revolution. This was to be accomplished by a “long march through the institutions.” What this means is that leftists were to infiltrate every institution of significance and gain power within them.
We can see the result of this idea today. While American leftists bear little, if any, resemblance to Marxists of old, they have penetrated our institutions and dominate culturally – in academia, in entertainment and increasingly in the economic sphere as well. If one were to read the Communist Manifesto, there are a series of demands at the end, most of which have come to fruition such as universal public education, a progressive income tax, a national bank, and the industrialization of agriculture.
This isn’t to say that there is a massive Gramscian conspiracy with thousands of members. Such a thing would be completely impossible to prove or disprove. However, the kernel of the idea has taken root, in part thanks to bona fide promotion in academia, and in part because it simply seems to have largely been a successful operation.
Thus “critical theory” is effectively a sociological philosophy and method that involves constant ideological attacks on Western civilization. Its guiding principle is that Western civilization is based on subjugation, dominance and tyranny. This takes many forms including “racism,” “patriarchy,” “heteronormativity” and “cisséxism” – all of which are predicated upon weaponized guilt.
Weaponized guilt is essentially taking those elements of Western and Anglo-Saxon culture, which prize even-handedness and “fair play,” and turning them against the culture itself. Indeed, the selection of the name “Black Lives Matter” is a masterstroke in weaponizing guilt: The only possible disagreement (or so say the advocates and allies of the movement) is that you don’t think black lives do actually matter. But, of course, except for extremely isolated, marginalized and numerically insignificant pockets, virtually everyone agrees that all lives have the same value. Indeed, it is a cornerstone of Western civilization and Christian teaching that this is true. It is nearly axiomatic. The Declaration of Independence declares that the basic equality of men is “self-evident.” No one would even know where to begin “arguing” this, simply because it is so accepted as a fact.
He continues by discussing how and why large corporations spread wokeness, and it has nothing to do with bettering humanity, but is another way of grabbing power and enriching themselves. As Jacobs observes, "woke capitalism is very much the free market in action. There is a benefit to the erosion of certain social values that have maintained Western civilization for hundreds of years. Woke capitalism is an attack on the nuclear family and Western civilization while providing nothing in its place. After all, who makes for better consumers than childless atoms whose only values are the prevailing cultural diktats of the day?"
But, Jacobs explains, the results will not be pretty:
Inflaming racial animosity between whites and everyone else will have dire consequences for the nation as a whole, especially during a time of declining wages, increased political instability and eroding social solidarity. The end result of goading the American public into viewing their problems as largely stemming from race, rather than economics, might well have profoundly dire consequences for both the social fabric and for the individuals that constitute it.
And that takes me to Rod Dreher's article this morning, "If It Can Happen In Kenosha…". Taking the riots to smaller communities can have a purpose. "The point," Dreher writes, "is that the 'At least Trump will keep us safe' meme is not working for the people of Kenosha. And how do you know it’s going to work for you in your city, should things kick off there?" In other words, it is a type of coercion to get people to vote for Biden in order to stop the pain (i.e., the riots). Maybe it will work, maybe it won't. But what will voting for Biden get us? Although Dreher doesn't say it phrase it this way, it looks like it will bring us the mark-of-the-beast style economic system (see Rev. 13:17):
I’ve had this working theory, for as long as I’ve been thinking seriously about the arrival of soft totalitarianism — basically, since just before I started writing my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies — and trying to figure out how it is likely to arrive in full force here. As you will be able to see in my book (it comes out September 29; pre-order it at that link), the progressive left has been moving steadily to conquer American institutions, especially cultural institutions. This is not something that politics can really stop. But it has been happening for some time, and it has accelerated this year.
If Trump wins, I’m not sure how this will play out. If Biden wins, he will face a lot of pressure to restore calm and order. Because he will already have the buy-in of institutional elites, who are not only progressive, but who also are so grateful to him for not being Trump, Biden will move aggressively to implement the rudiments of what James Poulos calls “the Pink Police State,” and I call soft totalitarianism. Put simply, the state will begin to use technological means to manage discontent via something like China’s social credit system. Major corporations and financial institutions will cooperate with the state to marginalize and ban right-of-center groups and individuals — and the usual civil libertarian groups, having gone totally woke, will not object.
Am I exaggerating that the end of this is a mark-of-the-beast system? Well, the mark on the hand or forehead is analogous to the mark that a devotee of a particular god might have carried during the Roman period, and is a display of alignment with that particular belief. It is, in fact, the antithesis of the followers of Christ bearing His seal on their foreheads (see Rev. 7:1-8). Remember, the purpose of the woke campaign today is not merely to obtain tolerance of Leftist positions, but to obtain your support. That is what "silence is violence" and "it's not enough to not be racist, but you must be anti-racist" means. You will be forced to adopt and support their positions ... or else. As Jacobs observes, "wokeism does not simply operate in the background of the rest of society."
You cannot simply ignore the cringe-inducing woke commercials on your television and not click the frankly hateful and racist articles of the woke online. Your compliance is a required aspect of wokeism. Think back to the social media phenomenon of large companies denouncing alleged “white supremacy” with a black square. Compliance with this was required, as if one were painting blood over their threshold to avoid the plague of the firstborn in ancient Egypt.
And the current Leftist's have engaged in some ingenuous marketing by naming their group "Black Lives Matter." Of course the lives of black people matter. But that isn't the purpose of getting you to say the phrase. It is to coerce or trick you into acknowledging or affirming support of the Black Lives Matter group and its social and political stances; because if you don't agree that "black lives matter" you must be a racist. And what do they believe? According to their website, they believe in critical theory:
We are guided by the fact that all Black lives matter, regardless of actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity, gender expression, economic status, ability, disability, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, immigration status, or location.
We make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead.
We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.
We build a space that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered.
We practice empathy. We engage comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts.
We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work.
We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.
We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).
Just this morning, we heard of a Washington D.C. BLM mob harassing white diners and demanding that they (the diners) raise their fists in solidarity. Is raising your fist a harmless action? No, because the raised fist denotes a certain belief system--international communism. Sarah Hoyt, writing about this incident, noted that she has been through this before, in a different country. And she stated:
I’m not going to lift aloft the fist that’s the symbol of the regimes that killed at least 100 million human beings. Yes, the fist means communism. Even if they tell you it’s because they care so much about black lives. To me it is the equivalent of being told to give a Nazi salute. So this happens to me, I die with both middle fingers aloft.
And she adds: "Telling you the fist is black power or concern for black lives, is like telling you the nazi salute is because you want to pet kittens. I will not sully myself with either gesture."
So you'd better be prepared to choose whom you will serve. (Joshua 24:15).
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