Author, columnist, speaker

The Real Battle -- and Opportunity

By Robert Knight

 The growing divide in the United States isn’t merely political. This runs far deeper.

It’s a struggle between those intent on using government and corporate power to turn America into a Marxist version of Sodom and Gomorrah, and those resisting this radical transformation.

Political pundits and Republican moderates who dismiss the “culture war” as a sideshow are missing it. A wave is building. People are awakening to the immense damage that the left is doing on all fronts and are pushing back.

The destruction includes the open border and mass illegal immigration. Americans are being hit with ruinous inflation due to policies flowing from Democrats’ climate hysteria and war on fossil fuels.

Then there were the lockdowns, shot mandates and the many now-exposed lies about COVID from health officials.

Finally, there are the hideous chemical and surgical experiments on confused children by a medical establishment in thrall to transgender insanity.

A lot of previously disengaged people have had enough. Led by Glenn Youngkin, an articulate cultural conservative who is now governor, Virginia Republicans flipped the house and all statewide executive offices in 2021. They made “woke” schools and parents’ rights a central theme.

To understand the rapidity with which recent cultural shocks developed in America and in Europe, think of being on a roller coaster. The car is slowly hauled uphill until it reaches the apex. Then it’s released and quickly achieves breakneck speed.

Cultural Marxists have been hauling us up their fun ride since the 1960s, when they began directly attacking marriage, family and Judeo-Christian values in the name of doing one’s own thing. In quick succession, they hatched “free love,” no-fault divorce, welfare, pornification, abortion on demand, gay rights and now transgender madness.

As families unraveled, especially in the inner cities, the government grew exponentially.

Democrats, whose party is now controlled by the hard left, have good reason to promote all this. When faith and families are strong, centralized power is less enticing, especially to a people steeped in constitutionally guaranteed, God-given rights.

Marx’s Communist Manifesto co-author Friedrich Engels knew what he was doing when he called for abolishing families more than 150 years ago. Mom-and-dad, married families had to be eliminated so that mega-states could rise without hindrance from a strong, independent citizenry.

Marx’s vision of totalitarian socialism came to awful fruition first in Russia’s Bolshevik revolution of 1917, which birthed the communist Soviet Union. Then it blossomed in Hitler’s National Socialist Workers Party takeover of Germany in 1933, eight years after he published “Mein Kampf.” It conquered China in 1949.

Americans once instinctively understood the threat posed by socialism. They saw it correctly as a false religion based on envy that begins with pixie dust but ends in coercion and eventually mass murder.

China under communist rule bested the Soviet Union in sheer numbers of victims. Today, the Xi Jinping regime is committing genocide against its Uyghur minority and harvesting organs of dissidents for sale. The UN has documented this.

It’s not like we haven’t been given notice about where America is headed without a major course correction.

Xi Van Fleet has seen communism up close. She witnessed the bloody Cultural Revolution under China’s Mao Tse Tung, history’s worst mass murderer. In America, she has helped expose radical indoctrination in public schools, beginning in Virginia’s Loudoun County. She sees critical race theory and sexual confusion as the spearpoint of communism. Evidence abounds that she’s right.

The left has commandeered most institutions, from colleges to academic journals, the medical guilds, the teachers unions and even the American Library Association (ALA). They are all promoting the transgender madness.

But here’s where pushback is becoming most visible. Female swimmer Riley Gaines has sued Lia (nee William) Thomas over his invasion of the women’s pool and women’s locker room. Ms. Gaines is also campaigning against Kentucky Democrat Gov. Andy Beshear, who vetoed a bill barring male-born athletes from female scholastic sports.

That legislation also banned giving children under 18 cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers or irreversible gender surgeries. The Republican-led legislature overrode him. Another 19 states also have enacted such laws.

State libraries in Montana, Missouri and Texas have severed ties with the ALA, whose president is Emily Drabinski. She tweeted in April 2022 that she is “a Marxist lesbian who believes that collective power is possible to build and can be wielded for a better world.”

Go ahead, liberal media. Spin that.

Meanwhile, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA’s ironically named Office of Intellectual Freedom, was featured in a video advising librarians on how they could reject story hours sponsored by BRAVE Books, a Christian publisher of faith-based children’s books.

This includes actor Kirk Cameron’s books, which he has read in libraries that haven’t banned him. These typically attract hundreds of parents and kids.

Many libraries stage drag queen story hours featuring men in exaggerated female outfits strutting in front of children. The ALA has no problem with those.

It took a lot to wear down America to get where we are: two world wars, a sexual revolution, disastrous wars in Asia, a swollen government and a corrupted mass media and educational establishment.

The latter two combined to germinate the monster of “wokeness” that will destroy our children’s future if we let it.

Note to Republican campaign strategists: If you’re too timid to oppose biological men competing in women’s sports and permanent surgical altering of the genitals of innocent children, you’re not worth whatever you’re being paid.

Illustration by Greg Groesch / The Washington Times.