Stop Going Along to Get Along

[P]eople historically known as “revolutionaries” or “communists” are best understood NOT by the ideological doctrine they espouse, but by the emotions they harbor—namely, resentment, a sense of grievance, and a desire to destroy institutions and people.

John Leake, Courageous Discourse Substack

July 29, 2024

Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit…Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

Matthew 7:20 KJV

The U.S. Constitution has only been in effect for 237 years, but is the oldest written constitution still in use. Prior to its ratification, the history of the world was that of governance by monarchs, dictators, tyrants, and tribal lords, with the will of the people not being much of a consideration. The constitutional republic established in the U.S. in 1787 truly is “the great American experiment,” and has led to the most opportunities for the greatest number of people, in the history of the world.

Those who profess to cherish freedom and the intrinsic value of each individual need to realize something:  in today’s social and political climate, going along to get along will not preserve these values. Freedom, family, religion, beauty, history, cultural traditions, and truth are all under attack right before our eyes. The future that will be experienced by our children and grandchildren hinges upon our response to these assaults.

Author G. Michael Hopf wrote in his post-apocalyptic novel Those Who Remain, “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” In explaining that the previous quote is “an oversimplification of generational theory,” Hopf writes:

In the quote itself, 'men', is really a reference to 'mankind'. With that said, let's breakdown what a strong man is.  A strong man is someone who isn't only physically up for the challenge...A strong man is also virtuous, regimented, focused, driven and self-less. Their goal is to care for those around them and strive to build a sustainable and value driven society built upon common beliefs. They are purpose driven people.

A weak man, is someone who tends to be selfish and even narcissistic. Their only concern is their own pleasure or desires. They are literally the polar opposite of a strong man, and their values are driven by a need for 'self' above all else. They tend to value being entitled to what a wealthy society has provided without ever daring to contribute to it. In fact, a weak man will often complain that the current system has failed them even though they live in relative comfort. Think of the person who goes to Starbucks, and on their iPhone complain about capitalism on Instagram or Facebook. These people have forgotten history and have no knowledge on how their surroundings have come to be, in fact, they will declare the system should be dismantled. That declaration leads to an ushering of 'hard times.' (emphasis added)

Hopf’s description of the entitled whiners and social justice activists who are making so much noise in public life and creating havoc these days is quite apt. Missing from his description is the majority of people – those who either don’t agree, but stay silent, or the ones who hear the rhetoric and are sincerely driven to feelings of guilt and shame about their ancestry and even their very existence. It’s easy to manipulate decent people who are horrified at being called phobic, white privileged/adjacent, selfish, narrow minded, planet destroying, systemically racist colonizers.

I’m reminded of the 2016 movie Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Why? Because two extremely powerful and brilliant superheroes are turned against each other by a mutual villain who plays them against each other to take down Superman. Watching the show, I felt that both Batman and Superman should have been smarter. They should have recognized that Lex Luthor was whipping them into a frenzy for his own purposes, to the detriment of both superheroes and  humanity in general. We should all be smarter about considering the motives of those who would restructure our lives.

In the real world, resentful agitators talk equity, inclusion, fairness, prosperity for all by reducing the rich, success through removal of merit based education and hiring, open borders, global health, restructuring of the traditional family, lived experience, and many other concepts. A lot of what the neo-Marxists say sounds reasonable to the reasonable person. But as John Leake said in the quote at the beginning of this article, revolutionaries are not best understood by what they say, but by the emotions they harbor – “resentment, a sense of grievance, and a desire to destroy institutions and people.”

During the past year we’ve seen increasingly brazen and foul displays of what happens when the majority is directed by those who would destroy everything. From the Satanic dance number at the Grammys, to the eerie and garish Biden White House Christmas presentation, to the controversial segment of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony, we see a few examples of where “Going along to get along” takes us. It’s time to realize that we’ve been had.

What we’re observing today is Marxism all over again – the same Marxism that drove Russia and then China into the darkness of communism.

Without getting into motive and other issues, it is highly interesting to note these excerpts from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech at the plenary session of the 18^th Valdai Discussion Club on October 22, 2021:

We look in amazement at the processes underway in the countries which have been traditionally looked at as the standard-bearers of progress. Of course, the social and cultural shocks that are taking place in the United States and Western Europe are none of our business; we are keeping out of this. Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, ‘reverse discrimination’ against the majority in the interest of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal…

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. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. 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. By the way, Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs…

Putin continues:

The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed and proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”

Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause, but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into ‘reverse discrimination’ that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin colour. I specifically asked my colleagues to find the following quote from Martin Luther King: ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by their character.’ This is the true value. However, things are turning out differently there…

Zealots of these new approaches even go so far as to want to abolish these concepts altogether. Anyone who dares mention that men and women actually exist, which is a biological fact, risk being ostracized. ‘Parent number one’ and ‘parent number two,’ ‘birthing parent,” instead of ‘mother,’ and ‘human milk’ replacing ‘breastmilk’ because it might upset the people who are unsure about their own gender. I repeat, this is nothing new; in the 1920s the so-called Society Kulturtraegers also invented some newspeak believing they were creating a new consciousness and changing values that way. And as I have already said, they made such a mess it still makes one shudder at times. (end quote)

When the President of Russia compares today’s Woke culture to the failed Marxism of the Bolsheviks, it would be wise to give that some thought. People remember Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto for a variation on the theme “Workers of the world unite!” What they are not so familiar with are the words that come right before, “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” (Emphasis added)

Marx was anti-life and anti-human. All his talk of the “proletariat,” the workers, was written at his desk. Marx never labored significantly in a field or a factory, was physically filthy – refusing to bathe, was unfaithful to his wife, and did not work or provide for his own children. His four sons died before Marx and his wife, and Marx’s two daughters ended their lives in a suicide pact with their husbands after Marx’s death. But Marx was good at stirring up grievances, and resentments, and calling for the overthrow of all existing social conditions.

The neo-Marxism we see today is an amended or extended version of the original Marxism, incorporating elements from other intellectual traditions such as critical theory, psychoanalysis, or existentialism. Still, the emphasis behind neo-Marxism is “the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” Everything – religion, the arts, the family, culture, traditions, social norms, governments and national sovereignty – everything.

Film producer Mikki Willis was on a documentary tour promoting Bernie Sanders’ Presidential campaign in 2016 when he was struck by the number of Che Guevara shirts, Mao Zedong hats, and communist sickle and hammer stickers he saw on the laptops and water bottles of young volunteers. Willis relates:

I asked one kid, “Are you trying to be edgy? What is that on your laptop there?” He pulled me behind the curtain and said, “We’re all democratic socialists, but what we really want is communism.” I laughed and said, “You’re joking, right?” He said, “No, but I can tell by the way you’re reacting that you think it’s the old communism. No, it’s a different kind of communism. It’s one that’ never been attempted and it’s benevolent.”

I drill in and ask, “How does it work? What is good about it? Why is it different? It basically led to the state owning and controlling everything.” He says, “We’re going to redistribute the wealth.” I reply, “Ok, where does that money go? How does it get redistributed through the government? You’re giving the government more and more of your tax money, and more and more power. Do you understand this is not new communism? This is what has always happened.”

I knew enough about this to at least say that. But this was a shock for me. Long story short, I came off the Bernie tour broken hearted. It was my political awakening and I wanted nothing to do with politics ever again. That’s when I started to do my research and study what was really going on with this thing called democratic socialism. All roads trace back to China and influence from other Soviet Marxist ideologies that have already been attempted and have been atrocious around the world. (emphasis added)

The drive to destroy all the institutions and traditions of the West is driven by Marxist principles and the nihilism that comes with them. For example, it’s evident in the infamous phrase from the World Economic Forum (WEF) predicting our future in 2030: “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy,” a phrase prompting so much outrage and ridicule that the WEF disabled the link to the video and claimed the concept “started life as a screenshot, culled from the internet by an anonymous anti-semitic account…” except it wasn’t. It came directly from the WEF’s “8 Predictions for the World in 2030.” Disingenuously, former WEF Managing Director Adrian Monck claimed it was an example of “how disinformation is created and why it’s essential not to perpetuate its spread.”

The WEF is bent on a Great Reset of the world, stating, “A true recovery from COVID-19 will not be about putting things back together the way they were: we need to ‘build back better’, to 'reset'…” Specifically, the WEF wants a “great reset of capitalism.” Indeed. And just who are these wise, wonderful, self-disinterested leaders who will direct the entire globe to “act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions?” Why, the beneficent, unelected leaders of the WEF and all of their associates, of course.

Neo-Marxism is evident in the race-dividing teachings of Ibram X Kendi, in his book How to Be an Antiracist, when he states, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” He might as well shout, “Down with the bourgeoisie, up with the proletariat!” Neo-Marxism is behind Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project that rewrites all of American history strictly through the lens of slavery and oppression.

We see this devaluing of the individual, and of human life in the World Health Organization’s push for the One Health initiative. One Health considers the well-being of plants and animals as equal with human beings, and identifies normal human activity as the driver of “disease threats.” This view of humans as blights on the planet ties in with radical global initiatives such as Net Zero and 1.5°C, in which elites’ plans for limiting inexpensive, effective fuel, and controlling the food supply will reduce quality of life and impose poverty on millions more.

The response to the Covid-19 pandemic, enforced worldwide, was the most extreme example of the devaluing of the individual in modern history. All of a sudden everyone was part of the collective, with no say in their own health – right down to being mandated to take an experimental vaccine into their bodies. People were deprived of the right to work, socialize, gather for weddings and funerals, attend school, comfort dying loved ones, gather with families, attend church, travel, or engage in any of the normal activities of life. The Covid-19 pandemic embodied what every tyrant in prior history has wished for – a means of gaining power and control over the entire world. It was indeed an attempt to “forcibly overthrow all existing social conditions.”

The anti-life tenets of Marxism are evident in the push for abortion, in the desecration of children through trafficking and “trans rights,” in the disrespect of religious values and beliefs, in the devaluing and even destruction of merit-based achievements, in the redefining of language, in the diminishing civil discourse, and in the studied loss of knowledge and culture.

The disrespectful spectacle at the Paris Olympics was explained by its organizers, post-performance, as a celebration of community and tolerance, stating “There was clearly never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group.” The organizers insisted that they weren’t  referring to the Last Supper at all, but to “Dionysus, the Greek God of celebration,” and said, “If people have taken any offense, we’re of course really sorry.” Spoken in the gaslighting format of emotional abusers, they basically said, “It’s your fault that you were offended. You’re too sensitive.”

As professor and clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet states, “[S]uch a ceremony shows what a society identifies with, such a ceremony represents the essence of the societal model that organises it. What is problematic, in other words, is not that a society is tolerant towards exotic and in some cases perverse types of sexuality and morality; what is problematic is that [what] this kind of morality represents is essence. That is why the displayed bad taste is not something to simply turn a blind eye to and shrug off; it is indeed something significant.”

Jonathan S. Tobin, editor-in-chief of Jewish News Syndicate adds, “The inclusion of that segment must be seen as part of a broader cultural debate about something very serious. Only at a time when the political left is waging war on the canon of Western civilization and seeking its replacement with an intersectional, secular neo-Marxist orthodoxy would it be not merely possible, but considered mandatory among our cultural elites, to pour scorn on traditional faith.”

Meanwhile, First Lady Jill Biden of the questionable White House Christmas had only words of praise for the opening ceremonies, which she called “spectacular.” An apparently fake X post had U.S. Vice President and presidential candidate Kamala Harris stating, “What an impressive show by all of these beautiful and diverse people at the Opening Ceremony of The Olympics!” Perhaps Kamala did not post praise for the “beautiful and diverse” blue naked man, dancers, and drag queens, but she recently appeared on “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars” in an episode taped before Pres. Biden dropped out of the 2024 election. Kamala, whose father was a Marxist, espouses equity and the Marxism-based phrase, “what can be, unburdened by what has been,” making it likely she would be drawn to a ceremony unburdened by respect for religion and traditional values.

Biden and Harris aside, many were not so positive about the Olympic ceremony. The Roman Catholic bishops of France expressed dismay at the “scene of derision and mockery of Christianity,” and Pope Francis expressed he was “saddened” by the “offence done to many Christians and believers of other religions.”

Tobin also commented, “As is always true for those who promote the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), only some people deserve to be included in the new secular religion. Christians are obviously not welcome, and that should trouble everyone, whether or not they share this faith.”

The Turkish Presidency posted on X, in referring to the Last Supper parody that, “[H]uman dignity was being trampled on under the guise of freedom of expression and tolerance, that religious and moral values are being mocked, and…this offends Muslims as much as the Christian world.”

Investigative reporter Debbie Lerman notes that the mockery of Judeo-Christian values in Paris “was a sinister message from our creepy globalist overlords. We control the narrative. Nothing you believe or hold sacred is relevant at all. Religion, science, art, history, sporting competitions – we will crush it all…”

We, of course, do not have to let them. It’s not too late to push back against the purveyors of tried and true bad ideas, but we need to speak up instead of staying quiet. It’s also essential to remember that the forces behind the attacks on Western ideals and traditions find it useful to divide us and keep us stirred up against each other. But we can choose to act with clarity of thought and decisive action while still treating those with whom we disagree with grace and dignity. Now is a good time for all of us to remember the statement often attributed to Ghandi, “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.”

The Paris Olympics opening ceremony was perhaps the most visible display thus far of what happens when the aggrieved few are given the megaphone. In their rush to appear open and fair-minded, many in society are attempting to forcibly accommodate and mainstream that which should remain an individual’s lifestyle choice.

For example, in a misplaced effort to be inclusive, the Massachusetts Senate just wiped the words “paternity, child born out of wedlock, his, man, woman, mother, and father,” from state law, stating that the Massachusetts Parentage Act “dismantles archaic legal barriers to basic parenting responsibilities for modern families.” Rep. Hannah Kane stated, “Recognition of legal parentage should not be contingent upon outdated norms or narrow definitions.” Governor Maura Healey signed the bill into law on August 9, 2024.

Former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines, commenting on the Massachusetts Parentage Act wrote, “It’s always been about corrupting our language, destroying the family, then taking away our rights & freedoms.” This assault on language is being pursued at the highest levels as seen in the CDC’s list of preferred terms. Disguised as “equity,” the constant shifting of language breaks down a shared culture, dividing generations, stifling discussions, and providing fodder for charges of “microaggression” at every turn.

The author who uses the pen name El Gato Malo suggests that, “People are not angry about ‘you be you’ they are angry about ‘you do what I say and give me stuff because of who I am…Cultural coercion only begets culture war. This is not about inclusion, it’s about enraging people by attacking that which they hold dear and seeking to erase the words and institutions they cherish.”

Which is where we all come in. Those of us who believe in the “live and let live” mantra may not have been prepared for a group of neo-Marxists who don’t believe in that at all. We may not have recognized that everything from the Covid-19 response, to the burgeoning of DEI, to the redefining of language, to the spectacle at the Olympics, is part of the same push to impose a Great Reset on the world. But now that we know, we can stop going along to get along, and start speaking up and pushing back.

El Gato Malo writes, “Perhaps we can all stop wrestling on the conservative/liberal axis and remember that most of us are predominantly ‘pro-civilization’…There remains a big tent of reasonable people around the ‘you be you, I’ll be me let’s accept each other (or at least leave one another be) and leave the kids out of it’ axis….Keep sight of that instead of being dragged into the assumption that ‘the other side is everywhere and evil’…The acts of a few extremists and outliers are so coloring our sense of our society that we’re failing to find the vast comity and commonality that truly does reside at its center.

It can feel overwhelming and discouraging to recognize that there’s a concerted effort to reduce the world to a place where all that we cherish is degraded, and freedom is replaced with centralized control by out of touch power-hungry elites.

A lot of sincere people have unwittingly bought into the neo-Marxist agenda being pushed by those who prey on our desire to be fair and open-minded, but we can reverse these anti-life trends. Let’s start today by seeing things for what they really are, speaking up, and being strong people who work together to restore and preserve a world that offers its best to all of us, and to future generations.