Our descent into madness …

That’s the only way to describe what’s happening. 

Antifa thugs physically attack innocent people coming out of a rally and are called “peaceful” protestors. Throwing rocks and bottles of urine at police, smashing windows and setting fire to cars is also called a “largely peaceful” protest.  Mayors are praised for ordering police to stand down while rioters loot and burn businesses; others for deciding they won’t comply with Federal immigration laws. 

Congress is being asked to outlaw “hate” speech – but only hate speech by some groups but not by others. The ACLU announced it will not defend free speech by some groups because it’s hate speech – this from the same ACLU that vigorously defended the Westboro Baptist bigots’ right to harass families burying sons and daughters who died while serving in our military. 

Social media networks are determining what is “hate speech” to be banned here, while also working with repressive regimes overseas to censor what can be viewed there.  Facebook and Twitter executives are deleting the accounts and postings of some “hate groups” but turn a blind eye to others and live-stream postings of beatings and even suicides, rapes and murders.  

We now have blacks at public universities demanding segregated, blacks-only dormitories and meeting spaces, and the right to exclude anyone who isn’t sufficiently black from those places. On one college campus, with that school’s administration’s blessing, black students and faculty had a day dedicated to excluding all whites from that campus.    

Meanwhile, public schools, libraries and even streets are being renamed, and historic statues and monuments are vandalized and torn down, because they honor long-dead segregationists.

Some want the monument memorializing Confederate soldiers buried in Arlington national cemetery removed – along with any Confederate symbols on their graves.  

A bust of Abraham Lincoln was recently set on fire in Chicago. Someone else spray-painted part of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Another doused a statue of Columbus with red paint. 

New York Mayor Di Blasio is seriously considering removing the Columbus statue from Columbus Circle in NYC because it offends some Native Americans and Caribbean blacks. He may also remove Grant’s Tomb because – despite defeating the slave-holding South in the Civil War, and later serving as a U.S. President – some think Grant himself was also anti-Semitic.

College and public university administrators support professors who spew hatred, including those calling for genocide on whites and murdering police. The same administrators allow violent protestors to silence conservative voices from being heard – for fear what those conservative speakers may say could incite violence.  Free-speech advocates on campuses are beaten by masked attackers who claim to be anti-fascists exercising their own right to “free speech.” 

Black Lives Matter activists and black entertainers promote killing cops – a popular BLM chant is: “What do we want? Dead Cops! When do we want them? Now!” A major movie star says he’d like to punch the President in the face.  A comedian poses with an ISIS-like picture of herself holding a bloody, severed head of Donald Trump and posts it online.

Elected officials call for the assassination of a sitting U.S. President. Celebrities get cheers for saying they‘ve thought seriously about blowing up the White House.  One gets cheers at an event for saying “When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?" – a clear reference to John Wilkes Booth.  And after a pause he added, "been a while, and maybe it's time."

I wish I was making this up but I’m not.

Some are quick to blame the events in Charlottesville for the sudden surge in violence and what can only be described as anarchy. The truth is it started long before Charlottesville; long before Trump was elected, in fact.  We’ve been heading down this maelstrom of madness for decades.

The far left and the left-leaning media have created a Frankenstein monster from a combination of myths, misinformation, manufactured outrage and outright lies. Now this monster stalks the land, apparently free of any moral compass or conscience.    

It’s frankly Orwellian, in many ways.

Free speech now doesn’t mean the right to express your views, no matter how hurtful or unpopular, but the right to stop others from expressing their views through violence and intimidation. There's long been a prohibition against inciting a riot or creating “imminent” danger like yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, under the guise of free speech.  Now, however, it’s perfectly acceptable to claim you’re expressing your right to free speech by inciting a riot, beating people and attacking police simply because you merely anticipate the possibility of speech and words you don’t want to hear.     

Freedom no longer means the Constitution will protect your right to believe what you want, worship or not as you wish, and live your life the way you want as long as you don’t harm others. Freedom is now subject to government approval alone: you can be forced by government edict to abandon your core beliefs, how you worship, how you live your life, or even how you run a business. All because your freedom may impinge on the freedom of someone else more politically favored.  

There’s no such thing as equality. Today, some are clearly “more equal” than others. Especially if you claim to be a victim. Being a self-described victim – or someone who asserts they are fighting to defend self-described victims – establishes a moral high ground in their mind that allows them to do whatever they want to whomever they choose with absolute impunity.   

Justice is no longer blind and even handed; instead of interpreting the laws or Executive Orders as written, some judges now divine motives behind laws or Orders to determine legitimacy. This reverses hundreds of years of legal tradition where the actual words, and the precise way they are written, were the only things that mattered. 

“Racism” and “racist” now cover more people and ideas than perhaps ever before in this country.  Unfairly, so, too.  Where once these were used almost exclusively to describe those who judged anyone and discriminated against them on the basis of their race alone, only whites – and especially conservative whites or Republicans of any race – are now automatically racists.

Anyone opposed to illegal immigration is racist as well.  Anyone who accurately describes our inner cities as urban hellholes – where minorities are killing each other in astonishingly high numbers, and poverty is higher than ever – is also automatically a racist.  Anyone who wants to improve education in our inner cities by closing failing public schools and giving poor parents the opportunity to send their kids to charter or magnet schools is also a racist.     

Curiously, those blacks who judge all whites based on their skin color are automatically not racist.  Blacks who judge all Asians based on their race alone are not racists. In fact, blacks can’t be racists at all, despite judging other groups based on race alone, because, well, they are black. 

Courts and Presidents and government regulators, not Congress, are creating de facto laws, in clear violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers.

And no one cares.  Unless, of course, it’s coming from a President and an administration with whom you disagree. When Obama and his administration did it, conservatives grumbled about executive overreach. But when Trump and people in his administration use the same tactics, the far left and media go berserk and fan the flames of violence in the streets. 

We are in a bizarre time in our nation’s history. 

There’s a collective blindness to what is actually happening, driven by a media that has devolved into a propaganda tool rather than a source of impartial news.  If one is to believe what our media are reporting, our country is awash in neo-Nazis and white supremacists, supported by Trump and fellow Republicans, who must be stopped – by any means necessary – or they will endanger Jews, gays, immigrants, and any people of color.     

The neo-Nazis and white supremacists in particular are the “oldest and darkest forces” Joe Biden decried recently in an op-ed.

Unfortunately, as usual, Joe is off base.  Neo-Nazis and white supremacists, as loathsome as they are, don’t really amount to much.  Their lunatic followers number in the hundreds, not thousands. Most often they have trouble getting a hundred supporters to show up, and even then they typically shout a few stupid things, wave a few dumbass signs, and go home. 

No, the real threat to Americans – the real “oldest and darkest forces” – are mobs fueled by emotion instead of reason. They don’t respect the rights of others, they want to rewrite history for their own purposes, and they prefer demagoguery to democracy to achieve their goals.     

It’s more than a tad ironic that so many of those using violence and destruction to oppose what they see as intolerance are themselves so intolerant of others.  With a mob at their back, they feel empowered to do disgraceful and despicable things they’d never do alone. 

When Trump noted after Charlottesville there was violence by both sides of the protests, he was widely criticized for implying a moral equivalency between the neo-Nazis and white supremacists and the counter protestors. He didn’t; he simply stated a fact borne out by video evidence.   

The "anti-fascist" mobs today, as in Charlottesville and elsewhere, use tactics startlingly similar to the Nazi Brownshirts of the 1930s. Yet they claim to abhor everything the Nazis stood for. They also claim to be fighting fascists, when they are in fact the modern incarnation of fascists.  

They have become what they abhor.  

That’s true madness. It can only end badly.