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In what was, for its time, considered to be an innovative and original film, The Sixth Sense tells the story of a troubled child psychologist who attempts to counsel a child who claims to be able to see ghosts. As the story unfolds, it turns out that child can, indeed, see ghosts, solving several murders and similar mysteries, to his shrink's consternation. Only at the end of the movie do we get the Big Reveal - spoiler alert: the psychologist is himself dead and a ghost, which is why the child can see him. He just hadn't realized it yet.
As half of America burns while the other half is imprisoned at home by their own lie-fed fears, we can't help wondering whether conservatism, "the real America," Americanism, "The American Way," or whatever you choose to call it is in that same unhappy situation - in fact dead, but only now becoming aware of that reality.
No "Land of the Free" would tolerate being commanded by executive diktat to stop working and stay home without so much as a law being passed saying so - and most likely not even then.
No "Home of the Brave" would allow mobs of thugs to rampage, burn and loot through dozens of cities for weeks on end without ferocious armed opposition. Far from that obvious, rational response to criminal activity, we see governors demanding that troops and police not be used to restore order, but that the disorder be allowed to proceed unmolested. After all, they're only destroying property which can be replaced - the costs of such replacement being no concern of theirs, or even, a fitting punishment for sins centuries old.
Is America as we've known it dead? In order even to properly frame this question, we need to first consider what America is.
It's easy to find "the United States" on a map, but the borders of that place have shifted over time without altering what the country was. Just because a place has a name doesn't make it a country: Antarctica is very large, has a name, and has lots of resources, but it isn't a country because nobody calls it home.
It's also possible to have a nation that doesn't appear on any map: the Jews were recognized as a distinct people for thousands of years even though they had no designated homeland, and today the Kurds are clearly a nation though there is no "Kurdistan" on the United Nations list. Both Jews and Kurds know who they are strongly enough to fight to preserve their identity, and that's what matters.
In common with most other countries around the world throughout history, the primary means of becoming a Jew or a Kurd is by being born to Jewish or Kurdish parents. A Jewish person might be born in France but still be Jewish, just as an Englishman might happen to be born in India but was still English both in their own mind and in everyone else's.
America has always been exceptional in this regard. To be an American does not require being born here, nor is it dictated by who your parents are. Up until very recently, the most important determining factor of being an American was wanting to be one - that is, by accepting the beliefs of universal freedom and universal opportunity that are often summed up as "Americanism." In this regard, America was almost more like a religion than a normal nationality - America was always willing to accept true believers as converts once they obeyed our laws, worked hard, assimilated, learned English, and settled in.
It's no coincidence that what we are seeing on our streets today more closely resembles a religious upheaval or conquest where all memorials and houses of worship of the old faith must be overthrown. Where once Americans worshiped the memory and great deeds of such luminaries as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and, yes, Christopher Columbus, their names must now be stricken from every tablet and every wall as Year Zero of the new era begins, exactly as the French revolutionaries defaced the statues in the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
And for those of us who watch in horror? Well, Richard Regan, a Republican candidate for the Michigan state house, found out the hard way:
“For the love of god do not vote for my dad.”
The daughter of a candidate for the Michigan state House wrote those words in a now-viral tweet...
Mr. Regan, a Republican, said in an interview with The Hill on Thursday that his daughter’s denunciations were unsurprising and implied she had been brainwashed at university.
“A lot of students when they go off to these liberal university campuses … she went to the University of Colorado in Boulder — and you know, they just kind of get sucked into this Marxist, communist ideology and she and I just don’t see eye to eye when it comes to the whole socialism, communism, Marxist philosophy,” he said.
He told the Hill that “her big thing has to do with the systemic racism,” an idea he also said “I don’t buy into” at all.
In a statement posted to Facebook, Mr. Regan was a tad less critical of his daughter’s politics.
“I am happy that she feels confident enough in our relationship to express her opposing thoughts so publicly,” he said.
Mr. Regan presumably loves his daughter and has sacrificed time, tears, and treasure for her wellbeing over many decades. When she was accepted to the University of Colorado in Boulder, no doubt he celebrated with her. Now he sees the price: she has, in effect, been torn from his family and re-planted into a different alien culture which he finds anathema.
Per historic American practice, even through his pain, he defends her right to reach her own opinion no matter how utterly wrongheaded, false, bigoted, and destructive it might be. And if she felt the same way about his views, they might - might - be able to continue on together, agreeing to disagree.
As we all know, though, tolerance is exactly what "social justice warriors" fight most strongly against: tolerance of any disagreement whatsoever, or any opinions other than their own. Fail to bow down to their particular dark gods, and you are an infidel fit only for the slaughter.
How has it come to this? The same way as in any other religious overthrow - parents fail to inculcate in their children a solid, abiding belief in the faith of their fathers.
We know little of Mr. Regan other than what's been reported on him in the news, an information source well known to be less fair and less accurate than the scratchings on restroom stalls. Nevertheless, from the simple fact that he is a Republican candidate for office, we can assume that he cares about the good governance of his country; as a candidate for a comparatively low office, he clearly is willing to serve without high financial compensation. This speaks well of his character and good intentions.
And, as a Republican nominee, he must at least mouth allegiance to the Republican party platform; it would seem probable that his daughter heard about the merits of Republican policies in her home as she grew up. Yet, as an adult, not only has she cast those aside, but she is doing all that lies within her power to kneecap them and humiliate the father who gave her life.
She could simply have kept her mouth shut - but no! She's made him a national laughingstock.
We could ask, what sort of vile political philosophy demands this kind of family betrayal, but we already know the answer - for some years now, the Left has demanded of its followers that they reject and repudiate their nearest and dearest who don't toe the line.
Today, we see calls for them to be snitched on to the government if they refuse to obey the unAmerican, unConstitutional, and economically devastating diktats of covid shutdown. Is it really that much of a step further to children turning in their parents for political crimes, as the old Soviet Union lionized?
Like all of us, someday Mr. Regan will pass from this mortal plane. When that happens, we suppose, his genes may carry on into the future, assuming his daughter chooses to reproduce.
But his beliefs won't - they will end with him. He failed to reproduce them in his offspring, just as surely as a childless person's family line comes to a permanent end when they die.
For some decades now, American Christianity of all stripes has been experiencing this problem - the departure of young people from the churches of their youth is well known. There's been some hope that they'd return to the faith of their fathers when they have children, and that does happen sometimes, but statistically, the decline is permanent and devastating.
In politics, it's long been known that older people vote more conservatively than younger, but there's also been the assumption that younger people get more conservative as they have families and grow older. Indeed they do - but all the same, each succeeding generation is one notch further left. Their parents failed to inculcate in them an understanding of and love for the nation that gave them the freedoms they now take for granted.
What sort of person would ever vandalize a statue of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, or Ulysses S Grant? Only one who has no understanding of history or of the immortal greatness of these men... and that's only because nobody has taught it to them.
Those great men themselves understood the fundamental importance of teaching history and morality. George Washington flatly said so in his Farewell Address:
Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports... Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.
Can anyone say he was wrong, or that his foresight was in any way in error? Our culture now celebrates acts and views that Washington would have views as so profoundly immoral as to be inexpressible in words - and, sure enough, "political prosperity" is exactly what we have not got. For two centuries, Americans heeded the wise advice of the Father of his Country; today, our children tear down his statues. Our economic prosperity is based on Washington's moralistic ideas and will die with them.
For decades now, our taxpayer dollars have been expended in indoctrinating America's children in what, for shorthand, we'll call the 1619 lie: the profoundly false and evil idea that America is fundamentally and irredeemably racist and bigoted. What's worse, they've been indoctrinated in the blood libel that the white race is itself inherently evil. This is precisely the same bigoted evil that led Southern whites to argue that Negroes were inherently inferior just as Hitler's arguments that Jews were evil.
The New York Times' writer Nikole Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for promoting this wicked slander, which is now being officially taught in schools nationwide at your expense. What inspired her to spit on the nation that gave her the opportunity to rise to such heights? In her own words:
The white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world... [The whites] lasting monument was the destruction and enslavement of two races of people. The descendants of these savage people pump drugs and guns into the Black community, pack Black people into the squalor of segregated urban ghettos and continue to be bloodsuckers in our community.
Yes, she went on to say that she didn't hate white people - she surely could have fooled us! Yes, as far as we know, she hasn't personally slain anybody of any color. But neither did Joseph Goebbels personally stuff any Jews into a gas chamber - he merely inspired others, just as evil but more physical, to do his dirty work for him.
There was a time when Hitler and his Nazi thugs were laughed at... until it was too late to stop them. They should have been spanked as children and told it's wrong to hate someone else because of their race, but because Hitler's parents and many other parents of that generation failed in their job of raising moral, decent children, millions of people died.
How many budding Hitlers now rampage across what was once our fruited plain? William F. Buckley thought the job of conservatism was to "stand athwart History yelling, Stop!" Perhaps so, but it hasn't worked: the time has come to literally stand athwart an onrushing mob, and compel them to stop by the use of whatever degree of deadly force is required to do the job.
Or before too many more years - months? weeks? days? - pass, it won't be statues of American heroes lying beheaded in the gutter.