The Facebook Revolution
I joined Facebook during the Corona Lockdown of 2020 to help publicize my new web-site, which I started after publishing my last book Divide the Country, that same year. It was a busy year with the shorter hours for shops, the vaccinations, (I have had four!) and the extended closures of government offices. The employees and tourists stayed home, and in that vacuum, the character of street-traffic in the downtown area altered, as roller-bladers, skateboarders, and cyclists took over, turning the streets into a post-apocalyptic, alternate-reality place, devoid of cars.
As I immersed myself in the culture of Facebook, I found myself reading more posts by left-wing bloggers with names like Moneyless Society, intersectionelle, and Progressives for the People. Their spiritual forebears worked as underground revolutionaries in the turbulent 1960s and '70s. Odd to see Facebook promoting the revolutionaries to the mainstream of American culture, although the outlandish message remains more or less the same: long on payback and expropriation, short on forward-moving policies and clueless about maintaining a modern, functioning society in an uncertain world. The simplistic message remains the same as it ever has--soak the rich, distribute their ill-gotten gain; but the tenor of the FB bloggers has a threatening creativity, with themes like: "Drown the bastards!"
Exhorting the masses to steal billionaires' money is one thing; suggesting that we throw them to killer whales or just drown them is extortion. Do we really want to live with that kind of threat hanging over us?
I do not know why the Republican Party or right-wing legal organizatiosn do not protest, why they don't complain to Facebook. They just tune out their fears, close their Facebook accounts and so on. For their children, however, it is not so easy. I am guessing that drug-use among young people develops from the fear they feel in the face of so much hatred; and most of them keep in touch with each other over FB and other sites, so they can't really avoid seeing it everyday.
In my last book Divide the Country, I suggested that we divide our Disunited States. Other writers have said similar things, and they fall on deaf ears. By the time this new revolution moves to a violent stage, it will be too late. So we still need to divide the U.S. Let the Left govern its People's Republic. I suspect Republicans will have to do all the work to divide the country. The Democrats have little sense of an independent country of their own.
However paranoid or resentful the bloggers are about Republicans and wealthy people, they lack the intentionality and personal courage to do much more than bitch and threaten. They draw back from achieving anything on their own. In fact, any reference to "separate from" or "different than" brings things to a head. The bloggers obviously fear the Right cutting them off, more than they do racism and sexism. Damned if we do; damned if we don't! Like a toxic relationship. Their demands, for all their vitriol, operate on the level of a revolt at a day-care center.
Do Republicans really want to risk their future by insisting on a farcical unity? Our situation reminds me of the verse in the book of Ezekiel 13:10: "They have seduced my people, saying 'Peace!' where there is no peace." We are at war with the Left! We tolerate it, wishing they would leave us alone; but they won't. As I scan the bloggers' posts, I marvel at how they network and use similar rhetorical devices and images--the killer whale, for instance.
Der Drahtzieher: "the man who pulls the strings"
I have read as much as I can about Nazi propaganda and have seen the same horrible caricatures of capitalists in Germany; so that one can only wonder how much the modern American Left draws its artistic ethos from Nazi-art motifs. Nazi propaganda shows a fat, heartless Jew spending an afternoon reclining in his vault full of cash, while regular Germans go hungry. It's the same deal, I tell you. Republicans can have no modus vivendi with the Left. We are only fooling ourselves.