INTRODUCTION
January 20, 2017.
Inauguration Day.
A very cold day in America.
It’s late January, so naturally there will be a chill in the air. The wind will whip through the crowds gathered in front of the U.S. Capitol building. However, the throngs gathered for this historic occasion will not be bothered by the cold. The true faithful wouldn’t miss this for the world. They’ve waited for this day for a long time. They’ve marched, they’ve chanted, they’ve occupied, from college campuses to urban centers, just to make this possible. Today, the foot soldiers of the American Leftist movement will gain their triumph. Today, Hillary Rodham Clinton will take the oath of office as the forty-fifth President of the United States.
On the stage with Clinton are the cast of characters who will make up her administration. There’s her husband, former President Bill Clinton—welfare reformer and signer of the Defense of Marriage Act, he’s easily the most conservative person on the platform. All he can think about, of course, is getting back into the White House, his old stomping grounds. He tries to remember if the interns start arriving on Day One. He hopes so. The sooner the better. His role in this administration will be mostly ceremonial—a few speeches here and there, a charm offensive ready for deployment when needed. He’ll have few official duties, and plenty of time for his own extracurricular activities.
Seated nearby is another familiar face: Al Gore. Once Bill Clinton’s Vice President, he’s returning now as Secretary of Energy. The man who made a career out of scolding Americans for their use of evil fossil fuels—while keeping his motorcade idling outside during his speeches—will finally be able to make his environmentalist dreams into reality.
Another Al isn’t far away: Al Sharpton, longtime activist for “social justice” and failed MSNBC TV host. The American public never quite caught on to the Reverend Al’s unique blend of shameless self-promotion and race-baiting on MSNBC—his ratings were always terrible—but his politics line up nicely with the new President’s, and he was a loyal mouthpiece on the campaign trail. So, he has been rewarded with the post of Secretary of Education. And his job is about to get a lot bigger.
Also on the stage is a man whose presence at this occasion would have seemed unthinkable six months ago—but that’s politics. He is former Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the committed “Democratic socialist” who ended up giving Hillary Clinton a run for her money in the Democrat primary. Despite being in his seventies—only a few years older than the new President—Sanders is revered by many as the fresh face of a resurgent American brand of socialism, which was firmly embraced by the new commander in chief in her drive to win at all costs. Officially, Sanders’s role in the new administration will be fixing “income inequality”—by any means necessary. However, the well-known friend to socialists around the world—who took his wife to the former Soviet Union for their honeymoon—is expected to advise Clinton on foreign policy matters as well, especially on how the United States can integrate more fully into worldwide collectivist movements.
President Hillary Clinton’s inaugural address will be a rousing one. As the masses listen below and watch on televisions around the globe, she will spell out her agenda for America’s long march into the twenty-first century. She will not speak of American leadership on the world stage—not even “leading from behind” as President Obama put it—but of simple “participation” in world affairs. We will end war, she proclaims to thundering cheers, by taking America out of the business of shaping the world’s destiny. After all, the new President will remind us, what right have we to tell other countries what to do when our own situation is so flawed? Ironically, in years past it was Hillary Clinton who led President Obama to topple secular dictators in the Middle East in favor of radical Islamic leadership.
She will then proceed to remind us of all the social ills that plague our fellow Americans—poverty, homelessness, stagnant wages, inflating health-care costs. She will waste no time in pointing out that these are all the fault of the greedy, heartless corporations that have controlled business and politics in this country for far too long. In another carefully delivered applause line, President Clinton will remind her audience that she is in office now in order to make sure the evil corporations pay for what they’ve done—in every sense of the word.
She promises the audience at her inauguration a brand-new era—an era without uncertainty, an era without risk, an era of absolute fairness and equity. The gap between rich and poor in America will no longer be bridged, she says, but the two sides of the canyon will be shoved back together. The seas will be un-parted. No American will be left wondering why their neighbor seems to have more than they do.
The crowd hangs on her every word, and cheers for every promise. This made all the “safe space” demonstrations and Occupy protests worth it. This is what they’d been fighting for. This is what generations of Leftists before them had been fighting for. President Hillary Clinton has shown them the mountaintop—but what does the path to the summit of socialism look like?
TWO MONTHS LATER
Two months after the inauguration, we start to see our first glimpses down that path. College students, back from their winter break and the exhilaration of the inaugural ceremonies, notice that things are a bit different on campus in the new Clinton era. College activists were the vanguard of the Clinton campaign army. While many campuses were divided between Hillary and Bernie Sanders in the primary, the #FeelTheBern crowd was soon won over once Clinton clinched the nomination and vowed to embrace her onetime competitor’s unapologetic brand of “Democratic Socialism.”
The Clinton team has rewarded their collegiate foot soldiers with some changes for which they have long clamored. One of the first acts of Al Sharpton’s Department of Education, which has dramatically increased its involvement with higher education institutions, is that “safe space” doctrines are now required on all American college campuses. Any speech that has the slightest possibility to offend another person is confined to certain “Free Speech Zones” in public areas or during certain programs. Speaking your mind outside of these areas will be classified as a “microaggression” and result in disciplinary action from the school and referral for prosecution in a court of law. This goes for students and professors alike, and anybody on campus can be brought up in front of student-run tribunals on charges of violating the “safe space” of another individual or of the university in general.
The goal is clear: to remake the American system of higher education into a breeding ground for future guardians of political correctness. It’s no longer about learning, about challenging yourself to think. No longer are American students expected (or encouraged) to live up to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s definition of intelligence—“the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” There’s only room for one set of ideas in the American mind now—the politically correct ones. And there’s no room for F. Scott Fitzgerald, either, for that matter. All he did was write about rich people.
This new American education will start even earlier than college. In the public schools, from kindergarten classrooms on up, the United Nations flag is now placed side by side with that of the United States. There is no more Pledge of Allegiance. Not only is it deemed exclusionary to the increasing number of kids born elsewhere, but it sends the wrong message. American children should now think of themselves first and foremost as “citizens of the world,” and as Americans second.
Even those in the older generations, well out of school, will have no problem getting access to the “right” information. More accurately, they won’t have a choice. In just the first few months of the Clinton administration, the American news media has already undergone a dramatic transformation. During the campaign, it was clear that every major news outlet—with some exceptions of center-right media—were unabashedly in the tank for Clinton. They weren’t just drinking the Kool-Aid, they were swimming in it.
After her election, it was decided that her cheerleading networks should simply drop their whole “impartial” act entirely. Why continue the charade of denying the reality of their bias when they can just join the May Day Parade already? In the interest of “fairness” and “progress,” mainstream media organizations consolidate themselves in a series of mergers, initiated and overseen by the government. The government then takes over the combined entities to create a single state propaganda mouthpiece, under the now greatly expanded authority of the Federal Communications Commission.
This takes so much guesswork out of the equation for consumers. This way, they won’t have to worry about conflicting perspectives. They can go to one place for all the news their benevolent Uncle Sam (or Aunt Hillary) deems fit to print. All the information is handpicked, vetted, and curated to suit the needs of the people—and their government.
Whose perspectives do get airtime under the new regime? Since all legal media is now effectively government media, many of the new “media personalities” are in fact government officials. Some high-profile members of the Cabinet host their own shows. Bernie Sanders gives “inspiring” lectures on the evils of pay gaps every Saturday and Sunday—Weekends with Bernie, they call the series. Al Gore’s 2006 environmental horror flick An Inconvenient Truth is shown frequently, with new commentary and interviews with the Secretary of Energy himself included to bring modern viewers up to date. Most kids will have seen the original—it will be required viewing in schools.
Schoolchildren, too, will be treated to frequent addresses by Education Secretary Sharpton, who also is back on afternoon television with educational shows that are strongly recommended for after-school viewing. Sometimes the Reverend Secretary will bring in special guests, like Professor (and former domestic terrorist) Bill Ayers to present his special 10-Part History of the United States. Grab the kids—it’s “edutainment” for the whole family!
Not only will everyone hear more from government officials, but we will hear more from the President herself. Between traditional media, which has now gone completely over to her side, and social media—where the White House bully pulpit carries a lot of weight among followers—we hear something from or about President Hillary Clinton every single day, on multiple occasions.
There’s a calculated reason for this constant intrusion. Team Clinton wants us to get used to hearing from them as much as possible. Soon, Hillary and her advisers will be more than just government officials making pronouncements. They’ll become trusted friends, and whatever message they’re spouting will be immediately accepted by viewers. More than that, consumers will welcome the idea of people from the government frequently beaming into their lives to discuss some matter of no doubt vital national importance. That makes eventual government involvement, and further government control, therefore seem necessary.
One of the many uses for a propaganda apparatus is the fomentation of crisis. And as veteran Leftist operative Rahm Emanuel said, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Early in her administration, President Hillary Clinton invents a crisis in order to achieve a longtime liberal policy goal. She declares that gun violence is a national emergency that threatens us all, and sets the Department of Homeland Security to the task of confiscating all firearms from law-abiding Americans until the “problem” is solved. The National Rifle Association is deemed a hate-mongering organization, and their Virginia headquarters is raided by federal agents. Yet the government is careful to point out that this is not a permanent “gun grab.” Citizens deemed trustworthy and obedient by the federal government may be able to get their guns back once the government determines the “crisis” is over, which will be sometime between now and never.
With the guns out of the way, the process of radical wealth redistribution begins. President Clinton made sure in her inaugural address to remind American entrepreneurs that they didn’t achieve hard-earned success on their own, and her Treasury Secretary, Bernie Sanders, soon tells them it’s time to spread the wealth around. A national minimum wage hike is put into effect, with no recourse for the small businesses forced to close by the new policy. Even entrepreneurs’ personal property is not safe; it’s been deemed that some of them have “too much.” That vacation home you spent your whole life working and saving for? You don’t need that—time to turn it over to the state.
The federal government may also come after your car, but for a different reason. Energy Secretary Gore’s department has been given sweeping new powers, and he’s tossing vehicles off the road left and right. The SUV that you load up to take your kids to soccer practice? It’s been outlawed by the Environmental Protection Agency. You’ll be provided with a voucher to exchange it for a hybrid, a cash rebate for a bicycle, or coupons to use on public transportation—your choice.
When none of these initiatives seem to be solving the unemployment crisis in America—and are even starting to make it worse—President Clinton turns to a solution that is as simple as it is elegant. It addresses the most glaring problem with one of the Left’s pet issues: political correctness. Unemployed Millennials and former Occupy activists—the people who got Clinton elected—are put to work under a new Homeland Security program designed to police hate speech. Any language deemed to be racist, sexist, or seen to promote inequality, patriarchy, and white privilege will now be punishable under the law. Citizens are encouraged to report any conversations or symbols that might trigger them. Power to decide what constitutes hate speech is delegated to a rotating council of Left-wing academics appointed by the President, and their powers are enforced by the roving gangs of activist thugs who were until recently unemployed. Their zeal for political correctness is such that it makes Mao’s Red Guard look like a church youth group.
When these gangs start raiding the homes and businesses of anyone they think has offended someone else, when non-regime-approved journalists are forced to broadcast in secret, when personal property is simply confiscated for violating new rules, people will start to look around at some point and start to wonder where it all began. It began on Inauguration Day, 2017, a cold day for America—when the chill in the air was nothing compared to the chilling effect on our freedom brought about by the rise of socialism.
* * *
These aren’t concrete predictions. Instead, let’s think of them as hypotheticals. The specifics of the scenario don’t even matter that much. It doesn’t matter whether the President of the United States is Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden or Mickey Mouse—as long as it’s someone who pushes a progressive, radical Leftist ideology, we are in danger. Radical Leftist attitudes have taken hold across many different facets of our culture, with the goal of forcing America steadily toward European-style socialism. This book aims to help wake us up to that threat. I still hope and pray that if we wake up in time, we may be able to avoid anything like the grim future I’ve just imagined.
Forced conformity, redistribution of wealth, a preoccupation with “fairness.” Does any of that sound familiar? Lots of books have been written and many movies made about societies that try to create a utopia and end up simply enslaving their people. George Orwell’s 1984 springs to mind pretty quickly. Yet there’s one classic example by the American author Kurt Vonnegut, which tears the whole false notion of utopia open in a concise, tight narrative. It’s a short story called “Harrison Bergeron,” first published in 1961.
“Harrison Bergeron” shows us what’s at stake when a society gets too preoccupied with fairness, when success becomes vilified. By the end of the story, it’s clear that most of the people in this society have lost most of their basic humanity. In the face of unspeakable tragedy, they just go on about their lives, so beaten down and “handicapped” that they cannot register or process simple human emotions. They are no longer conscious of what it means to truly be alive. All because their society—their government—would rather everyone be equal and soulless than some do better in life than others.
“Harrison Bergeron” is fiction, obviously. It was written, though, at a time when the shadow of communism was spread over large swaths of the world. It can be taken as the warning of a writer—a very eccentric and individualistic one at that—about the dangers of state-enforced egalitarianism that was so rampant in the collectivist societies of the time. And it’s no less relevant today.
The America we live in does not resemble the America I grew up in. Back then, we all recognized the beauty of the American dream, the radical notion that the embracing of hard work and traditional values was the path to prosperity and social mobility. Today many scoff at that notion. Socialism is cool now. Cool enough to allow a tome defending socialism—Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century—to become one of the most popular books of our time. It’s unclear when this backward ideology made a comeback, but in 2008, a Democrat from the academic socialist circles of Chicago, Barack Obama, won the election on a promise of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”1 Obama’s platform promised the use of cooperative radical changes that would fundamentally transform America, and it struck a chord with young people desperate for answers in a bad economy.
Three years later, raggedy, disheveled Millennials in bandannas and Che Guevara T-shirts took to the streets in America’s cities. From Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park to Oakland’s Ogawa Plaza they “occupied,” demanding free health care, free college, and freedom from personal hygiene and personal responsibility. While these modern-day flower children didn’t have any specific legislative goals, their demands were clear: a radical redistribution of wealth and reorganization of society. They demanded an America where the state used any means necessary to achieve equality.
We’ve seen radical experiments in equality before. For most of the twentieth century, members of both parties stood strong against the threat of Soviet and Chinese communism—both radical experiments in socialism. Men like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan made the case for American exceptionalism and called the Soviet Union what it was: an “Evil Empire.” It was through the determined efforts of men like that, and the superiority of the American system that we ultimately won the Cold War. In 1989, the Berlin Wall that separated East Germany from West Germany, and the free world from the Iron Curtain of Soviet communism, came tumbling down. Ronald Reagan famously told his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!” but before he could, Germans did, using anything they could find, including their bare hands. When the Berlin Wall fell, Soviet communism came down with it.
Nation after nation declared independence from the Soviet Union, and for the first time, the world truly saw the stark contrast between the free world and the totalitarian misery of the Eastern bloc. The West was dominated by skyscrapers, shopping malls, and supermarkets stocked with five of everything; the egalitarian East? It was dominated by dreary ghetto-style block housing, bread lines, and censorship. The contrast was clear. This should have been the end of socialism. It should have been consigned to the dustbin of history.
But it wasn’t. As time moved on, the prosperity America afforded us allowed us to forget about the prisons, the bread lines, and the secret police. We forgot about Solzhenitsyn’s tales of Siberian gulags and Stalinist oppression. The idea of something for nothing was apparently so appealing that we let slick politicians explain to us that socialism wasn’t so bad, that it was more Sweden than Stalingrad. Apparently, it worked. That’s perhaps the only explanation for an America where a Woodstock-era socialist Senator from Vermont who honeymooned in the Soviet Union during its darkest days was able to speak to packed crowds of young people across the country. It’s not just the kids, though. People who should know better are utterly clueless. When pressed on the difference between a Democrat and a socialist by MSNBC host Chris Matthews, Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz couldn’t come up with an answer.2 In defending his film Trumbo, which casts communist Hollywood collaborators in a sympathetic light, celebrated Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston attempted to apologize for Soviet communism by incorrectly stating that reviled dictator Joseph Stalin wasn’t actually a communist, but a fascist (as if he’d know the difference).3 It’s no wonder that a majority of young Americans polled today say they prefer to elect a “socialist” over a “capitalist.”
America’s elite universities were once fertile ground for debate where students discussed ideas that were both classical and experimental, traditional and controversial. Students demanded the right to free speech. A generation later, students are demanding freedom from speech. Now, college campuses are places where coddled Millennials go to get indoctrinated by 1960s radicals. Ten years ago we worried about liberal bias on college campuses, but today students are demanding it, calling for protection from conversations and symbolism that they deem “triggering,” a catchall term for anything anyone anywhere might find mildly offensive. Censorship has long been a tool used by the politically powerful to stamp out dissent and stifle protest—yet today’s kids, ignorant of the past, are demanding it!
There’s simply no mistaking it: American values are under attack. We face real threats from abroad, but there’s a more subtle danger that we often overlook: the collapse of the virtues that helped make this country great. They are precisely the pillars of our society that the Left knows they have to undermine in order to create their bleak, gray, egalitarian utopia. I know them well, not just because they’ve saved my country since its founding, they’ve also saved me. I was a kid who came from nothing, took some risks, and made a good life for myself and my family in a way that could only happen in America.
President Ronald Reagan famously said that “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”
But after President Ronald Reagan won the Cold War, the socialist threat is arguably more subversive. In their endeavor to radically reform American society, the socialist Left has used fear, shame, and class warfare to divide us. They recognize that doing so is essential to destroying the many qualities that have made America an exceptional nation since its founding. Those nine core values—grit, profit, manliness, thrift, individuality, dominion, merit, pride, and providence—are qualities that defined my experience in America and many others. They were essential to my own personal success, and restoring their primacy is key to restoring the American dream. Now is the time to wake up America.
Copyright © 2016 by Eric Bolling
