What is going on?  Is the left going bonkers?  Mostly peaceful protesters blocked the ICE office in Portland, Oregon.  Protesters drove Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen out of a D.C. restaurant.  Woke young women everywhere are reciting the magic words "F--- Trump."  And then the mean-girl owner of a Virginia restaurant told presidential spokeswoman Sarah Sanders she didn't want her in her Meryl Streep clique and to get out of her restaurant, because transgender policy in the military.

Let us leave aside my prediction that this is a replay of the sixties, when the left last thought the Progressive Millennium had arrived in the wake of civil rights and protesting the Vietnam War.  And then had its head handed to it.

The fact is that leftism is a militant religion that wants to make war on its Satan and all his renegade angels in the nine circles of racist, sexist, homophobic Hell.

Waging war on Satan works pretty well as long as you work on your own personal demons.  But many people prefer to work on other people's demons.  That is what the separation of church and state is all about.

Now, back in the old days, after thirty years of the Thirty Years War, the Deep State of the time decided that the combination of religion and war was getting a bit out of hand.  For one thing, it had killed off about a third of the Germans.  So they appealed to everyone in the Euro aristocratic Deep State to dial back the appeal to religion.  They called it the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

But then the Protestant Dutch decided that Catholic France was too much of a threat, so they invaded England, taught them central banking, and launched a second Hundred Years War from England to teach the French a lesson.

So the French invented the modern secular revolution, the Reign of Terror, and efficient execution to teach the Rosbifs a lesson.  And then they invented the modern Man on a White Horse, Napoleon, to rescue them from their totalitarian Hell.

Again, the aristocratic Deep State got together and decreed a Treaty of Vienna to cool all the jets in Europe.  That lasted until the rich sons of the bourgeoisie got woke to revolution and started the whole thing over again.  Only this time, in 1830, the rich kids decided to make a musical, Les Mis.  And then there was 1848, and a new generation of rich kids.  Only this time, no musical, just a Manifesto.

While all this was going on, the Brits and the Yanks were putting the finishing touches on The Great Enrichment, a deep, dark conspiracy so immense that it proposed to raise incomes by a ridiculous 3,000 percent in 200 years.  And whaddya know: they succeeded!  Check it out at my updated Great Enrichment page right here (note that the chart is a log chart, so U.S. annual per capita income goes from $1,100 in 1820 to $30,000 in 2010):

Do you see all the arcs of history in that chart?  Some of them are a bit jagged.

At the end of the second biggest jag in that chart, World War II, the global Deep State decided to deep-six the religion of aggressive nationalism as practiced by the nation-state and rule without the consent of the nationalist mob.  How is that working out, Deep-Staters?

Now, I was at the Seattle stop on the Jordan Peterson road show last week, reported here.  What Peterson is saying is that none of us just views the world as facts.  We all view the facts and interpret them through our values, our religion.

So all our lefty friends are doing is looking at, e.g., little children on the border or transgenders not in the military and deciding, through the lens of their values, that the facts require peaceful protest to bend the arc of history toward justice for these victims and refugees.  And no dinner for Sarah Sanders!

They deny that there are other lenses and that other good people can have different values and see the facts through a different lens.  If you know only one lens, then it is easy to give Clinton a pass and throw the book at Trump and throw people out of restaurants.

Not surprisingly, humans have developed maxims that address this hypocrisy.  We all know them: physician, heal thyself.  Judge not lest ye be judged.  Clean your room.  And then there is the long-form version:

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

That was 2,000 years ago.  What did they know of modern leftism?  So here is a new one for the ages:

"Activist, protest thyself."

Christopher Chantrill (@chrischantrill) runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.