Everyone knows it: the death of George Floyd was just a pretext. The rioters who continue every night to wreak havoc in Portland, and who are poised to engage in new orgies of destruction all over the country don’t know much and care less about Floyd. They’re quite open about engaging in a “revolution” with the goal of destroying the existing order and replacing it with an authoritarian Marxist regime. But what we are seeing today is not new. Its seeds were planted decades ago. Now the question before us, if we want to preserve the United States as a free society, is what we must do to counter this violent, hate-filled movement.

There will be no easy fix. The Left’s long march through the institutions began in the 1960s and has ended in total victory; only a reverse march through the same institutions will ultimately overcome the catastrophic effects of the Left’s advance. The leftist stranglehold on the educational system is a big part of the problem: the Antifa and BLM barbarians of today learned their hatred at our colleges and universities. Our children have been taught to hate the land of their birth. Who didn’t think this would bear bitter fruit? There was some indignation among conservatives over the 1619 Project, which portrays the entire American enterprise as racist, oppressive, and hateful, winning the Pulitzer Prize, but that was just the culmination of decades of miseducation and propaganda disguised as education. I wrote Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster as an antidote, to remind Americans, or show them for the first time, the heroes who made America great -- and the failures and sellouts who got us into this fix.

But the education most of the rioters have received has made them abjectly incapable of thinking rationally and evaluating claims on the basis of their logical coherence and supporting evidence. No amount of careful reasoning, no amount of evidence is going to convince most of the rioters that their rage is based on false premises, because they have been carefully educated throughout their lives to feel rather than think, and to believe that America is a nation of deep injustice with a shameful history and an equally condemnable present. It doesn’t matter that the claims that the rioters and their defenders are making are false. It doesn’t matter that police brutality affects people of all races. It doesn’t matter that thoroughgoing civil rights legislation has made “systemic racism” a thing of the distant past.

The rioters know America is evil because they have been taught it all their lives by virtually every authority they have encountered, and those authorities have also taught them that those who tell them otherwise are stupid, contemptible, and operating out of ulterior motives. This is true of the establishment media as well as the educational system -- not to mention the corporate culture, the entertainment industry, and more. As long ago as 1962, Richard Nixon famously complained about biased press coverage during his campaign for Governor of California in 1962 when he said, “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.”

The propaganda machine that did him in was in its infancy then. Now it is infinitely more powerful, and most people still take its power for granted. No one bats an eye when Democratic Party operatives such as George Stephanopoulos and Donna Brazile, and a host of others, go into the “news” business. It is taken for granted that every reporter for every major publication, every last one, is a hard-Left ideologue.

This has consequences far beyond simply giving only one side of the story and doing everything possible to make President Trump look as bad as possible. Government and law enforcement officials at all levels today have no problem appearing at functions of groups such as the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which the media consistently portrays as a “civil rights” organization when its agenda is in fact deeply subversive.

But they would never be caught dead at a conference of a group opposed to jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women, and if they did have the temerity to show up at such a gathering, they would have to answer to a hysterical media lynch mob enraged at their appearing at a meeting of a “hate group.”

All that is just a small part of a very large problem. If all this isn’t rolled back, the calls for revolution will get louder and shriller, and eventually prevail.

Can it possibly be done? Not all at once. But one step that could be taken now is the stripping of all federal funding from all universities and colleges that suppress all points of view that dissent from the leftist line. Another is a thoroughgoing reform of primary and secondary school material, such that it once again tells the truth about our nation, which will naturally make students proud to be American.

PBS and NPR, as just two more leftist propaganda mills, should also lose all federal funding. Let them survive on their merits if they can. And as for the rest of them, the legal protections that all the social media giants to maintain a monopoly on the means of communication must also be taken away. The self-appointed guardians of acceptable speech must be swept aside. Let the people determine for themselves who is telling the truth and who isn’t.

And as for the entertainment industry. Turn it off. Or watch movies from the 1940s and 1950s (which are better than the new ones anyway). If John Cusack and Robert de Niro want to lecture their audiences with hate-filled socialist agitprop, turn them off. If enough people did this, they’d feel it – and maybe a clever entrepreneur will arise in Hollywood who will realize that there is a great deal of money to be made from people who don’t want Leftism and anti-Americanism shoved at them in every movie.

Recover a sense of our history, our values, our culture, and teach them to your children. Our young people will not defend what they do not value. Learn in Rating America’s Presidents why America is even worth defending.

These are just a few general notes. There is much, much more that must be done. Yet none of this is even on the table now. If the nation is to survive, however, these things must be done. This fight isn’t over. And if the riots have shown us anything, it is that free Americans face a ruthless and determined foe. We must be no less resolute in the defense of truth, justice, and freedom.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 21 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.

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