We are living under a regime that's increasingly totalitarian.  And it is using an insidious strategy — call it disinformation, propaganda, gaslighting, indoctrination, or outright lying — to achieve the leftists' political and social goal of a "Great Reset" of America.  The regime's enforcers, or boosters, are the media, academia, and Big Tech, who together control the narrative with faked statistics, slanted semantics, and endless repetition.  They also deploy the psychological tactics of intimidation, shaming, and canceling.  At the center sits the government, but the chain of command — who dictates to whom — is often unclear.

"Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth" is a principle often attributed to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.  In America today, "woke" social justice warriors are using a continuous barrage of lies to achieve their Machiavellian agenda.

Four recent, egregious lies come to mind.  In June 2020, Gordon Klein, a UCLA business school professor who has taught at the institution for forty years, was suspended for refusing a student's request to provide an easier exam for black students.  Black students, it was propounded, were emotionally distressed after the death of serial felon George Floyd in Minneapolis.  The email exchange between Klein and the student, which went viral, was deemed "hurtful," and the professor was unreasonably branded an "insensitive bigot."  Antonio  Bernardo, the school's dean, organized a smear campaign against Klein and sought permission to fire him.

Klein stood his ground, saying he was shocked by the student's request, which he found "deeply patronizing and offensive" to black students.  He also assessed, rightly, that granting the request would violate the California constitution's prohibition of "race-based preferences in public education."  But such has been the effect of woke indoctrination that, incomprehensibly, students called for his removal and gathered 20,000 signatures on a petition demanding that he be relieved of his teaching duties.  In its eagerness to be seen as woke in the current racially charged atmosphere, UCLA chose to ignore the abject harassment of its professor, sided with the crybullies, and suspended Klein.  Fortunately, an academic senate committee ruled that instructors are entitled to refuse requests to change grading schemes, and Klein was reinstated three weeks later.

But the retaliation against Klein and others continues.  The professor, who was denied a merit raise and is suing UCLA, says the controversy devastated his consultancy practice.  Apparently, businesses — like large numbers of college students and faculty — value being seen as woke over scholarship, justice, and integrity.

In another case, nodding to the nebulous concept of "cultural relativism," a federal judge in Detroit defended female genital mutilation (FGM), a procedure banned since 1996 in the U.S.  The judge, Bernard Friedman, in 2018 declared the ban on FGM unconstitutional, then (on Sep. 28, 2021) threw out the feds' case, accepting that the secretive procedure performed on nine minor girls, aged 7 to 12, was merely a "religious ritual."  The lead defendant, Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, denied performing FGM and referred to the procedure as benign "shaving" — whatever that means.  Federal prosecutors had acknowledged the existence of a "secret network of physicians" who were performing the ritual as "part of a religious obligation and cultural tradition" of the Dawoodi Bohra community, to which the girls, Dr. Nagarwala, and other accused belong.

Survivors of the procedure have described it as demonic.  They say they have physical and mental scars to show that it went beyond just "a nick" or "shaving," and that it amounted to "gender violence."  But even though the U.S. Constitution does not provide for absolute freedom of religion and deems certain religious practices crimes, Judge Friedman thought otherwise.  His 2018 decision declaring the ban unconstitutional had been appealed by the U.S. House of Representatives, and in 2021, the STOP FMG Act was signed into law, giving federal authorities more power to prosecute those who perform the procedure.  But with woke judges like Friedman at the gates, de facto FGM might well become permissible.

The third incident is about the debacle in Afghanistan.  The only person under investigation for America's avoidable surrender to the Taliban is Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, a decorated Marine who's in the brig for telling the truth about the Kabul airport suicide bombing and calling for accountability from military leadership.  This while Biden has armed the terrorists with $83 billion in U.S. weapons and stranded thousands of Americans and Afghans who contributed to the U.S. effort in country.  The incarceration of Scheller contrasts sharply with the absolving of Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the author of the disastrous withdrawal.  This is the same general who bashed Trump and the Republicans, promoted BLM, and called up his Chinese counterpart to say he would warn of any American attack.  A patriot has been silenced; a traitor is free to pursue his woke agenda for the military.

Perhaps the most bizarre of logic-defying anomalies that are becoming commonplace is the National School Boards Association (NSBA)'s letter to the Biden administration demanding that anti-terrorist laws such as the PATRIOT Act be used against parents protesting against curriculum content and school mandates.  Parents have of late been extremely vocal against the teaching of the Marxist Critical Race Theory (CRT), the use of sexually explicit material in the classroom, the promotion of gender fluidity, and implementation of severe COVID-19 restrictions.  The NSBA has asked the FBI, the Secret Services, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to "investigate, intercept, and prevent the current threats and acts of violence" by whatever "extraordinary measures" necessary.  Mischaracterizing the First Amendment right to assembly and protest as "hate crimes," it has demanded the removal of protesters from school grounds.

Social justice warriors use such hyper-charged rhetoric about reasonable dissent to indoctrinate students and to marginalize and censor parents who object to their subterfuge.  Virginia's Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Terry McAuliffe, even argued that parents have no right to tell schools what to teach.  Vetoing legislation that gave parents the right to decide on books used in schools, he said, "I'm not going to let parents come into schools, and actually take books out, and make their own decision."  Even when the books contained sexually explicit material.  Not unexpectedly, U.S. attorney general Merrick Garland has instructed the FBI to mobilize against dissenting parents.

The examples cited illustrate how the cultural Marxists' agenda has infiltrated our schools, universities, military, courts, and beyond.  Together with the government, the woke cabal functions as a quasi-totalitarian regime that advances a deceitful agenda and suppresses — or "cancels" — all contrary views, disguising the truth beyond recognition.  The dissonance, and concurrent unease, of the condoning of BLM and Antifa's violence, the exoneration of military incompetence and treason, and the criminalization of legitimate dissent represents a series of "through the looking glass" moments for the average "unwoke" American.  As ex-radical and conservative writer and policy advocate David Horowitz declares, "inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out."

Image: JSMed via Pixabay, Pixabay License.

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