If you never watched the brilliant German movie, Downfall, do so.  It stars the late Bruno Ganz, whose portrayal of Adolf Hitler during his last days in his Berlin bunker was powerfully chilling.  Hitler was a psychopath, whose unshakable certitude and will were central to driving National Socialism’s capture of the German people.  Both were also central to the numbing devastation that Hitler’s hubris brought to Germans in the end.      

Seeing the movie again, and having had read various accounts of Hitler’s and the Nazi’s rise and fall, I’m left with two key takeaways: at core, National Socialism was a cult, and it was terribly evil.  No revelation the last point.  But it was a cult, characterized by pseudo-religious sensibilities -- fanatically so.  Its dogma (Aryan superiority, among other tenets), trappings, hierarchy of priests, and capstone deity, Hitler, made it an uber cult.

Prior to being fired by Fox News, Tucker Carlson spoke to a Heritage Foundation audience.  Carlson’s remarks were seminal.  He identified the clash between traditional America and the Left as rising to an entirely new and ominous level.    

We’ve moved beyond mere politics and policy differences, Carlson claimed.  The conflict is with a Left that has increasingly embraced evil. That’s hard to accept.  Most Americans don’t want to regard other Americans as evil.  But the evidence is abundant and growing. 

Maybe Carlson’s bold assertion was a reason why the Murdochs canned him?  The Murdochs are quintessential players.  Their interests aren’t served when their network’s marquee personality infers that a civilizational clash is underway. 

Per the Daily Wire, April 22:

Tucker Carlson delivered a speech on Friday contending that the American political debate has moved beyond a contest between rival policy positions and is now driven by [left-wing] factions with fundamentally “evil” objectives.

The veteran television host and journalist, whose Fox News show attracts millions of viewers every evening, remarked at an event for the Heritage Foundation that fellow conservatives must swiftly adjust their approaches to the national conversation since some political forces desire to tear down the nation rather than engage in legitimate political dialogue. [Italics added] 

Conservatives, as Carlson suggests, really have no choice.  American civilization hangs in the balance. 

If conservatives fail to acknowledge this evil, they’ll surrender unearned advantages to the Left and its allies, who’ll continue to claim good moral intent while upending the nation. 

The Left -- which has captured the Democrat party, portions of the establishment, corporate media, corporate America, and a wide range of institutions -- is destructive because it is thoroughly Marxist.  Marx proclaimed the need to destroy traditional civilization as a prerequisite for utopia.  Marxism has always been a cult.  The American Left exhibits all the traits of being a cult driven to ruin and domination.

Let’s make a quick qualifier, lest critics charge labeling the Left and its allies as evil paints too broadly. 

Not everyone on the Left and among its allies are evil.  Some are cynics angling for personal gain.  Many others are useful idiots. 

Posted April 25 at Twitter by Xi Van Fleet, a survivor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and a “defender of liberty:”

Mao was a master of collecting & mobilizing useful idiots to help him to gain power.  [snip]

American useful idiots have no idea that the same fate awaits them [exile and reeducation] after their usefulness is over.  They don’t know bc they were never taught the history of communism.       

The American Left has no Mao to lead it… no living deity, though it does have priests -- in academia, media, the arts, nonprofits, corporations, and government.  It does have Marx’s and Mao’s ghosts.  Mao’s Little Red Book is the New Testament compliment to Marx’s Communist Manifesto.

Today’s Marxism encompasses more than politics and economics.  It’s cultural in scope.  It has no relationship to the old liberalism of mid-20th Century America.  Old liberalism -- the JFK brand -- and conservativism once shared similar values. 

Liberals and conservatives once attended the same churches; their kids went to the same schools.  All were patriots, extolling American virtues.  They opposed tyranny.  They had different ideas about the role of government but shared the same ends: make America better, more prosperous, preserve rights and liberties.  RFK Jr. echoed some of that old liberalism in his presidential campaign kickoff remarks, speaking against what he regards as the new tyranny: the merger of state and corporate power.     

Kennedy is right, in part, but is too limited in scope. 

Today’s Left despises the shared values that once gave liberals and conservatives common ground.  The Left is a cult instigating a movement to destroy traditional mores and culture, and then impose a radically new, perverse morality and order on Americans.  It is fanatical, uncompromising, and bloodless as it pursues power and domination. 

Carlson sums up why conservatives need to change their thinking.  Per Daily Wire:         

“We write our papers and they write their papers, and may the best papers win. I don’t think that’s what we’re watching now at all. I don’t think we’re watching a debate on how to get to the best outcome. I think that’s completely wrong,” Carlson said. “There is no way to assess, say, the transgenderist movement with that mindset. Policy papers don’t account for it at all. If you have people who are saying, ‘I have an idea, let’s castrate the next generation, let’s sexually mutilate children,’ I’m sorry, that’s not a political debate. That has nothing to do with politics.”

Indeed, sexually mutilating children to “change their gender” is well beyond politics.  It’s deranged, for starters, and abusive and demeaning of a child’s personhood.  As Carlson pointed out, proclaiming killing babies in the womb a “positive good” is morally grotesque.  Sexually indoctrinating children -- from kindergarten forward -- is a lurid act of mental and emotional molestation.

Razing the working and middle classes by choking off conventional energy production; attacking law and order; imposing reverse racist policies as retributions against nonblacks for the false charge of ongoing “systemic racism;” forcing woke in schools and businesses; dictating where citizens should live; even dictating what cars -- if any -- Americans drive; and what constitutes diets make the argument all the more persuasive that the Left is a cult with no stop built in. 

There’s a cold war underway that’s unlimited in scope, initiated by a pernicious, destructive leftist cult, a war whereby society is to be consumed, spit out, and remade.  Failure isn’t an option.  Fanatics aren’t interested in splitting differences.  They want nothing to do with peaceful coexistence.  There’s no “national divorce” in the offing.  They’re predatory, sanctimonious, and very willing to blow up everything rather than concede.  They’re true believers, whose souls are entirely consumed.   

A leftist cult on the scale we’re discussing rarely self-immolates without destroying the innocent, too.  As with Germany’s Nazi cult, if this evil American cult isn’t vanquished first, it will rule ruinously.  And if its hold on power falters, it means to leave nothing behind. 

Carlson, again, from the Daily Wire:

Carlson noted that Americans should turn to heaven for hope as the nation’s foundations collapse. “Maybe we should all just take 10 minutes per day to say a prayer about it,” he concluded.

That prayer needs to be a call for strength, resolve, and acceptance of realities, and the courage to fight to defeat the malicious forces loose among us.  Our rights, our freedom, our very lives are at stake.     

J. Robert Smith can be found regularly at Gab @JRobertSmith.  He also blogs at Flyover.  He’s recently returned to Twitter.  His Twitter handle is @JRobertSmith1.

Image: Elti Meshau, Unsplash