In the history books, great social revolutions are often distilled into digestible reasons for their emergence.  Rising unemployment, widespread illness, cultural upheaval, and rapid technological change have all been diagnosed as the proximate causes for various sudden shifts in society.  If you look past those antiseptic historical autopsies, though, and concentrate on the feelings and passions of the people who experienced the revolutions firsthand, you will find another symptom present in every single movement for great change: popular rejection of ruling class lies.

People despise lies, especially lies that have had the effect of making them feel foolish.  People despise lies so much that they will go out of their way to pretend obvious lies are somehow still based in truth.  It is much more comfortable to believe that governing institutions continue to make "honest" mistakes than to accept that those institutions abandoned honesty a long time ago.  It is easier to spin one lie away with yet another soothing lie than to accept the darker, harder, bitter truth.  However, officially sanctioned lies tend to coagulate in the body politic much like spike proteins clotting in the blood until, eventually, the whole system just bursts.

When that happens, people become rightly mad.  They are mad not only because they finally recognize that their government has been engaged in massive deceptions, but also because they are ashamed for having defended obvious lies as truths for far too long.  Rage is the inevitable result — a rejection of the people and institutions responsible for such degrading self-delusions.  And when rage arrives, a peculiar thing tends to happen: fewer and fewer ruling-class heirs remain to defend the status quo.  History records successful revolutions when the previous system's liars rebrand themselves, recede into the background, or simply disappear.

Whatever else you might think about our current historical moment, one observation is inescapable: rage is in the air.  And how is the ruling class responding?  Instead of turning down the temperature under a boiling pot already spilling over, it is frantically pressing down an iron-laden lid and hoping the pressure won't build.  The vast majority of Americans believe that their elections are tainted by fraud, but the ruling class chooses to see nothing.  Rising political dissent is met with government-engineered censorship and false imprisonment.  Popular opinions against illegal immigration and unnecessary wars and for energy independence and less government regulation are entirely ignored.  The people's wants and needs are scorned, while the unaccountable bureaucracy imposes its will upon the unwilling.  Just as every other deposed ruling class has done in the past, our ruling class has chosen to stand on top of the lid barely containing society's boiling pot of passions, buoyed by the false notion that raw force will make that pot less likely to explode.

If any spectacle could convey the ruling class's contempt for the people, it is Hillary Clinton's recent sit-down with Rachel Maddow during which the two serial liars celebrated the current regime's political persecution of President Trump.  The whole world now knows Clinton as the chief architect behind the Russia collusion hoax and Maddow as the shameless propagandist who supported that hoax with baseless conspiracy theories of her own.  If it is really a crime to "defraud" the American people and the U.S. government by spreading unsubstantiated lies meant to fracture society, misuse government resources, and escalate geopolitical tensions with nuclear foes, then by any reasonable measure, Clinton and Maddow deserve their day in the dock for all the damage they have done.  Instead, not only have both inveterate liars suffered no consequence for fanning the flames of falsehoods meant to topple the Trump administration, but also they laugh in the faces of Americans who are now forced to witness the Biden regime arrest his chief political opponent under the color of law.  The old tyrants who propagated the last hoax applaud the current tyrants propagating the next one, and their hatred for the American people who see through their duplicity echoes with every cackle.  

The collapse of the "rule of law" and the impartial application of "justice" always precedes the ultimate collapse of any governing system.  Again and again I have come across the same tale in the notes and diaries of people who suffered through such difficult eras while recording their thoughts for posterity.  One of the recurring observations passed on from generations past is the shocking recognition that the "rules" had suddenly changed forever.  Rights once thought well preserved quickly disappeared.  "Justice," as it had been known, evaporated — replaced by loyalty oaths and religious-like devotion to the State.  Civil codes of conduct vanished in the shadow of the ruling class's predilection for intimidation and brute force.  The agreed-upon compact binding citizens with their government was summarily rewritten into an indentured servant contract empowering the government to be masters over their citizen slaves.  Reading the warnings from the past hits me like a horror movie with an indelible message: beware the moment when long-respected rules are carelessly thrown away.

When I listen to Clinton and Maddow laugh about locking up their political enemies for imaginary crimes, I get that same horror movie feeling.  

The ruling class now takes the following indefensible position: the highest officeholders within the DOJ, the FBI, and the broader Intelligence Community can engage in an international conspiracy with the Democrat party to frame an elected president as a Russian spy in order to force his removal from office — without facing any real criminal scrutiny, let alone punishment.  Those same Intelligence Community leaders can then orchestrate a fraud upon the American people by falsely labeling Hunter Biden's incriminating laptop as "Russian disinformation," and when President Trump correctly observes that parts of the federal government have again engaged in a conspiracy to affect the outcome of a presidential election, it is the victim — not the perpetrators — whom the system seeks to lock up.  

The ruling class tries to steal the 2016 election, and Donald Trump alone is punished with the Mueller Inquisition, DOJ harassment, and an unfounded impeachment.  The ruling class successfully steals the 2020 election, and Donald Trump alone is punished with enough federal and state indictments to put him away for a thousand years.  To the liars sitting atop society's boiling pot, that kind of hypocrisy seems like "justice."  To ordinary people, though, the new rules of injustice have only ensured that the pot will overflow.

When systems lose legitimacy, they lose longevity.  American institutions have lost all legitimacy, yet the ruling class — just as all overthrown ruling classes of the past — remains enamored of its own lies.  Masks will save you from COVID.  America's borders must remain unprotected for diversity's sake, while Ukraine's borders must be protected at all costs.  Only government-sanctioned racism will end racism.  Americans should live in poverty so that Marxists such as John Kerry and Al Gore can pretend to fight the weather.  Pedophiles should be treated as a protected class, but children should be victimized by "trans" indoctrination and surgical mutilation.  Donald Trump is somehow not "fit for office," but the dementia-addled, money-laundering criminal in the White House somehow is.  Every problem in society is the fault of white people, men, "climate change" — or all three!

Everywhere Americans once turned for guidance — their government, the news media, academia, disinterested experts — is now covered in the same "woke" slime and "politically correct" lies.  Those lies are building up all around us, choking more and more Americans who see through them.  The false promises of "hope" have been replaced with raw anger.  The boiling pot meant to contain Americans' passions is popping and splattering.  And America's ruling class forcefully pushes down the lid, openly hostile to the truth that it alone is responsible for everything that finally explodes.

Image via Pickpik.