While I continue to believe that the United States can survive anything, there are times when that faith is sorely tested.  We survived the sundering Civil War and two world wars, as well as a decades-long nuclear face-off with the Soviet Union – so what could possibly pose a threat now?

I feel that threat.  Some recent news items seem to echo Orwell's classic novel, 1984, a dark fiction of a world governed by a triad of malicious world dictatorships, the chief weapons of which are mass deception and draconian punishments for the slightest perceived dissent from the official version of truth.

These news items include the Covington Catholic High School incident at the Lincoln Memorial and Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's rant that the planet has only a dozen more years before an apocalyptic disaster.

These items are of particular concern because they cap a lifetime of increasingly bizarre social trends.  It always seems that these trends could not possibly get worse, yet they always do.

The Covington incident is far worse than it seems at first.  It reveals an Orwellian trend in America in which no matter what the facts are, they are deliberately twisted beyond recognition to support a political goal.  It could not get worse than this, but it does.  Innocent teenage students are being systemically (as well as systematically) vilified to the point where their futures are threatened, not only with libel that may ruin their careers before they start, but even with death threats.  This is due not to negligence or ignorance, but to a deliberate, planned course of action aggressively pursued by leftists in the media.

Will it get worse?  If it does, we will see actual murders committed in the name of false ideologies.  Worse yet, the reportage following those murders will blame the victims.

Another recent and bizarre phenomenon is embodied in the person of Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  One disturbing feature of her thin biography is that, as did Barack Obama in 2008, she seems to have emerged suddenly, from impenetrable obscurity, onto the front-page headlines of the American news media.  As was the case with Obama, she has no prior achievements of note – quite the opposite, she demonstrates an abysmal ignorance of basic economics despite having a college degree in that subject.  She does, however, have charisma, and it seems that there is a secret formula of the right mix of personality, appearance, and constituency that has propelled her and others like her to high positions for which they have no competence. 

Ocasio-Cortez and her ilk are either the cause or merely a dreadful symptom of an internal disease that has for a lifetime eaten away at our core national values.  The effect of that disease has been pervasive.  It has metastasized into the news and entertainment media, education, and the churches.  It knows no reason, and indeed, it condemns reason as the tool of the oppressor.  It refuses to debate, instead screaming and threatening. 

We can survive this.  We will.  But survival will not be an easy task.  It never has been.  The Tree of Liberty, as we all know, requires the blood of tyrants and patriots on a regular basis.  Toil, blood, sweat, and tears (as Sir Winston Churchill warned) are the price we must be willing to pay. 

America will survive and flourish.  Even so, there are days when I fear.

Image: Mark Hillary via Flickr.