A recent exchange with a family member led me to pen this afterthought, which is really a consolidation of much that I have published here.

The movement toward centralized control of American’s social and economic lives began in the so-called Progressive Era of the late 1800s and early 1900s. It got a boost from the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who moved the country in the direction of governance by non-elected bureaucrats. FDR moved the country further in that direction.

And all of that happened before the emergence of a coalition that I will call the academic-bureaucratic-media-technology complex (hereinafter ABMT), which has coalesced around a long list ideological desiderata. Some of them are hangovers from the Progressive Era and FDR’s New Deal. Most have arisen in the past six decades, with the most bizarre among them having been hatched in the past decade. Here are as many of them as I can list without retching:

• income redistribution
• universal health care
• abortion, for any reason, up to and even beyond the birth of a child
• reverse anti-racism, anti-sexism, etc., aimed mainly at the imagined enemy of “equity”: the straight, white male of European descent
• anti-whiteness, just because whites do happen to be smarter and less violent than blacks (on average)
• sexual libertinism and “reproductive liberty”
• “prison reform” (i.e., lighter and shorter sentences, or none)
• de-funding police departments because of an occasional wrongful death (and many more debunked charges of racism and brutality)
• reducing defense expenditures because peace is just a matter of diplomacy
• cultivating convenient scapegoats (e.g., “Big Business” before much of it joined AMBT, Trump, and Russia)
• saving the planet from an imaginary incendiary death, which is somehow to be accompanied by ever-rising seas
• replacing reliable sources of energy with unreliable ones because they are “sustainable” (a mockery of the word)
• debasing the language and erasing the nation’s cultural heritage on the pretext that some parts of it are “offensive” (mainly to effete whites who cringe at a sketch of a gun)
• the practical debarment of religion from political discourse (Christianity and Judaism, to be precise)
• and anything else that bestirs the combination of utter naivete and adolescent rebelliousness which characterizes AMBT.

The list is always growing because the quest for cosmic justice never ends. It cannot end because it is impossible to attain: Reality — the stubbornness of human nature, the limitations of nature, the prohibitive costs of attaining cosmic justice — always intervenes.

But that doesn’t deter ABMT, which has a cult-like devotion to the attainment of its desiderata.  Cult-like because it is the goals that matter, not the possibility of their attainment or the social and economic costs of striving to attain them. It is a cult ruled by feelings, not facts.

Any failure to advance the cult’s agenda is called an attack on democracy, as if the cult had anything to do with democracy. If it did, it wouldn’t be in the business of trying to suppress dissent from cult’s tenets; it would react peacefully (in rhetoric and deed) to judicial decrees that thwart the accomplishment of its desiderata (contra the reaction to Supreme Court rulings on guns, abortion, and EPA’s overreach); and it would accept the outcomes of election results that rebuff its candidates. If it did, its members would understand that they, not their political opponents, are the real fascists to be loathed and feared.

Nor are the members of the cult devotees of science. They use the word cynically to justify their dictatorial impulses.

Actual (representative) democracy and actual, fact-based, refutable science are to the cult as sunlight is to a vampire.

AMBT is abetted by a large segment of the populace. Having captured the Democrat Party, AMBT has captured some of its habitual. (Though there are signs that some of those adherents have had enough of AMBT’s “woke” agenda.) Then there are the over-educated and affluent professional classes, whose members believe in the idealistic, pseudo-scientific malarkey that propels AMBT, and who cannot see (or do not care) about its effects on the nation’s social and economic fabric. There is also the “education” industry, which has for decades faithfully regurgitated AMBT’s agenda and indoctrinated tens of million of young Americans. It deserves special mention and a place in the Ninth Circle of Hell. As for the many others unmentioned here, theirs is a combination of venality, envy, ignorance, and the aforementioned adolescent rebelliousness at work. Not every member of the cult ascribes to every item on AMBT’s agenda, but all support it because they believe — falsely and foolishly — that its attainment will be to their benefit.

AMBT would not be where it is today without the aid and comfort of professional politicians — Democrats, of course. Many of them may not be true believers, but they evidently believe that their profession of faith in AMBT’s agenda helps them to attain power, which is what they mean when they say that they are public servants.

The cult and its enablers are so committed (in practice if not in conscience) to the cult’s desiderata that the attainment of those desiderata justifies the use of any means to advance them. Limits placed by the Constitution and constitutional laws are sundered; ideological opponents are slandered, libeled, and shamed; lying (including the fabrication and use of the so-called Steele dossier) and cheating (as in rigging elections) are taken for granted; violence is condoned or encouraged — and excused because it is done by the “oppressed” (or something along those lines).

In a phrase: Their ends justify their means.

The long list of ends comes down to three things:

• The first thing is to make people dependent on government (a dependency that began in earnest under FDR).
• The second, and related, thing is to relieve people of taking personal responsibility for their life outcomes. (FDR, again, takes “credit” for having initiated this practice.)
• The third thing is to accomplish the first two things not just by making people dependent on government and relieving them of personal responsibility, but also to dragoon the population at large into supporting the first two things (whether or not they support them). This used to be done by regulation and taxation. It is now being done (in partnership with AMBT) by controlling speech under the rubric of combating “disinformation”.

It is the preservation and advancement of the cult’s agenda that drives the myth of the “insurrection” on January 6, 2021.

Which brings me to Donald Trump. It was he who crystallized opposition to the agenda of AMBT. For that sin he was the subject and victim of the hoax that begin during his candidacy and endures to this day. For that sin he was the victim of the greatest electoral fraud in this country’s history.

If the acts perpetrated against Trump because of his opposition to AMBT’s agenda do not convince you that AMBT must — must — be defeated, nothing will. The coming mid-term elections may put the country back on the right road. But it will take victory — a resounding GOP victory — in the presidential election of 2024 to stride further down that road and away from the Sovietization of America.

My hope for 2024 is that a politician who is more articulate, personally credible, and bureaucratically adept than Donald Trump will be the GOP’s candidate for president. If the election of 2016 was the Flight 93 election — as Michael Anton dubbed it — the election of 2024 will be the Armageddon election. God save us all if Satan’s disciples win.