Joy Reid, in May, aired a clip of an “angry white parent” in Missouri who’d had enough of the distorted critical race theory (CRT) being crammed down her kid’s throat by a smug mob of woke educators.
“Just because I do not want critical race theory taught to my children in school does not mean I’m a racist, damn it!” she blurted through tears.
She, and others in places like Loudoun County, Virginia, speak for millions whose kids are taught CRT without their input, against their wills, with threats to keep silent. When parents do speak up, they’re scarlet-lettered as “racists” by cultural Pharisees like Joy Reid.
Grinning like Howdy Doody, Reid pecked and poked at this Missouri parent from her perch at MSNBC, reducing her to just another “Karen” clawing at the world from inside a cage of “whiteness.”
“Actually, it does [mean she’s a racist],” the giddy Reid barfed.
She was not listening. None of them are. Her swipe at this mother, trembling with angst over her child being force-fed a mangled version of history, is the kind of mockery that millions are getting these days when they beg to differ with the tyrannical monks of woke orthodoxy. It’s unnecessary, irresponsible, and shockingly unserious. Yet we’re forced to take it seriously because times are getting so dangerous.
Take Tucker Carlson.
He speaks his mind on forbidden topics. He’s a target now – not just of vicious rhetoric, but violence. In 2018, a mob tried to force its way into his home when his wife was alone. “She heard pounding on the front door and screaming,” Tucker recalled. “Someone started throwing himself against the front door and actually cracked the front door.”
The mob screamed, “Racist scumbag, leave town!” and “We know where you sleep at night!” This was posted on social media: “Each night you remind us that we are not safe. Tonight, we remind you that you are not safe either.”
In the same week that Carlson revealed that the NSA spied on him, Salon published a column headlined: “Tucker Carlson prepares white nationalists for war.” The writer, Chauncey DeVega, accused Carlson of using “stochastic terrorism” to incite his audience – especially white supremacists – to violence against liberals, progressives, and people of color.
But it’s not just Carlson. We’re all right-wing extremists now.
“The Trump regime and its larger neofascist movement (which now includes virtually the entire Republican Party) escalated the use of stochastic terrorism to extreme levels,” DeVega wrote. “In the wake of the Trump regime’s coup attempt and the Capitol attack, … experts are warning that white supremacist and other right-wing violence remains the greatest threat to America’s domestic safety and security.”
As twisted as it sounds, this narrative is a conservative “Red Scare” for big tech, the DOJ, the Defense Department, left-leaning media, the White House, and the Democrat Congress.
Nancy Pelosi announced that a committee will investigate the “root causes, the white supremacy, the antisemitism, the Islamophobia” behind the Jan. 6 “insurrection,” and it will operate “as long as it takes ...”
Thousands went to Washington to protest election fraud, but slithery politicians focused on the rowdy few who strayed to the Capitol and went wild. As the murderous Antifa and BLM roam free, these jailed trespassers are used as flesh-and-blood proof that right-wing terrorism is real. Jan. 6 is designed to criminalize political differences so digital snoops can collect the whispers of Trumpian lone wolves.
There’s a rhyme to all this in history – two sides with irreconcilable differences, both quoting God and the founders. A time when two sides, convinced they’re right, could not both be right. When the Union was so fragile, that anyone who dared to whisper that slavery should be abolished, exposed themselves to mortal danger.
Representative James Tallmadge crossed that line in 1819 when Missouri was next in line to join the Union. Tallmadge proposed that Missouri be “born free.”
“If you persist, the Union will be dissolved,” threatened Representative Thomas Cobb of Georgia. “You have kindled a fire which all the waters of the ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood can only extinguish.”
Pro-slavers, dead serious about owning men as property, were also dead wrong. Yet like today’s Democrats and leftists, they felt justified using viscous rhetoric, threats, and mob violence to shut down dissenters.
In 1837 journalist-abolitionist Elijah P. Lovejoy, like Tucker Carlson, was not one to back down to threats. He wrote his conscience. Lovejoy was fired, ridiculed, chased out of town, vandalized, and eventually shot dead by a pro-slavery mob. No one was charged. Politics and justice had failed.
Lovejoy’s murder infuriated John Brown. The killing was meant to send a warning to abolitionists: “Shut up, or else!” For Brown, that was impossible. Lovejoy’s killing was, effectively, a declaration of war. The breakdown in civil remedies left Brown with only primitive ones.
He became a feared abolitionist leader during “Bleeding Kansas” in 1856, and in 1859, led a raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry to trigger a slave revolt. The raid was doomed from the start, but it became the catalyst to the cascading events that ended slavery.
A year after Brown’s execution and one month after Lincoln’s election, Republican Frederick Douglass gave a talk about free speech the same week a mob “invaded, insulted, and captured” a meeting that featured a forbidden topic: “How Shall Slavery Be Abolished?” The mayor shut down the meeting and refused to protect it.
“No right was deemed by the fathers of the government more sacred than the right of speech,” said Douglass. “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist.”
Of all our rights, the right to speech is the “dread of tyrants.”
“It is the right which they first of all strike down,” he said. “Slavery cannot tolerate free speech. Five years of its exercise would banish the auction block and break every chain in the South.”
Slavery did refuse to tolerate speech, so America got four years of war instead. Wars of words are proxies for wars of violence. When words fail, primitive responses become inevitable.
Today, the repressive tactics of ruthless liberals and leftists are heating our divisions to boil over into something very ugly. Fools relish violence, but “John Brown” is coming. That’s not a wish. It’s not a threat. It’s the algorithm of freedom. When smothered inside a stubborn repression, freedom sooner or later finds its way out.
You can’t destroy liberty, destroy history, and mandate policies that destroy the lives and livelihoods of history’s freest people, and expect them to just sit and take it forever.
It’s impossible.