Watching the unhinged pro-Hamas campus protests now enthralling excitable leftist journalists, who all want to believe they are junior John Reeds covering the Red October of 1917, we must remember that most Americans are uninterested in the antics of privileged college idiots—and the professional provocateurs urging them along. The average American is far too busy trying to navigate the travails of Bidenflation and has little time for those who expect their student loans to be paid for by those who are working and paying the taxes that they want to hijack to cover the costs of their college degrees.

There is, of course, a sizable minority of the deranged and disaffected, clustered in our decaying Democrat-run cities, who comfort themselves with the idea that Americans can be bamboozled, through determined and deliberate chaos that they hope will crash our current system of representative government, into adopting a censorious Socialist statism. Today’s fringe of student revolutionaries are not alone in this dream; there seems little other rational reason for the ongoing efforts, which have spanned many years, to bankrupt our nation, erase our borders, and defund our police. All these and a host of other increasingly bizarre efforts to remake our cultural, social, and sexual norms seem to spring from the same strategy that posits giving our country a nervous breakdown will inevitably lead to our demise as a constitutional republic founded upon a foundation Judeo-Christian values and Enlightenment principles of personal freedom.

Our country does have its problems, but the current race to embrace anti-semitism and anarchy seems exceedingly unlikely to solve any of them. However, it does provide yet another opportunity to divide us by race, gender, ethnicity, and religion, which has been the primary left-wing strategy for many decades now. We are encouraged at every turn to self-identify as anything other than Americans, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship are increasingly denigrated and discarded whenever possible in order to dishearten our nation’s many patriots. 

For example, as has been repeatedly pointed out, illegal immigrants now receive many more direct cash benefits than military veterans who risked their lives to defend our nation. Our country’s peculiar crop of non-patriots—many of whom hold high-ranking positions in government, education, and the mass media—sneer at those who still cherish traditional American values of honor and duty. These supposed leaders now insist that our country’s flag is a symbol of hatred and oppression, which would certainly be a shock to those who bravely fought and died to preserve precious freedoms around the world. Little wonder so few are enlisting in our nation’s military services today, a trend that has become a crisis. Why would they bother to fight when so many of our political, cultural, and academic leaders go out of their ways to shame those who still love America and all it has steadfastly stood for in the past?

Oddly enough, the performative virtue signaling that now pervades our society has almost nothing to do with any traditional virtues. It is instead an insidious mechanism for institutionalizing different degrees of historical victimization (most of which are relics of attitudes long discarded) so anger and suspicion can be maintained in order to foment discord wherever possible, which inevitably disables any possibility of productive dialogue and compromise. 

Recognizing the mistakes of our nation’s history is necessary for our growth and advancement; insisting we must flagellate ourselves for errors forever is a tool for keeping us wallowing in the past rather than looking forward toward a bright future. We are trapped if forgiveness is made impossible—and it’s expressly forbidden today by the cultural Marxists now seeking to destroy America—so it is unsurprising that we cannot move beyond old, worn out enmities that have little relation to our country today.

If we’re waiting for politicians, bureaucrats, and the self-promoting priesthood of “experts” to save America, we’re going to have a long wait. The solution is to be found within each of us, and it’s very simple: Call out stupidity wherever you see it, refuse to comply with that which offends your sense of justice or morality, and don’t let anyone shut you up or shut you down.

Each of us has to start defending our nation because very few of our leaders are leading anymore, and the clock is rapidly ticking down toward a very dark midnight if we don’t act now.