One of the definitions of topsy-turvy is the “inversion of the natural order.” This is what we are experiencing in our culture, from the top down. As a recent article by Victor Davis Hanson states, “the Establishment Is the Revolution” (see link below). It is not the protestor in the street demanding or making topsy-turvy changes, but the university administrators, elected and unelected officials, and CEOs of the media, big tech, and a host of other companies. This revolution, this tumult, this upside-down milieu concerns very serious aspects of our lives, what the late Gerhart Niemeyer, a Nazi refugee, termed “the moral order.” New Arkansas Governor Sarah Sanders, in her Republican rebuttal to President Biden’s State of the Union Address on February 7, said that the “dividing line in America is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal or crazy.” Paraphrasing Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech of March 5, 1946, I say to you readers that “a woke curtain has fallen upon this continent.”

We are in the midst of a cultural revolution like Communist Chairman Mao’s which attacked the “four olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas. In her book While Time Remains and in public appearances, Yeonmi Park, a defector from North Korea, asserts that Columbia University’s professors and students provide indoctrination like that of North Korea.

I have made a list showing how pervasive is the tumult in 17 areas of our lives:

• The world used to favor free speech. People would quote Voltaire: I disapprove of what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it. Now, government at every level censors and suppresses speech. Government has willing partners among many private entities.
• News media used to investigate election interference, election irregularities, election fraud, public corruption, breaches of security, and so on. Now, news media actively suppress the news (e.g., the Hunter Biden laptop).
• Law enforcement used to enforce the laws with arrests, convictions, and imprisonment. Now our municipalities defund police. Police quit the force. Arrested individuals are set free on no-cash bail. There is vocal support for releasing prisoners and even closing prisons. On the southern border, government agents do not bar illegal immigrants but process the ones who turn themselves in and let the “got-aways” get away.
• “Open borders” takes on a whole new meaning when a Chinese spy balloon can transit the entire continental United States with full knowledge of our President and military.
• The FBI devotes time and resources to conduct SWAT-type raids on people whose attorneys have said they were willing to surrender (Roger Stone, Mark Houck). The FBI identifies parents at school board meetings as domestic terrorists, and surveils Catholics who favor the Traditional Latin Mass.
• The past saw growing denunciation of the practice of “female circumcision” or “female genital mutilation.” Now, however, there is ever-widening support among academics, medical societies, hospitals, and school personnel for child mutilation (removing penises and female breasts) under the name of transgender transition.
• Abortion was either forbidden or it was “safe, legal and rare.” Now, legislators wear a lapel pin with the single word “Abortion.” Abortion is lauded as a positive good, a rite of passage for women. The Democratic Party is the Abortion Party.
• Citizens used to widely support orphanages and homes for unwed mothers. In recent decades “crisis pregnancy centers” have helped mothers with their pregnancies and caring for infants, without regard to race, ethnicity, or creed. These have now been the subject of arson and vandalism, with little police interest.
• Public schools historically provided a sound education for future wage earners and future voters. The schools united the diverse residents of a neighborhood. They taught children to respect authority, including that of their parents. Now they fail to make students proficient in math and reading (not a single student in 23 Baltimore schools), and they indoctrinate students to hate this country, its history, its government, their parents, and the white students among them. The values of our public schools are totally at odds with the parents and taxpayers. Our children in public schools are in re-education camps. Parents demand a good education, not a woke education, not an anti-public education.
• In the past, the academic success of an individual was to be lauded. And parents and schools were to be congratulated for having such students. Now, high SAT scores, or a National Merit Scholarship, are to be kept hidden by school administrators. (For some reason, it is still okay to praise outstanding student athletes.)
• By law, convicted sex offenders can’t live or work near schools. But now members of school boards, and those who work in schools as principals and teachers, teach young children about sex and about gender fluidity. They encourage students to adopt a gender other than their biological one and to hide it from their parents. These personnel are in reality “unconvicted sex offenders.”
• As with public schools, the values of our public libraries are totally at odds with users and taxpayers. They promote pornography and Drag Queens. The libraries are anti-public, anti-parent, anti-child.
• For decades, Disney provided family entertainment which was good and wholesome and patriotic for children. Everything by Disney used to be treated like it bore the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Now Disney can’t distinguish between boys and girls and promotes racism directed at whites (e.g., Disney-Plus’ “Proud Family”).
• The military, corporate, and academic worlds used to be apolitical. Now DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) personnel in the military and in the corporate and academic worlds are like the commissars attached to every level of every organization in the Communist Soviet Union and Communist China. For example, such federal employees regularly appear before grant-making bodies, including those in the fields of science and health, to remind them to favor grant applications by women and by people of color.
• In the past we would laud the financial success of an individual and of a business. A business that grew and employed more people was a good thing. Now, capitalism, investment, and profit are dirty words. Business is to be regulated and taxed as if, as Steve Forbes recently said, prosperity is assumed. Democrats like the golden egg but not the goose that lays it.
• Financial advisers used to have a fiduciary duty to find the best financial return on your money. Now financial advisers identify companies that they think are good for you in ways other than financially. ESG (environmental, social, governance) is the acronym of the day. How much money is at stake? America’s 401(k) plans held $6.3 trillion in assets as of September 30, 2022, in more than 625,000 plans, on behalf of about 60 million active participants and millions of former employees and retirees.
• The Bible was “the Good Book.” Now it is the bad book. Biblical religion opposes same-sex relationships and gender fluidity. Espousing Biblical religion is deemed a hate crime. People cannot abide by Biblical admonitions such as this from the Book of Isaiah (5:20): “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.”

The revolutionaries, the woke mob, have infected our government at every level, our military, our schools at every level, our media, our tech companies and platforms, our companies, our public libraries. They have infected Wall Street and Main Street. They have contaminated our children. But we, we who are American, shall overcome.

Link to Hanson article: https://tennesseestar.com/2023/01/31/victor-davis-hanson-commentary-the-establishment-is-the-revolution/