The Pandemic Clock Strikes Five: Pandemic to Pandemonium
By Bob MacGuffie
With the pace quickening, in a blink, our clock has literally skipped four and has struck pandemonium. As May turned to June with red states reopening apace and blue states slow-walking the process, we were suddenly jolted from diminishing concerns regarding the Pandemic to staring kinetic Marxism straight in the face. Seemingly within hours, dozens of U.S. cities were contending with varying degrees of violence and rioting on their streets. The alarming extent of urban destruction has probably not been seen in our country since southern cities witnessed during the Civil War. After three months of Pandemic leading into this, Americans were rightly saying – what is going on here? And for certain, something is going on.
Protests don’t blossom in hundreds of cities, and within days, with riots closely behind in almost a hundred cities in such a compressed time frame without planning and coordination. The question is who is doing the planning, who is executing on those plans, and to what end? Not so curiously, no mass media outlet is asking these basic questions. Many of those sincerely concerned with race relations were furious with the violence being done to their neighborhoods and the people within them and said so on camera. The violence was initiated by a spectrum of groups that were using the protests as effective cover, many with the most superficial, tenuous, or absolutely no connections to the movement to improve race relations.
The vanguard in the streets is Black Lives Matter (BLM), a group known for chanting for the killing of police in its marches, and practicing property destruction and violence along the edges of its marches. With thousands marching peacefully as cover, its claims of nonviolent intent are belied by the violence left in the wake of many of its very marches. With a website espousing, “we disrupt the western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” and a founder, Patrisse Cullors proclaiming “we are trained Marxists…super-versed on the ideological theories of Marxism,” it is obvious BLM is not pursuing the best interests of the American people. America’s inner cities are submitted as evidence. Working hand-in-glove are Antifa’s local chapters, Refuse Fascism, Anti-Racist Action, Anarchist Black Cross, The Sunrise Movement, Unicorn Riot, and many others. They try to keep a lower public profile, but their planning, training, and activities have been recorded and reported upon by independent media.
These less visible and more aggressive groups perpetrating the violence are largely leaderless by design and cleverly aligned in an informal nationwide coalition communicating on social media. For subversive coordination, they’ve abandoned Facebook and Twitter. They instead use platforms such as Discord and Signal and have been caught giving the word to switch platforms just as the violent operations were about to commence. It is this confederation of groups and their financiers that prepositioned pallets of bricks and Molotov cocktails in strategic inner-city locations just in advance of the marches. Their goals have nothing to do with addressing racial issues, but instead, pursue anarchy and societal breakdown. As the entire picture comes into focus we see the familiar pattern established by early twentieth-century Marxists, which played out many times, most notably in the Bolshevik, Nazi, and Maoist revolutions.
The playbook always includes the Intelligentsia, the Politicos, and the violent street activists and thugs. The Intelligentsia in academia, the press, and the NGOs serve to create societal “victims”, and whip up and enumerate grievances, identifying classes of targets who they assert are responsible for the perceived wrongs. Propaganda organs in the press, academia, and related social media channels conduct sustained repetition and reinforcement of the grievance messages. The propagandized population demand the wrongs are righted, and the Intelligentsia identify the political figures to be relentlessly pressured to take up and implement proposed legislation, regulation, and executive actions. Meanwhile, the street activists are readied, awaiting only an event fitting the grievance profile and storyline to occur, and the ignition point is reached, unleashing horrifying street conflagrations that get the attention of the entire country. Formerly intransigent government officials are cowered to act on the demands, while sympathetic officials race one another to get to the head of the parade. Statues, symbols of the nation’s history, and established order, are toppled, legislation enacted and regulations implemented. The agenda is advanced – on to the next round.
The role of the Intelligentsia is to provide an intellectual underpinning to the chaos created by the mob. They provide some pseudo-historical theory, group indignation, outrage, and call to action for the young activists to charge into the streets. As the violence begins they provide justification or intellectual cover for it in mass media outlets. After it’s over they provide excuses – all to guilt the population, creating self-censorship and a generally muted response from the public. These tactics serve to condition the citizenry to accept periodic anarchy and prepare the battlespace for the next, most assuredly more severe round of violence.
Some of today’s Intelligentsia can be found in plain sight at planning sessions in New York City each spring. The impetus for the current wave of street violence was kicked off in March of 2011 when Pace University hosted the annual meeting of The Left Forum. What was planned that spring was multi-city street protests called “Days of Rage.” The initial event fizzled, but what emerged was Occupy Wall Street later in the fall of that year, which subsequently morphed into today’s perpetrators.
In attendance and presenting was none other than subversive Frances Piven of “Cloward-Piven” renown, plus Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Daryl Lamont Jenkins, Stephen Lerner, Ashley Cunningham, and Andy Stern among many others. Google the names and search YouTube for the Left Forum events and you will see them spell out their designs for America. You will find them casually justifying “bringing down the capitalist system, redistributing wealth and power, bankrupting banks and corporations, and creating conditions of ungovernability.” To accomplish these ends they recommend “creating uncertainty for capital by putting banks on the edge of insolvency via a mortgage and student loan strikes.” And always accompanied by aggressive street antics.
With Barack Obama serving as a pied piper, the way was clear for the Left to come out, gather strength and resources, and get into position during the past decade. This current crop of activists has been building over that period but they are being egged on and directed by the old red bulls who ran wild in the 1960s. They want to taste revolution before they die, and their reconstituted efforts to inculcate the gullible, and activate the truant starting over a decade ago have indeed brought America to the doorstep of “ungovernability.”
Though our current crisis may come as a surprise to many, two authors foretold it all in a landmark 1997 book, “The Fourth Turning.” Historian/demographers Bill Strauss and Neil Howe explored how successive generations drive a four-phase cyclical pattern of history every eighty to one hundred years – from a High to an Awakening to an Unraveling to a Crisis. They perceived the ‘90s as an Unraveling and predicted the U.S. would enter a Crisis phase in the first decade of the 21st century, which would last up to twenty years. The financial implosion of 2008 has marked the inflection point, the “fourth turning,” into the Crisis which will impact most all institutions and people in the country. Clearly the events of 2020 represent a quickening of the societal forces which will have to ultimately be reconciled in this decade if we are to emerge from this phase as a still self-governing society.
This Crisis converges national dynamics – political, cultural, and financial – of sufficient potency to pose an existential threat to the future of the republic. Scottish historian, Alexander Tytler has noted that the average age of history’s democracies has been about 200 years because voters inevitably discover that they can vote themselves generous benefits from the public treasury. In addition to the undeniable looming catastrophe of our $25+ trillion national debt hanging in the wings, we face a head-on cultural Marxist revolution and an utterly corrupt, and in many parts traitorous political leadership.
The Fourth Turning book traces back seven great historic cycles to the Medieval, fifteenth-century period. This current Crisis concludes the seventh Millennial cycle. This writer has partnered in the writing of a book to be released early in 2021 titled “The Seventh Crisis: Why Millennials Must Reestablish Ordered Liberty.” The theme and events of the ticking Pandemic Clock have now merged with those of the accelerating Seventh Crisis already underway. Now the strokes of our clock are to chronicle events beyond the sphere of a mere Pandemic.
