A Nation of Sleeping Susies

In the 1950’s, I remember listening to a hit recoding of an Everly Brothers’ song, Wake up Little Susie on my 45 record player. I believe the song title has an implicit warning for us today. With apologies to Winston Churchill, like the frantic teens in the song, who overslept, we have become a Nation of Sleeping Susies, who are in deep trouble. This will become a reality if we fail to address the dangers that are confronting our national identity. I believe our religious, moral, and constitutional beliefs have been threatened with annihilation. Our situation resembles on a broader scale what C. S. Lewis noted, nearly a 100 years ago, the modern world insists that religion be a purely private affair, then shrinks the area of privacy to the vanishing point. When the state moves in, separation means forcing the church to move out. And the state keeps moving into new domains which it claims its own.

During the pandemic secular governments closed down all the nation’s churches, far longer than it did bowling allies, massage parlor and liquor stores because they were deemed more important to the country than going to church. Faithful Christians and conservatizes are virtually being forced out or backlisted from teaching, public speaking, the major social media, major publishing, journalism and even politics. TV shows, radio programs and anything on secular media are silencing or eliminating opposing voices. The loss of the wisdom and wit of Rush Limbaugh to lung cancer, earlier this year silenced forever the leading voice of reasonable thinking and defense of the traditional moral order.  

As Austin Ruse’s new book puts it, the Church and our traditional culture are Under Siege and we must oppose it on all levels or be destined to join THEM. His book and that of Jewish Conservative David Horowitz are A clarion call for us to defend America — or risk losing it altogether. In his new book The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America, Horowitz writes that Americans are more divided today than at any time since the Civil War…The two parties are now guided by outlooks so divergent that their supporters seem to inhabit different universes.

In his chapter on Orwellian Sedition, Horowitz repeats the author’s adage that he who control the past, will also control the present and the future. Today, the ideological Left already controls a larger swathe of the American present. It dominates the intellectual and popular culture that shape its citizens’ perception— the major universities, the schools, the media, the entertainment industry and the non-profit world of advocacy institutions which functions as shadow political universe. Drawing on its prodigious power to affect public opinion, thanks to the New York Times and the Pulitzer Foundation, the Left has systematically targeted America’s origins with the explicit intention of burying the American Experiment and paving the way for a new-undemocratic order. 

One of the weapons in the installation of Communist Antonio Gramsci’s Long March through Western culture has been the infamous 1619 Project, developed by New York Times’s journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a black American and a pro-Castro Leftist. Her painfully long essay was not historical scholarship but a screed, mired in a swamp of falsehoods about the true origins of this country. Her stilted rhetoric was littered with fallacies, lies and distortion, so much so that many liberal professors discredited her Project. Her lies include her egregious claim that over 12 million slaves were kidnapped and brought here since 1619. Though many thousands were lost at sea, the total number is well under a million. The first 20-30 Africans brought to the British colony of Virginia were indentured servants, like so many white servants since slavery was illegal in the British colonies in 1619. They were not kidnapped but purchased from either Muslim slave traders or black tribal leaders, who sold millions of their enslaved enemies around the Americas. These slaves were the proceeds of centuries of tribal warfare. Horowitz boldly compares The 1619 Project to The Protocol of the Elders of Zion, a genocidal, published in Russia in1903 designed to justify the extermination of the Jews in Europe.

In our schools, the attack on America’s past has also been advanced by Communist professor, Howard Zinn and his People’s History of the United States, which was required reading for millions of benighted high school and college students across America for several years. It was an invaluable tool in exchanging truth and discussion for ideology and indoctrination while distorting the facts of our country’s history.

Unsurprisingly, there is a popular name for this religious war between godless secularism and traditional religious belief, that is, being woke. First used in the 1940s, the term has resurfaced in recent years as a trope that symbolizes awareness of social issues and movement against injustice, inequality, and prejudice. Black American folk singer-songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly, used the phrase in his 1938 song Scottsboro Boys, which tells the story of nine black teenagers accused of raping two white women. His powerful lyrics I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there—best stay woke, keep their eyes open. In the early 21st-century’s, the use of woke meant being alert to social and/or racial discrimination and injustice. This usage was popularized by soul singer Erykah Badu’s 2008 song Master Teacher, via the song’s refrain, I stay woke…Stay woke. Watch closely.

Before 2014, the call to stay woke was largely unheard of…until the Michael Brown shooting by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer. Missouri…stay woke suddenly became the battle cry of Black Lives Matter activists, wreaking mayhem in the streets of Ferguson. BLM used it in a chilling context: keeping watch for police brutality and unjust police tactics. Crowds materialized out of nowhere to confront hundreds of police in military armor to protect the citizen from the unruly mob. 

According to CNN, Michael Brown’s stepfather consoled the teen’s distraught mother after the controversial grand jury announcement and then turned to the crowd of demonstrators, saying, Burn this motherf—er down and Burn this b–ch down. Louis Head’s incendiary comments preceded the outburst of violent rage over the decision not to indict policeman Darren Wilson in the August shooting death of the 18-year-old Brown. A row of businesses on West Florissant Avenue, a major thoroughfare in the St. Louis suburb, was torched the night of the verdict. Police cars and vehicles at a nearby dealership were turned into fireballs. Shots fired from the mob, chased away fireman, trying to put out the fires. 

The truth of the Michael Brown death has been buried under tons of racial propaganda. People were led to believe Officer Wilson murdered him in cold blood, even after the Grand Jury declared that the officer was totally justified in shooting Brown, who weighed about 300 pounds. He and his small-bodied accomplice, Dorian Johnson went to an Asian market, where they stole a package of cigarillos from the convenience store. When the owner tried to stop Brown, he tossed the small man around like he was a rag doll. The owner called the police. Meanwhile, the thieves walked back to their neighborhood in the middle of the street. Officer Wilson knew about the theft and had a description of the suspects. Wilson drove up to the suspects and told them to get out of the street. They refused. Brown fit the description easily. So the officer started to arrest them. Brown resisted and tried to get in the police car while wrestling with the officer. He was obviously trying to get his gun. A shot was discharged and Brown was slightly wounded. In his hand. He started to run away. The cop told him to halt. Brown turned, stopped and then charged the officer, who then emptied his gun into the behemoth who outweighed him by nearly 80 pounds.

Black Lives Matter was not interested in justice or peace…only civil unrest and violence because justice is not useful to their revolutionary cause. Johnson’s erroneous hands-up storyline completely distorted the truth and inevitably the justice of the shooting. Johnson, who did not resist, told police that his friend had held up his hands and begged the cop not to shoot him. Hands up…don’t shot became their new battle cry. The forensic evidence and multiple witness statements thoroughly discredited his false statements.

Since Ferguson, BLM has been the vanguard of wokeism. Horowitz has skillfully connected all the dots between them and their Marxists’ forbears, who labor for  revolutionary change. He paints BLM as a racist and violent vigilante group which has surged to political and cultural power in America by hooking their star to identity politics. This has helped them form a viable  network of hundreds of similarly anti-American leftist organizations. Many of those organizations, Horowitz notes, are funded by America’s largest corporations and philanthropies, such as billionaire agitator George Soros’ Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the ice cream magnates’ Ben & Jerry’s Foundation.

Horowitz also implicates the 2017 anti-Trump Women’s March and its radical feminist organizer Linda Sarsour, a dedicated supporter of Hamas, raging anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, cop-assassinations and BLM icon Assata Shakur. At the March, the self-described Palestinian Muslim sister Sarsour delivered a call to support the litany of intersectional victim categories the left had weaponized against purportedly sexist, white America: black women, native women, undocumented women, people with disabilities, and the LGBT communities. There is no doubt that these groups have all been schooled in the Rules for Radicals handbook that Saul Alinsky and his acolytes had taught to their apostles, Hillary Rodham and Barack Obama.

While Horowitz is more concerned with the secular side of the war on American culture, his Catholic counterpart, Austin Ruse focuses on the more overt examples of America’s moral decline. His Under Siege acknowledges the many challenges facing Christians and conservatives today. Based on his many years as a cultural warrior, Ruse likens himself to the battle-hardened replicant Roy Batty in the 1982 film, The Blade Runner, who grimly declares, I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Ruse spares no hesitancy in going into detail about the horrors of transgenderism, child and adult pornography, abortion, and sexual predators in the church. He enjoins his readers to descend into the abyss to see what the evil Left has wrought.

Besides the grisly details, what is disturbing is the swift expansion of these perversions. Transgenderism has gone from being a rare occurrence to a popular lifestyle choice with thousands of clinics willing to perform surgery and offer hormone treatments to confused minors and adults. Child pornography is rampant and reinforced through sexual education in Marx’s public school programs and various media outlets. It leads directly to the online ubiquity of adult pornography and its obscene profits. Ruse compares our precarious state to the time of ancient peoples sacrificing children to Moloch. Abortion murders millions of unborn humans. It has arguably expanded into legalized infanticide, in what Catholic Speaker Nancy Pelosi describes as sacred ground while the Church continues to sell off its property so it can dole out millions in settlements because of sexual predators in the priesthood.

In a different vein, in an interview in the Wall Street Journal, self-made millionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy explained the premise of his book, Woke, Inc. to be published in August 2021. He literally wants to put Wokeism Out of Business. His narrative details the story of the unholy alliance between the Socialist Left and Crony Capitalism. Ironically, it was the movie Spotlight, which told the story of how the Boston Globe exposed sexual abuse and its cover-up by Catholic priests and the hierarchy in the early 2000s. This film  inspired him to take on Woke Capitalism. His goal in ‘Woke, Inc.’ is to do the same thing with respect to the ‘Church of Wokeism,’ which he defines as a creed that has arisen in America in response to the ‘moral vacuum’ created by the ebbing from public life of faith, patriotism and the identity we derived from hard work. They have all been unilaterally replaced in the public lexicon by ambiguous words, such as diversity, equity and inclusion. Ramaswamy’s classification reinforces Ruse’s belief that the Left is establishing a State Church as a paradoxical theocracy.

Wokeism entered its unique union with capitalism in the years following the 2008 financial panic and recession. We were—and are—in the midst of the biggest intergenerational wealth transfer in history, he says. By the end of the crisis, Americans were actually pretty jaded with respect to capitalism. Like Alinsky, the Obama left wanted to take money from corporations and give it to poor people. The birth of Wokeism was a life raft to corporations, the author states. It helped defang their critics on the Left. Wokeism lent a lifeline to the big banks as long as they applauded diversity, inclusion, appointed token female and minority directors, and mused about the racially disparate impact of climate change.

In Ramaswamy’s mind, a bunch of big banks got together with a bunch of millennials, birthed woke capitalism, and then put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption. Thanks to this unnatural marriage, big business makes money by critiquing itself. Ramaswamy has canonized Klaus Schwab, the founder and CEO of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as the patron saint of wokeism for his relentless propagation of stakeholder capitalism, the view that big business must do social good on the side. Davos is the Woke Vatican with Al Gore and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock as its archbishops. Some have called this The Great Awokening, a sardonic reference to The Great Awakening of the 18th century. Wokeism is a misnomer, a blatant self-contradiction because its advocates are unable to fathom reality from the horror of their agenda. They hide behind the Gnosticism of their dedication to destroying the freedoms of this country. They do this while millions of Sleeping Susies are oblivious to their Satanic ideology. In the comforting words of Austin Ruse’s Under Siege, we should not pass your time in fear… or distraction… or as our Medieval forbears did in basket-weaving…There are halos hanging from the lowest branches of the trees. He challenges us to reach up and grab one. Our nation of Sleeping Susies depends upon us to wake up everyone to the truth by any means at our disposal.