August 18, 2022
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A Nation of Sleeping Susies

A Nation of Sleeping Susies

In the 1950โ€™s, I remember listening to a hit recoding of an Everly Brothersโ€™ song,ย Wake up Little Susieย 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 aย Nation of Sleeping Susies, whoย 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,ย 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 nationโ€™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.ย ย 

As Austin Ruseโ€™s new book puts it, the Church and our traditional culture areย Under Siegeย and we must oppose it on all levels or be destined to join THEM. His book and that of Jewish Conservativeย David Horowitzย areย A clarion call for us to defend America โ€” or risk losing it altogether.ย In his new bookย The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America, Horowitz writes thatย Americansย are more divided today than at any time since the Civil Warโ€ฆThe two parties are now guided by outlooks so divergent that their supporters seem to inhabit different universes.

In his chapter onย Orwellian Sedition, Horowitz repeats the authorโ€™s adage thatย he who control the past, will also control the present and the future.ย Today, the ideological Leftย already controls a larger swathe of the American present. It dominates the intellectual and popular culture that shape its citizensโ€™ 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.ย Drawing on its prodigious power to affect public opinion, thanks to theย New York Timesย and the Pulitzer Foundation, the Left has systematically targeted Americaโ€™s origins with the explicit intention of burying theย American Experimentย and paving the wayย for a new-undemocratic order.ย 

One of the weapons in the installation of Communist Antonio Gramsciโ€™sย Long Marchย through Western culture has been the infamousย 1619 Project, developed byย New York Timesโ€™sย 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 herย Project. Her lies include her egregious claim thatย over 12 million slaves were kidnapped and brought here since 1619.ย 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 comparesย The 1619 Projectย toย The Protocol of the Elders of Zion,ย a genocidal, published in Russia in1903 designed to justify the extermination of the Jews in Europe.

In our schools, the attack on Americaโ€™s past has also been advanced by Communist professor, Howard Zinn and his Peopleโ€™sย History of the United States,ย 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 countryโ€™s history.

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

Before 2014, the call toย stay wokeย was largely unheard ofโ€ฆuntil the Michael Brown shooting by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer.ย Missouriโ€ฆstay wokeย suddenly became the battle cry ofย Black Lives Matterย activists, wreaking mayhem in the streets of Ferguson. BLM used it in a chilling context:ย 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.ย 

According to CNN, Michael Brownโ€™s stepfather consoled the teenโ€™s distraught mother after theย controversial grand jury announcement and then turned to the crowd of demonstrators, saying,ย Burn this motherfโ€”er downย andย Burn this b–ch down. Louis Headโ€™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 dealershipย were turned into fireballs.ย Shots fired from the mob, chased away fireman, trying to put out the fires.ย 

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 wasย totally justified in shooting Brown,ย who weighed about 300 pounds. He and his small-bodied accomplice, Dorian Johnson went to an Asian market, where they stole a package ofย 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.ย 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 peaceโ€ฆonly civil unrest and violence because justice is not useful to their revolutionary cause. Johnsonโ€™s erroneousย hands-upย storyline completely distorted the truth and inevitably the justice of the shooting.ย Johnson, who did not resist, told police that his friend had held up his hands and begged the cop not to shoot him.ย Hands upโ€ฆdonโ€™t shotย 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 Marxistsโ€™ forbears, who labor forย ย revolutionary change. He paints BLM asย a racist and violent vigilante groupย which has surged to political and cultural power in America by hooking their star to identity politics. This has helped them form a viableย ย network of hundreds of similarly anti-American leftist organizations.ย Many of those organizations, Horowitz notes,ย are funded by Americaโ€™s largest corporations and philanthropies, such as billionaire agitator George Sorosโ€™ย Open Society Institute, theย Ford Foundation, and the ice cream magnatesโ€™ย Ben & Jerryโ€™s Foundation.

Horowitz also implicates the 2017 anti-Trumpย Womenโ€™s Marchย and its radical feminist organizerย Linda Sarsour, a dedicated supporter ofย Hamas, raging anti-Semiteย Louis Farrakhan, cop-assassinations and BLM iconย Assata Shakur. At the March, the self-describedย Palestinian Muslim sisterย Sarsour delivered a call to support the litany of intersectional victim categoriesย the left had weaponized against purportedly sexist, white America: black women, native women, undocumented women, people with disabilities, and the LGBTย communities.ย There is no doubt that these groups have all been schooled in theย Rules for Radicalsย 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 Americaโ€™s moral decline. Hisย Under Siegeย 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 replicantย Roy Battyย in the 1982 film,ย The Blade Runner, who grimly declares,ย Iโ€™ve seen things you people wouldnโ€™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 toย descend into the abyssย 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 choiceย with thousands of clinics willing to perform surgery and offer hormone treatments to confused minors and adults.ย Child pornography is rampant and reinforced through sexual education in Marxโ€™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 theย time of ancient peoples sacrificing children to Moloch.ย Abortion murders millions of unborn humans. It has arguably expanded into legalized infanticide, in what Catholic Speaker Nancy Pelosi describes asย sacred groundย 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 theย Wall Street Journal,ย self-made millionaire,ย Vivek Ramaswamy explained the premise of his book,ย Woke, Inc. to be published in August 2021. He literally wants to putย Wokeism Out of Business.ย His narrative details the story of the unholy alliance between theย Socialist Left and Crony Capitalism. Ironically, it was the movieย Spotlight, which told the story of how theย Boston Globeย exposed sexual abuse and its cover-up by Catholic priests and the hierarchy in the early 2000s. This filmย ย inspired him to take onย Woke Capitalism.ย His goal inย โ€˜Woke, Inc.โ€™ is to do the same thing with respect to the โ€˜Church of Wokeism,โ€™ย which he defines as a creedย that has arisen in America in response to the โ€˜moral vacuumโ€™ created by the ebbing from public life of faith, patriotism and the identity we derived from hard work.ย They have all been unilaterally replaced in the public lexicon by ambiguous words, such asย diversity, equity and inclusion.ย Ramaswamyโ€™s classification reinforces Ruseโ€™s belief that the Left is establishing a State Church as a paradoxical theocracy.

Wokeismย entered its unique union with capitalism in the years following the 2008 financial panic and recession.ย We wereโ€”and areโ€”in the midst of the biggest intergenerational wealth transfer in history, he says. By the end of the crisis, Americansย 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 ofย Wokeismย was a life raft to corporations, the author states. It helpedย defang their critics on the Left.ย Wokeism lent a lifeline to the big banks as long as they applauded diversity, inclusion, appointed token female and minority directors, andย mused about the racially disparate impact of climate change.

In Ramaswamyโ€™s mind,ย 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,ย big business makes money by critiquing itself.ย Ramaswamy has canonized Klaus Schwab, the founder and CEO of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as theย patron saint of wokeismย for his relentless propagation ofย stakeholder capitalism, the view that big businessย must do social good on the side. Davos isย the Woke Vaticanย withย Al Gore and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock as its archbishops. Some have called thisย The Great Awokening, a sardonic reference toย The Great Awakeningย 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 ofย Sleeping Susiesย are oblivious to their Satanic ideology. In the comforting words of Austin Ruseโ€™sย Under Siege,ย we should not pass your time in fearโ€ฆ or distraction…ย or as our Medieval forbears did inย basket-weavingโ€ฆThere are halos hanging from the lowest branches of the trees.ย He challenges us toย reach up and grab one. Our nation ofย Sleeping Susiesย depends upon us to wake up everyone to the truth by any means at our disposal.ย ย ย 

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Written by
William Borst
1 comment
  • Good points, but my question is, and do what. We are long on identifying the problems but short on what to do about it. My take is, we need to repent and ask God for his help, because outside of that help, it is very hard to see how we have much chance of getting out of this. There are more of us, but they have most of the power, or so it seems. So my question is, now what.