River News: Our View

The universe is a mysterious place, and so is Earth, as is whatever planet the nation’s progressives call home in their heads.

Like, eerie parallels in history keep popping up. None were quirkier that the parallels of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln after their murders. Both were elected in years that ended in ’60; both were assassinated; both were shot on a Friday, in the head and in the presence of their wives; both were runners-up for their party’s nomination for vice-president in ’56.

And then there was this: Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy who told him not to go to the theatre, while Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln who warned him not to go to Dallas.

It gets even stranger, but those who wish to jump down that rabbit hole can do so on the internet. Our point being, history can be oddly repetitive.

And so can some fictional depictions of future history. Ask many conservatives what year it is, and they will chuckle and simply say, “1984,” as in George Orwell’s 1984. These days most people recognize that this isn’t the America we grew up in, much of that due to the massive erosions of freedoms and downright borderline totalitarianism rampant in the country.

There’s even an internet newsletter blog out there — Make Orwell Fiction Again — that captures the times perfectly.

All of which brings us to this year’s election and the very first question to ask is, if last year — actually, the last few years — was 1984, just what year is it now?

Well, given all those quirky parallels that history likes to deliver to our lifesteps, we’d like to nominate 1968 as the current year.

Then, as now, we had an extraordinarily polarized nation. We also had a deeply unpopular Democratic president. Most people think the Vietnam War drove that unpopularity, and that’s true mostly, but other issues were also doing Lyndon Johnson no favors. His Great Society, now lionized in legacy media and in government novels they call school textbooks, was actually wildly unpopular in many sections of the nation.

Joe Biden is also dealing with historic unpopularity based on, well, just about any issue you name. The economy, the Ukraine War, Jewish freedom and Israel’s survival, immigration, crime, government regulation and taxation, student loans — hey, somebody take the shovel from that man so he can’t dig any deeper.

There are also the spooky eruptions of demonstrations on elite college campuses, fueled by the Israel-Hamas war, a war that Bernie Sanders correctly says looms as Biden’s Vietnam.

A political observer over at The New Yorker found a spooky parallel in the campus demonstrations: Police took action against Columbia University protesters at Hamilton Hall this year on the exact day of the fifty-sixth anniversary that police ended a student takeover of Hamilton Hall in 1968.

Go down that rabbit hole.

The protesters won’t stop there, of course. Most people believe Chicago will be the scene of fire and brimstone — in other words, riots in the streets — when the Democrats convene there in August. Of course that’s just what happened in 1968 when the Democrats convened in Chicago, dooming them in the 1968 election.

Here’s another parallel: the existence of a third-party candidate with the significant ability to siphon off voters from the Democratic Party. In 1968, George Wallace ran a racist-fueled campaign that attracted many working class white voters who had traditionally voted Democratic.

This year, while Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is certainly not running a racist campaign, it is a populist effort that will likely attract working class voters disaffected by Biden’s Democratic Party.

None of which is to say there aren’t big differences between 1968 and today. There are. Many of the 1960s campus protesters were paid for and orchestrated by powerful forces, as they are today, but many of the Vietnam demonstrations were authentic, too, swelling crowds by tens of thousands, while the fake protesters this year are just about all that turn out.

There’s another difference, too. This year’s protesters appear eager to endorse terrorism and totalitarianism. They largely endorse the military-industrial state — go Ukraine! — while in the Mideast hankering for a religious regime that seeks the extermination of Jews and that would gladly kill the LGBTQ contingent among the progressives the first chance they got.

They seek a Palestinian state not so they can co-exist with a Jewish state but so they can be Palestine From the River to the Sea — in other words, the creation of that state must be accompanied by the destruction of Israel.

In the 1960s, the marchers deplored government authority and the military-industrial complex, they marched for women’s rights and gay rights, and were allies with the only movement that can secure for the Jewish people their right to life and liberty — the right to national self-determination.

Sure, the 1960s protesters didn’t want to go to a war and get killed, either, but love and peace animated their outer boundaries as much as self-preservation.

There is another parallel to 1968 that should be discussed, and that is, in this repeat season of chaos, just what is the end game of all these protests? For, as in 1968, none of this disruption and certainly none of the calls for genocide against Jews are helping Joe Biden politically.

That wouldn’t make common sense, and the polls are showing it. As summer approaches, protests in the streets against “Genocide Joe” are louder and more belligerent than any chant about Donald Trump. 

Given that the theatre — funded by George Soros and Soros-types and even large Democratic donors — is helping Trump in the election, what are those orchestrating all this behind the curtain up to? And make no mistake, without that big-money orchestration, all the chaos in the streets goes away.

Well, again there’s 1968 to look back to. 

The riots in the streets of Chicago and on the college campuses hurt the Democrats then, too. And then too the protesters and their manipulators knew it would.

The whole point was to defeat their nominee. Remember, the platform of the Yippies and the hippies and the more organized Students for a Democratic Society was socialist in its substance and revolutionary in its tactics. To them, the moderate to liberal establishment of the Democratic Party was as evil as Richard Nixon and the Republicans.

In their eyes there was no difference. They didn’t call it a uniparty, but that’s how they saw it — that Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson were as tethered to the war machine and the U.S. security state as the Republicans.

Indeed, they viewed the Democratic establishment as more of a threat because they stood in the way of the revolutionaries capturing the Democratic Party completely. Defeat them, and they could have the entire party apparatus.

And that’s what they did — in the rubble after Humphrey’s defeat, the George McGovern wing of the party captured control and plowed full steam ahead to the party’s 1972 train wreck.

And so it is today. The chaos is designed to bring down Biden, not to re-elect him. To conservatives, Biden is seen a senile puppet of extreme woke leftists, and he is that, but Biden also continues to sit at the helm of the Washington swamp, otherwise known as the uniparty.

He plays both sides on Israel and Gaza, shouting about halting one shipment of bombs to Israel but signing off on long-term arms deals. His regulatory agenda is designed to enrich billionaires and, on a range of matters, as incredible as it may seem, Biden is seen by the extreme left as insufficiently radical: Climate change, cancelling student loan debt, codifying Roe v. Wade. 

On the border, his sign off on a plan to restrict the flow of illegals at the border again attempted to appease both sides, which pleased no one and was a failure from the get-go. 

We might think Biden’s agenda is radical, and it is, but it’s nothing compared to what the progressive wing of the party wants — a police state compelling the complete regulation of life by the government and a complete redistribution of wealth from capitalist Main Street to corporate and bureaucratic globalists who will rule from Brussels and Davos.

Biden’s defeat is seen as the ticket to opening the Democratic Party to total control by that cabal. It worked in 1968, and it seems to be working this year. 

To be sure, Biden could well lose all on his own, but this year the extreme left seems eager to assist him in his political suicide. 

The president seems not to notice. To be fair, he doesn’t notice much. If he had, he might have dropped out of the race, like Lyndon Johnson did, or at least have hired a secretary who could warn him where not to tread.

Alas, no one in this White House has a clue what year it really is, and that really is our best hope to make Biden — and Orwell —  fiction again.