OPINION

America Is in a Cultural Riptide That Defies Logic

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

America is presently caught in a cultural riptide that is dragging us to a place where most of us really don’t want to go.

To those bothering to look, it is a current that alarmingly is growing in strength, becoming inescapable, and, with increasing speed is taking us further and further away from that shining light on the hill we were raised to love and used to call home. As that light—symbolic of our liberties and freedoms—fades in the distance, we are being swept away against our will toward a dark place ruled by a self-chosen cabal of elitists who have proclaimed themselves to be uniquely endowed with a politically correct humanist form of “enlightenment.”

The society they are crafting is a place where values and traditions we once thought were right are now condemned as wrong. And those social practices which we used to consider wrong are not only being codified as right but are being placed on humanist alters of social justice before which the unenlightened—We the People—are ordered to bend a knee in worship … or else.

Consider we are now being told that all whites are, by definition, racial bigots solely by virtue of their skin color. And, we are also now informed that all whites as a group are to be considered white supremacists who are committed to the perpetuation of an only recently discovered systemic racism that, in turn, was cleverly institutionalized by a Constitution drafted by white slave owners. No longer is it defensible to assert that those men sought to create a unique nation where all men and women should be treated equally under our laws as the God who created us all views them to be. Instead, we are told that if we ever hope to arrive at the utopian society the “enlightened” elites claim to be achievable, whites just need to apologize for the “privileges” they have “usurped,” make reparations for the damages they have inflicted and then just get out of the way … or else.

Of course, there remain some among the unwashed who continue to challenge the logic—or, better yet, the lack thereof—of those who would postulate that the victims of such race-based bigotry are themselves the bigots. But they are quickly dismissed for failing to appreciate that the lack of logic inherent to the policies of the “enlightened” is no longer to be considered relevant within the confines of the public debate as they have defined it.

Consider further the recent election when millions of people witnessed before their very eyes the largest successful criminal conspiracy ever pulled off in the history of mankind—i.e. the fraud that disenfranchised over 75 million voters to illegally replace a president the “enlightened” disdained with another “president” suffering from dementia. And yet, notwithstanding the obviousness of this truth, the same elites who committed this crime now would have us all believe that we must be committed to the silencing of any who would challenge the legitimacy of an illegitimate president due to the threat such dissidents pose to our democracy. It’s the same logic as a murderer telling the police to not question the crime in light of the fact that the corpse is already dead. That is the kind of logic pretzel that enables these same newly re-empowered elites to find that a certain congressman seated on the House Intelligence Committee who is alleged to have been bang-banging a Chinese spy named Fang Fang poses no more of a threat to our democracy—not to mention, our nation’s security—than the declared anti-Semite who remains seated in the House Foreign Relations Committee. While at the same time, we are told by those same “enlightened” elites that the xenophobic bigots who supported President Trump—who, on a sunny day, prefer to refer to themselves as patriots who endorse things like law and order, a strong economy, enforceable borders, domestic jobs and election integrity—are henceforth to be categorized en masse as potential domestic terrorists. And as such, it is they—that is, not the elitist criminals—who are to be identified, censored, boycotted, de-platformed and, whenever possible, prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law—as defined and selectively enforced by the elitists, of course … or else.

Meanwhile, this newly re-invented culture we are being forced to inhabit is passing laws that would require schools, businesses, and churches to surrender their constitutional liberties in order to avoid discriminating in any way against people with hairy chests and five-o’clock shadows who may also choose to grow breasts, wear a dress and paint their nails. Nor are we to even think about complaining if some of these same individuals out-compete our daughters on the track or wrestling mat, or even if they choose to share our daughters’ locker room showers. We are told sexual orientation and gender preference is not for anyone other than the individual to decide. Thus, predictably, based on this illogical game plan, it will not be long before civil rights protections will soon be extended as well to pedophiles and polygamists … or else.

For many caught in this cultural riptide, the question that begs to be asked is: “How do we get out of this fix?”

The answer may lie in how we got here.

As a nation, we have willfully untethered ourselves from the anchor that once guided the morality of this country—i.e. a belief in the God from which emanated the Judeo-Christian ethics upon which this country was founded. To our shame, many of us remained silent as we were told by a few that a culture’s morality is not dependent on the precepts of an imaginary God. Humans, we were told by the politically correct, “enlightened” few, are capable of forming their own morality. And indeed, according to them, only when the moral devotion of humanity is unleashed from the “tyrannical” commandments of such a God and redirected toward wherever our worship of“science” and “humanity” can take us, will we be allowed to reach the utopia of our own creation that we have been assured by the enlightened is attainable.

And therein lies the very lie that has been offered to replace the God-inspired truth and standards we as a people used to share in common.

It is this very same lie of the inherent goodness of a humanist morality that was sold to people by socialist leaders in the past like Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong to enable those same people to justify—in their minds—the need to kill tens of millions of their fellow man.

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn put it this way when asked how the socialist policies in Russia came to result in the death of over 60 million people:

“Men have forgotten God …”

Logic dictates that is something America might want to seriously consider soon before the cultural rip tide of today takes us beyond the point of no return … or else.

Clifford Nichols is an attorney and the author of A Barrister’s Tales.