The Summoning Rituals of the Left

And there came out of the smoke, locusts upon the earth
Revelations, 9:3

The malignant playbook of the contemporary left is generally considered to be Saul Alinsky’s 1989 “Rules for Radicals,” and there is certainly much truth to the story of the book’s destructive influence. But the source text for social and political upheaval is Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven’s far more detailed and authoritative 1997 manual, “The Breaking of the American Social Compact.”

The Cloward-Piven strategy seeks to hasten the fall of the free market and the republican structure of government by overloading the administrative apparatus with an avalanche of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis mode and eventual economic collapse. Choking the welfare rolls, for example, would serve to generate a political and financial meltdown, break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears, and bring the system crashing down. The fear, turmoil, and violence accompanying such a debacle would provide the perfect conditions for fostering radical change.

We see the strategy in action today, forging a situation that was unnecessary from the start via a series of tactical steps, among which: the campaign against productive farming; the so-called 15-minute city herding people into condo-congested urban centers where they are readily supervised and mastered; open borders allowing for a refugee tsunami to alter the character of the nation; a censoring and disinformative media rendered corrupt to the core; the mandating of useless masks or plausibly toxic vaccines; and the implementation of a digital currency in which citizens’ spending can be monitored, restricted, or even frozen. Such phenomena have no basis in even the remotest necessity but are essential in order to prepare the ground for an imminent totalitarian state.

This is the rationale for the so-called COVID pandemic and the bugbear of “Climate Change.” A bad flu season affecting mainly the elderly with comorbidities is not a viral pandemic, as Dr. Vernon Coleman ironically shows. The climate is always changing as a matter of course — the term “climate change” is a gross oxymoron; the thesis of anthropogenic forcing obscures the fact that carbon is material for life and nitrogen for farming. COVID and Climate are tactical phantoms that have nothing to do with reality and everything to do with social control. The Clowardly rePivening put in place by the Democrat Party has only one aim: to create a crisis out of thin air and then seek to defuse it by creating a real crisis that advantages only the Party. It is the diabolical form of creation ex nihilo.

Thus, a ginned-up pandemic is a perfect excuse for mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting, especially if the voter rolls have been flooded with uncountable and counterfeit names and the voting stations have been commandeered. There is no immigration chaos unless a chain system is entrenched and the border is left wide open. There is no such thing as “white supremacy” unless it is apodictically proclaimed and false-flag operations are carried out. There is no need for costly, largely ineffective, and harmful renewable energy installations unless drilling has been rendered illegal and the oil pipelines have been shut down to avoid a bogus climate catastrophe. The bible of the Democrat left begins: Let there be a crisis. And there was a crisis.

We see this species of casuistry at work in the spurious legal vendetta brought to bear against Donald Trump. Innumerable but, so to speak, trumped-up charges need to be created out of whole cloth for the Democrats to prevent their most feared and formidable opponent from entering the presidential race. Since they cannot reasonably put out a contract on Trump, they have resorted to a form of legal assassination, predicated on nothing substantial. Concoct a simulated crisis of legitimacy, then act to disarm it. Cloward and Piven would be proud of their loyal and attentive felons.

Related: ‘Toxic War on Masculinity’ Destroys the Left’s Conventional Wisdom on Men and Faith

The strategy is admittedly brilliant. The aphorism “You never let a serious crisis go to waste” is generally attributed to Rahm Emanuel, who was at the time Barack Obama’s Chief-of-Staff. But it goes back further than that, whether to Winston Churchill who toward the end of World War II purportedly said “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” or, more likely, to M.F. Weiner who wrote in Medical Economics an article titled “Don’t Waste a Crisis—Your Patient’s or Your Own,” the benign version of the phrase intended to benefit both doctor and patient. (Cf. The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs.)

The phenomenon in its negative or exploitative sense, however, implies something truly insidious as it goes deeper than dealing with an actual, undeniable crisis. A genuine crisis is also manipulable but it is not always available. That’s the problem. A ghost crisis is something else, since it can be summoned at any time and put to immediate use. All it requires is a kind of conjuration ritual. As noted, first manufacture a crisis that doesn’t exist by calling it out of the void, then make sure through policy manipulations, media disinformation, and hypothetical remedies that it doesn’t go to waste, so that one can further one’s own unrelated agenda. To create indignation, righteous fury, and abject compliance over what does not exist is why leftist thinking is magical thinking, the apotheosis of contrived illusion, yet it is very effective in generating public assent and legislative travesty.

As Stephen McDonald warns on Liberty Island, Cloward-Piven in action would probably mean “an America gone red in tooth and claw, [p]roperty confiscation at a minimum, re-education camps [and] the country in ruins. If that wasn’t the probable outcome, leftoids wouldn’t be pushing for a Cloward-Piven result in the first place.” As for the tandem in question, we have met the type before: dissociated academics who serve the Prince of Lies rather than seek truth through disinterested scholarship. And as for their acolytes, they are the locusts of the political underworld creating nation-destroying havoc where there was none before.