A WARNING, FROM A FRIEND ON FACEBOOK:

A systemic defect inseparable from the system requires wholesale replacement of the system. That’s the game with the systemic-racism canard. The goal isn’t civic equality or respect — both widely supported, both fully achievable in-system. The goal, as Matthew Peterson has noted, is regime change.

This is why you see the aggressive delegitimization of state force, police and military alike. The capacity for violence that is properly the monopoly of any functioning state is stripped away through the closing of the necessary political space. You’re seeing it already: police won’t police, prosecutors won’t prosecute, the man in charge of the Army of the United States issues public apologies, the city fathers of Seattle abandon governance of their own urban core, even “Cops” is cancelled. The state writ large, the sole bearer of democratic legitimacy, is enervated and unsure. Solzhenitsyn would have recognized it: it looks like St Petersburg in 1917. The powerful abandon their duties of stewardship, having absorbed and believed their enemies’ critiques of themselves.

When the regime changes, the people in charge will be the same ones conducting ideological purges and smashing statuary now. It will be rule by Americans with the aesthetic ethos of the Taliban and the social ethos of Mao’s China. We aren’t there yet — but we are a long way toward it. Events accelerate, and once everyone is on board — once the nice lady on CNN who worked on Capitol Hill as senior staff gets her wish of stripping you and me of George Washington and the whole Founding — then the network coalesces and they seize the reins. The existing superstructure is too attenuated to use the power at its disposal, neither for its own preservation nor for the protection of the people whom it is supposed to serve.

The new one won’t be.

Yes, this is nothing like a civil rights movement.