The mission of The St. Croix Review is to end the destruction of America by reestablishing the family as the center of American life, restoring economic prosperity to an independent middle class, and reviving a culture of tradition.
A Chasm of Division in America
Barry MacDonald — Editorial
One may think of other times in history when America was bitterly fractured over differences of politics and culture.
The division caused by the Vietnam War, along with the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr., with the civil rights movement and race riots, and with the Manson murders is an equivalent to the trouble in America now. Family members were bitterly estranged over opinions that could not be reconciled. There was great doubt about the worthiness and goodness of America. American leaders had lied to the public about important issues. The Vietnam War started through dubious means and progressed with deficient strategy and poor leadership. Over time stalemate disintegrated America’s trust in its presidents and generals. The measurement of success through the relatively high numbers of enemy dead compared with American dead came to be seen as cynical, senseless, barbaric, and unworthy. Poor whites and minorities were drafted without access to the deferment that more affluent Americans enjoyed. The poor were unwillingly sent to a war they believed to be unjust and unworthy of the sacrifice of their lives.
The mystery that surrounded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was a wound that never healed. Americans began to mistrust and hate their government. The secrecy of the bureaucracy was noticed, loathed, and despised.
Marxist agitators infiltrated university campuses in groups like the Weathermen Underground that carried out terrorist bombings throughout America. Patty Hearst, granddaughter of American publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Nineteen months after her abduction she became a fugitive wanted for serious crimes committed with the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was arrested for bank robbery. She had been brainwashed by Leftist ideology.
The Watergate impeachment saga, the forced resignation of President Nixon, President Ford’s pardon of Nixon, the abandonment of South Vietnam, and the victory of Communist North Vietnam were flashpoints in a dark era of American history. The prestigious media triumphed over the downfall of the Nixon administration. Nixon’s humiliation was a cultural turning point. As a teenager I remember the glee with which many of my generation celebrated.
Rock and roll, popular fiction, movies, entertainment, and intellectual commentary reflected and contributed to a marked shift to Left in American politics in the ’60s and’70s. It was hip to be young and distrustful of older generations, institutions, and American heritage. A gulf separated those who knew the Great Depression, World War II, and the Korean War from those who protested the Vietnam war. For most of us during those times it was better to be guarded among casual acquaintance lest conversation devolve into viciousness.
Americans of that era had become deaf to opposing opinions, and blind to the good-hearted intentions of others whose experience had so profoundly and differently affected them. Scornful caricatures of standup comics were weapons in a cultural war. Patriotism was mocked. Societal trauma made us hate and demonize each other. How much division can a society bear? America’s leaders tested the limits of social cohesion during the Vietnam War.
The St. Croix Review was founded in 1968, amid the estrangement of the American Left and Right. The roots of The St. Croix Review are embedded in the soil of American goodness, decent civil liberties, respect for our neighbors and communities, economic liberty, a stout defense of American sovereignty, lawful order, personal self-reliance and individual initiative, the bedrock of motherhood, fatherhood, and family, honest and transparent government, and, most of all, the importance of personal integrity.
Let’s take stock of the malign influence that Leftwing ideology has imposed on American society since the Vietnam era.
On a podcast Megan Kelly revealed the contents of the writings of Audrey Hale, the 2023 Covenant School shooter. Hale murdered three nine-year-old students and three adults at the Covenant School. In her journals (that were kept from the public by the Nashville police for two years) Hale repeatedly confessed hatred for white Americans. Hale was obsessed with transgenderism. She wrote “Female pronouns make me like I want to die.” She considered herself and other murderers as “gods.” She thought of Tim McVeigh, Jim Jones, Jeffery Dahmer, and Dylan Klebold (one of the two Columbine school shooters) as “gods.” Hale regarded herself to be the reincarnated soul of Dylan Klebold. She wrote of Klebold, “My thoughts of depression are forever linked to his and my experience as well.”
Clearly Hale was hypnotized by Leftist identity politics. Her profound disturbance was coincident with the introduction of gender indoctrination into the curriculum of America’s public schools. It is difficult to imagine that the toxic brew of hatred and confusion that skewed Hale’s consciousness would have arisen without the impetus of Woke ideology.
Let’s take stock of the tendency toward political violence encouraged by Leftist rhetoric. The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) is a nonprofit organization that reports on the spread of “ideologically motivated threats, disinformation, and misinformation across social media and physical spaces.” They “identify and forecast emerging threats in the era of information disorder.” They track “how viral social media narratives were legitimizing political violence, particularly in the aftermath of the United Healthcare CEO’s assassination.” The authors of reports write, “The reports found widespread justification for lethal violence — including assassination — among younger, highly online, and ideologically left-aligned users.”
The reports note Leftist influence in a proposed California ballot measure named “the Luigi Mangione Access to Health Care Act,” that celebrates the alleged leftist murderer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The ballot measure targets health insurance denials, one of Mangione’s reported motivations. Just days after the Luigi Mangione Act was filed in California a California man who was “angry with pharmacies” was arrested for the murder of a Walgreens employee. The victim, Erick Velazquez, was not a pharmacist but was a respected husband and father of two children.
M.D. Kittle writes for The Federalist. He reports that 55 percent of “self-identified leftists” say that killing President Trump is justifiable. Kittle cites a NCRI report:
“The unhinged left, fueled by Trump Derangement Syndrome and seething hatred for Elon Musk, is trending more violent, according to a new study that finds political violence targeting President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser is ‘becoming increasingly normalized.’ . . .
“The report, produced by the Network of Contagion Research Institute in partnership with Rutgers University’s Social Perception Lab, finds a broader ‘assassination culture’ appears to be ‘emerging within segments of the U.S. public on the extreme left, with expanding targets now including figures such as Donald Trump.’
“Less than a year after assassination attempts on then-presidential candidate Trump and the literally explosive violence against Musk’s Tesla electric vehicles, it’s no secret that leftists are ratcheting up violent rhetoric and actions. The more troubling trend is that an ‘assassination culture’ isn’t just coming from the ‘fringe’ left.
“‘These attitudes are not fringe — they reflect an emergent assassination culture, grounded in far-left authoritarianism and increasingly normalized in digital discourse,’ states the report, titled, ‘Assassination Culture: How Burning Teslas and Killing Billionaires Became a Meme Aesthetic for Political Violence.’”
The political rhetoric of Democratic politicians has poisoned the American people. President’s Biden’s use of the appellation “extreme Maga Republicans” has had an impact. The constant harangue and equation from multiple elected Democrats toward both Republican politicians and Republican voters with slurs and smears of “Hitler,” “Nazis,” and “fascists” has soured, embittered, and hardened the hearts and minds of American leftists.
Clearly the tenor of the mass media’s barrage of leftist narrative in the delivery of the daily news has had a profoundly negative effect on American society. The corporate media has turned broadcast and printed news into a daily attack in the style of a Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals attack. Every issue is fodder for the seizure of Leftist power. A relevant modern proverb is: The issue is not the issue; the issue is power. The broadcast news and the major newspapers of the ’60s and ’70s were dignified and restrained in comparison with the sly bile and pollution practiced by our current “journalists.”
I am a poet and I associate with various groups of poets in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Of the dozens of poets whom I know, all but one is on the political Left. They are vocally extreme in their rhetoric. There is an ignorance embedded in their opinions that appears to be insuperable. A pinprick of a counterargument would come against the iron bull of decades of propaganda. When I am with them, I am able to communicate in a light-hearted mien, in the ethereal realm that skillful poets are able to exploit. There is much to discuss apart from politics. I am able to listen to their rage against President Trump and be unaffected. I see their upside-down version of reality. I notice a certain coherence and predictability about them. I feel a sadness in my association with them because they will never know the best of me. I have prominent duties among them. I realize I have constructed a house of cards. If I expressed political opinions I would probably be ostracized. I don’t talk about politics, but I am not hiding either. I will play the role that God assigns for me when I am among them. I could intelligently explain my take on any issue that is likely to emerge in conversation. I would not be heard. I don’t believe them to be intentionally cruel people. They are products of the Vietnam War, and of the layers and layers of leftist media narrative, and of a community of like-minded individuals. They are cogs in the leftist machine. They have many worthy qualities but appeals to liberty would find no reception with them. They have been trained to be intolerant, but they cannot recognize their intolerance.
We good-hearted Americans who are frightened by America’s and Western Europe’s descent toward leftist totalitarianism must do our best to reach those people who are able to hear our message. We must hold to our positions and be eloquent and persistent in the defense of our ideals.
It is ironic that the elitist Left accuses the Right of being fascist, when it is the Left that is most fascistic. To accuse the Right of the very wickedness that they do is a devilish trick. Accusation and demonization are effective tools.
If America is to recover, we must focus and direct our message skillfully. We must free our schools from the malignant influence of leftist propaganda. We must propagate alternative media platforms. We must humble the bureaucracy. And we must support the broad swath of the current Trump agenda.
Once people learn to think like Marxists, with a vicious victim mentality, they are formed in concrete. *
