Remember when Hollywood activist Jane Fonda chortled that the coronavirus was “God’s gift to the left”?
That was back in October 2020, at the height of lockdowns and school closures, when the country was reeling from the violent BLM-Antifa riots over the summer.
It was no time for celebration, but clearly Hanoi Jane knew something that most Americans didn’t pick up at the time.
A new book out this week explains what leftist Fonda seemed to know back then, perhaps from her papered-over days as a Communist collaborator during the Vietnam War.
While we were sleeping, in 2020, America went through a cultural revolution that was instantly recognizable to escapees from totalitarianism like Xi Van Fleet, who had lived through the terrors of Mao’s China as a schoolgirl.?
Her book, “Mao’s America,” is a five-alarm warning of the menace in our midst.
She is alarmed that most Americans do not see clearly what she does, that “the root of today’s ‘woke revolution,’ not to mention its ultimate goal, is Marxism followed by Communism.”
2021 woke-up call?
You might remember Van Fleet as the plucky Virginia mom who burst onto the national stage in 2021 with a 60-second speech to the Loudon County School Board, warning that critical race theory and similar woke ideology being shoved down kids’ throats echoed Mao’s murderous Cultural Revolution in the China of her youth.
Her kids were grown by then and she was shy, but she felt a duty to warn the adopted country she loved about the menace it was facing.
“Chinese by birth, American by choice, survivor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, defender of liberty” is how she describes herself, having emigrated to America in 1996.?
China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao Zedong, the Communist dictator who ruled from 1949 to 1976, lasted 10 years, and covered most of Van Fleet’s school years.
“In my memory, it also appeared to happen overnight, just like it did here in America in 2020 … Overnight, we were told the country we lived in was rotten to the core and needed to be dismantled.?
“Instead of looking for racists, we were ordered to look for ‘counterrevolutionaries’ …?
“People turned against each other in search of enemies and in defense of Mao. Friends turned against friends, neighbors against neighbors, co-workers against co-workers, and family members turned against each other. As children, we were taught to report on family members, including our parents.”
“Cancel culture ensued, and on its path anything that was not pure Maoist — including our Chinese heritage — was literally destroyed. Statues were toppled by mobs. Books and art were burned.”
It was all too familiar to Van Fleet when America started tearing itself apart in 2020.
She knew it wasn’t spontaneous, but deliberate.
She couldn’t miss the striking similarities of America’s own Cultural Revolution, born of the perfect storm of the pandemic and the violent hysteria whipped up over the death in Minnesota of a black criminal, George Floyd, under the knee of a white cop.
With mounting horror she saw the lawless mobs set free to menace the populace and recognized them as the homegrown version of Mao’s Red Guards, with the subsequent ongoing breakdown of law and order the deliberate outcome.
“The summer of 2020 will forever be remembered as the summer of unrest and violence,” she writes.
“It runs parallel to the Red Guards’ Red Terror in August and September of 1966. Americans are now told to accept a new reality where the police have become villains and criminals have become victims who are allowed to roam freely in our cities and communities, terrorizing the citizens.”
Destabilized by chaos
Sanctioned shoplifting and the encouragement of an emboldened criminal underclass that plagues most blue cities is not some random after-effect of the pandemic, but a tactic she recognizes to destabilize law-abiding citizens and keep them in a perpetual state of confusion and fear.
“It is all about power,” she writes.
“It is about gaining power by first destabilizing a society through cultural subversion and upheaval.”
She saw children turn on parents, Thanksgiving family gatherings riven by division and discord, the public ritual denunciations of conservatives, the toppling of statues, the denigration of our history and of religion and the nuclear family, the absurd lies and gaslighting by our leaders accepted as holy writ, and above all, a very un-American censorship which crushed dissent.
“But wait,” she said to herself.
“I have seen all of this before …?
“I know what it is that is happening here because I’ve seen this on both fronts: far-left progressive forces, using weapons such as CRT, wokeism, BLM, and cancel culture, in order to root out conservatives and any resistance to their radical agenda.”
Van Fleet also was reading WeChat, a Chinese version of Facebook, and was struck by “how many Chinese people in China were laughing at what was going on in the US, calling it the ‘American cultural revolution.’ ”
The Chinese knew better than most Americans what was happening in our country, and they reveled in it.
Thank goodness for refugees from communism like Van Fleet.
They are the canaries in the coal mine warning us to wake up before it’s too late.
Rand slams fed cyber-censors
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) politely eviscerated DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and FBI Director Christopher Wray this week for their efforts to censor Americans on social media under the guise of “threats to the homeland.”?
While attempting to deny the documented undeniable, both men conceded their meetings with Big Tech had all but dried up in the wake of the scathing US District Court ruling in July in the landmark free-speech case Missouri v. Biden, which is heading to the Supreme Court.
But you can bet they will find some more imaginative method of controlling unauthorized speech ahead of the 2024 election, as they did in 2020.
In that case, the call by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to impeach Mayorkas could be seen as an election integrity measure, as well as well-deserved punishment for his border mismanagement.