As Americans approach a post-COVID celebration of the Fourth of July, it's an appropriate time to consider why the most extreme elements of the far Left have been able to take control of American institutions so quickly — despite polls showing that the overwhelming majority of citizens oppose the "woke" agenda almost in its entirety.

During the Fourth of July, the root cause of this national nightmare will be on display for all to see.

I'm speaking of the backyard barbecue.

The barbecue is the hermeneutical key to understanding the gradual breakdown of western society — not just in the U.S., but also in Australia, Canada, and many other countries. 

It explains why normal citizens watch helplessly as blue-haired men in dresses take control of key government departments, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, intelligence services, virtually all universities, many corporations, and much of the judicial system.  It all comes down to influence.

The truth is, normal, happy, well-adjusted people don't really care about politics — or care only when they are forced to by rioting mobs of looters in their cities.   

Normal people of any and all colors don't want to tell you their pronouns, chemically castrate their sons with puberty-blocking drugs, or defund the police.  They're neither oppressors nor oppressed. 

They just want to live their lives in peace, attend their kids' soccer or baseball games, and enjoy summer afternoons grilling

Therein lies the problem: it turns out that, with a very few exceptions, the absolute worst people on the planet — the kind of people who were hall monitors in high school and enjoy creating and enforcing petty regulations on their fellows — go into politics. 

These are the entitled few who believe that rules and regulations are for other people, never for themselves — the grifters, tax cheats, and adulterers who run for office instead of working for a living.  These are the Bill Clintons and Gavin Newsoms of the world.

Now we have scientific data to back up this commonsense intuition. 

In a fascinating article on Substack, political scientist Richard Hanania provides a mountain of evidence for why, as he puts it, "everything is so liberal" — despite the fact that, statistically speaking, there are relatively few liberals and fewer still "woke" progressives.

The most basic reason is the barbecue — the fact that normal people would rather grill than protest, rather throw water balloons than Molotov cocktails.

It turns out that protesting — screaming, yelling, burning down buildings — gets attention.  It gives the tiny handful of fanatics influence wildly disproportionate to their numbers.

One example: The cowardly executives at the Target Corporation removed from their stores all copies of a book critical of "gender-affirming" treatments for minor children, particularly young girls, when a single anonymous person tweeted in protest.

One tweet was all it took — and all the copies were removed.

What Hanania shows is that the lunatic left is full of screaming fanatics who desperately want to "change the world" and will do anything it takes to achieve their goals.  "Democracy does not reflect the will of the citizenry, it reflects the will of the activist class, which is not representative of the general population," he explains.

Statistically, this is seen, Hanania says, in the greater number of leftists who donate to political causes and show up at political marches, protests, and demonstrations.  They simply care more.

Hanania points out that while 74.2 million Americans voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, only 3.7 million donated to his campaign — compared to 5.9 million for Joe Biden.     

This divide is even more dramatic when it comes to demonstrations. 

If a university forces its freshman women to share showers with senior men, as Joe Biden's executive order apparently does, it doesn't have to worry about armies of angry parents occupying the administration building. 

Yet if it dares to maintain its century-old "trans-exclusionary" policies, that is precisely what it can expect from phalanxes of blue-haired men in dresses, egged on the likes of CNN's Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon. 

Which group gets its way?  As Yeats put it: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."

"Conservatives may tell themselves that they are the normal people party, too satisfied and content to expend much time or energy on changing the world," Hanania writes.  "But in the end, the world they live in will ultimately reflect the preferences and values of their enemies."

All is not entirely lost. 

As the far-left pushes more and more of its totalitarian policies on the general population, normie Americans and MAGA boomers are slowly beginning to awaken to the reality of what is happening to their country.

The recent explosion in protests at school board meetings — led by parents angry at the "anti-racism" equity curricula being forced on children in schools — shows that conservative activism can make a difference. 

Yet that also explains why America's oligarchy is pulling out all the stops against the January 6 protesters and Trump-supporters generally, desperate to send a message to half the country that it will not tolerate normal Americans acting the same way leftists do — causing a ruckus, vandalizing government buildings, wrestling with police, and so on.

If ordinary Americans start making as much noise as leftists, then the oligarchs' political agenda may be threatened.  And that simply cannot be tolerated.

Robert J. Hutchinson writes about the intersection of history, politics and ideas.  He is the author of What Really Happened: The Lincoln Assassination.

Image via Pixabay.

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