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The average Joe spends his time at work, and with his family and friends. He may vote, but politics is not his passion. He basically wants to be left alone. But the ruling class—the decision makers who run our institutions—won’t let him. They are interested in getting him to do what they think is in his best interest. They don’t need to consult him, and that is because they know better.
Radical intellectuals and activists are just as arrogant, and just as intrusive. They entertain grandiose plans about socially engineering society, and they have all sorts of plans on how to steer the average Joe. Just like the ruling class, they feel confident in making decisions for him.
What unites the ruling class and radicals is power. They lust for it. Why? Their goal is to control the average Joe, getting him to dance to their every beat. But he is not easy to control, and that is because his primary allegiances are to his family and religion. If they can pry him away from the grip of his family and religion, there is a good chance he will find a sense of community with them. Then they can proceed to implement their vision of the good society.
Standing in their way, more than any other factor, is Christianity. It is committed to the family and traditional moral values, and that is something that makes elites uneasy and radicals unhappy.
It used to be that the ruling class and radicals stood in opposition to each other, but something new has been happening. There has been an alignment of large sectors of the ruling class and radicals. They may still clash, but more often than not they have joined hands. There is one big wrinkle—the success of Donald Trump. It is clear that he has punctured the ruling class bubble (which explains why many hate him). But there are still large sectors of elite decision makers who have broken bread with radical thinkers and activists. They have Christianity in the crosshairs.
The ruling class has almost nothing in common with the average Joe. They are wealthy, well educated and are mostly secularists who devalue, if not disparage, Christianity. President Ronald Reagan knew them well. In a famous speech he gave branding the Soviet Union the “evil empire,” he quoted from C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. Lewis warned that the greatest evil in the world was being done by the “quiet men,” the clean-cut men who run our institutions.
Yes, it is the “quiet men” who run our institutions that we need to guard against, many of whom have adopted the radical agenda. What they seek was best said by Bill Ivey, a ruling class member who advised Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016. Speaking of elite Democrats, he said, “we’ve all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry.”
That is their goal—to establish a “compliant citizenry.” To achieve this goal they rely on “soft totalitarianism.” Unlike the violence that is practiced by the architects of “hard totalitarianism” (Hitler, Stalin and Mao), they seek to seduce and coax the average Joe to do what they want him to do. Pope Saint John Paul II warned about this development, saying the elites want a subservient population.
Radicals despise religion, in general, harboring a special hatred for Christians. They know that as long as the average Joe lays anchor with his religion, he is not likely to bow to their secular appeals. In some instances, radical activists resort to violence, as in firebombing crisis pregnancy centers. Appeals have also been made by educators and celebrities to shoot Trump supporters.
Their allies in the ruling class are more careful, preferring to unleash the FBI to spy on ordinary Catholics. The Biden administration took direct aim at pro-life Catholics and Protestants, thus doing the dirty work egged on by radical intellectuals and activists.
To be sure, there are good members of the ruling class and there are good intellectuals, professors and activist Americans who seek to make our society better. But there are way too many on the other side, elitists, writers and activists who are working overtime to hurt our country. They have chosen to disable the family and religion because if they succeed in doing so they will be well on their way to securing victory.
The ruling class and radicals want us to despair. Let’s make sure they fail.
