When the "independent journalists" of the progressive Democrat narrative "news" have their coordination meeting, and receive guidance from the central committee in how best to project their own lack of professional ethics onto "the enemy", is there a motto? Something like:

Malicious gossip war is niceness

Independence is groupthink

Ignorance of the past is our strength

https://twitter.com/lpolgreen/status/1165738254689345544

It's delusion. The entire "racist" narrative is delusion, when it isn't calculated misdirection, by progressive Democrats, to cover the screamingly obvious fact that _all_ of this is "progress" gone wrong.

The whole sorry mess is the collateral damage of "progress"- starting with reasoned debate gone out the window in the '60s when screaming accusations (AKA "protesting") like babies having a tantrum, in order to win "national conversations" for which no compelling case was made with reasoned argument supported by objective evidence, were substituted for it.

The "protests", the calculated incivility, the screaming profanity, the re-writing, without justification, or, often, warning of, of etiquette, and many other cultural norms, the "new morality", the "sexual revolution", "feminism", the "anti-war movement" (there is a stunningly obvious lie, leftism _IS_ war- the central idea of Marxism is that nothing but struggle between groups of people matters: Leftism was never authentically anti-war, but anti _some_ wars, presumably, those which impede the march of "progress"), and more, or course, but I don't have all day.

In 55 years of imposing, piece by piece, "fundamental transformation" on the "Democratic" (no longer) Party first, then the USA entire, without ever making a compelling case, without the agreement of the people of the United States, "by any mean necessary", the "New Left" (lets call it, to distinguish from earlier rounds of the same poisonous ideology) has created the monsters it demands that we give up our liberty to them to be saved from, then given us a "cure" worse than the "disease" (for the people as a whole, and the Constitution, but, not, necessarily, for the community organizers, and the administrative state, whose ranks grow, and grow), repeatedly. Mass shootings are only one of those "monsters", although perhaps one of the most telling (the other, I guess, is the epidemic of abortion), because young men, and young women, need the restraint provided by stable families to stabilize them, especially in the early years of adulthood.

What this "progress" has evidently done, is, I think, not a clever plan- to substantially dismantle those qualities which John Adams so eloquently warned us we _must_ have, as a people, to be fit to be governed by a Constitution such as ours:

While our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned us by Providence. But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation, while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world. Because we have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. Oaths in this country are as yet universally considered as sacred obligations. That which you have taken, and so solemnly repeated on that venerable ground, is an ample pledge of your sincerity and devotion to your country and its government.

Letter to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, 11 October 1798, in Revolutionary Services and Civil Life of General William Hull (New York, 1848), pp 265-6. There are some differences in the version that appeared in The Works of John Adams (Boston, 1854), vol. 9, pp. 228-9, most notably the words "or gallantry" instead of "and licentiousness".

Wikiquote: John Adams