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WigWag's avatar

It’s July 14th today, it’s also the day after the assassination attempt and, throughout the French-speaking world, it’s Bastille Day.

On July 14, 1789, somewhere around a thousand French peasants who were mad as hell made the decision not to take it anymore. They stormed the prison where Louis XVI housed his political prisoners and thus began the French Revolution.

The elite that the French peasantry revolted against was the Royal Family, its courtiers, the Catholic hierarchy and the aristocracy.

In the United States today our elite is

the over-educated intellectual set; the credentialed clerisy. The vanguard of our contemporary rulers is the mainstream media who are reacting with justified panic as they watch their power, influence and earning power collapse around them. They will say anything and do anything to maintain their control over the public discourse but they are failing and they know it.

Trump is the leader of the current revolt and the deplorables that he champions are metaphorically storming the American Bastille. That’s why the rhetoric employed against Trump is so overheated. Whether that rhetoric motivated the now dead assassin doesn’t really matter. What matters is that our current elites are as venal as the French elites in 1789 and they are just as frightened and desperate. They will continue to say anything and do anything in their attempt to hang on.

It’s not just Trump who they worry about. They’ve recently decided that Biden is no longer an asset they can depend on. If Biden won’t resign his candidacy I can’t help but wonder what measures they might take out of their desperation.

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D. R. Parsons's avatar

I believe the use of violence as a political strategy is taught in our institutions of higher learning. A Colorado professor in the late 1960s recommended reading Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth" to me and a group of trainees for Prez Kennedy's "Volunteers in Service to America'.

Recently I saw a copy of it on TV. In HBO's (award winning) "The White Lotus" a young woman is relaxing by the pool reading "The Wretched of the Earth". Later on she's reading Aime Cesaire's "Discourse on Colonialism". It's no proof of anything, except that these formerly obscure tracts are leaking out into the culture...from somewhere.

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