#abe greenwald

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

[eretzyisrael]

[nosferdoc]

“Recognizing the DSA’s arm-twisting plan to seize power is also important because it’s the only part of their Communist fantasy that’s actually going to happen. And it’s happening. These giggling ignoramuses aren’t going to abolish the presidency or the Senate or anything else. But they’re going to make us good and miserable trying.”

— Abe Greenwald, The Misery Strategy, 7/27/2026.

[alanshemper]

[arcticdementor]

Yes, This Is a Revolution - Abe Greenwald, Commentary Magazine

The battle for the survival of the United States of America is upon us. It has not come in the form of traditional civil war. There are no uniformed armies,

The battle for the survival of the United States of America is upon us. It has not come in the form of traditional civil war. There are no uniformed armies, competing flags, or alternate constitutions. The great showdown is not being fought within the physical limits of a battlefield. It is instead happening all around us and directly to us. It defines our culture, sustains our media, and gives new shape to our public and private institutions. In this fight, there is no distinction between what was once known as the culture war and politics rightly understood. The confrontation stretches through time and space, reframing our distant past even as it transforms the horizon, erupting from coast to coast, and constraining our lives in subtle and obvious ways. And it’s happening too fast for us to take its full measure.

For partisans, it often feels as if everything stands or falls on the ideological battles of the day. But this is different. This is objectively real, and it’s remaking the nation before our eyes.

We know it’s different this time because the stakes are continually articulated by the enemies of the current order. They are demanding, and in some cases getting, a new and exotic country. The police are indeed being defunded. The statues are coming down. The heretics are being outed. The dissenters are being silenced. The buildings are burning, and the demands are ever growing.

…

If it wasn’t clear in late May and early June, it should be well understood by now that we are in the throes of a genuine revolution of the most extravagant sort. Like messianic revolutionaries of the past, the revolutionary mob of the 21st century is out to “remake the world.” Their compass is “no longer pointed at one thing.” It’s aimed in all directions at once. As Thomas Paine said approvingly of France in 1791, “it is the age of revolutions, in which everything may be looked for.” A mission so grandiose demands the most radical assault on the current order, and changing the world begins with changing one’s country. So it was in France in 1789, Russia in 1917, and China in 1949. And this is especially so if one’s country is seen as the seat of the present evil and is also the most powerful nation on the planet. This is, then, most fundamentally a revolution against the United States of America and all it stands for.

And yet, we seem to be treating the great unraveling as something less than a revolution. Apart from the boasts of the revolutionaries themselves, we are apt to hear characterizations of the moment as either “an opportunity for change” or, among those who are wary of it, a “fever” that will blow over in time. But what we are living through now is more consequential than any period of recent unrest, and it’s not just another leftist wave destined to roll on until it loses strength. Indeed, a revolution’s ultimate power comes from its being underestimated, tolerated, or accepted by those outside its ranks. The speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has adopted the language of the revolution, calling federal agents “stormtroopers.” For New York Representative Jerry Nadler, anarchist violence in Portland is but a “myth.” And the media’s abiding sympathy for the revolutionary cause has become mainstream journalism’s new North Star. The great unraveling has won the tacit approval of the press, influential policymakers, and a great many ordinary Americans. It is, therefore, already remaking the world.

We tend not to recognize the revolution for what it is—first of all because it seems to lack a proper paramilitary element. Popular notions of insurgency involve images of AK-47s, organized bands of armed men, and the general flavor of war. But in truth, the current revolution has drifted much further into this territory than the media care to admit. The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), the anarchist territory formerly established in Seattle, boasted a provisional armed “security” force. Weeks after CHAZ was dismantled, Seattle police responding to a riot uncovered a cache of weapons including explosives, bear spray, spike strips, and Tasers. Antifa members not only routinely dress in similar black garb but have come to rely on a crude but dangerous arsenal of improvised fire bombs, fireworks, rocks, bricks, and frozen water bottles. In New York, three rioters were arrested for throwing Molotov cocktails at police vehicles. Revolutionaries in cities around the country have shown up to “protests” with rifles and assorted arms.

The revolution lacks martial discipline but not a body count. Three weeks in, some 20 people had been killed during riots alone. The number has climbed steadily since. Within the brief life of Seattle’s CHAZ, there were four shootings and two deaths. You can add to these the hundreds dead (overwhelmingly African-American) in major cities due to new policing restrictions. And this is to say nothing of the multitude of nonfatal injuries, including hundreds suffered by law enforcement. Among these is the likely permanent blinding of three federal agents in Portland whose eyes were targeted with high-power lasers.

The cost of revolutionary violence in destroyed property and ruined livelihoods has been gargantuan, somewhere in the billions of dollars and climbing ever higher. And if you don’t think vandalism is a sufficiently revolutionary act, you’d do well to note that the term “vandalism” itself was coined during the French Revolution to describe the ruination of the country at the hands of the sans culottes.

…

Some have been prone to discount the revolution as a mere by-product of seemingly larger national woes. In the run-up to the riots, the nation suffered from a dispiriting pandemic and a paralyzing lockdown. As a result, we went from 3.5 percent unemployment to 14.7 percent in two months. For more than a decade, political polarization has been growing and faith in American institutions has been plummeting, both trends sped up and magnified exponentially over the course of the Trump presidency.

But these overarching conditions don’t vitiate the sincerity or salience of the revolutionary cause. To the contrary, they mimic precisely the classic circumstances under which revolutions have been birthed. It is in soil fertilized by decayed public trust that revolutions take root—whether or not those revolutions actually address the source of destabilization. One year before the onset of the French Revolution, France saw a totally failed harvest. One month before, a devastating hailstorm nearly wiped out national yields again. These disasters along with broad French distrust of the church and other institutions outside the monarchy all contributed to the fall of the king. Illness and disease have also been classic contributors to revolution. In 1917, St. Petersburg, ground zero for the Russian Revolution, was considered the unhealthiest major city in Europe. Its ongoing woes included a deadly cholera epidemic only a few years earlier.

…

The revolution’s left-liberal targets, in the media and the academy and mass entertainment, have been quick to adapt—some out of genuine sympathy with the cause, others hoping to protect their political standing, and still others out of abject fear. In China, few dared criticize violent Red Guard gangs for fear of seeming unsympathetic to the revolution. In the United States, rioters are furnished with every excuse the elite can muster. And the broad acceptance of the revolution in liberal institutions has resulted in a widespread pressure campaign of accusation, confession, and reeducation.

Mao sought to eradicate what he labeled the Four Olds: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas—the established mental life of the country. Our own pressure campaign is shaped by similar goals. The revolutionaries have deemed American customs, culture, habits, and ideas racist. And instead of Mao’s Little Red Book to guide them in the ways of the proletariat, they have Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, which shows them all the hidden places where racism is to be found and rooted out.

…

For those not being re-educated by the state or canceled by the media mob, that is, for ordinary low-profile Americans, there are other channels of coercion. In the New York Times, writer Chad Sanders recommends interfamilial blackmail. In a June 5 op-ed, he suggested to white people: “[Send] texts to your relatives and loved ones telling them you will not be visiting them or answering phone calls until they take significant action in supporting black lives either through protest or financial contributions.” This, too, is straight out of the Cultural Revolution, during which Chinese were compelled to shun and turn against any family members with even the most remote connections to the wrong ideas.

_____________

What to do? Those of us who stand opposed to the revolution and its aims harbor the hope that the revolutionaries will “eat each other alive” or that their mixed motivations, outlandish ideas, and repellent actions will ultimately blow up the movement from within. But such internal dynamics can serve to refine, not kill off, revolutions. Revolutionary France was a perpetual and bloody power struggle between parties such as the Hébertists, Thermidoreans, and Jacobins. Such competition ensured that, in the long run, the fiercest elements came out on top. The same can be said of the battles between the Mensheviks, the Left SR, and the Bolsheviks of Russia. The Cultural Revolution was itself a sustained effort to wrench and secure control of the Chinese Communist Party. And in all these cases, important nonrevolutionary fellow travelers found reason to make common cause and go along with the winners at any given moment. Judging from history (and the present), it is unlikely that the revolution will self-destruct.

[dianabletter]

Six Tips For Writers: What I Learned As COMMENTARY Publishes My Story, "One Kiss, One Baby, One God"

A nothing-to-do-but-be moment.

Nothing to do today? You can read my short story in Commentary Magazine here. It just came out. I am honored to be published in this respected journal.

I sent this story in to the slush pile and the editor, Abe Greenwald, liked it. Which shows you that even if you don’t know anybody, you can still get published. But before you send it out to magazines, send it to…

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