America’s mind riots

Firas Modad
3 min readJan 22, 2021

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There is a madness aflicting Americans because of democracy and irreligion, and it will get worse.

Condemnations from the left are still running wild after one (white) woman was shot dead, three others died of medical issues and at least 52 people were arrested as Trump supporters and at least one actor stormed the US Capitol building in Washington, DC on 6 January. President Donald Trump called on his supporters to go home and to respect the forces of law and order, after having called on them to go to the Capitol and protest at a rally in which he repeated his claim that the election was marred by fraud. To be clear, the condemnations were of Trump and of the riots, not of the shooting.

This is of course in stark contrast to the condemnations of the police for being supposedly ‘institutionally racist’ — whatever that means today — during the riots of summer 2020. It is in stark contrast to most of the media establishment justifying and defending riots over the death by overdose of George Floyd. Health experts fell over themselves to say that, while the pandemic was still an enormous threat, systemic racism was an even bigger health crisis. Trump’s rioters are facing the full power of the law, rightly so, with the media cheering. But Portland and Seattle are yet to address antifa’s shenanigans, and the media is utterly silent.

This is not only due to the partisanship of the media, which only the most blind partisans deny. It is mainly due to the fact that America has lost any sense of a shared identity or shared values — itself the result of a system that places no premium on passing shared values down the generations, but instead claims, insanely, that each individual can discover his own values and that all value systems are equally valid. With this mindset that carries little respect for founding traditions, and given the realities that the human mind is religious and the human being is tribal, it becomes easy and natural to justify the awful actions on your own side and attack those the same actions on the other side. It is a combination of bad dogma operating in the absence of good dogma, and the awful tribalism that grows naturally in the absence of a unifying faith.

Because America now lacks a unifying faith, it also lacks a unifying moral authority that can impose calm and restore sanity. As such, this division is being deepened every day with the media hysteria, the race huxterism, and the insanity of critical race theory and gender theory that are pushed by the Democratic Party. It is deepened by the Republican Party’s base rallying around the awful and weak character of Donald Trump, his narcissm, and his inability to distance himself from the worst elements in his own party.

In a democratic system, you are not rewarded for thoughtfulness and nuance, except in the rare circumstances where there is a modicum of good faith between the contestants, and some towering moral characters than can impose unity. Neither can exist without a shared faith, which at the very least provides the assurance that the contestants are serving the same higher purpose. Now, half the country believes the other half are led by paedophile bloodsuckers. That other half believes that their opponents are facists and Nazis. Democracy, mroe so than ever in the age of mass media and social media, rewards loudness, and confuses being principled with being unwilling to empathise and then compromise. It is not any longer a question of ambition counteracting ambition to bring about the best possible outcome and prevent tyranny. Now, both sides harbour and express the ambition, increasingly openly, to utterly humiliate and destroy the other side — the very essence of tyranny. And with Biden posing as a moderate while embracing the worst ideas on the fringes of the left of his own party, this is set to get worse. As it becomes clear that Biden’s embrace of luxury causes like transgenderism and environmentalism will not bring about dignified life to his own base, let alone the other side, the sense of disappointment that both sides have in the system is set to deepen. Moreover, with each administration now setting a pattern where it dedicates its energies to erasing the legacy of its predecessor, the room for compromise will shrink further.

In the absence of a unifying story or faith in America, it is only natural that each democratic contest will pull the country further apart, rather than bring it together. Just as 2016 was worse than 2012, and 2020 was worse than 2016, 2024 will be much, much worse than 2020.

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