BEPPE GIOVANELLI

I worked for a government agency in the decade of the sixties. It was the era of The Great Society in policy circles. It was also a critical inflexion point for the progressive left. The Marxist promise of the Soviet Union had failed and was seen to have failed. The workers in the west were doing better materially than the workers in the worker’s paradise – not just a little better, but dramatically better.

The old left in the US, which had thrived in the conditions of the Great Depression was encountering both resistance and worse apathy from their clients the industrial workers. The Frankfurt School members who had fled to the west were well set up in academia and they understood that the battle may have been lost on the factory floor, but the culture of the west was entering a decadent period and that weakness was available for exploitation. In places like divided Germany, it was obvious that the supposed economic dreadnaught of scientific materialism was, ah, how shall we say, er… less than optimal. The East Germans had shortages and produced the Trabant – perhaps the worst automobile ever, and the West Germans were putting out Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Volkswagen – arguably some of the best cars in the world. It was the same people and same culture, the same language and history, but with a line artificially drawn through their midst. All variables save one were controlled for. The one operant variable was the philosophical difference between a directed economy and a market economy. One was scientistic and abstract. The other was organic and concrete. One was blah blah blah jawboning, wishes, and hopes enforced by threats and intimidation and the other was a hard bottom line. Embarrassingly, all could see the fruits of the poison tree of scientific materialism. A wall had to be built to pen in the masses to prevent their flight. So much for environment determines human nature. Human nature tended to leak into the public square.

The New Left decided to attack the culture that was the foundation for the more successful market economy. And they did. The change in tactics required a new client group because the workers in the west were onto them. The New Left did to blacks and women what they had formerly done to workers under the shadow of the Soviet Union. I was speaking with a newly retired woman of my acquaintance who had worked without a break since she was in her teens. She had held some important positions and won some awards for her creative work, but she never managed to break into real money or power so that she was always making others rich with her best efforts. Looking back on her career she spoke for the first time about a feeling of having been poorly used. She said that she only recently realized that she should never have worked but should have stayed home raising children and that her artistic abilities and interests were better suited to the home than commerce. She never had any children and once out of the excitements of business competition she realized that all she got were things and much of them were out of fashion, obsolete or worn out. She had no generational future. When she and I were young none of the middle class mothers worked. Now two incomes are required. As for the other client of the left, they are doing much less well by any sociological indices than prior to becoming a client class. Today’s Trabants are groups of people sharing an identity. They are being made ugly and poorly functioning. They are being made ill-suited for their purpose and grimly uniform with few options.

I saw the failure of the sixties left up close and personal while working for the Great Society apparatus. It helped to reinforce a common sense perspective that I had noticed in myself at a very young age. I never fully bought into the nonsense. But the moral chaos, the financial and human waste, and the incoherence of the policy initiatives was Kafkaesque. I was aware of a certain training program operated by a newly defrocked priest under contract to the community action program (CAP). He was forty something training volunteers in their early twenties. The course involved “sensitivity training” in a rented windowless basement. No facts – only feelings. There were self-criticism sessions in which the participants were asked to reveal to the group their fears and vulnerabilities. It became apparent that the ex-priest used the information to sleep with the young women in the program and play nasty psych games with the young men. No complaints were ever made by any of the participants. Perhaps shame played a part in their silence. One of the young women who had lived near where I went to college prior to working for “the man” and with whom I corresponded long after my job ended turned to lesbianism – in part, I am convinced, as a response to being sexually used and physically and emotionally abused by the older man.

I understood at the time and my understanding has deepened over the years that the left’s purpose has been to turn the world into a sterile sex farm for the elite. They begin grooming the kiddies for future fun and games as early as possible. Jeff Epstein was not an outlier – he was just unfortunately vulgar in method and subsequently caused a fuss. He and McCarrick got greedy. With a little more discretion they could both be happily being feted by the rich and powerful today and be serviced as desire called. To paraphrase William Jennings Bryan, we are being crucified on a cross of sexuality. You can perhaps imagine how I sat up and paid close attention to the Fatima vision of souls falling into hell like snowflakes because of sins of the flesh. I have known this about the left for decades. Only yesterday the concept bubbled to the surface at TCT – here.

Maybe others are catching on. The left has cast off all restraint and no one can say they are being subtle. It’s all quite obvious now.

We await a divine corrective with fear and trembling, but also with hope.