Is America a Volcano About to Blow Up?
My New Book Offers Some Historic Insights on How to Survive
In AD 79, a volcanic eruption at Mount Vesuvius in Italy buried the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, ejecting a massive and speedy cloud of stones, ashes and gasses that traveled 21 miles high, killing an estimated one thousand people. Epic.
Sometimes it feels like that our country is in a similar place, about to erupt, two sides colliding for an all-stakes war to define America’s — and maybe the world’s — future.
I have written a new book, a historical novel, in which I have one of the characters say, “I feel like I’m living inside Vesuvius, before the volcano blew.”
In The Concert, Luby Shaporina describes the hell of living in Leningrad during World War II, as Nazi Germany’s artillery pounded the majestic city into hunger and deprivation while a paranoid Stalin brutalized any citizen of the Soviet Union who questioned his policies. During the Siege, nearly one million residents of Leningrad, now called St. Petersburg, died of starvation. But two million others survived, and many were witness to a remarkable performance by starving musicians that lifted the city’s spirits and gave people courage to fight to the end. On August 9, 1942, the date Hitler had planned a victory party at the city’s famed Hotel Astoria, these musicians performed Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, a musical depiction of the Nazi invasion. Many in the audience — which included German front line soldiers forced to listen by Russian propaganda efforts — heard in the music an echo of their own traumas.
I began the book, based on a true story, during the pandemic. As the nation stayed home and fear stalked our streets, restaurants, businesses, gyms & beaches, I thought the story of perseverance against the odds might offer hope.
But as the pandemic turned totalitarian and the novel’s plot unfolded, I saw in this tale a subtext that will resonate with readers of Make Orwell Fiction Again: communism and fascism are both evil. What is the difference between Stalin and Hitler, if they both enforce their will by torture and murder? What is the difference between the Bolsheviks and the Gestapo, if individual liberty is sacrificed to state control?
Lately I have begun to wonder if history is at a pivot point, where everything that came before will little resemble the world to come. It is not hard to imagine this, given the transgendering of the nation — nearly 40% of Brown University students identify as LGBTQetc — the instilling of victimhood as an American trait in our schools, the wide-open borders open to drug and child sex cartels, and a hysteria over global warming that is undercutting prosperity. In short, the Democratic Party has stolen Lenin’s Playbook, destroying a once-vibrant economy in favor of centralized government power. And like the Bolsheviks, in the hierarchy of politically-correct power, the comrades at the top are steeped in corruption (hello Pelosi, Bidens, Hillary).
There is much to worry about.
Not content with its efforts to destroy the combustion engine, the Biden administration is now trying to block sunlight from hitting Earth’s surface. The WH claims global warming is hurting the planet — though some argue it is actually making it greener. But in their alarmist view, if blocking the sun will kill off food production and thus a few million humans, well, that’s not a bad thing either. In a recent gaffe, Vice President Kamala Harris said this quiet part out loud, suggesting that the administration’s goal was to cull the population.
The open border, coupled with the decision by blue cities to open the jails and the knee-jerk reflex of the media to blame Republicans for gun violence, even when it’s committed by trans activists, has made our streets unsafe, unsanitary, and unappealing. Once charming cities like San Francisco and Seattle now attract druggies and homeless people who rule the streets. A brilliant new indy movie, Sound of Freedom, chronicles the anguish of a former Homeland Security agent who quits his job in order to rescue children from the traffickers crossing our borders. Despite a boycott by major critics, the film is outpacing Indiana Jones. And one more thing: it is difficult to watch Sound of Freedom without wondering what is the difference between sex perverts kidnapping children for kiddie rape and drag queens grooming them for sexual disorientation. Anyone?
Meanwhile we have sent $75 billion in aid and weapons — including cluster bombs, designed to impose maximum damage on civilians — to fight for Ukraine’s border with Russia. This Biden Disaster makes no sense to anyone except the Washington Establishment, in bed with the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address in 1961. Meanwhile our own weapons supplies are depleted, and the war in Ukraine has drawn Russia and China — two of our most formidable foes — into alliance. As Vivek Ramaswamy has said, it’s time to negotiate a peace treaty between Ukraine and Russia.
The weaponization of abortion, and the people who oppose it, brings shame on our public discourse. For 50 years, anti-abortion advocates made a lonely, cold winter-time trek to DC to urge its repeal. Finally, last year the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade as unconstitutional. Instead of accepting the decision, the Left picketed the homes of Supreme Court justices, patently illegal, as the FBI looked on and did nothing. Transgenders continued the attack on Catholics, with one group, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, invited to mock nuns at Dodger Stadium.
The shame of COVID, and how the Trump and the Biden administrations handled it, will not stop smarting unless we as a culture acknowledge the central fact that the mRNA vaccine, rushed to production by POTUS 45 and mandated by 46, killed a lot of people and seriously injured many others. The government spent a fortune telling us the vaccine was “safe and effective.” It was neither. A recent study submitted to the medical journal Lancet reviewed 325 autopsies and found that the vaccine was the cause of death in 73.9% of cases — with most showing damage to the cardiovascular system. After great initial interest, Lancet scrubbed the study from its website. Nothing to see here. Damar Hamlin & Bronny James are only the latest young, strong, black athletes to suffer, perhaps from too many shots. Meanwhile the CDC has written a memo for biological men wanting to “chestfeed” their babies. Will anyone trust government health agencies again?
Ethicist Aaron Kheriaty — a clarion voice during the pandemic for health policies that required the consent of the patient — argues that for all the woes in an angry world, it is the attack on conservative speech and individual rights that most dooms the country. It is the fulcrum for all the attacks by a Stalinist Media. As he argues:
“The common feature of all totalitarian systems is neither concentration camps, nor secret police, nor mass surveillance—as horrifying as all these are. The common feature of all totalitarian systems is the prohibition of questions.”
The case of Missouri v. Biden is a metaphor for the rest. The attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana sued the US government for its colluding with Social Media tech companies to suppress information during the 2020 election, and during the pandemic. Recently, the federal judge issued a preliminary injunction, prohibiting the White House or any federal agency from working with tech media to censor. Kheriarty, one of the plaintiffs, calls the evidence his side uncovered during discovery “the most serious, coordinated, and large-scale violation of First Amendment free speech rights by the federal government’s executive branch in U.S. history.”
Kheriaty also suggests that at a time of cultural dysfunction, the obligation of every patriot, of every Christian, of every person who believes in God and country, is to speak up. Citing dissidents in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, he suggests that the underground writings of dissidents — what reformer Vaclav Havel called “the power of the powerless” to foment change — can likewise empower us.
So let us summon our words, let us fight for our beliefs, let us stand for children and for justice and for free speech. And like those musicians in Leningrad, let us play so loud that chandeliers shake and the powerful notice. As Ludwig van Beethoven once wrote, “To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable.”
I hope you will buy my new book — the kindle version is available for pre-order on Amazon — and the publication date for all versions is August 9 — the date of the concert in 1942. Please share it with your friends. Maybe, history can steer the future. Maybe, if we value our creativity and our culture, just maybe we can save the world.
Thank you. If you’re in South Florida I’m giving a book party at my office in Delray Beach Friday Aug. 18 from 4:30-6:30, where I’ll autograph books and offer my thoughts. Details to come. 🙏🏻
Thank you!