When COVID-19 first reared its ugly head a mere couple of years ago (seems like much longer, doesn’t it?), the Trump-hating Left recognized that here was a crisis too good to waste, to paraphrase Obama’s former Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel. As Cheryl Chumley observes in her new book Lockdown: The Socialist Plan to Take Away Your Freedom, “Democrats, progressives, globalists, collectivists, socialists, and Marxists saw opportunity to reshape an entire world.” Lockdown, from Humanix Books, is her damning overview of how the power-lusting Left manipulated and exploited the pandemic to kickstart their Great Socialist Reset.
Chumley is the online opinion editor for The Washington Times, an Army vet, a journalist, and author – most previously (2020) of Socialists Don’t Sleep: Christians Must Rise or America Will Fall. If you are unfamiliar with her writing, Ms. Chumley pulls no punches in her takedowns of the Left, and makes no apologies for her Christian perspective on political events. She is not reticent about identifying as “evil” the forces wreaking ruin in the world today; nor is she vague about their aim: leftists “want total and complete lockdowns of individual freedoms, individual rights, individually held liberties so they can stage their reset and reshape a new America, a new world, more in line with their collectivist and elitist beliefs. It’s called destroy, then rebuild. What they’re destroying is the Constitution; what they’re trying to rebuild is cultural Marxism and communist control.”
Along those lines, she bluntly states that, in the COVID pandemic, “Democrats saw opportunity to control. To expand power. To rule. To crush. To subjugate. To usher in political reforms, economic changes, and societal shifts of such magnitude that even a Trump term two couldn’t undo.” This agenda, Chumley correctly writes, is “shameless, despicable, and outright evil.”
After that forceful opening, Chumley goes on to break down the Left’s pandemic strategy in chapters devoted to: the media-driven fear-mongering that herded Americans into lockdowns and mask mandates; the targeting of children to mold collectivist thinking in impressionable young minds; the narrative that true patriotism means conformity to government command; the takeover of the health care field; the push to expand climate change legislation and a “green” economy; and more. Along the way she slams billionaire globalist technocrats like subversive philanthropist Bill Gates and evil mastermind Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, men who are funding the collectivist reshaping of every aspect of our society.
In a chapter titled, “Spinning the Truth so Socialism Can Thrive,” for example, Chumley notes that once the coronavirus hit the scene, “[f]ear-fueled prognostications became the order of the day.” Dissent and “misinformation” against the official government/Big Pharma/globalist narrative were treated as a virus more threatening than COVID. Those who told the truth about the so-called vaccine, or who even raised reasonable concerns and questions about its efficacy and side effects, were deemed dangerous “conspiracy theorists.” Cancel culture surged. The Left seized the opportunity to demonize the enemies of atheistic Marxism – manufacturing the threat, for example, of “rising Christian nationalism.”
The targeting of Christian patriots is particularly telling – and alarming. “Strip away God, and what’s left is government,” Chumley warns. “Government, big government, bigger government, ever-growing, ever-expanding government: Democratic, socialist, communist, collectivist government. Do that, and America itself is cancelled.”
The Left also grasped the opportunity to turn schools and colleges into totalitarian “breeding grounds for… government informants”; to empower and enrich the bullying teachers unions, which are controlled by leftist activists, of course; and to train an entire generation to believe the government is the beneficent parent of society – all while causing long-term scholastic and emotional damage to the students themselves.
To help facilitate their agenda, the Left also fashioned the divisive narrative that real patriotism meant submission to the ever-changing health orders from politicians and globalist medical authorities drunk on power and profit: mask mandates, social distancing, multiple rounds of experimental vaccines, the shuttering of businesses, etc. Resist such manipulation of our language, Chumley urges: don’t “hand the socialists an easy win by allowing them to redefine noble patriotism, in all its American individualistic glory, as dark sheep-bleating collectivism.”
In her chapter on the “free market freefall,” Chumley warns that the Great Reset envisioned by our elitist betters – Marxism “masked as ‘better’ capitalism” – will be the end of America as we know it. The pandemic has been exploited to usher in a new era of woke corporatism in which CEOs “serve as enforcers” for a leftist agenda. It is nothing less than “the weaponizing of the private sector against private citizens, on behalf of government’s wishes.”
In “Lessons on Deception From Animal Farm,” Chumley draws an insightful comparison between the Left’s self-serving, ever-shifting narratives and those of the totalitarian pigs in George Orwell’s 1945 political fable, who modify the Farm Rules as necessary to benefit themselves (“Some animals are more equal than others”).
“The sanest people in America today,” Chumley writes, are those Americans who rejected, and continue to reject, this politicized pandemic: “the gym owners in New Jersey who made national headlines by defying their governor’s order to shut down and shut doors”; “the moms and dads who stand before school boards in their communities and deliver impassioned pleas to… return to a time when teachers actually taught on the things that mattered, and not on the things that mattered only to Black Lives Matter…”; “those who dismiss Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates as either outright charlatans, or at best, as bureaucrats with overinflated senses of self-importance…” The Democrats label such people as “reckless – dangerous, even,” Chumley writes. But the “Leftists are the insane.”
Warning that we are “paying the consequences for our idolatrous behavior” in a country that has degenerated into secularism and fear, Chumley concludes with an exhortation to turn back to God and stand strong in the face of Big Government overreach in your community. “There is no other way to save America,” she asserts, noting that evil collectivists “won’t be able to withstand the pushback from a God-centered, Constitution-knowing citizenry.”
Supported by nearly 30 pages of endnotes, Cheryl Chumley’s Lockdown: The Socialist Plan to Take Away Your Freedom is a must-read summary of the collectivist, globalist, Marxist agenda that surged during the pandemic, and which the Left is still pursuing with desperate abandon. Fight back, she encourages. Quoting 1 John 2:18, Chumley writes, “‘It is the last hour; and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come; therefore we know that it is the last hour.’ Make that hour count.”
From FrontPage Mag, 6/17/22
