After the Reign of Terror began during the French Revolution, the tactics of the Parisian mob spread throughout the country. The homes of the nobility were destroyed, churches looted and put to the torch and a nightmare of murderous rage descended on the clergy and aristocracy at the hand of the Sans-Culottes. Using the façade of legal process from so-called Committees of Public Safety, tens of thousands of “Enemies of the People” were arrested and executed. (Many were dispatched by the use of the guillotine, a device specifically invented for this purpose.) Resistance was fitful and quickly crushed. Only a few places in France were able to hold out against the Terror.

One was an area of Brittany called the Vendée. Considered to be one of the poorest and most backward parts of France, the locals cherished their king and queen and their Roman Catholic faith. (Think of them as “bitterly clinging” to their monarchy and their religion.)

When the Revolutionary Government murdered the French royal family and took away their parish priests, the peasantry in the Vendée launched a fierce and determined armed rebellion against it. Turning to the local nobility for leaders with actual military experience under the Ancien Regime, they sustained an insurgent army for years against the government in Paris. Even though they ultimately lost militarily, the people of the Vendée finally won the restoration of their Roman Catholic faith and a degree of autonomy thanks to their determined resistance. They also left a lasting inspiration to working-class counter-revolutionaries fighting left-wing terror and repression. Think of the Carlists’ role in Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War. Think of the Nicaraguan contras’ defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990. Think of the two hundred Vietnamese-Americans carrying forty-foot-long banners based on the South Vietnamese flag outside the Capitol on January 6.

We are very close to our own left-wing totalitarian regime in the U.S. night now, with almost every aspect of life affected by WOKE ideology. At least in revolutionary France, there were places of refuge like the Vendée. Here there are no safe places from identity politics and its necessary corollary; white, liberal guilt.

The Democrat Pary’s constituencies already endorse its intellectuals’ aim not to convince the rest of society but to subdue it . . . They reason that America’s social-political order is founded on racism, patriarchy, genocidal imperialism, as well a economic exploitation . . . The revolution is all about the oppressed classes uniting to inflict upon the oppressors the retribution that each of the oppressed yearns for.

– Angelo Codevilla, Claremont Review of Books, Fall, 2016.

Consider the stifling conformity of thought and public discourse in furtherance of that worldview throughout our country today.

Our local newspaper reads like a Democratic Party newsletter. Within a mile of my home are three mainline Protestant Churches, with permanent signs using Gay Pride/Rainbow Coalition colors and Woke slogans like “Fight Racism” and calls for “Equity,” “Inclusion,” and “Social Justice.” There are also signs for special events like “Solidarity with Palestine” and “BLM” rallies. (These are all churches whose ministers used to lecture us about how scary the “Radical Religious Right” was because it mixed politics and religion.)

I’ve written about how all the institutions in our community that shape opinion have gone over to the left. We know that our schools and colleges have become P.C. Corporations and not-for-profits have followed suit. Federal and state bureaucracies have also succumbed. Even local ones have too, e.g. my county government now has its own D.E.I. office.

One of the most disheartening surrenders is by public libraries, which have become centers for leftist agitprop.

Everyone has heard about drag queen story hours for children but consider a partial list of other “Signature Events” hosted by the Kansas City, Missouri, Public Library:

These are only a few of the items on the Cultural Marxist Smorgasbord that are offered up constantly by an institution that I used to support generously. Nowadays, however, the message to me as a straight, white, cis-gendered male is that my beliefs can not only be disregarded but I can be made to feel responsible for all the suffering and injustice in the world.

We are trapped in a Vendée of the spirit. Those in authority—culturally, economically, and politically—want us dead, along with everyone and everything we hold dear.

Compromise is impossible with people who want to kill you. Discussion is impossible with those who deny objective reality when it does not align with their political beliefs. I worry about the future of the country. Are we like the doomed counter-revolutionaries of the Vendée of two hundred years ago?