Peter Hitchens's recent essay is about Britain, but change a word here and there, and it applies with equal prescience to America.

What we now face is regime change. [text color in original] That is why these strange crowds have begun to gather round ancient and forgotten monuments, demanding their removal and destruction. 

They do not know what they want, or understand what they are destroying. But that no longer matters. They think their moment has come, and they may well be right. 

This is why the memorial to Winston Churchill, and the Cenotaph itself, were shamefully boarded up on Thursday night – an act of appeasement if ever there truly was one. 

COVID is not and never was a health crisis remotely justifying the destructive magnitude of the measures imposed — allegedly against it.  It is and always was a seized-upon, contrived, promoted, exaggerated, and prolonged wedge, utilized from the beginning by the political left for its ends and abetted by an establishment already dominated by those who hate our society and its history or are too badly educated to love and defend either.

All of America's institutions having capitulated with barely a murmur to the lockdown and mandatory masks, with all the weakness and passivity they collectively symbolize.  The left saw that the moment was ripe for a real revolutionary blow.  It bet that blow would conclusively expose the helplessness to which decades of inculcated cultural self-loathing and abasement had reduced those whose duty is to defend America's civilized order — a civil order the moral goodness of which has never been surpassed in human history.

And the Floyd riots came.  And the left was correct.  The same institutions — that had not the intelligence, courage, or faith in their own society to criticize or question the ongoing ruinous and ludicrously indefensible COVID tyranny — quite predictably refused to lift a finger against the Floyd mobs that rampaged, and still now threaten to continue rampaging,  across the country.

The COVID tyranny and the Floyd riots are not irritants that will pass when the Wuhan flu disappears and America's elites have humiliated themselves and baselessly defamed their less protected fellow countrymen as racists sufficient to sate the mob.

This time, COVID has taught our would-be masters that the generations of Americans now living are easily ordered about and stripped of their ancient rights, and authority's meek and feeble acquiescence in the face of utterly unjustified destruction — of our cities and the monuments to our history — has taught the mob that society has lost faith in itself and accordingly that plunder and widely inflicted violent chaos carry no risk.

Government will be back again and soon, with another crisis, justifying new measures of control over the most minute and intimate details of our lives.  The mob will be back, on pain of more plunder, with new lists of non-negotiable demands for apology, abasement, and compensation of injustices that exist only in its fevered and uninformed imagination.

When a society loses the will to resist the mob, up to and including force, it opens the door to revolution.  France learned that in 1789, Russia in 1917.  In both societies, chaos and mass murder followed.  Neither society ever fully recovered, and it is unlikely either ever will.

The circumstances America faces are potentially revolutionary.  Whether they unfold into revolution depends on whether Americans aggressively reassert their traditional rights to live normal private lives free from arbitrary restraint and, at least as significantly, whether American elites find the courage and moral authority to reject the outrageous racism libel and vigorously defend a fundamentally just and indisputably widely prosperous society from the depredations of the mob.

Graphic credit: Pixabay.