“There is no proletarian,” wrote Oswald Spengler, “not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money – and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.” What the German prophet of pessimism meant was that revolutions generally boil down to the whip passing from one hand to another equally or even more eager to exercise the lash.

The idealists tend to be blind to this and serve their new masters just as well as the ones they endeavor to throw off.

For months, entire city blocks have been defaced, looted, and razed in the name of a racial justice spearheaded by Antifa and Black Lives Matter. Their aim is summarized by far-left activist Ashley Nicole McCray: “This future that we all want, that we’re all trying to build, really is about the destruction of colonization, white supremacy, and capitalism.”

But McCray’s is itself a colonial project that seeks to fill with its poison every political and cultural institution in the basin of American life. It also happens to be backed by many in America’s mostly white capitalist class who use racial grievances for their own gain and are used by the aggrieved in turn. Increasingly it appears we are witnessing a ruling class power grab more than a social justice revolution. The elites are striking back directly and through proxies.

After 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed in self-defense two left-wing rioters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, credit card issuer Discover blocked its users’ ability to donate to his legal defense fund. Twitter suspended the accounts of journalists who wrote, “Kyle Rittenhouse did nothing wrong.” Facebook removed posts and videos – that is to say, evidence – that showed Rittenhouse in a positive light while threatening to delete the accounts of offenders sharing the verboten content.

“We’ve designated the shooting in Kenosha a mass murder and are removing posts in support of the shooter,” a Facebook spokesperson said. Along with the media, Silicon Valley proudly plays the part of judge, jury, and character assassin.

Throw a stone, and you’re sure to hit a major company that supports Antifa or Black Lives Matter. Throw a brick through Nike’s window, help yourself to some new shoes, and the multinational corporation will still pledge allegiance to your cause, a cause that receives sanction from much of the federal government as well. After all, that brick is great free advertising.

Based on a threat analysis conducted in August, three Department of Homeland Security draft reports concluded “white supremacist extremists [present] the most lethal threat” facing Americans headed into 2021. None of the drafts mentioned Antifa or Black Lives Matter as a domestic terrorism risk, but ranked “white supremacists” as a threat higher than foreign terrorist groups. The reason Antifa has not been designated a terrorist organization, as Trump said they would in late May, might be that DHS thinks straight, white males clinging to their Bibles and guns pose a more significant threat to our way of life.

The tentacles reaching out from the darkest corners of our “democracy” to foist hope and change on us by any means necessary appear to be constituent parts of a “color revolution.” An analysis in Revolver News explains that these revolutions are foreign policy instruments consisting of a “continuous barrage of protests, mass demonstrations, and other acts of civil disobedience,” staged with the help of nongovernmental organizations, all to effect regime change.

Observers have noted the similarities between key State Department players, NGOs, methods, and themes here and in Belarus, where the legitimacy of Alexander Lukashenko is being challenged in the same way Trump is being challenged.

“These same State Department and NGO-aligned groups have been encouraging mass protests against Lukashenko,” Revolver reports. “Perhaps most notably, they’ve referred to the demonstrators specifically as ‘peaceful protestors,’ and used any attempts to control the riots as a pretext to further undermine the legitimacy of the target government.” In our own country, the masters of the universe are already preparing to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s reelection.

“What we and the other media need to start doing,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “is preparing the American people that there is nothing illegitimate about this election taking additional days or weeks to make sure all the votes are counted.” The American people, says Zuckerberg, must accept that sometimes elections don’t go the way our ruling class would like them to, and it can take several business days for them to make the needed corrections.

On the other side of the web, Twitter, too, has appointed itself the arbiter of public truth. The platform has begun justifying its political censorship with the promise of more to come as part of its project to partner “with the government, civil society and our peer companies to better identify, understand and mitigate threats to the public conversation, both before or after an election.” The Transition Integrity Project, a shadowy group connected to a constellation of George Soros backed groups that play a role in destabilizing foreign countries, threatened violence in the event Trump is reelected. “A landslide for Joe Biden resulted in a relatively orderly transfer of power,” the group’s war game analysis concluded. “Every other scenario we looked at involved street-level violence and political crisis.”

The difference between what is happening in Belarus and the Beltway, however, is that the former is a revolution, while the latter is actually a reaction to a revolution.

Independent of Trump’s successes and failures, the America First moment as a whole was a real revolution that happened in 2016. Trump sat like indigestion in the belly of the Beltway beast for four years. It wants to spit him out and get back on with the business of swallowing up our lives by reasserting, conserving, and consolidating its control. Our “revolution” is therefore an elite reaction, in which Antifa and Black Lives Matter function as “lumpenproletariat” operating in the interest of the ruling class – Karl Marx’s “‘dangerous class,’ the social scum, that passively rotting mass” which plays “the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.”

To this end, it helps to understand the nature of our ruling class.

Unlike the United States, countries like Belarus still have elites concerned with conserving and protecting existing traditions and institutions: family, church, nation-state, and so on. Historically, ruling classes have endeavored to conserve the societies over which they preside. Our elites, on the other hand, thrive on the managed destruction and fleecing of traditional American society and institutions. Regardless of the degree to which Trump has actually defended these things, he is a symbol of historic America, and therefore the symbolic antithesis of everything to which our ruling class is opposed.

And while there undoubtedly are cynical elements chiefly concerned with power, there is nevertheless an alternative worldview the ruling class holds and wants to impose. Kevin P. Phillips wrote that the modern ruling class, far more than their predecessors, “has sought to modify or replace traditional institutions with new relationships and power centers.” It does not seek to conserve, but instead advocates and benefits from accelerated social change.

“Nothing is more central to the controversiality of the new class than its 1963-72 attempt to sidestep existing outlooks and institutions and reprogram American society,” Phillips wrote of its emergence and the subsequent triumph of its ideals.

What had been promiscuity became openness, naturalness, and freedom. Youthful naïveté became goodness; war and the military became intolerably evil; divisions of class and ethnicity were ignored amid new blueprints of busing, rent subsidies, and proclamations of a new brotherhood and social malleability; criminality was downplayed amid talk of unequal opportunity; poverty was declared conquerable, and everyone was labeled educable―environment, not heredity being key; drugs were tolerated and even encouraged, if not as another vista of life, at least as another expression of freedom.

To date, the ideological framework and power centers with which the elites justify their untouchable status, social functions, and influence remain fundamentally unchallenged. In the middle of an elite reaction, the Republican Party appears preoccupied with proving it isn’t racist.

“Conservatism” is not the tool we need when American society recently suffered a complete cultural revolution that created the consensus against which Trump crusaded to the White House, and which the ruling class is attempting to reassert. While socially conservative sentiments and aims are good, the only way to go back to what was, at this point, is to employ revolutionary tactics. Unless we find the will to disembowel the institutional entrails of the elites, their reactionary intrigue will only worsen. But this will be an impossible task if we view ourselves as the “conservative” force, as we should be working to overthrow rather than conserve the conditions that empower the ruling class to dispossess Americans of control over their national destiny.

If the aim is merely to survive this “revolution” and win elections, then we have only delayed the cycle a little while longer. To break the cycle, the engine of intrigue must be destroyed. We need the equivalent of the Hungarian “Stop Soros” laws. Entire federal agencies must be downsized and outright abolished. We must take to task corporations that have bankrolled mayhem and misinformed the public through censorship. If we do not do these things, elections will not matter in the end.

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This article has been republished with permission from American Greatness.