Journalist Seth Barron’s Book Investigates How the Left Exploits the Good Nature of Americans

Journalist Seth Barron’s Book Investigates How the Left Exploits the Good Nature of Americans

In the recently released book by Humanix Books, “Weaponized: The Left’s Capture And Destruction of America’s Sacred Institutions,” New York City-based journalist and author Seth Barron details who, how, and why the Left is using the good nature of the American people to wreck our way of life.

Barron defines weaponization, a concept often used by psychologists, not in personal, but in political terms:

In America today, weaponization refers to the use of ostensibly neutral institutions or concepts for political or ideological ends that would be difficult to achieve without leveraging the good reputation of those institutions.

In the process, the institutions themselves get compromised, and society turns on itself. In the Meantime, the woke ideologues turn their activism into dollar bills while comfortably advancing the goal of destroying the country.

Weaponization proved a winning strategy for the left, and Barron provides multiple examples. He shows how an idea as fundamental to our self-understanding as a nation as the American Dream has been turned on its head by proponents of migration. The term, widely believed to have been coined by the historian James Truslow Adams in the 1930s, stood for the opportunity to make something of oneself and to improve on the condition of previous generations.

At the hands of special interests, it ceased being our creed, Barron explains, and became something that foreigners alone are entitled to. When, early in his second term, Donald Trump announced $100,000 fees for H-1 B work visas—a common-sense move designed to prevent the replacement of skilled American labor by their often-indentured foreign competitors —the opposition protested that the “American Dream is finally over”. Over for the foreigners, that is. Never mind that the phrase itself has nothing to do with immigration.

As a matter of fact, Barron explains, giving in to the demands of the radicals would change the material conditions in the U.S. to such an extent that it would amount to a reverse of the American Dream:

This is the crux of the problem and captures the thesis of this book. Mass immigration has been turned into a weapon directed against the American people. It reduces the wages by flooding the labor market. It increases the price of housing. It dislocated the community and frays the social fabric.

Barron documents how multiple ideas, viewed positively or as soliciting the nation’s sympathy, are deployed against us in the spheres of citizenship, public safety, urban planning, and education. He dispels common misconceptions such as that,  through inheritance, white people leveraged housing ownership to accumulate “generational wealth”. According to this line of reasoning, blacks have been historically denied that opportunity via “redlining” and need to be reimbursed for the injustice. Yet most whites inherit nothing—and even if they do, the absolute majority of estates dissipate within a few generations. Because America is a highly socially mobile society, the talk of “generational wealth” is meaningless.

Barron explains who is behind most of the weaponization. Here, Angela Davis is a perfect example. Davis was a pink-diaper baby who came of age in the 1950s and 60s. At the time, American Communists were plunged into crisis following Nikita Khrushchev‘s “Secret Speech” condemning Joseph Stalin’s personality cult. The West, of course, knew about the gulags and the purges, but Khrushchev’s admission made the USSR seem weak, prompting the Comintern to seek alternatives. Pretending to disavow Communism, Barron explains

American Communist hardliners […] disguised themselves as lovers of American liberal democracy and burrowed deep within our institutions: journalism, academia, law and the judiciary, the clergy, and entertainment. From there, they promoted the installation of true Communism in the creation of a new constitutional regime, based not on the innate equality of men but on the engineering of society to redistribute its goods and resources according to the ideology of its planners.

Many of us, Barron continued, still find the word “Communist” too harsh—as if communists are some kind of fictitious monsters as opposed to the real people who hold beliefs that have been with us since antiquity. Contemporary communists themselves prefer the euphemism “Democratic Socialist”. It’s a comedy of manners—and not only because the latter anyway advocate the very Marxist redistributionist agenda of the former.

Angela Davis is a bridge between the two. She made it on the FBI most wanted list for murder, defended the mass executioner Jim Jones, hobnobbed with the East German jailers, and received the Lenin Peace Prize in the USSR, was gifted academic positions without completing her PhD, and became an object of adoration by rock ’ n ’ roll’s finest. She is the highest profile Communist in the U.S. who, Barron notes, “founded the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a Marxist party that permits cross-membership with the Democratic Socialists of America”. DSA itself,  of course, had all but succeeded in its hostile takeover of the Democrat Party—and thus stands to weaponize its institutions as well as whatever goodwill it had with the American people.

Angela Davis is one of the loudest voices calling for police abolition. Police abolition itself is a weaponization of the concept of public safety. We all want orderly streets, yet race communists, while erecting barriers to robust policing, demand that we embrace quixotic and expensive projects they claim will create conditions for true peace on the streets.

The activists then set up “non-profits” asking for funds to provide various services. As these groups grow and become more powerful, elected officials compete for their favor in exchange for public money. Democratic institutions are thus “captured” by special interests.

Weaponized is a deeply troubling book, but it’s the best kind of wonky. Barron makes it a compelling read with vivid examples, fascinating insights, and a great deal of humor. It’s a must for those of us grasping for an explanation for why, all of a sudden, in the months leading to our country’s 250th anniversary, and when we spent decades trying our best to be empathic, it became nearly impossible to be a proud American. Our virtues have been weaponized against us.

Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.