Collectivists Turn May Day Into a High Holiday

Collectivists are celebrating May Day with 3,000 protests across America and by debuting an anti-capitalist “Animal Farm,” George Orwell’s allegory of Bolshevism. The demonstrations advance the goal of replacing traditional holidays with salutes to the state, hoping to sell the promise that — this time — collectivism will deliver plenty, not poverty.May Day Strong writes in a press release that it has planned “a worker-centered escalation with strikes, rallies, marches, civic education, and walk-outs” of 100,000 students “under the banner of ‘Workers Over Billionaires.’” Their goals are to “tax the rich,” even as the top 1 percent of earners pay about 40 percent of all income taxes.It’s doubtful that discouraging words will be said for rich leftists, however. The Democratic candidate for governor of California, Thomas Steyer, is considered — as the Illinois Democrat, Governor Jay Robert “JB” Pritzker, declared himself at the 2024 Democratic National Convention — “a good billionaire.”Twenty-one school districts in North Carolina alone “will be closed for educators to attend ‘Kids Over Corporations Rally’” and “more than a dozen cities have called for ‘No Work, No School, No Shopping.’” Each student is “just another brick in the wall,” as Pink Floyd sang in their 1979 opus, “The Wall,” against having “thoughts controlled.”George Orwell in 1940. Via Wikimedia CommonsOrwell, in his 1945 novella, “Animal Farm,” satirized how the Russian Revolution’s promises gave way to dictatorship in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Stalin killed up to 20 million in peacetime. Prior to that, Lenin’s Bolsheviks killed up to 10 million.Orwell was a “democratic-socialist,” which then meant a traditional Western liberal. Yet “Animal Farm” has been rewritten into a version of “the Two-Minute Hate” from Orwell’s novel, “1984.” The new telling, aimed at children, makes capitalism the enemy, throwing Orwell’s cautionary tale down the “Memory Hole” to serve May Day’s agenda.Napoleon, the corrupt pig ruling “Animal Farm” rewrote the “Animalism” bill of rights whenever it suited. Orwell’s slogan for his “1984” dystopia illustrated the danger of such revisionism. “Who controls the past controls the future,” it stated. “Who controls the present controls the past.”Until now, mass walkouts, protests, and work stoppages were seen only in banana republics where people were denied inalienable, unchanging rights. America’s Founding Fathers knew that pure democracy of this sort leads to mob rule; so, they built mechanisms to effect change into the Constitution.The governor of California, Ronald Reagan, in a televised address on May 7, 1970 announcing the closing of California University and State College campuses. APIn “A Time for Choosing,” President Reagan’s 1964 speech, he said that the Founding Fathers “knew a government can’t control the economy without controlling people,” and “it must use force and coercion.” He added that the framers of the Constitution also knew “that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector.”Reagan also rejected May Day’s collectivist language and touted individualism over the state. “I, for one,” he said, “resent it when … the free men and women of this country” are referred to as “the masses … a term we haven’t applied to ourselves in America.”Proponents of May Day think they can better run the lives of millions. Informed that this has always failed, they retort that “real communism” has “never been tried,” which would be news to the likes of Vladimir Lenin, Fidel Castro, and North Korea’s Kims.Communist party supporters hold portraits of Stalin and Lenin near the Kremlin at Moscow’s Revolution Square, February 23, 2022. AP/Alexander ZemlianichenkoThe founder of Communist China, Mao Zedong, murdered as many as 70 million, targeting the “Four Olds” of ideas, culture, customs, and habits. It’s no accident that deconstructing traditional holidays, most of them focused on God, is happening concurrent with elevating May Day to put the state at the center of American life.May Day, celebrated by ancient Europeans, was first co-opted by the 1889 International Workers Congress at Paris. Among their demands was an eight-hour workday. Yet it took the American billionaire, Henry Ford, to implement it in 1914 and a five-day workweek in 1926. These private sector innovations, not protests, popularized the term “weekend.”America’s future belongs to the young people at today’s protests. May Day’s collectivists wish them to stay ignorant of the past, urging them to celebrate the new high holiday by abandoning their individuality, and leaving the very classrooms where history would teach them that they’re more than just bricks in a wall.Correction: An eight-hour workday was among the demands of the International Workers Congress. An earlier version misstated the duration.

Collectivists Turn May Day Into a High Holiday

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