by Dr. Jack Wheeler
May 1, 2017

May Day.  For thousands of years, Western cultures have had a Festival of Happiness at this time of year, a joyful celebration of the end of winter and the onset of summer.

The Romans called it Floralia – five days of fun in honor of Flora, their ancient Goddess of Flowers.

For millennia throughout Europe, the Celts celebrated Beltane, the halfway point between the spring equinox and the summer solstice by joyously venerating the aos si (the spirits of nature) with bonfires, decorating their homes with flowers, feasting and partying.  There are Beltane festivals to this day in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the Isle of Man.

Germanic cultures since the Iron Age (ca. 600 BC) have held a festival of rejoicing at this time of year, with dancing around a Maibaum, a May Tree.  About 500 years ago, the Maibaum became a decorated Maypole with long ribbons held by encircling celebrants.  The festival culminated in crowning a pretty village girl the Maikönigen, the Queen of May, with garlands of flowers.

All of this came to America.  When I was growing up, my sisters would always get up early the morning of every May 1st to scour our backyard and our neighborhood gathering flowers, which they would leave in a May Basket at our front door for Mom, our Queen of May.

Families for generations have done this all over America, towns for generations have had a May Day Festival of Happiness.  Why would anyone want to ruin this, turn a time of joy and flowers into a time of anger, hate, and rage?

The headlines of this morning (5/02) are abundant:

May Day Carnage: Havoc across Europe as Protestors Clash with Police in Violent Scenes

Thousands Rally for May Day Protests Around the World

On May Day, Protesters Take to the Streets Nationwide

May Day Protests Spark Riots, Arrests Across Country

May Day Protests Turn Violent in Pacific Northwest.  Also in LA, Chicago, Des Moines, Houston, New York, Baltimore, on and on.

Why is it so hard – so impossible – for the Left to be happy?  Why are Lefties always filled with destructive anger?  And why do they pick the most innocent fun-filled-for-millennia day of the year to vent that bottomless rage?

Answering the last question is the easiest:  It’s precisely because May Day is the most innocent fun-filled-for-millennia day of the year.

May Day has become a National Holiday in over 30 countries in Europe and dozens of other countries around the world.  But not as May Day.  Instead, it’s called “International Workers Day.”

Since it was the invention of Marxist terrorists in 1889, it should be called International Terrorists Day.  Only the Marxists and Fascists of the Left could take an innocent celebration of springtime and turn it into celebration of murder, terrorism, hate, and envy.

It’s important you know the real history even though it will make your stomach churn, so here it is.  It begins not in Europe but in America.

One hundred and thirty one years ago tomorrow, on the evening of May 3, 1886, a group of men met in the basement of Greif’s Hall on Lake Street in Chicago.  Almost all of them were recent immigrants from Germany, and what brought them together was a hatred they had in common.

They called this hatred by various names – they were “anarchists,” “socialists,” “communists,” “syndicalists,” “revolutionaries” — all code-words for anti-capitalist.

They all hated capitalism with a fanatically violent fervor.  They all claimed to be champions of “workers,” of employees, people who had jobs — and above all human beings on earth they hated those who provided those jobs, the entrepreneurs who created the companies that made those jobs possible.

One of them was Louis Lingg from Mannheim, who had come to America less than a year before.  He had taught himself how to make hand-held bombs containing dynamite (invented by Alfred Nobel in 1867), and at the meeting in Greif’s Hall, he gave one of his bombs to Rudolph Schnaubelt, the brother-in-law of one of the meeting’s organizers, Michael Schwab.

The following evening, May 4, a demonstration was held in support of “workingmen’s rights,” organized by an anarchist-socialist German-language newspaper in Chicago, Arbeiter-Zeitung, and its editor, August Spies from Hesse, Germany.  It was at Haymarket Square, at West Randolph and Desplains Streets.  It was chilly and drizzly, with some 600 in attendance.

At about 10:30pm, with a speaker calling out “To arms!” and advocating violence, Police Inspector John Bonfield, at the head of a contingent of 60 uniformed policemen, called for the meeting to be over and the crowd to disperse.

Rudolph Schnaubelt lit Lingg’s bomb and tossed it into the police.  Officer Matthias Degan was killed on the spot, six officers died thereafter, and dozens wounded. A number of demonstrators then pulled out revolvers and began firing at the police, who returned fire, killing four.

History knows this as The Haymarket Massacre.  There were eight arrests, including Spies, Schwab, Lingg, and Schnaubelt.  Bombs and bomb materials were found in Lingg’s apartment.  Schnaubelt escaped (fleeing to South America, he died in Buenos Aires in 1901).

Five of the defendants were sentenced to be hung – but only four were, as Lingg committed suicide by smuggling a blasting cap into his cell, which he lit and put in his mouth. It blew off his lower jaw, and it took hours for him to die in agony.

Lingg, along with the four who were hung, lies buried in Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery.  And now comes the part of this story that may make you ill.

There is a Monument to the Haymarket Martyrs in the Waldheim Cemetery – and it is not in honor of the policemen murdered by the anarcho-communists.  It is a monument to the terrorist murderers.

Not only that, it is a Shrine of the Left’s, a pilgrimage site.  The Haymarket Terrorist Murderers have been turned into heroes. Just like a Palestinian terrorist suicide bomber who murders Israeli children is hailed as a shahid, a martyr.

And it gets worse.  It is officially designated (by Clinton in 1997) as a National Historical Landmark, stating:  “This monument represents the labor movement’s struggle for workers’ rights.”

It is a monument to Marxist-Fascist terrorist murder.  To this day, the Communist Party of Illinois calls its website The Spirit of Haymarket.

Only terrorists like Communists could hijack May Day (May 4th, Haymarket Martyrs Day – close enough to May 1st to hijack), and celebrate terrorist murder instead of life. Which they did, at the Communists’ Second Internationale meeting in Brussels in 1889, designating May 1st as a “day of international resistance and solidarity against capitalism.”

And that is what it remains, as we see in the headlines today.  Why – when it is free market capitalism that has brought previously unimaginable prosperity to countless millions, while totalitarian anti-capitalism has brought unimaginable poverty and death to countless millions?

There’s a clue in Richard Rahn’s column today (5/02).  He begins by asking:

“If you were really hungry and given the choice of half of an eight-inch pizza or a third of a twelve-inch pizza, which would you choose?”

It’s devilishly clever – for 6th grade math tells you to make the second choice as it’s 50% bigger.[1]  So how come leftie politicians always ignore the math when it comes to lower taxes and scream “tax break for the rich!”?

That’s because of the implied full question of Richard’s:

“You’re really hungry and so am I.  I have two pizzas.  You can have one-half of the 8-inch one and I’ll have the other, we’ll split it down the middle.  Or you can have one-third of the 12-inch one, while I get two-thirds.  One-third for you, two-thirds for me.  Remember I’m the guy who made the pizzas, and I’ll sell the one you don’t want.  Which do you choose?”

“That’s not fair!” the Leftie will scream in rage.  “Social Justice demands equal sharing, equal distribution, it doesn’t matter who made the pizza in the first place!”

This is the crux difference between freedom advocates and totalitarians, conservatives and liberals, the capitalist right and the anti-capitalist left –  the difference that enables the former and disenables the latter to be rational.

The former will rationally choose what’s more for him, regardless of whether the other person gets more.  The latter is so envious of someone getting more than him he’s willing to irrationally get less for himself.

In other words, rational self-interest is the primary motivation for the freedom advocate, while envy is the primary motivation for the totalitarian – and masochism is a defining characteristic of envy.

Envy is not simply hatred of someone for having something you don’t — it is the willingness to masochistically hurt or deprive yourself as long as the person you are envious of is also hurt or deprived.

An ultimate example is the Moslem suicide-bomber.  Richard’s example is more prosaic, the hungry guy who would rather eat less than the other guy eating more.

Masochism lies at the heart of both envy and the fear of it – for the more one fears being envied, the more one is driven to masochistic self-humiliation in attempts to appease the envious.

For years I’ve been explaining the social corrosiveness of envy and the fear of it, such as Rejecting the Evil Eye way back in November 2004..

All three of the great barbarisms of modern times are pathologies of envy. Naziism, preaching race-envy toward “rich exploitative Jews”;  Communism preaching class-envy toward “rich exploitative capitalists”;  Moslem Terrorism preaching culture-envy toward the “rich exploitative West.”

Homegrown barbarisms we’re being subjected to right now – like the racists of Only Black Lives Matter, the fascist thugs of Antifa, and forms of rage against success and prosperity – are pathologies of envy.

What gives envy its enormous destructive capacity is the fear of it, fear of the Evil Eye. It is envy which makes a Nazi, Communist, Moslem Terrorist, or Antifa thug. It is the fear of being envied which makes a Liberal.

Liberalism is thus not a political ideology or set of beliefs. It is an envy-deflection device, a psychological strategy to avoid being envied. It is the politicalization of envy-appeasement.

 You can’t get a clearer example of this than the lunacies on college campuses across the country – the envious attacking with fascist violence anyone who opposes them, while envy-appeasing snowflakes apologize to them for their “white privilege.”

The result is the compulsion of the Envious Left to ruin and destroy every aspect of our culture that retains any shred of moral normalcy.  And for the Envy-Appeasing Left to cheer them on.

Who do those with Evil Eyes hate and fear the most? The person without fear of their envy.

Voodoo only works when the person it’s directed at believes in it. Witch-doctors have no power over people who refuse to be afraid of them. The only power evil eyes have is the deep, irrational, superstitious fear that their envy has magic power to do harm.

So what would be the greatest nightmare of the Envious and Envy-Appeasing Left?  A President who rejects their voodoo.

This is the secret that lies at the heart of the Trump Presidency.  He was elected to reject the envy of the Left, and he is pathologically hated by the Left for that very reason.

Thus it turns out that the secret of how to Make America Great Again is simple:  to reject, to oppose, to not care about, and to laugh at the envious and their appeasers who don’t want America to be great at all.

The Rejection of Envy is the antidote to make the Left’s compulsion to ruin our country impotent.

But for the antidote to work, it cannot be applied just from the top down starting with Trump in the White House.  It has to be applied from the bottom up by millions of us in our daily lives.  Start thinking today of how envy may be directed at you and your loved ones, and how you can reject it.

No more Envy Voodoo.  That’s the way to MAGA.  And to have May Day be happy and joyous once again.

— Dr. Jack Wheeler is editor-in-chief of To The Point News and is widely credited as the architect of the Reagan Doctrine. How to End the Left’s Compulsion to Ruin Everything originally appeared at To The Point News.

[1]  A  third of a 12-inch pizza is 50% more than  half of an 8-inch pizza.  37.68 square inches (6’ radius squared x pi (3.14) = 113/3 = 37.68) vs. 25.12 (4’ radius squared x pi = 50.24/2 = 25.12)