Why? How? What to do?

As Americans watch the shocking events of 2020 unfold on their television screens or stream them on their computers, they are asking those three essential questions.

Sean Hannity, in his just-released and already No. 1 best-seller, Live Free Or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink, has written the necessary book of 2020.

In it, Hannity answers — in detail — exactly why all the turmoil Americans are witnessing this year and that they have been witnessing the past four years has been happening in the first place. He also examines just how the American Left in 2020 is using everything from demands for a “Green New Deal, socialized medicine, abortion on demand, open borders, abolishing the Electoral College, packing the Supreme Court” — not to mention oh so much more, ranging from silencing free speech to outright violence — to “fundamentally transform” America “beyond recognition.”

Hannity wrote his last book 10 years ago, and vowed he was done writing books. Yet the veteran television host and talk-radio star was so alarmed about what he was witnessing as 2020 unfolded that he felt the need to discuss exactly what all of a similarly alarmed America was seeing unfold.

Hannity opens with “A Warning,” saying this:

I wrote this book to sound an alarm — as a warning to my fellow patriots about the left’s undying commitment to turn America into a land our grandparents, founders, and framers wouldn’t recognize.…

While conservatism is inherently non-radical, progressivism, especially today’s version of it, is intrinsically radical. Left to their own devices, they would move the country wholesale into socialism and authoritarianism.…

If the last fifteen or twenty years have shown us anything, it is that the left means business and their business includes wiping away American exceptionalism and the unique ideas that have made this nation the freest and most prosperous in history. 

From there Hannity is off and running, beginning with a detailed reminder of just how and why America was founded in the first place. He cites former President Ronald Reagan saying, in his 1989 farewell address to the nation, that during his time in the White House there had been a turn to what Reagan called a “new patriotism.” Said the president:

This national feeling is good, but it won’t count for much, and it won’t last unless it’s grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge. An informed patriotism is what we want.

Hannity picks up on this exactly, and spends the first section of the book recounting the reasons for the country’s founding. He moves from the arrival of the Mayflower and the Pilgrims to the words of John Winthrop, the captain of the Puritan ship Arabella, words that Reagan also cited in his farewell address. Winthrop’s sermon was titled “A Model of Christian Charity,” and the famous passage was this:

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all the people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.

Hannity sets about doing exactly what Reagan suggested — outlining basic if sadly now-untaught early American history. He moves sequentially, beginning with the Connecticut Puritan-turned-Congregationalist minister Thomas Hooker writing the “Fundamental Orders of Connecticut” in 1639, providing what ConnecticutHistory.org calls “the framework for the government of the Connecticut colony from 1639 to 1662.”

The role — and the importance — of religious figures like Hooker in early American history are outlined here. The contributions of men with names like theologian John Cotton and evangelical preachers Jonathan Edwards and George Wakefield are discussed.

As a native of Northampton, Massachusetts, myself (and, ahem, of a certain age), one could not get through school, not to mention my Congregationalist church named “The Edwards Church” for hometown boy and religious revival leader and minister Jonathan Edwards, without learning this very history. Indeed, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut laid the groundwork for what would become, almost a century and a half later, the First Amendment to the Constitution, not to mention the underlying principle of limited government based on the consent of the governed — the people.

In these pages Hannity reminds of the “gifted group of men who were learned students of religion, history, political science, and comparative government” who wrote the Constitution. They were well aware of humanity’s failings, “that man is corrupted by sin and that, left to his own devices, he would subjugate other men.” Benjamin Franklin’s role in creating “a republic, if you can keep it is discussed, so too James Madison’s warnings in Federalist 51:

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

Hannity moves from a discussion of the origin of the Constitution and the principles that were behind the writing of it to “The Rise of the Radicals.” There he illustrates in vivid detail just how “progressives” began their rise in American politics, including at last today’s Democratic Party.

Of central importance in Live Free or Die is Hannity’s decision to devote an entire chapter to “Socialism: A History of Failure.” And what a spectacular list of failures socialism has wrought in search of the socialist “utopia.” From Marx and his Communist Manifesto right from the get-go socialist regimes — whether in Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, China, East Germany, Cambodia, and more — are notable for, as Hannity notes, being “drenched in blood from the very beginning.”

The pattern is always the same. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” that was the program of the Bolsheviks when they took over Russia in 1917 quickly emerged as a “horrific police state.” Which is to say, as Hannity does, “the seeds of authoritarianism and violence are right there in socialist philosophy.” He goes on:

Socialists these days cite “social justice” as their goal, but socialism is not focused on achieving justice of any kind. Instead, its main impulses are rage, envy, scapegoating, a thirst for vengeance, and a desire to violently overturn the entire existing order.

One cannot possibly watch the ongoing scene of riots in Portland, Seattle, or, this past Sunday night, in Chicago, without recognizing that this is exactly what “socialism” is in fact about.

All of which raises the second of the three questions — that being “how.” How exactly is the American Left going about the business of bringing their “utopia” and “social justice” to America.

There is more involved in doing this than simple, straight-out violence. So infuriated was the Left at their rebuke in 2016 that was the election of Donald Trump that they have targeted Trump himself right from the moment of his election. As Hannity phrases it, this began with “Deep State I: Russian Collusion — The Hoax of the Century.” The instruments of the government itself were used to try and take down, first, candidate Trump — followed by no less than a silent coup attempt against the newly elected and then newly sworn in president.

As I have noted in this space before in “The Vindication of Sean Hannity”:

For month after month after month since the Trump election, Hannity has, with a disciplined patience, used both his radio and television shows to provide a forum for the kind of relentlessly detailed investigative reporting for which the Washington Post was once famous when uncovering the Watergate scandal.

In his book Hannity puts it this way:

Even as the mob peddled their lies [on Trump and Russia collusion], an all-star cast on my radio and TV shows was providing Americans the real story. Mark Levin, Dan Bongino, Sara Carter, John Solomon, Gregg Jarrett, Alan Dershowitz, David Limbaugh, Joe diGenova, Victoria Toensing, and many other standouts joined us to document how a corrupt upper echelon of law enforcement and intelligence, officials abused their powers to spy on a campaign and presidency they didn’t like. They relied on phony intel, listened in on conversations, used undercover informants, and leaked bogus claims…. The Fake News Media trashed our Hannity ensemble cast every day for reporting these truths. But we never relented. We covered this very real abuse of power, and the 434-page (Justice Department Inspector General David) Horowitz report was vindication. We were dead-on right.

Exactly.

With the Trump–Russia collusion weapon rendered useless, the next weapon in the socialist arsenal was the impeachment hoax. Hannity heads it this way: “Deep State II: Impeachment — The Failed Attempt to Decapitate the Trump Presidency.” This is a detailed examination of a monumental abuse of power that was exercised for no other reason than that the Swamp Creatures, as Hannity correctly calls the “cabal of politicians, investigators, and media liars,” were determined to get Donald Trump.

What infuriates the Left perhaps most of all is what Hannity takes the time to document “Trump’s Triumphs.” In spite of all of this furor, the president has in fact succeeded — even as his enemies schemed and plotted on how to take him down — and silence his supporters. The Trump economic successes are examined, successes on energy, trade, rebuilding the military, and in foreign policy are all listed.

And not least is the president’s response to the virus analyzed. Thankfully Hannity does a calendar listing of exactly how Trump responded, beginning with inquiries to the Chinese government on January 4.

There is more here — much more. There is a focus on “The Left’s Assault on Free Speech” — a central part of all authoritarianism.

Which brings Hannity to the last question — what to do? There is an answer: get involved, engaged, “work harder than you ever have to re-elect President Trump and deliver Republican majorities in both house of Congress.” Fight like your country and the future of your families depends on it — because they do.

Americans watching the burgeoning violence overtaking their cities, the obsessive Trump Derangement Syndrome that has driven everything from the Trump–Russia collusion hoax to the phony impeachment to the virulent Hate Trump Media spewing smears, sheer hatred, and outright untruths on cable news, not to mention this or that web site, need to understand why all this is happening in the first place. What is the history, the reasoning, and the goal of those smashing windows, burning, looting, destroying property, and all the rest?

As said at the beginning, the answers are to be found in Sean Hannity’s Live Free or Die, making it the necessary book of 2020.

And not a moment too soon.