In his description of the venal French courtiers of A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens declared that "[t]he leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance[.]" In order to retain privilege, those grandees spun a web of deceit, in which they themselves were caught. They lost sight of reality. Many a head dropped into the guillotine's wicker basket in consequence. It was the cost they paid for sacrificing integrity to power. Obsession with power leads to a criminalized state, which splinters the perishable moral fabric of society. From those shards, like the dragon's teeth, grow national discord.

Are we now faced with a startling exhibition of "leprous unreality"? As constitutional expert and author Mark Levin has affirmed, the Democrat speaker of the House has deposed constitutional tradition. With a tear in both eyes, she has tyrannized over presumption of innocence. She has flung the people's business (but not her own business) to the winds, and like Lady Macbeth, she is in hot (though prayerful) pursuit of an inquisition.

The people's house has become the charnel house of counterfeit Democrat prerogative. Is it a last-ditch attempt to seclude suspected skullduggery from public notice? No votes were required before the Schiff "Star Chamber" demolition crew swung into action. A mincing strumpet on whose cloaked hearsay a president can be subpoenaed to death enjoys certification. New rules can be minted as needed to clinch the desired outcome: the slaughter of Donald Trump's presidency, together with the slaughter of the Constitution.

These radicals, whose ideological cant and alleged criminal malfeasance outstrip each other in hypocrisy and mobster farce, are the entrenched officeholders. They are revolutionary grandees, defending their grubby beachhead deep in the bureaucracy through attributed racketeering and the asserted outsourcing of scandalous criminality, combined with a breathtaking denial of wrongdoing. One can only conclude they have convinced themselves that any crime is acceptable for the good of the nation. Whether, as Lord Acton asserts, all power corrupts, or whether there is an entitlement to depravity embedded in the Left's social justice dogma is of little matter to their quarry. They are determined to destroy him one way or another. He has already withstood numerous battering rams that would have felled a herd of stout bulls by now.

Nor have many Republicans rallied to his defense. Like well -fed diners at an exclusive Washington club, they remove a golden toothpick (donation of George Soros) from between their professionally whitened teeth, limply wave it in the air for a few seconds of token protest as they admire the gilded ceiling above, then resume prying loose the residue of fine living. The rough-and-tumble of less privileged lives cannot penetrate the camaraderie, the fastidious scraping of silver on porcelain, and the clinking of crystal.

Batting in the president's corner are the deplorables. These down-to-earth, commonsense patriots are libeled as rigid throwbacks, forever linked by the MSM with the rise of Nazi Germany. They are now fit to be tied, bursting with indignation. The scorn in which they are held is in essence the Left's disdain for the two-thousand-year conception of human nature, based on its close observation, by non-Marxist philosophers, theologians, scientists, and historians of the West.

Dangerous for the Democrats are the farcical expectations they have implanted in every school child's mind for the last twenty to forty years. Although camouflaged in social justice rhetoric, nevertheless, the underlying assumptions and premises of their ideology fail to meet the test of reality. In fact, they have created an artificial, alternate existence, comparable to the game world our obsessed children play in on their electronic devices — full of superheroes (Democrats) and evil monsters (Trumpsters). Like Dickens's French courtiers, they are caught in the web of their own fantasy.

Evidence of the splintering social fabric is already apparent. Rumors of crimes at the hands of the Democrat-controlled Deep State abound and undermine public trust. Snowflakes demand places safe from the real world. Children are recruited into the fairy tale of rescuing the planet from an imaginary dragon. Through childish games of dressing up as boys when they are women and wearing lipstick despite being men, our youths are indoctrinated into insanity. The maniacal Antifas have yet to comprehend that fascism was defeated in World War 2, therefore they must desist from bashing innocent citizens, whom they mistake for Hitler-supporters.

These childlike adults are the true victims of the Left! Sense has been replaced by nonsense and gravity by sentimental gibberish. They have been robbed of analytical skills. They have been sold a withered, sickly notion of what it is to be a human being. The situation has deteriorated since Diana West's groundbreaking exposé, The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization, published in 2007. It is small wonder we have an epidemic of drug deaths, suicide, and despair among young adults.

In her explanation of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, How the Soviet Union Disappeared, published in 1998, Wista Suraska speaks of the brainwashing of children in Stalinist society. Gorbachev's generation (who presided over the Soviet Union's demise) was the first generation of students to learn history from Stalinist teachers, the first to be indoctrinated in the rococo intricacies of Marx's Dialectical Materialism. It was not without influence on their loss of power. She states, "What was lacking, therefore, was not knowledge of the facts but the criteria on which to judge them and from which to draw moral as well as practical conclusions." The transmission of culture from parents to their children was broken by the communists — as it has been today in the Left's education mill. Many of the indoctrinated are already parents. Unreality perpetuates unreality, just as poverty perpetuates poverty across generations.

Quoting again from Suraska, as early as the 1930s, Bertrand Russell saw the weakness of the gangster Soviet Union in the system of organized lying upon which the Soviets depended, which kept their followers out of touch with reality. The Democrats have made the same mistake, for the same reason: the error of assuming that society is a tabula rasa for human experiment and social engineering. Their ideological divorce from reality cannot be sustained unless, as in China or Islamic nations, by military force, draconian punishment, and surveillance.

No one can predict the future. Yet, just as the trauma of the English Civil War prompted Thomas Hobbes to re-evaluate political life, beginning with the question "What is a human being?," there will be a critique. It will be not a revanche, but a re-evaluation and a movement forward. Values determine the moral fabric of society. The human being, with all his richness and relationship with the universe, needs to be resurrected. We cannot allow the leprosy of unreality and its criminal sequel to further disfigure our children, our citizens, and the institutions of the nation.