While everyone was watching Georgia, the new masters of the world were busy making billionaires disappear, blocking even the laughable year-late WHO investigation of the coronavirus, and arresting the entire pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.
And yes, they were emboldened on all of these fronts because their adversary in the White House is on his way out, replaced by Ten Percent For the Big Guy. They'll pause to ensure their power is secure and move on to the next items on their agenda soon.
The signal America's political system is sending to Beijing is a dying nation curled up in a fetal position. We're drawing our swords against each other. Nobody is watching the signal fires from Gondor blaze to life on one mountaintop after another.
And when the American party in power pushes to achieve its authoritarian dreams, the new masters of the world will use their enormous global media and economic influence to help. At last, they will say, the final holdouts for capitalism and democracy are seeing the light.
You can't oppose an ideology without BEING its opposite. You can't champion ideals you don't really believe in, not when the chips are down. The side of a great twilight struggle that constantly makes moral, ethical, and intellectual compromises is the side that's losing.
The human race needed us to be better, smarter, stronger, and braver than we have been. There's a lot of blame to go around. We'll probably spend more time over the next few years spreading it than doing better. Or we COULD move as fast as we did against the last fascist menace.
Everybody was convinced freedom would lose the heavyweight bouts against fascism and Soviet communism. Both had enthusiastic Western adherents, huge media influence (the same paper currently shilling for Beijing gave you Walter Duranty) and lots of friends in U.S. politics.
There's no easy path to a comeback, no magic recipe that would fit in a Tweet, and plenty of reasons to think America's slide into hospice socialism and bitter domestic warfare is irreversible. The hour is late and the ticking of various doomsday clocks grows deafening.
But our fathers and grandfathers, and their fathers before them, showed us it CAN be done. We have means of communication and organization that should make it easier to move quickly, if we use them skillfully. We have to rebuild from the ground up. We can do it.
Americans were told to see themselves as sick, weak, fearful, and corrupt. Enough believed it to make 2020 a terrible year for freedom and the hopes of mankind. But we don't HAVE to believe it. We can embrace a better vision, faster than you might think.
I think it starts by looking at your neighbors and seeing not hated enemies or distrusted thieves, but heroes in waiting, brothers in arms, people you can take a chance with. That's how this whole America thing got started in the first place.
Love is always an act of faith, a leap from the lion's head, and that includes patriotism and the love of freedom. Have faith in one another and leap together. It's hard to believe sometimes, but that's when faith is most important. Start small and local, and never stop building.
May the new fascist enemy become the latest in a string of dark titans who underestimated the resolve of free people because they don't understand that we are free to argue, to make mistakes, and then learn from them. /end
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