John Hayward Profile picture
6 Jan, 13 tweets, 3 min read
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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More from @Doc_0

7 Jan
Speaking of principles we should all agree on, let's have a full stop to Democrat politicians describing America as an illegitimate nation when it suits them, and to left-wing teachers imparting that message to our children. No more flag-burning and kneeling theatrics.
We cannot indulge irresponsible rhetoric and teaching about the legitimacy of America for 99% of the year from lefties and then suddenly start yelling at rioters who break into the Capitol for trespassing upon the sacred ground of democracy.
We were just subjected to four years of idiotic "Resistance" role-playing - and serious destructive action by Democrat loyalists in our vast bureaucracies and courts - based on the notion that America stops being a legitimate nation when Democrats lose elections.
Read 6 tweets
7 Jan
Political violence is always wrong and should never be tolerated from anyone. Once "protesters" threaten lives and property, their grievances and ideology should become absolutely irrelevant to the situation.

That is, obviously, not the country we live in.
Long ago, we had an attitude of zero tolerance for terrorism, "we do not negotiate with terrorists," etc. One reason for this was the implicit understanding that negotiating with terrorism legitimizes it. Violence becomes an instrument of politics.
Some of us warned all last year that treating violence as acceptable, even laudable, from SOME people would mainstream it and touch off an arms race. Everyone would start getting the idea that only groups with a demonstrated capacity for violence are taken seriously.
Read 17 tweets
6 Jan
One big long-term, and long-running, problem for the GOP is that it still has no idea how to harness populist energy, and no idea how to fight back when Democrats perpetually use it against them. Leadership still thinks populism is witchcraft and burns adepts at the stake.
From the Perot movement to the Tea Party and now Trump, GOP leadership views surges of populist energy as a threat to be undermined and destroyed by all means necessary, not a positive flow of energy to be understood and embraced in constructive ways.
The other side, meanwhile, relentlessly uses populist rhetoric and political strategy while doing everything in its considerable media, cultural, and political power to frighten the GOP away from it. Few strategies have been more successful at undermining an opposing party.
Read 12 tweets
5 Jan
An important lesson of the post-Cold War era, learned far too late: allowing totalitarian regimes to interface with the political, economic, and media systems of free nations is like installing a dangerous virus on a computer.
The suicidal folly of globalism was believing the reverse: that freedom and democracy would leak into totalitarian systems and produce quiet revolutions. As we know after 30 years of disastrous experimentation, tyranny is FAR more viral than liberty in the modern world.
Tyranny, like a computer virus, breaks all the rules that allow free markets and democracies to function. Tyranny ruthlessly exploits "weaknesses" in the code of free systems, working from beyond the reach of the legal or social enforcement systems in targeted nations.
Read 19 tweets
31 Dec 20
Let's be blunt: much of the lockdown madness that destroyed the economies, politics, and culture of the free world was based on policymakers believing China's lies that it wiped out the coronavirus overnight through the magic of authoritarianism.
We're just now confirming - as if any rational observer needed elaborate confirmation - that the true number of "cases" in China was vastly higher than what the Communist government reported to the outside world.

nytimes.com/2020/12/30/wor…
And even the higher numbers in China we're learning about now are vastly lower than the number of "cases" and "Covid deaths" that would be logged if China counted them using the same metrics as neurotic Western governments and media.
Read 8 tweets
30 Dec 20
Argentina legalizing abortion offers an opportunity to reflect on the great unwritten media narrative of the past few generations: the lives of women and children got worse in so many ways after Roe v. Wade.
Media would never, ever write that narrative, of course - would never string stories together and search for a pattern that could be refined into a political point - but it's the net impact of their reporting on women's issues. Everything started getting worse in the 70s.
There is a valid "narrative" to be discerned from that ocean of bad news about women and children over the past few decades. It's not a coincidence. It's a direct result of the Big Lie pushed by the abortion lobby: that only one person is involved in the decision to give birth.
Read 14 tweets

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