After years of employment growth, resurgent confidence, and the first stirrings of cultural renewal, Covid-19 shoved us back into Barack Obama's vision of Hospice America: a dying nation whose socialist caretakers consume our wealth while making our decline comfortable.
Obama's vision held that the American Century was largely a mistake, and our claims to greatness were hypocritical, unfair, and xenophobic. We belonged in those hospice beds, fading away to make room for a vibrantly multicultural world to take the reins of history.
To the Obama Democrats, American greatness was an illusion, achieved by ruthless inequality and exploitation. The socialists would see to it that our deathbeds were equally comfortable as the fire of innovation, industry, competition, and ambition died in America's graying eyes.
A key element of Obama's rhetoric was that only American GOVERNMENT was great, or capable of achieving great things. Private endeavors were trickery and ruthless exploitation: "You Didn't Build That." Only the political class and the almighty State could have "Sputnik moments."
The colossal failure of Obama's vision - the truth of his government as a pit of corruption, an Ineptocracy that kept making billions of dollars vanish into foolish "investments," bungled projects, and slush funds - made disillusioned Americans rise from their hospice beds.
But the pandemic slammed us right back down into those beds, restraints buckled in place and masks strapped across our faces, watching helplessly as our wealth is pillaged and squandered again. This time they won't let us get back up. The American Century ends once and for all.
And it's not some vibrant rainbow coalition of happy decolonized Third Worlders taking their equitable share of global power and guiding the planet into a multicultural future of fairness. It's a murderous fascist superpower, Communist China, taking control as America fades.
The Left is stoking the fires of cultural warfare and racial resentment to keep us from organizing against them. We're being taught to hate and fear each other so that we don't cooperate or compete with each other willingly. This hospice frowns on the patients fraternizing.
Political correctness and cancel culture are destroying our ability to communicate with anyone except the State and its agents. That's the endgame of all this lunacy: no one feels comfortable using the words or ideas necessary to organize resistance against collectivist power.
There are polls that show a majority of Americans are literally afraid to speak in public because they fear P.C. cancel mobs, which could destroy their business or get them fired over social media posts. What good is your precious 1st Amendment if you're afraid to use it?
Watch "I Care A Lot" and imagine the Democrat super-state is Marla and Americans are her victims, and you're pretty close to where the pandemic has left us. The only way to break out of that trap is to resist. Do all the things Hospice America patients aren't supposed to do.
REAL resistance isn't the schoolyard play-acting game the neurotic Left indulged in from 2017 to 2020. REAL resistance is hard. It involves risk and sacrifice. You're up against forces that are willing - no, eager! - to hurt you, not joust with you on Twitter.
The first step in real resistance, the first thing you must do to change the momentum of history and shatter the illusions of those who would dominate you, is to look around and see one another. Show each other you're not alone. Teach the political class you can't be ignored.
Every oppressive ideology teaches its subjects to feel alone and isolated, afraid to speak up because everyone around them is a potential informer. Vast majorities are subdued by atomizing them, making each person feel lonely and even a little crazy for doubting the "consensus."
Look to each other for strength and understand you're not alone in seeing what's happening right now as lunacy. You're not ready to lie down and die. You know the American Century is not over - the truth is that mankind needs us more than ever, as we face our greatest test.
Look in the mirror each morning and see someone who has both power and responsibility, who has the right to speak in both agreement and dissent, who has the only freedom that really matters: the right to REFUSE. See a man or woman who must be persuaded, not commanded.
Understand: in that mirror, you see the most valuable capital on this planet, and YOU own it 100%. You alone determine its value. Resist those hatching expensive, insane schemes to take control of your capital or destroy its value. They're not your friends - or your nurses.
Americans do not belong in some expensive but dilapidated state-run hospice. We should be standing atop the latest wonder we have built, planning the next one. The greatest battle for freedom in human history has been joined. We belong on the front lines, not dying in bed. /end
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I'm not a fan of pointlessly inconveniencing voters, but this mad dash to make voting effortless is a horrible idea, even without considering the destruction of all ballot security and the increased risk of fraud. Requiring SOME effort makes for better voting.
One of the fascinating things about the Internet and social media age is how it has illuminated the changes in human behavior that come from eliminating ALL costs or effort from a given activity. We act very differently when the cost is a tenth of a penny rather than zero.
When it comes to voting, we unquestionably end up with a lower quality of civics and politics - and a VERY noticeably lower quality of elected official - when voting becomes a zero-effort activity. People respond to the message that voting is a frivolous activity.
Every crisis becomes a religion if it lasts long enough.
One factor in that transformation is the Beautiful Theory phenomenon: the power elite insists its remedies are logical and politically correct so they MUST work, even if the actual evidence shows they obviously don't.
When Beautiful Theories crash into hard, cold reality and shatter, faith is the glue used by the elites to put their precious ideas back together. They need MILITANT faith to get the job done: true believers eager to crush doubt and compel obedience by making war on the infidels.
Some are swept into the faith because they desperately crave a sense of control over the crisis. They need to believe Something Can Be Done, and they'd rather invest their faith in debunked Beautiful Theories than have no faith at all. Faith is a coin that demands to be spent.
Minimum wage hikes are an easy pander - thank politicians for "giving you a raise," and don't think about all the jobs they destroyed! - but they're also an important weapon in the Left's war on the middle class.
Political tinkering with the minimum wage teaches people to think of employment as a gift from the State, rather than an exercise of capitalist freedom. The Left needs to keep poor and middle-class people from seeing themselves as capitalists selling their labor for profit.
An immediate practical benefit of minimum wage hikes for socialists is that they destroy the jobs poor people need to climb into the middle class. It's like blowing up bridges so the enemy can't get reinforcements. Blowing up the on-ramps to employment secures welfare dependency.
The persistence of high taxes as a top issue for Republican voters is interesting, especially since "wartime conservatives" often needle the GOP Establishment for constantly pushing tax cuts as their only coherent policy idea.
The rap against the GOP-E is that it compromises, caves, or remains utterly silent on countless other issues, but it keeps pushing for tax cuts. The Left eats its lunch on almost every other issue and pummels the GOP for constantly demanding "tax cuts for the rich."
Some of the Left's critique now resonates with the scrappy Trump wing of the GOP, which (understandably) suspects the GOP-E is more interested in doing favors for its big donors than serving its constituents. Tax cuts and deregulation for the big fish, nothing for the guppies.
The argument that government has no responsibility to protect the free speech rights of citizens (MUH PRIVATE COMPANIES) is curious given that Big Gov spends trillions and uses huge amounts of coercive force to protect all sorts of ersatz "rights" invented by socialists.
We're told people have a "right" to health insurance, so government had to seize control of the entire industry, spending trillions to destroy the free marketplace, provide lavish subsidies for favored policies and groups, and outlaw insurance that didn't meet its standards.
We're not far removed from a vicious argument about the "right" to contraceptives, which was based ENTIRELY on the assertion that asking people to pay even a pittance for those goods was equivalent to denying them "access" to sacred contraception.
The masks are never going away, folks. Entire industries are growing around the Lockdown Forever ideology. Masking is politically and psychologically useful, in addition to being profitable. Vested interests will fight any effort to give a nationwide all-clear.
Even if the government stops pushing mask compliance - and I wouldn't expect that day to come for years, if ever, under the current administration - private companies will be persuaded to require or strongly encourage masks on their premises, and will require them for staff.
They'll say this is necessary to make everyone feel comfortable. Look at the people wearing masks while driving around alone in their cars. They're not going to feel "comfortable" without demanding everyone else wear masks for a very long time. They've been scared to death.