THE COLUMN: Roll, Tumbrels, Roll

Ten years ago, back in the halcyon days when we simpletons believed the Republicans were at least some of the time an opposition party, and that Willard Mitt Romney was a man of probity and character, I wrote the following in the pages of National Review Online about the election that was about to take place. The piece was entitled "Crush Them."

Conservatives have a rare opportunity tomorrow to do something they signally failed to do in the landslide elections of 1972 and 1984: finish the job. Nixon’s victory was vitiated by Watergate and quickly revenged by Woodward and Bernstein, leading to his replacement in 1974 by Jerry Ford, a man who exactly nobody thought was qualified to be president of the United States, probably including Ford himself. Ford led to Jimmy Carter, whose ineptitude and weakness in turn lead to Ronald Reagan, who swept Carter away in 1980 and then smashed Walter Mondale and the Democrats to powder in 1984. 

And then, having won a famous victory, conservatives went home and left it to the establishment GOP in the form of another man who never should have been president, George H. W. Bush, to fritter away the fruits of ideological victory and be supplanted by Bill Clinton.

In retrospect, of course, William Jefferson Blythe III was Pericles of Athens compared to Barack Obama Joe Biden, who far more than Clinton has revealed the true face of contemporary American left-liberalism in all its coercive ugliness: a blizzard of executive orders; the deployment of the regulatory agencies that have (in the words of the Declaration of Independence) “sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance”; and the naked Marxist appeals to race and class envy. The most anti-American of American presidents has run the most un-American of campaigns.

Change only a couple of words and it's déjà vu all over again: shuffling, senile Joe Biden really is the zombified embodiment of Hussein's third term, staggering, one hopes, toward utter electoral disaster later today as long-suffering Americans finally awake and rise up against the tyranny of les aristocrates who have been torturing us these past two years and more. A la lanterne!

As my regular readers know, I have long described the Democrat Party—not just its lawless and fascistic modern incarnation, but going all the way back to its inception when Aaron Burr, the sitting vice president, a member of the Democratic-Republican Party, notorious traitor, and the founder of Tammany Hall, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in 1804—as "a criminal organization masquerading as a political party." Indeed, I even wrote a small monograph concerning its violent, seditious history, still available on Kindle.

Now, after two years of Biden, everyone can see just how awful the Democrats really are. Not simply the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition, but (as they were during the Civil War, which they started) a movement actively hostile to the founding principles of the country that continues to give them shelter and legitimacy. Indeed, they have become the Anti-American Party, advocating unfettered abortion, public criminality, political violence, economic destruction, radical egalitarianism, an obsessive racialism that would make a Nazi blush, open and undefended borders, and the abrogation of the Constitution: a document they've long despised and which they are now actively trying to repeal.

As with the Great Reset (get your copy of Against the Great Reset here), the Democrats under the unholy trio of Biden. Chuck Schumer, and organized-crime-adjacent princess Nancy d'Alesandro Pelosi, together with their ideological flunkies in Congress and statehouses across the land, seized upon the uncertainty surrounding the Chinese-originated virus known as Covid-19 to suspend the first amendment and impose draconian lockdowns based on absolutely nothing but the word of a snake-oil peddling bureaucratic lifer named Anthony Fauci and a gullible president of spectacularly bad personnel judgment, Donald Trump.

No need now to limn the devastation—personal, economic, social, educational—that the Covidiots unleashed upon an unsuspecting public. Already, by April 2020, it was clear to some of us that the Covid panic was not a medical issue but a political weapon; it needed to be dealt with summarily before the evil of the "new normal" Leftist mentality fully took hold. Therefore, in the April 28, 2020 issue of the Epoch Times, I wrote:

From the available data, and the increasing preponderance of the evidence, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which is commonly known as the novel coronavirus and causes the disease COVID-19, has turned out to be only slightly more lethal than a normal seasonal flu—but the damage it’s done to our nation’s economy, our Constitution, and our sense of national pride has been incalculable.

Forget the pandemic—it’s time to flatten the panic curve. The fact is, the United States has just gotten a good long look at the ugly face of fascism, brought on by an overreliance on medical professionals with great taste in scarves, preening for the cameras and basking in media adoration, but without an ounce of domestic policy sense.

They’ve been aided and abetted by a hostile, ignorant White House press corps—when all you know is politics, everything looks political—intent on courting a coup against the president and determined to keep alternative viewpoints from the public as long as they can.

In this, they have willing collaborators in Big Tech, which has inflicted its peculiar brand of censorship via YouTube and Facebook to make sure nothing escapes the Washington bubble’s imprimatur regarding what constitutes acceptable public opinion.

This was my advice to president Trump:

That’s where the president comes in. The president can’t, on his own toot, command that the country reopen tomorrow. Under our federalist system, that authority lies with the governors, some of whom, such as Kristi Noem in South Dakota, never closed their states in the first place. (“I took an oath to uphold the United States Constitution,” she said.) But he can lead by example—by relishing his role as the chief executive and defender of the Bill of Rights, and making sure that freedom under the rule of law, not “safety,” remains the primary American value.

If the president wants to win reelection, he’s right to stop jousting with the press corps, and instead to break out Old Glory and announce that this unconstitutional and economy-busting overreaction is over—and will never happen again.

He didn't and that's why he isn't president any more. Had he taken command of the situation, instead of standing there beside the malignant dwarf Fauci and his wicked-witch assistant, Deborah Birx, as if watching his own funeral, Trump might still be president. Instead he allowed the Democrats to stifle dissent, punish objectors, mask children like slaves, force elderly couples to suffer and die apart, restrict travel and destroy whole swaths of the American economy, and then watched himself lose to a bitter, doddering, incontinent non-entity a few months later. And not just lose the presidency, but the Senate (and thus the Congress) as well. 

Trump's gone, but the people who did this to us are not—not yet, anyway. And now these villains have the chutzpah to request amnesty for their sins: 

In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks.  Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”

These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.

Of course you knew. You all knew. And yet you endorsed the social ostracization of dissenters—"deniers," to use the loaded word hijacked from the Holocaust by people who ought to know better. You fought every rollback. You unleashed shrieking hordes of Walking Dead Karens to accost their neighbors on the streets and in the shops and literally scream at them. You went from zero to World War Z in the blink of an eye. 

"But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society," bleats the Atlantic's writer, Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University.

And that might be the biggest lie of them all. Anyone's who dealt with the Left for more than five minutes understands that mendacity is their stock-in-trade, which makes Biden the perfect president for our times. This is a man who, after all, can literally say of coal-fired electricity generating plants, "We're going to be shutting down these plants all across America," and then have his hapless press secretary insist a few hours later that her senescent boss's words were "twisted" and that of course the man who so gleefully shut down the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office really loves the fossil fuel industry. Hey, he's from Scranton! Coal country! 

If and when their bald-faced deceptions are found out, the next step is to fall back on their old standby, a plea for "tolerance." But tolerance is a protective coloring, not a virtue; it doesn't mean "compassion" (although that's not a virtue either), it means the process by which the breaking point of anything is ascertained. You reach full tolerance when the wing busts off your airplane and you're sent screaming to your death. You never want to go full "tolerance," because if you do you will die. Oster again:

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. 

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty... Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve... The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.

No, let's not. Instead, let's vote as many of you out of office today as possible. Let's round up and fire en masse the malicious thugs and petty party functionaries and time-serving rent-seekers and the cabal of Ivy League-educated media punks and poetasters who view themselves as part of the Democrat machine and daily proclaim their fealty to the Party. Let's publicly call out the neo- and cultural-Marxists who adhere to the Brezhnev Doctrine and will never willingly take one step back in their pursuit of "social justice." For them, every Democrat executive order is Order 227, for which they are supposed to fight to the end.

So let's make them do it. Give them what they want. No surrender, no quarter, no mercy. Fire them, strip them of their pensions, blacklist them. Kick them off Twitter and hound them on Facebook, as they have done unto us. Banish them from the town square. Inscribe their names on the Wall of Shame. RICO them and their infernal political cells. Go full Kurtz on them, literarily speaking. Hell, make sure they never eat lunch in this town again. Remember: they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit.

I concluded my NRO piece thus:

It’s not enough for the GOP to win tomorrow. It needs to win big, a win so convincing that even the Left won’t be able to explain it away. The definition of victory in war is not a 50.1 percent majority that allows the other side to keep fighting — it’s the battleship Missouri, on whose deck the losing side signs articles of capitulation. The modern Left — the unholy spawn of ’30s gangland and ’60s academic Marxism — must be forced to its knees in surrender.

There’s a honored place in our political system for a leftist party, one that pushes for improvement in areas that need improving, but not one devoted to revolutionary “fundamental change.” A vote for Romney tomorrow is a vote against the socialist elements that seized control of the JFK/Scoop Jackson Democratic party in 1972, and has worked against America’s best interests ever since. A vote for Romney tomorrow is a vote for a restoration of the old Jacksonian — Andrew, that is — Democratic party, a true populist party shorn of its Communist accretions that is every bit as all-American as the other guys. Unless and until this happens, though, the modern donkeys will continue their war on the Constitution, convinced they are on the side of the angels, and taking solace in the late Ted Kennedy’s words, “the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

It’s up to the electorate tomorrow to show them that the dream is really a nightmare, from which it’s time to awake, that the cause of America always endures, and the work of restoring our founding principles begins anew today. 

Maybe I'll be right this time. It's up to you; it's up to all of us. Finish the job.

THE COLUMN: What's the Constitution Among Friends?

Thus spake the great George Washington Plunkitt, of Tammany Hall fame, and it makes a fitting epitaph for the noble experiment in self-government that is, or was, the United States of America. Last week, we discussed the now-explicit anti-constitutionalism and anti-Americanism of the modern Left, and their desire to see it on the ash heap of history, now that it's served its purpose (like John Hurt in Alien) as their incubator and victim. From at least the time of Woodrow Wilson, the Democrats have despised the Constitution—which they think let them down in the battle over slavery—and have sought to kill it by the death of a thousand cuts, some of which have been delivered by the Supreme Court, some by legislation, and some by sheer inanition.

It's time now to begin going into detail about what can be done and what can't. The good news is, there are solutions, or rather, one simple one. The bad news is, it will never be implemented, because the century-long browbeating of the American public via the political establishment and their handmaidens in the news media makes that effectively impossible.

The hell with it.

Free speech, the cornerstone of our Republic, dies in several ways, most obviously by suppression and prohibition. We might term this the punch-in-the-face, "shut up, he explained" approach much beloved by national-socialist fascists and totalitarians everywhere. Aping the unfortunate literary example of most of the Ten Commandments, leftist rules for radicals are filled with thou-shalt-nots, which delight those who instinctively believe that humans are intrinsically guilty and must be punished, even for sins they haven't committed yet. It's not a big leap from "thou shalt not covet they neighbor's ass"—don't blame me, blame the King James Bible—to the clank of prison bars and the eternal solitude of the oubliette. In a proscriptive community, just one look is all it takes.

But it also dies from self-strangulation, which is currently the preferred murder weapon. Having just emerged from Facebook prison for the second time in less than three months (a month in stir for each "offense against community standards," i.e. thou shalt not speak ill of the Chinese or the Ukrainians), and having been permanently anathematized by Twitter for (I believe but cannot prove, since they won't tell me) publicly correcting the mistakes of a certain "presidential historian," which act of lèse-majesté the reigning robots of Tweetville deemed "targeted harassment," I am bloodied but unbowed.

Social media has proven itself a very great evil, and in the coming kingdom needs to be atomized and resurrected as a genuine free-speech platform, not an implement of government and "community" censorship hiding behind the increasingly slipping mask of private enterprise.

This is in contradistinction to the U.S. Constitution, and in particular the Bill of Rights, derided by leftists such as Barack Obama as "a charter of negative liberties" in that it tells the authorities what they may not do, not what you the citizen may not do, but which in reality is the sole guarantor of personal freedom left in these crumbling United States, which almost certainly will not last out this century and is unlikely to make it to its 300th birthday intact. But then, the Left has never really been interested in freedom—intellectual, spiritual, or personal—when it can enforce conformity via the trigger fingers of all of the non-constitutional agencies with which it has supplanted the Declaration of Independence. License, especially the sexually exotic, is what they mean when they say "freedom," and if you don't like it you're a bigot who deserves to be cancelled or charged.

The joke's on them, Barry.

That said, it's becoming increasingly likely that the Left won't be crushed at the polls this November. That the Burden of Brandon may not, in fact, bring the houses of Congress tumbling down around Nancy Pelosi's and Chuck Schumer's ears. At the highest levels, nobody cares who's "President." One guy named Joe signing the bills is as good as another, especially given the fact that the nomenklatura runs the national-security state today, just as it did in the old Soviet Union. A nebbishy nonentity, such as Mr. Thompson in Atlas Shrugged, is just what the moment calls for, to occlude the ugly face of fascism beneath.

Neither side wants to upset the worm-ridden applecart. Resuscitate a dead nuclear deal with Iran without Senate approval? "Forgive" student loans for gender-studies unemployables at taxpayer expense, without bothering to get the House to originate the spending bill? No problem! What part of "our democracy" don't you understand?

It's like the relationship between the CIA and the KGB during the Cold War. Both teams loved the status quo and neither wanted things to change, ever. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, at which I had a ringside seat, caught them both completely by surprise. But in the cozy modus vivendi of the current Washington racket, an accommodation has long since been reached between "progressivism" (always good) and "conservatism" (always bad) by which things will gradually but inexorably shift leftward until the Last Trump, when the charade collapses under its own weight and we have finally reached the New Jerusalem: one zillion consecutive life terms in Hell.

Freedom ain't what it used to be, and coveting your neighbor's ass has a vastly different meaning nowadays. Much of the population of the territorial United States now hails directly or indirectly from countries and regions that have neither a connection to nor an affinity for 18th-century British or American political institutions and philosophy. Perhaps the worst moment of the wretched George W. Bush presidency came with these spectacularly ill-chosen words in his second inaugural address:

Eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul. We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery... In America's ideal of freedom, the exercise of rights is ennobled by service, and mercy, and a heart for the weak.

Revelation 21: it's down there somewhere.

At that, any self-respecting Roman would have laughed out loud and ordered the Tenth Legion into action. (You want to see a country that has never, ever, once fought for freedom? Try China.) Even with "their democracy" crashing around Roman heads during the civil wars between 83 and 44 B.C., it had already lasted half a millennium, and in form if not in substance would last another half-millennium in the west. "A heart for the weak" was the surest way to find your head sitting atop a pike in Parthia or nailed to a tree in the Teutoburg Forest by German barbarians. Nobody ever said gratias vobis ago to the Roman legions bringing civilization to Gaul or Germania at the point of a gladius.

Which brings us back to the Constitution, now as shredded and torn and lying on the floor of the Senate like Caesar on the Ides of March. The easiest and most direct way to restore our American Republic (not "our democracy") is to restore the Constitution in all of its salient particulars, including the restoration of the Ninth and Tenth amendments, a return to the notion of limited central government, the reduction of the Supreme Court to its (very constrained) core powers and duties, and the rollback of the National Security State that began with the American surrender after 9/11. We'll be looking at the details of our Restoration in the coming weeks, what political price we might have to pay to effect it, and whether at this point it's even worth trying.

What's in our future? Civil War? Partition? Amicable divorce? In the meantime, let me leave you with this, from my debut novel, the controversial Exchange Alley, written after my return from Moscow in 1991 and published in 1997 but set in the period just before the end of the Soviet Union.

There is an unmistakable odor about socialist countries that pervades every public place. It is a strong animal smell, composed in equal parts of sweat and unwashed clothes, Russian cigarettes, cheap perfume, piss, disinfectant, and leaded gasoline; in the heyday of Communism, every socialist country smelled the same. But in the mother church of Marxism-Leninism, the reek was stronger, sharper, more pervasive. It was the ur-stench of the Soviet system, the stink of a dying animal and with each passing year it got stronger and more difficult for foreigners, even fellow travelers in the west, to ignore.

Smell that here at home now? I thought you might.

THE COLUMN: Invasion of the Body-and-Soul Snatchers

Elon Musk, after me the foremost scourge of Twitter, is much in the news these days. Not only for his high-stakes poker game against the unworthy likes of Parag Agrawal—an Indian immigrant with a bad attitude toward the First Amendment, doing the job (with a handsome pay package) that Americans just won't do—but for his direct challenge to the Wokerati whose private preserve Twitter, Disney, Netflix, and just about every other aspect of the culture have become. Naturally, the eccentric multi-billionaire immediately came "under fire," as the gun-shy media likes to say, for past sins real or imagined, and immediately turned the tables on his accuser in a way that even Bill Clinton never dared to do.

But as we've all learned over the past several decades, truth is irrelevant to the Leftist project, whose two-step program for fundamental transformation goes like this. First, posit a counter-factual. Second, act on it as if it were true while browbeating the bejesus out of your opponents. Lately, it doesn't matter how counter-factual or, indeed, utterly ridiculous it is: men can get pregnant, police should be defunded, and the "right" to an abortion can be found in the Constitution. The Hive Mind pushes these precepts and many more, and if you don't agree, then the only explanation is that you're some sort of racist or bigot, now the dirtiest words in the English language. There is no longer any such thing as dispassion, and the time for debate, disagreement, and rational discussion is over. Get with the program, comrade.

Run! It's Dave Chappelle!

This is what happens when everything—sex, race, sports, politics, music, culture, pancake mix, butter, baby formula, religion, the nation-state, your Aunt Hilda—becomes political. Musk has, correctly, described such conformity as the "woke mind virus." Such a state of affairs is in fact the end-state of "progressive" cultural-Marxist thinking, which has substituted the permanent imposition of political correctness in place of what economic Marxism had initially anticipated, which in the words of Friedrich Engels was the "withering away" of the State itself. 

The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society – the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society – this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not ‘abolished.’ It dies out.

Wrong again, Freddy! What the Marxists discovered after they sandbagged the first, anti-Tsarist Russian Revolution and replaced it with their own, is that the State and its coerced minions in private enterprise come in very handy if you're a power-mad atheist bent on cultural destruction and your own supreme power. It took 75 years of Soviet communist rule, the blunt-force application of a central-European anti-capitalist philosophy promulgated by a malevolent hobo and his rich benefactor, for the Russian people to learn the partial error of their ways. In the meantime, the State never died out.

The "withering away" of the State is in fact the last thing the Left wants, especially as the Great Reset dawns in Davos. Oh, the nation-state can go once they have captured its armed forces; after all, such outmoded concepts as a "nation" only encourage such nasty concepts as nationalism, which must be stamped out by any means necessary. The communist Left didn't win its prolonged struggle with its former ally, National Socialist Germany, to countenance allegiance to something at once both higher and baser than the abstract ideal of International Socialism. That the version the Left is currently trying to impose upon us looks much more like the fascism of the Nazis than the communism of Stalin is left unremarked. But hey—omelets and eggs.

Which brings us back to Wokism -- now, amazingly, suffering a series of defeats as the Zeitgeist turns. In Florida, the thrashing of the Walt Disney Company by Gov. Ron DeSantis—the next GOP candidate for president, if the Republicans have any sense— vividly demonstrated how far the force of will, painfully applied, and an absolute refusal to accept their literally insane premises can go toward reversing the course of degenerate political correctness. DeSantis has shown that one arrogant corporation's "progressivism" is another man's sexual perversion, and that decent folks draw the line at the grooming of their defenseless children by those who can't reproduce any other way, whether by the House of Mouse or proselytizing operatives working within the taxpayer-supported public-school systems. The withering State is not so much fun when it's punching back, is it?

The quick rout of the Ministry of Truth under its nasty Gauleiterin, Nina Jankowicz, was also an encouraging sign, although technically the "Disinformation Governance Board" is only "suspended" pending an assessment by two of the most dedicated statists in recent history, Michael Chertoff and Jamie Gorelick. Naturally, the lickspittle media is furious: "The fate of the board is yet more proof that efforts to combat even clearly threatening disinformation will always be ripe targets for the purveyors of disinformation, and officials should have better anticipated and handled this obvious dynamic," huffed the once-respected Columbia Journalism Review, echoing the anti-freedom sentiments of Walter Lippmann in his 1922 treatise, Public Opinion.

Careful! It might be Nina Jankowicz!

Even more fun has been the collapse of Netflix, a company that is living proof of Erick Hoffer's maxim that "every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." What started as a way to make movies available to everybody for a small subscription price turned into a market-cornering monstrosity and ultimately into the woke "Streaming Service," which sought to replace the studios as the principal financier and greenlighter of motion pictures. It borrowed a fortune, produced next to nothing of value, drove good scripts out of the market, and has damn near destroyed the picture business by replacing professionalism with aspirationalism.

Faced with a subscriber exodus, a shareholders' lawsuit, and a loss of some $200 billion in market capitalization, and finally paying the financial penalty for trying to force endless remakes of Moonlight and other woke sermons down everyone's throat, Netflix has suddenly had an attitude adjustment: 

More significantly, the document adds a new directive for employees to act with fiscal responsibility — a change that comes as Netflix in Q1 saw its first decline in subscribers in more than a decade. The updated Netflix Culture memo also includes a new section called “Artistic Expression,” explaining that the streamer will not “censor specific artists or voices” even if employees consider the content “harmful,” and bluntly states, “If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.”

And then there's Nancy Pelosi and her effective excommunication from the Catholic Church. Who says there's no good news? Would that Robinette—just banned from entering Russia— could be next. 

Still, in the aftermath of the Great Covid Panic of 2019-22, the American economy continues to crater. Soaring gas prices at the pump, occasioned by Biden's cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline and all the anti-energy policies that have since followed, are only the most outward manifestation of the rot at the heart of the American experiment. Not just content with your body, the spirit-sapping demons unleashed by the Frankfurt School hunger for your soul as well. They want their passionate desire to kill children in the womb to remain uncensured by society and have not only protested but threatened violent riots should the Supreme Court stick to its convictions and overturn the moral enormity of Roe v. Wade this term. 

Just close your eyes and everything will be all right.

The stock market also recently has had one of its worst weeks ever, and polls show most Americans have utterly lost confidence in the Biden administration. Even worse, Biden's crack foreign-policy team is now encouraging historically neutral Finland to join a superfluous and outmoded NATO and thus fall under the alliance's Article 5 provision of "collective defense" should the Finns, as they often do, get into a spat with the bear next door. For those scoring at home, this is essentially how World War One started, but who reads history any more?

To add insult to injury, the country and its nursing moms are suffering through an absolutely predictable, government-created shortage of baby formula, apparently on the moral principle that if you can kill babies in the womb right up to the moment of birth, you might as well go the extra mile and starve them to death after they're born. In a reversal of the 1948-49 Berlin Airlift, airmen from the Ramstein Air Base in Germany have shipped over pallets of Nestle Health Science Alfamino Infant and Alfamino Junior formula: Operation Fly Formula.

The formula shortage will eventually ease. But something else will take its place. The litany of potential disasters under Joe Biden is endless, each baleful new development replicating like the pod people of Don Siegel's classic 1956 film, sucking the life out of human beings and institutions, absorbing mind and memory, and leaving nothing but husks behind. They never stop, they never sleep, they never quit.

You wanted "malaise," America? You "voted" for it—and you got it. 

By the way, have you heard about monkeypox? Not a worry for you, you say? After all, "most initial cases of monkeypox have been among gay or bisexual men who have had sex with other males." Silly fellow. The Disinformation Governance Board, currently disguised as a giant watermelon, would like a word with you. As Kevin McCarthy (the actor, not the politician) warns at the end of Body Snatchers: "You're next!" 

THE COLUMN: Sic Semper Tyrannis

On this, the second anniversary of The-Pipeline.org, we present the first of a series of weekly columns that will appear each Monday morning. Everything on the table, nothing off the table. mw

And so we near the end of the Great Pandemic Hoax of 2019-22, an unprecedented and breathtaking power grab by governments around the world to seize powers far beyond their constitutional allotments and to transform a relatively minor flu virus — however originated and for what ill purposes — into a weapon of mass economic and emotional destruction whose effects will be felt for years and decades to come. It has been a textbook example of tyranny.

Consider it a warning shot, though, because while Covid may finally have been exposed for the non-apocalyptic event it always was, such tyranny is only the beginning until we put a stop to it. Put a stop to extra-legal "emergency" measures that are transparently and insultingly fraudulent, and which are invoked in the name of the "greater good." Put a stop to the notion of judicially sanctioned "protected classes" in a formerly classless society. Put to stop the notion of a "New Normal" of privation, deviancy, and spiritual and material penury imposed by Leftists as they continue their centuries-old task of undermining every tenet of Western Civilization in the name of "equity" — in a world in which equality is aspirational at best and equity is impossible.

And, once and for all, put paid to the notion that "when you've got your health you've got everything,"  the motto of a nation of neurotic hypochondriacs that is fundamentally at odds with every principle of the moral and socially productive life. For under this seemingly anodyne contention lies a wealth of mischief, chief among them the idea that your fellow citizens pose an existential threat to you by their refusal to conform, and thus can and should be restricted, incarcerated, or even killed as the need arises. And all in the name of Socialism, whether National or international.

Nicolae and Elena in happier times.

As we've seen via a recent study by the Johns Hopkin University (a study of studies, really), the lockdowns imposed by states, countries, and municipalities everywhere in the name of "mitigating" the spread of an illness with a 99 percent survival rate in the name of public health were completely ineffective.

Far better to have done nothing at all; instead, families were separated, the elderly (those most at risk from the respirational difficulties caused by the likely Chinese-manufactured bioweapon) died alone and often in squalor; weddings and funerals were canceled or held "virtually"; businesses were shuttered and driven into bankruptcy; more than two years of schooling were ripped away from forcibly masked children; and colleges and universities continued their descent into mere parental-money shakedown rackets by offering education-by-Zoom as they continued with their main mission of gobbling up real estate to take it off the tax rolls and fatten their endowments.

And the only people held responsible for this sanctioned crime wave were... you. You, the uncooperative, the recalcitrant, the deplorable. You, the anti-social, the rebellious, the individualists, the fighters, the darers, the doers. You, the people who founded this country in defiance of central authority and rule-by-pronunciamento, you who pledge allegiance not to a political party or a strong leader, but to a flag and to the country for which it stands. One nation, under a God whom the other side has no use for, but only contempt. Just as they do for you.

It's become axiomatic that inside every leftist is a totalitarian screaming to get out. So if there's one positive thing Covid has done is identify those people for all to see: the slave-muzzle wearers, proudly exhibiting their servile natures. They're the Karens, the mask nazis, the buttinskis who can't leave you or your family alone, the ones who screech at the sight of the unmasked like Donald Sutherland ratting out a real human being at the end of the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers:

These are the same people who want to force you into electric cars but not provide a reliable source of electricity for them. Who wish to destroy the energy industries that built our nation, and leave you freezing or sweltering in the dark. Who condone and even encourage mass looting of shops, the murder of small Asian women waiting for a subway train, the shooting of policemen by the underclass, and the flouting of nearly every law of civilized behavior on the streets in the name of "social justice." And these are the people who, under the rubric of "climate change" and "the Great Reset," want to strip you of your home, your cars, your livelihood and, eventually, your life. No matter which office they hold, high or low or none at all, these people are your enemies and should be treated accordingly.

Make no mistake: Covid was only a beta-test, one that a submissive population passed with flying colors. Instantly repealed, without all that pesky business about amending the Constitution, were the first, fourth, fifth, and the eighth articles of the Bill of Rights. (The ninth and tenth, of course, have long since been rendered null, void, and nugatory. You remember them, the ones that reserve all unenumerated rights not mentioned in the Constitution to the people and the states.) This is why former president Barack Obama infamously referred to our founding document as a "charter of negative liberties." Which is precisely what the Founders desired.

Read 'em and weep.

Ah, but "affirmative" rights sound so much better. Like FDR's Four Freedoms:  what could possibly go wrong with having government affirmatively promise you freedom of speech (already guaranteed by the first amendment), freedom of worship (ditto), freedom from want and freedom from fear. While they were never legislated formally, the first two were superfluous — and have in any case been repealed by Covid — and the latter two have been implemented by stealth under the false flags of "compassion" and "safety."

Affirmative rights, however, are essentially fascistic; your "safety" and material security, in the zero-sum mindsets of governments everywhere, come at the expense of someone else. Feminized guarantees of "safety" and "security" were standard fare in every European communist country until its collapse between 1989 and 1991, It's instructive to note that those are the same terms in which censorious social-media sites such as Twitter (from which I was "permanently banned" in August 2020 for unspecified "targeted harassment") and Facebook (in whose Sugarmountain Gulag I am currently spending another two weeks for "hate speech," which is Zuckerspeak for disparagement) couch their own "rules" and "community standards." The sooner both are destroyed, the better and freer everybody will be.

For when the preference cascade begins, punks, tyrants and dictators need to watch their backs as the real workers of the world unite. I spent the years between 1985 and 1991 shuttling in and out of East Germany and the Soviet Union, was in Berlin as the Wall was being torn down, and departed from Moscow just before the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in the summer of '91. (The Soviet Union folded four months later.) I stood on Fisherman's Bastion in Budapest with Hungarian friends in late 1989, looking east over the Danube, as they expressed their fears of an imminent invasion from Romanian troops. Hope was in the air — the Wall had just fallen — but uncertainty still ruled. Would the useless George H.W. Bush administration come to their aid? Or, once again, would the fascist-communist tanks roll?

Instead, a miracle happened: the people, united, were not to be defeated.

On Dec. 21, 1989, the old dictator went to the well once too often, and called a rally he couldn't control. As the people's voices rose against him (if the Romanians had had trucks, they would have used them), his voice broke, his expression changed from confidence to befuddlement, the television transmission stopped, and he was whisked away. A rebellion that had started with a lone priest in the ethnically Hungarian town of Timișoara spread eastward across the country to Bucharest. The next day, the evil pair tried to escape by helicopter, but by then the army had switched sides. Ceaușescu and his wife were arrested, tried, and summarily executed.

What's the old saying?

Oh yes: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Enemies of the People: Jack Dorsey