Therapeutic totalitarianism

 

Nicholas J. Kaster’s column today at American Thinker has a sobering analysis of the local and state governments’ endless mask mandates, lockdowns, and other joys of the never-ending pandemic:

We have entered the seventh month of coronavirus panic, with large parts of America still partly or wholly shut down. What began as a 15-day expedient designed to “flatten the curve,” has gradually become the norm in American life. The goalposts have continued to shift. First, the focus was on hospital overcrowding; then it moved to overall deaths; then it moved to number of positive cases; now it seems to be shifting to the availability of a vaccine. The real endgame appears to be the November election.

. . .

Many have seen parallels in this creeping authoritarianism to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. And indeed, there are some: the obsessive mask conformity, the endless and often contradictory edicts by state governors and mayors, and the tiresome mantras celebrating obedience (e.g., “Alone together”).

But a closer analogy to our current predicament can be found in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Huxley’s novel, published in 1932, 17 years before Orwell’s, envisions a dystopia that is sated but soulless, where the people’s every earthly need is met, but at the cost of their liberty and humanity.

. . .

The idea of a riskless utopia is pure fantasy, of course, but the power that will accrete to the ruling class is very real.

Mr. Kaster’s column is here.

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Where are the alternatives to Facebook?

Dan Bongino is investing in an alternative to YouTube.  I hope he and others also attempt to start up alternative to Facebook.  From the Patriot Post: 

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Today is Constitution Day

Today is Constitution Day. From the Constitution Center website:

On September 17, 1787, the Founding Fathers signed the most influential document in American history, the U.S. Constitution.

Every year, the National Constitution Center hosts the best Constitution Day celebration in the country. We are the place to turn to help you commemorate this historic day while meeting your federal education requirements, at the Center and online!

Live Online Programming

This year students and teachers can join us from anywhere for FREE engaging, educational live programs and award-winning resources. Tune in all week long for engaging and interactive programs, featuring National Constitution Center scholars and other special guests!

Much more at the website with links and resources.

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The Great COVID-19 Hoax

photo credit: Milwaukee Independent 

Some skeptics probably rank man-made global warming/cooling as the world’s Biggest Hoax.  Alicia Colon nominates the COVID-19 lock-down and related control tactics (think: face masks) as the Biggest Hoax.  Both hoaxes are all about money and power.  Her article “Falling for the Biggest Hoax in History” at American Thinker begins:

It will probably take months if not years for the truth of the Covid-19 pandemic to emerge, but when it does will any politician take responsibility for the lies and disinformation or the damage this hoax caused this great nation? I don’t think so, but what it did prove was what happens when the Democrats are in charge. They may not be in the White House but it is the House that wields the power over legislation and our money.  Couple this power with the useful idiots in the mainstream media to promote the widespread hysteria, and we then had the total capitulation of a frightened nation that accepted an unprecedented total lockdown of its existence. Shame on us.

Further into the article:

In previous severe flu seasons, there were much higher death rates yet there were no mandatory lockdowns.  Why do I call this pandemic a hoax?  The only reason why politicians, especially the Democrats in charge, pushed for shutting down the economy was because economic destruction was their ultimate goal. Trump’s strong economy, low unemployment numbers for all Americans was a real obstacle to a Joe Biden victory. Democrats have seized on this pandemic because they never let a crisis go to waste.

Americans have been gaslighted. We can’t take anything reported by the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, MSNBC, the Drudge Report and the Alphabet Networks as gospel because it’s all designed to frighten and delay the recovery. . . .

Read Ms. Colon’s complete article here.

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Hanson on “Biden: The Great and Powerful”

 

The great Victor Davis Hanson explains the bizarre Biden campaign in “Biden: The Great and Powerful” at American Greatness.  From the article:

So the lightweight Biden was reflated as a sort of centrist hot air balloon to be used to float the hard-Left basket carriage beneath across the election defining line.

But fusion/collusion is not just a matter of a Potemkin veneer. Biden’s agenda is a fantasy creation. His role was to save the party from Sanders, win suburbanites, and pander to the party’s socialist sympathizers of Antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement. That is an impossible task because today’s Democratic Party is a conglomeration of squabbling tribes and looney agendas. 

Biden is now ordered to keep still on the issues of the day, because what he once said to get nominated and please the Left would lose him the election. He wants to defund the police, but not to defund the police. He wants to phase out fossil fuels and end fracking but not to end fracking in Electoral College-rich Pennsylvania. 

The rioting, Biden insists, is due to police brutality but not due to it entirely. Trump’s COVID policies killed thousands, but Biden’s own bromides are either identical or would be less effective. 

And on and on, as Biden is made to wink and nod to the Left that his only role is to get them elected before collapsing at the finishing line. 

The media thinks this will work, and so owns the project. Biden will stay sequestered, visit a key state occasionally, pop out of the plane to say he is “barnstorming” Michigan or Wisconsin and then fly back into his Biden bunker for more Zoom puff interviews—and hope progressive polls show that he can endure weekly bleeding until November 3.

Every four or five days the media will blast the airways with, “Trump is ripping out mailboxes,” “Trump won’t concede and will have to be forcibly removed,” “Trump insulted our war dead as ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’ as he hid from the rain to keep his hair dry.” Most recently Bob Woodward’s book queued up for its turn of 72 hours of smears, right after gab-bag Jeffery Goldberg’s anonymous sources faded out. 

Will this joint project of progressive ideologues of the Democratic Party and the major media work? 

Read the complete article here. 

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Not just any yard sign

Sent from my friend Shirley who drove around the Perry area and found this creatively festooned barn (click to embiggen):

 

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Michael Anton on “The Coming Coup”

 

Michael Anton is the author of The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return. He was interviewed on Mark Levin’s “Life, Liberty, and Levin” on Fox.  He was a great guest, so I looked up his essay on American Mind, “The Coming Coup?”, which starts off:

Democrats are laying the groundwork for revolution right in front of our eyes.

As if 2020 were not insane enough already, we now have Democrats and their ruling class masters openly talking about staging a coup. You might have missed it, what with the riots, lockdowns and other daily mayhem we’re forced to endure in this, the most wretched year of my lifetime. But it’s happening.

It started with the military brass quietly indicating that the troops should not follow a presidential order. They were bolstered by many former generals—including President Trump’s own first Secretary of Defense—who stated openly what the brass would only hint at. Then, as nationwide riots really got rolling in early June, the sitting Secretary of Defense himself all but publicly told the president not to invoke the Insurrection Act. His implicit message was: “Mr. President, don’t tell us to do that, because we won’t, and you know what happens after that.”

All this enthused Joe Biden, who threw subtlety to the winds. The former United States Senator (for 26 years) and Vice President (for eight) has not once, not twice, but thrice confidently asserted that the military will “escort [Trump] from the White House with great dispatch” should the president refuse to leave. Another former Vice President, Al Gore, publicly agreed.

One might dismiss such comments as the ravings of a dementia patient and a has-been who never got over his own electoral loss. But before you do, consider also this. Over the summer a story was deliberately leaked to the press of a meeting at which 100 Democratic grandees, anti-Trump former Republicans, and other ruling class apparatchiks got together (on George Soros’s dime) to “game out” various outcomes of the 2020 election. One such outcome was a clear Trump win. In that eventuality, former Bill Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, playing Biden, refused to concede, pressured states that Trump won to send Democrats to the formal Electoral College vote, and trusted that the military would take care of the rest.

The full essay is here. 

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