The most recent edition of Hillsdale College’s Imprimis features an essay (adapted from
a speech) by the inimitable Mark Steyn.
It begins:
I live about 20 minutes south of
the Canadian border, which used to be called the longest undefended frontier in
the world. People moved freely back and forth across it all day every day. But
now it’s been closed for over a year. At one point my daughter asked me to
drive her up there, because there was a 30-minute opportunity for people on one
side to talk to their friends on the other. “Sad!” as President Trump would
say. It was like Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin during the Cold War, except that
both sides are now like East Berlin.
I don’t know how this happened, but
it is just one indication that America, and the West in general, have become
almost unrecognizable from what they were not that long ago.
Look at just three things we have
lost.
One is equality before the law,
something absolutely essential to a free society. In its place, we now have
politicized law. If a policeman fatally shoots someone, whether his name is
released to the public depends on whether the shooting is consistent with the
preferred narrative of the ruling class. A policeman recently took down a young
woman who was threatening the life of another young woman with a knife, and
that policeman was immediately identified—indeed, his photo was posted and he
was threatened by NBA superstar LeBron James on Twitter. On the other hand, we
know nothing of the policeman who shot dead an unarmed woman in the U.S.
Capitol on January 6. His name will apparently never be released to the public.
Second, border control. Functioning
societies, at least since the Peace of Westphalia three centuries ago, have
borders. America has no southern border and no plans to get one. The official
position of our government seems to be that any of the seven billion persons on
this planet has a right to come and stay in the U.S. for three years, until his
or her assigned court date comes up. As the number of people with pending cases
continues to grow, that three years will extend out to five or seven or 15
years. If we get all seven billion people to come here, the court system will
break down entirely and maybe we can go back to having a functioning border.
And third, dare I bring up the fact
that it is a real question whether we can go back to agreeing to have open and
honest elections? And if we don’t have open and honest elections, control of
our borders, and equality before the law, then we don’t have the conditions for
politics or free government.
And here’s the thing. It is not at
all clear to me that many of America’s conservative politicians understand the
seriousness of all this. You can see it in the fact that they go around trying
to scare people with the specter of a “radical socialist agenda.” For well over
a year now, we have been living in a world in which it’s accepted as normal
that the state has essentially unlimited power—and in which our freedom to
decide for ourselves has been diminished almost to invisibility. Why do these
conservative politicians think the words “radical socialist agenda” still scare
anyone in a time when the state can tell us whether we can have Aunt Mabel over
for Christmas? They are completely out of touch.
Over the same period as the
pandemic lockdowns, we have seen an escalation of so-called wokeness. And if
you look at one of the most startling manifestations of this, transgender
fanaticism—which involves, after all, the abolition of biological sex and, I’m
sorry to have to say it, the physical mutilation of children—one notices that
America is farther down this road than any other country in the Western world.
In other words, at this moment of crisis for Western Civilization, or for what
we used to call Christendom, the leading country of the free world is pulling
the wrong way.
Think of it. Your daughter has been
training since she was a little girl to run in school sports. Now at 17, she’s
in the state high school track championships, and you are forbidden even to
notice that she’s competing against a woman who is 6’2” with thighs like
tugboats, a great touch of five o’clock shadow on her face, and the most
muscular bosom you’ve ever seen. You’re not supposed to notice the craziness of
this, and the craziness is at its craziest right here in America.
We traditionally think of France as
being a bit screwy, but today there are French intellectuals who regard
themselves as hardcore leftists and yet who think America has gone bonkers on
this transgender issue. President Macron himself has said that American
wokeness is an existential threat to the French Republic, and he even found
bureaucrats in France’s education bureaucracy who agreed. There is not a single
bureaucrat in the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., who would agree,
but there are apparently a few in Paris.
If you look further east in Europe
to the lands that were once behind the Iron Curtain—to Hungary, Poland, and the
Czech Republic, which still function as conventional nation-states calculating
their best interests—you find tremendous fear of the threat of wokeness that is
being exported, sometimes aggressively, from America. So it is here in the U.S.
where we have to put the stake through these ideas.
But again, even most of our
conservative leaders and institutions seem oblivious. School districts in
America are talking about revising their curricula to cover transgender issues
from grade school on. Now, I went to an English boys’ school, and we were
expected to pick up sexuality on our own time. In those days people would have
looked puzzled if you had said, “We’re going to have to cancel geography or
Latin, because we need to put gay studies in there.” These days, instead of
going off behind the bike shed during recess to learn about sex, kids need to
sneak behind the bike shed to do a little bit of closeted geography or closeted
Latin. It’s completely backwards. And yet what do we hear from most
conservative politicians? That it would be nice to offer people a tax cut!
We are way beyond tax cuts. We’re
broke. We’re just a smidgen away from $30 trillion in federal debt—something
with no historical precedent. Talking about tax cuts today is like talking
about VAT tax refunds on the Titanic. It’s not actually what’s necessary at the
moment.
Another big issue that should take
our minds off tax cuts is China. I can’t get over the way we in the U.S. have
been ordered by our governors and the CDC to punish ourselves by living small,
shrunken lives, while the people in China who loosed this pandemic on the world
have paid no price for it.
Dr. Fauci has been a federal
government bureaucrat since 1968. He’s the J. Edgar Hoover of public health. He
talks about the COVID virus as if we’re at war. But he seems to think a country
wins a war by taking it out on its own population rather than the enemy, which
is what we’ve done.
. . .
Lots more here.
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