Highlands, NC
September 22, 2023
From a peaceful plateau atop the southern Appalachians, we sip our coffee, and consider the contrived turmoil brewing below.
Since the turn of the century, the administrative state has been stirring the pot. With an onslaught of military misadventures, financial repression, relentless debt, biomedical malfeasance, cultural perversion, and weather-related rip-offs, it turns up the heat and brings anxiety to a boil.
For two decades, we’ve been primed to endure endless “emergencies” from which we need to be “saved”.
But for fabricated fear to be effective, the perpetrators can’t have the people they’d “protect” talking back or asking too many questions. We’re supposed to accept what they say, do as we’re told, and complaisantly sacrifice our liberty for the sake of “society”.
In the Orwellian fashion that’s become too familiar, the repulsive former prime minister of New Zealand re-emerged this week to warn of the dangers free speech poses to “the values we value so highly.”
Online opinions must be “curated” to protect prescribed perspectives the peasants aren’t supposed to refute. After all, how can “leaders” limit how people live their lives if skeptics are able to expose their lies?
To these psychopaths, to quote the one who recently wrecked New Zealand, contrary opinions (which are usually later revealed as facts) are “weapons of war.”
Speaking freely is fine when there’s nothing to complain about. But when governments create chaos, it’s in the “collective interest” that perceptive dissidents shut their mouths.
For the “greater good”.
This is the crowbar by which rights are always pried away. None of us can be free until everyone is “safe.”
This requires individual rights be subjugated to the “general will”. To do so, a “crisis” must be concocted. And that’s the one thing government is good at.
During this millennium we’ve been in a perpetual “state of emergency.” Before the smoke cleared from ground zero, the Constitution was already in ashes.
After meddling for half a century in the Middle East, the US government reacted to the predictable blowback by clamping down on the usual suspects:
Us.
“Terror” became an existential threat, and every American was under suspicion.
By targeting “terror”, the US government battles a tactic. From the State’s perspective, this is the perfect enemy. It’s ominous and frightening, ubiquitous yet invisible, impossible to defeat, yet requiring endless war.
Two decades after the towers came down, the Patriot Act remains in effect. Yet the topic of Islamic terrorism rarely comes up, despite incessant bombings, coups, and invasions making more vengeful Muslims than ever before.
But the bogeyman is no longer needed. The “emergency measures” are permanently in place. They’re simply taken for granted as facts of life…almost as if the “temporary” means were the intended ends.
To conquer an “enemy” who ostensibly “attacked us for our freedoms”, all of us needed to relinquish our liberty. And despite pockets of resistance, most Americans willingly did. After all, “you can’t be too safe!”
Metal detectors went up around the country. Entrances to sporting events and public buildings resemble border crossings. A monstrous department arose to protect “the homeland”, making us wonder what the Department of “Defense” is supposed to do.
Even the word “homeland” was a disturbing addition to the American lexicon, reminiscent of totalitarian language from repugnant regimes.
To hop a plane we had to ditch our dignity. Belts came off, shoes were removed, arms were raised, and radiation ramped up. Degrading gropes became a perverse price to catch a flight.
Innocent Americans were humiliated and demeaned as if they were inmates, which is exactly how they were supposed to feel. Suspicion was encouraged and trust eroded. If we saw something, we were supposed to say something. In the fertile soil of fear, the snitch society began to take root.
Twenty years later, it fully blossomed as part of the vendetta against a virus… and especially upon anyone who questioned the required weapons in the “public health” war.
Like “terror”, covid was an ideal foe. Scary, unseen, and ostensibly everywhere, its molecules would kill us if we didn’t do what we were told.
When covid crossed the ocean, the terrorism template came off the shelf. We were “all in this together.” For “fifteen days” we’d “slow the spread”, forgoing freedom to save society.
An “emergency” was declared and lockdowns (another term derived from prison) imposed. (Small) businesses were closed. Travel was prohibited. Gatherings were forbidden. And a century of viral knowledge was hurled on the pyre of hysterical panic.
Like any respiratory ailment, covid was always going to do what it’d do no matter what we did. Masks, shots, distancing, mandates, restrictions, segregation, clamp-downs, arbitrary closures, approved rioting…
None of these had any effect on the spread of the germ they were supposed to assail. But they were highly effective creating the chaos they were meant to cause.
Wariness and apprehension reached unprecedented heights. Neighbors treated each other like toxic vessels of lethal poison. They covered their faces and kept their distance. Many assumed the role of eager Stasi, scolding anyone who didn’t comply.
We’d like to think these outrages couldn’t happen again. But, unfortunately, far too many Americans are just fine with this nonsense. They succumbed before, which is why the wardens think they can get away with it again.
But to the extent old ground can’t be recaptured, troops are forming on a second front. Despite decades of phony threats, false fears, and failed predictions of impending doom, we’re supposed to believe “the climate” is a war only urgent “action” can possibly win.
After a summer when normal meteorological activity (and unusual arson) was blamed on average people driving cars or eating meat, the president is again being urged to break the glass. Declaring an “emergency” to tinker with the temperature grants him more arbitrary power to boss us around.
This is clearly unconstitutional (as if such a quaint complaint matters anymore). It’s also self-evidently ludicrous that government edicts or political “policy” can customize the climate.
Regardless how many taxes are raised or dollars created, no amount of palm greasing, drilling bans, or crony subsidies will tailor global temperatures to whatever unstated level is supposed to be “ideal.”
But it’s not about correcting the climate. It’s about controlling us. That’s why no government should have authority to declare an emergency that gives additional power to the government declaring the emergency.
Yet regardless the contrived “crisis”, that’s always the answer. More power to the State, less liberty for us. And when we resist, we’re lectured that liberty has its limits, and told we’re selfish for not upending our lives to accommodate someone else’s fear.
Notwithstanding a popular trope that many politicians now parrot, our rights are absolute. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be “rights”.
They are natural and innate, inherent attributes of any human being. They aren’t “privileges”, to be pulled away on a whim by the entities they’re implanted to protect us from.
They are shields against duplicitous hucksters utilizing (or fabricating) states of “emergency” to expand their power, pick our pockets, and line their own.
Thomas Sowell described politics as “the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.”
Perhaps that’s why whenever politicians break the pane, the shards inevitably fall on us.
JD
Another insightful, thoughtful, and well-written missive. My regret is you do not have a wider audience. Every American should read this.
Well said!