Posts Tagged → freedom
To What and to Whom are you loyal?
Couple of interesting conversations in the past 48 hours about loyalties, one in the Juneau, Alaska airport with a guy distributing whisky around the world, and the other guy a lawyer back East. Both educated but practical, both smart and articulate, neither particularly ideological, and neither a consumer of Breitbart or Gateway Pundit news information. Which is to say, both are opinionated but not well informed, and their loyalties show it.
Both men say they are Republicans or the admittedly endangered species Kennedy Democrats (John F. Kennedy today would be a far-right America-First conservative Republican, but I digress) both say they are moderates, both say they want a “centrist” or a moderate to be the next president. Their joint political loyalty is to the idea of bipartisan and moderate political philosophy.
The lawyer takes great umbrage at President Trump taking on the executive branch’s administrative state, saying that “Trump wants to make himself monarch of America.”
The whisky salesman wants “a return to civility.”
As far as I can tell, both these very different men are devotees of ideas or images of ideas that were last seen dead on the side of the road America has traveled in the past ten years. Americans chose Donald Trump precisely because of the so-called “political moderates” standing for nothing in particular and constantly making self-serving “bipartisan” deals amongst themselves that always, always exclude Mister and Missus America. It’s what prompted the America First/ Make America Great Again movement.
As a great sage once said, If I am not for myself, who will be for me? In other words, you can’t live in America and be concerned more about people and places outside of America and still have America thrive and survive or even last as America for long. Thus MAGA and Trump enduring and actually thriving despite an unrelenting attack by the establishment media, Hollywood, academia, the Federal executive branch’s administrative state, corporate America, Wall Street, and the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association, to name but a few of America’s domestic enemies.
The American people know their survival and freedom is on the line, and they have stuck with their only true advocate through thick and thin.
The notion of “civility” also died when the establishment media came out of the closet in 2008 not as ideological crossdressers, but as war-painted cannibals bent on wanton, bloody destruction of everyone they opposed. Compare the openly partisan fake news media now to 2008 and it’s like they aren’t even the same species; that is how much toxic political poison the mainstream media “news reporters” have drunk since going all-in for non-vetted Barack Hussein Obama back in 2008. The un-civil establishment media is so openly un-civil and fake that the Biden White House issued an open memo demanding that all Fake Newsdom rally ’round the Biden Crime Family and attack Republicans instead of reporting on the treasonous international bribery the Biden family has engaged in for years.
As they say, you can’t make this stuff up, because this truth we are living is crazier than any fiction we could write. And I don’t know what planet a grown, intelligent, experienced adult American is living on to want or expect civility and moderation in a heavily one-sided toxic atmosphere like this. Trump isn’t the cause of this environment, he is the victim and the symptom of the corrupt sickness assailing America by way of “moderate” divided loyalties.
You – an American citizen of voting age – cannot both be loyal to America as a sovereign nation with the rule of law applying equally to all citizens and also support a wide-open southern border with millions of illegal immigrants coming in. You – the proverbial reasonable citizen in the street – cannot be loyal to an America where the rule of law prevails in all things, and also support a federal bureaucracy that is untouchable, unreachable, and that insubordinately does not answer to its Chief Executive, who was (and still is) Trump.
Trump a monarch? Yes, it sounds ridiculous, but…well, the US President is Chief Executive of the Executive Branch of American federal government. The Chief Executive is in a way, I suppose, a sort of monarch in his executive domain there. He is the boss. When the taxpayer-paid staff of that same executive branch openly rebels against their chief executive and acts insubordinately, it is they, not the President, who is acting like a monarch. Trump was elected by The People to run the executive branch, and the staff people of that executive branch are supposed to abide by their oaths of office, and follow the orders of their chief executive. When those staff people do what they want, and not what the elected chief executive wants, then they are each acting like petty kings. They are in open rebellion against The People of America.
So here we are, a people of divided loyalties. We want things that can’t possibly exist, and we are loyal to fake news media outlets because we still want the taste and smell of the old civility and moderation we once enjoyed. We want an unelected, unaccountable federal bureaucracy to continue on as if its continuing rebellion against the President was no big deal, while simultaneously telling ourselves that we are the good Americans. After all, we want stability and security and moderation and civility. And so we support the true villains in American politics, instead of the champions of a free America with the rule of law for all, the MAGA America First advocates like President Donald Trump.
If your hunting club suddenly turns anti-gun, would you stay loyal to it? If your work place suddenly throws you out into the street for no good reason, would you stay loyal to them? If your children’s school suddenly became disloyal to your children’s best interests and to you, would you remain loyal to that school?
I myself am loyal only to the founding first principles for which American government is supposed to stand. When the government ceases to represent or implement those principles, then that government and the individual staff people in it no longer have my loyalty. They are loyal to themselves and to their power, not to me and my rights.
I am loyal to Power To The People. We, The People own the federal bureaucracy, not the rogue, corrupt, violent, lawless staff at the FBI, ATF, DHS et al. who are the Gestapo KGB strongmen of the Biden fascists seeking to bend all people to their evil will through illegal midnight raids on the homes of their political opponents. These people cannot ever have the loyalty of the American People. And people who are loyal to these vile anti-freedom alphabet organizations are no longer Americans, because they have abandoned the basic principles of fairness and due process that used to make America America.
Whither America right now is a question of loyalty, your loyalty, to whom and to what.
Midsummer report
My apologies for the long absence here. Summer is in full swing and our family has been operating at full tilt speed. Time only for doing things, and none for writing about it all, until now.
First off, our oldest kid was married on Independence Day. Held at a pretty and historic farm, it was a fantastic wedding, and we feel like we acquired a wonderful addition to our family. However, the preparation necessary for that event took up a lot of time and energy, for many months. And then there was the recovery week. And then there was the vacation week. Hence no blog posts. Full credit to my wife for all of the wedding planning.
At least I myself am back in the saddle, while other people around me are still recovering from their vacation. Not everyone does well with the surf fishing bum lifestyle, including sleeping on the beach, eating questionable food from a warm cooler that has been pawed over and drooled on by feral raccoons, and drinking fetid water. I myself thrive in this kind of environment, and so I am back to report back to our three readers.
What can I say about the wedding other than I fired our small black powder cannon seven times, for good luck. It was Independence Day, and while the venue does not allow fireworks, they did allow the cannon (it’s a cast iron, steel sleeved replica swivel gun with a 1.75″ bore). And in my speech as the bride’s father, how could I miss an opportunity to point out that Independence Day was brought to us by citizens with guns? That is a fact, is it not?
And (of course, I guess) I heard back afterwards that some of our wedding guests were offended by the cannon and also offended by my mention of the origins of American freedom – citizens with guns. You can’t make this stuff up if you tried, like it’s a Hollywood movie script caricature of spoiled rotten children who get everything that Planet Earth can provide and yet nonetheless complain about it. Something like “The food here is terrible and the portions are so small.”
Are Americans now really offended by Independence Day fireworks? Are they offended by displays of patriotism and mentioning of historical facts that unfortunately run contrary to some evil political narratives that privately owned guns are bad and our freedom was brought to Americans by a immaculately conceived federal government that descended from Heaven? Are some wedding guests now so crass that they actually complain about the bride’s father setting off his celebratory toy cannon for the enjoyment of all the normal fun-loving people in attendance?
I have a hard time believing these things, but I did get to witness this stuff. America is in big trouble when its own citizens, young and old, hate its founding and can’t give a proud father his one moment and some space to celebrate it. Jiminy crickets.
Just returned from a subsequent beach trip to a a long spit of federally managed property on the east coast. The National Park Service rangers were 99% normal, nice, intelligent Americans, thank you very much, Gage, Donald, and Stephen.
In this national park there is a problem with artificially high numbers of deer, foxes, and racoons. They have no natural predators and they are multiplying at breakneck rates and having huge negative impacts on the environment and local ecology. Vegetation shows a distinct deer browse line about four feet above the ground, and the racoons are everywhere, aggressive, and aiming to ruin your trip. I watched a red fox steal a camper’s breakfast sausage meal right off of his plate on the guy’s picnic table. We had raccoons patrolling our campsite and under our table as soon as we broke out our food. They will grab your food right out of your hand. It is a fact that raccoons are host to some nasty parasites they excrete in their poop, which was abundantly displayed all around the campsites. Raccoons are also the number one vector for rabies among wildlife.
Aside from posing health threats and incessantly badgering the humans who are trying to enjoy the park, the foxes and raccoons also eat the eggs of rare nesting shore birds. These rare birds enjoy huge swaths of cordoned off human-free dunes and beaches in the park (and also on federal and state lands out on Long Island, like Orient Point and Montauk). And yet the same exact NPS staff enforcing the human no-go dune zones policy are absolutely fine with the overabundant nest-raiding foxes and raccoons that render all the no-go zones meaningless. The staff do not support hunting or trapping these destructive pests, either to improve the park visitor experience or to protect the natural environment.
How can the rare birds successfully nest on the ground and hatch their chicks there when the artificially super overabundant egg-eating raccoons and foxes are allowed to roam at will?
Talking with various National Park Service staff about this problem resulted in exposure to various levels of education and serious/unserious mindset. Most of the NPS staff acknowledged there is a wildlife problem on site that must be addressed. Hunting the deer and trapping the foxes and raccoons is the normal and responsible way to deal with this artificial human-caused environmental problem. These are the responsible and serious ways of addressing a visitor problem on land that is owned by the US taxpayer and whose management is entrusted to taxpayer-paid bureaucrats.
However, when I mentioned the above normal solutions to a young, handsome, tall NPS Park Policeman patrolling our campground, he responded “The same can be said about humans — there are just too many humans. And your solution to the overabundant raccoon problem is not humane.” He would get rid of the humans and allow the artificially high numbers of nuisance wildlife to proliferate. With taxpayer-paid federal employees of this guy’s low caliber and high wokeness quotient, the park visitor experience is going to degrade. C’mon, NPS, you can screen your employee applicants better than this. This foolish people-hating young guy should never have a gun and a badge, much less wear an NPS uniform.
Overall the surf fishing was fun if mostly unproductive. Probably due to the high heat and ferocious sunshine. I can report that catching cownose/ bullnose rays on strong surf tackle is a hoot, but then safely decoupling that animal from the tackle is a whole other thing. They whip their barbed tails around trying to nail the fisherman, who is trying to release them back into the ocean (I learned to place something heavy on the tail while using heavy pliers to remove or break off the hook). We did witness a large shark violently feeding close to shore, and it would be a fair guess to say it was probably eating these rays, which we caught and saw in abundance on both the bay side and the ocean surf side.
So that is the mid-summer report. Fast action, lots of family, some big family celebration and lots of family movement across the beautiful American landscape for work and vacation. I hope that you the reader are also enjoying your summertime. Summer is such a glorious time to be with family and friends, to visit new places, to camp out under the stars and cook over an open fire, to think through life’s normal challenges and to spend time with people we love…and then it is over just when we are all starting to really get into it.
So make the most of your summer.
Career politicians ended representative democracy
At its founding, America was envisioned as a representative government, a constitutional republic, where We, The People would vote for good citizens from amongst our ranks to represent our interests in government. Guy leaves his farm and plow behind to do his civic duty, returns back to the farm four or six years later. It is a good idea, because it does away with unfair feudalism and hierarchy, where only a few people at the top have power and everyone else is a powerless serf/slave/peon with no individual rights. The people making the laws are the same people who will be subject to the same laws. Everyone is treated fairly under the law.
And for a long time America worked pretty well on this model. Yes, there have been some political scandals along the way, and some power grabs that were turned back. Typically the American citizenry have been jealous of their rights and understandably suspicious of government in every way, and so they “throw the bums out” when the collective situation gets bad.
But somewhere in the past sixty years, maybe eighty years, America got deeply into political careerism. You know, where elected officials Mary Jane and Billy Bob were so respected and maybe even revered, either for their honorable traits or for their ability to deliver taxpayer funds to private beneficiaries, that the voters routinely, even habitually vote for them at every election. And so these people who kept getting elected in primaries and in general elections became career politicians. Either their entire career or most of it was spent working their way up a sort of “ladder” from local positions of authority to national positions of authority. And thus did people aim to have a career in politics, because of all sorts of reasons, some good, some bad, some corrupt, but there developed an entire culture within the two main political parties, Democrat and Republican, where party bosses would work with special interest groups to line up tame candidates who owed their political career not to We, The People, but to the party bosses and special interest groups.
And career politicians began to get really rich from their relatively low-paying public jobs. All the more reason to just stay in there and not do anything else with your life!
And so here we are, mid 2023, and career politicians in both political parties are willfully destroying America (e.g. faux “debt ceiling” wild spending spree that no one can ever pay for, Department of Defense can’t track expenditures below $100,000,000 and so our tax dollars are wasted and stolen from us, $83 billion worth of American military hardware is abandoned to our enemies in Afghanistan by Biden, neither party will hold Rep. Adam Schiff accountable for being a serial liar needlessly costing taxpayers $32 million etc).
Because career politicians are so personally invested in their political careers that if they deviate and try to do the right thing, then they stand a good chance of losing their elected office. And then doing the wrong thing becomes accepted and then promoted by the various established information outlets.
And so career politicians continue to make one bad decision after another, to hold onto their own personal power. To the point where even when Americans lose, when America loses, career politicians still win.
And so we reach the present financially and culturally unsustainable points that will inevitably result in America failing, and everyone losing their individual rights, and then some feudal overlords take over and use brute force like everyone else around the world lives under.
I know, I know, so many readers here laugh out loud when I write this stuff.
“America destroyed! Unsustainable! Ha ha ha that Josh guy sure is an idiot, because he obviously doesn’t know America is waaay waaay too big to fail!”
And so despite a long human history littered with wrecked human civilizations, the warnings from taxpaying worker bees like me go not just unheeded, but mocked and belittled by career political staffers and career politicians in both parties as they all continue to make financially and culturally unsustainable and reckless decisions for the collective rest of us. And at the end of their day, all the careerists see is money and power, and so anyone within their orbit can commit the most grievously corrupt behavior without being held accountable. As one of my mentors Frank used to say, the longer a career politician is in office, the tighter the horse blinders get, until they see nothing except what is right in front of them, which is money and power.
The rest of us? The We, The People worker bees? We see the corrupt rot all around us eating away at America. We see Rome beginning to burn, while the career politicians feast and live carefree lives devoid of discipline or honesty. This is not going to last, friends. If we all continue to re-elect career politicians, then our freedom-loving civilization is probably going to end within the lifetimes of the people reading these words, and everything we take for granted will be gone. All of it. It will all be History, as they say.
What happened to Earth Day?
Earth Day began decades ago, in 1970, when I was a kid. I remember it as a distinct point in time where the people around me spoke about raw sewage and chemicals being dumped and piped directly into American waterways. Up until that point, Americans had kind of unhappily or grudgingly accepted environmental degradation and pollution as an unfortunate necessity of economic and technological progress.
But fish kills in what older people then clearly remembered as pristine trout streams, and obvious losses of waterways with once- major fishing and waterfowl hunting to untreated, unfiltered, unmitigated chemical and physical waste dumping bothered most Americans. A great deal of this pollution was out in the open, unsightly, and an obvious reflection on Americans as a people. Then the Cuyahoga River caught on fire because of all the dangerous pollution in it, and that image galvanized Americans to clean up our act.
What was happening then was public waterways and air that were shared publicly were being used as a cheap dumping ground by production facilities of all sorts. The American public was bearing the burden of environmental waste, while the same processes that generated that waste also generated income that was privatized. I am 100% for private income, but I strenuously object to using shared waters and air as a cheap garbage disposal, and so did people of all backgrounds in 1970.
Thus was Earth Day born. Fair enough, understandable enough. And the environmental cleanup and protection movement followed closely on its heels. The US Environmental Protection Agency, where I began my professional career, was created soon after Earth Day to address the obvious problems resulting from carelessness with our shared environment.
But now, after decades of increasingly crushing environmental laws and regulations that ridiculously “protect” us down to parts per trillion of chemicals that already naturally occur at those levels in the natural environment….Earth Day represents something totally different than it did in 1970. Today, Earth Day is a celebration of an all-out assault on Western Civilization by people pursuing a ridiculously impossibly unattainable “Net Zero” goal. Meaning that humans should have zero impact on the planet. None. Which naturally necessitates a complete (and unreasonable, undemocratic, authoritarian) overhaul of our way of life, freedoms, choices, food, etc.
Earth Day is now marked and promoted by people who supposedly “know better” what is right for us. And in fact almost 100% of the environmental and even land conservation organizations are politically partisan and politically extreme, embracing all kinds of cultural and economic Marxism while rejecting American capitalism and individual freedom. This shift away from cleanup to directing us on what to eat and when and where is patently bad, unfair, wrong, and in fact is so egregiously foolish it is hurting the credibility of the environmental quality movement.
When environmental groups like Penn Future and Sierra Club always protect one political party and always attack one political party, they are shown to be about partisan politics and not about environmental quality. They are political shells. And when a local land conservancy embraces evil “Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity” policies that are actually against the founding principles of said conservancy, such as private land ownership and capitalism, then we know that even the once- wonderful land trust movement has been hijacked and turned against America.
So in 2023, Earth Day represented authoritarianism, out of control Big Government, cruel assaults on and corresponding losses of individual personal freedoms and choice, and a whole bunch of other bad stuff. The fact that Earth Day is now openly un-American and anti-America tells us that Earth Day’s promoters are not trying to protect us from pollution, they are trying to take control of our lives and destroy what had been the most free nation on Planet Earth.
Supposedly in the name of saving us from ourselves. To which I and a lot of other Americans say No Thanks.
Today’s “I know what is best for you better than you do” mindset of the environmental movement is what drove me out of working at the USEPA. It is unreasonable, unproven, and every day it is shown to be wrong and wronger.
Instead of all the anti-science climate hysteria sky-is-falling nonsense, Americans should be celebrating the incredible environmental cleanup and success we have had in the past 53 years since Earth Day was first established. Tilting at environmental windmills makes some people feel like they have meaning in their lives, and if they themselves want to take on the burdens they propose for the rest of us, then they can make that choice. But they have no right to try to take away my right of choice, your right of choice. And if there is one clear indication that the loudest voices promoting Earth Day are not serious and do not deserve to be treated seriously, it is the fact that absolutely none of these people do what they say the rest of us must do “to save the planet.”
Potent symbol of freedom: A gas kitchen stove
Only in the purposefully chaotic and bizarre power politics of 2021 to 2023 do Americans discover themselves clinging not just to their Bible and their guns, but to the gas stove in their kitchen. Yeah, Ol’ Smoky is now a symbol of your personal freedom.
Why in God’s green earth is the federal government (and several state governments including New York and Washington) trying from several different angles (consumer protection regulation, legislation, and straight-up executive branch political fatwa confiscation) to eliminate stoves that burn natural gas?
Because of control! Of you! By the bureaucrats and the lawless control freaks in government!
They want you hooked up to the electrical grid matrix and completely dependent upon whoever controls that electrical grid. One false move by you, and -POW! – your power goes out and it won’t be restored until you delete that mean “right wing” tweet and stop attending that church down the street.
This debacle of bad governance and really bad government overreach is all because a gas stove provides Americans with independence from the electric grid. While the electric grid can be controlled with the flip of a switch or two, as can the power meters on our individual homes, a gas stove operates either from a huge natural gas main pipeline that takes a lot of effort to turn off, which effects multiple city neighborhoods, or from a large propane tank in the back yard.
Propane tanks for residences run from 100 gallons to 3,000 gallons in size, providing the careful homeowner with potentially several years of cooking and heating independence until a fill-up is needed. Hooked up to a non-stop 24/7 gas main, a home can heat and cook with a gas stove 24/7. And in fact, I have personally seen an elderly woman in my neighborhood huddled up in front of her gas stove to stay warm in the winter, while the electric power was down and unavailable. This ability to run your own kitchen and home disconnected from the electric grid is serious independence from control and monitoring!
And the control freaks hate it hate it hate it!
There is a good reason Barack Hussein Obama recently installed a 2,500-gallon propane tank at his luxury vacation beach front mansion on flood-proof Martha’s Vineyard Island. When you have a large propane tank and the power goes out, you can always run a powerful electrical generator off of that propane, as well as heat and cook with your gas stove. Some people even have the old fashioned style natural gas lights in their homes, and they work great! It is like whatever happens with the power grid doesn’t really apply to people with natural gas stoves. You are completely OK and independent.
Turns out, Obama did at least this one thing right in his life, although he won’t admit that he is a hypocrite about it, because the guy is constantly hectoring us about the evils of the propane gas in his tank. I say, if a serial liar Marxist Kenyan named Barack Hussein Obama can have a gas stove and the huge propane tank out back to keep the stove fired up and cooking 24/7 off-grid, then an honest-to-goodness genuine red-blooded American like you can have one, too. Just on principle, no questions asked.
What is truly interesting about this subject is the bogus and openly fake “study” supposedly done by the Rocky Mountain Institute that the gas banners and book burners supposedly relied on for their screams of horror and outrage about “the dangers of gas stoves“. Click the link above and see for yourself. This is not a study, nor does it rely on real studies. It is a political brochure with pictures. The concerns that RMI lists are based on the improbability/impossibility of people sitting inside a gas-fired oven while it is on fire, and do not take into account ambient air dilution, stove top hoods and exhaust fans, or the risks from alternatives to gas stoves.
It is as if the only thing that RMI cares about are the potential risks (none of which are proven with actual long term study data showing a strong correlation between gas stoves and related health problems); they don’t even talk about the benefits of gas stoves. Not the least of which is that clean burning natural gas emits far fewer and less pollutants than coal-fired power from the usual electrical power plants where we get most of our electricity.
This gas stove banning business is all about bureaucrats directly controlling your home life, which means your personal freedom. They used a fake “study” by a 100% partisan and ideologically driven activist organization called Rocky Mountain Institute to “inform” their chums in the partisan and ideologically driven activist organization called the mainstream media, who in turn created the (fake) astroturf political target for partisan and ideologically driven politicians who don’t give a fig for the actual scientific truth or for you or for freedom.
Whenever we see so-called “science” claims like this gas stove ban hype that cannot be challenged or debated with its proponents, then we know it is not science, it is propaganda.
Cling to your gas stove for dear life. Do not let go of it, do not give it up, and vote out of office any elected official who supports banning gas stoves. These are bad people, controlling people, who believe they know best how you must live your life. Even the life you live in your own kitchen, frying up chicken and plantains and sauteeing vegetables, all of which really do throw up a whole bunch of oily particles in the air that can get into your lungs. And believe it or not, this is a subject I know a lot about, because after finishing graduate school I took several courses on this subject at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, and got “A” grades.
Take it from me, the RMI “study” is BS, the supposed health issue about gas stoves is BS, and I’m not even a doctor. Keep your gas stove, and toss out the RMI study and its claim that your gas stove is dangerous. Live free, my friends. Breathe that free American air and rejoice.
Biden’s Police State
The Police State Is Here and “Governed” by Joe Biden
Posted on April 4, 2023 at Natural Gas Now by Tom Shepstone
Joe Biden, the compromised plagiarist who Obama said could muck up anything, is now in titular charge of a police state once known as the land of the free and brave.
Western Civilization is collapsing at an ever increasing rate. The United States, the only remaining culture and force with the potential to reverse the decline, has now become a police state, with Joe Biden supposedly the chief. This chief of police really isn’t, though, as anyone above the age of five can see with their own eyes. He’s being tragically manipulated by the worst sorts of leftists and radicals, who couldn’t care less about him but need to use him to knock the U.S. down as many pegs as they can, while they can. Exactly who they are we can only speculate, but we know China and the deep state are in the mix and we know we are their enemy. They have created a police state over the last decade and we’re living in it, whether we realize it or not. Is there hope of reversing things?
The evidence we are living in a third-world police state is everywhere today. We are living in an Orwellian or Fahrenheit 451 world where offending someone in government or favored by government has now become a crime against the state. Consider the following:
Douglas Mackey a/k/a Ricky Vaughn was just convicted of a Federal crime for Tweeting a perfectly obvious joke regarding Hillary Clinton where, with a MAGA hat displayed on his profile picture, he suggested Hillary voters could vote by text in 2016. There is no evidence anyone at all took it seriously, but humor is the worst of sins for leftists. The photo on the left below is Mackey’s Tweet and the photo on the right is by a Leftist telling Trump voters the same thing. Mackey was arrested and the one on the right has been ignored by the Biden Feds. This is brownshirt police state stuff:
Senators from both parties have introduced a bill by the astoundingly Orwellian name of the RESTRICT Act, which is superficially about chasing TikTok out off the country but is really about empowering the Federal government by bureaucratic edict to shut any and all social media that doesn’t comport with the views of the state. It would further empower the outrageous deep state control of the media revealed in the Twitter files. Those files are only the tiniest bit of the wide-spread infestation of Big Tech by a deep state that is arm in arm with it as a result of the Section 230 protections Federal law gives to Big Tech companies.
Thomas Jefferson said “No government ought to be without censors, and, where the press is free, no one ever will,” [meaning that the only censors should be the citizens holding accountable their government] but today the press and Big Tech are no longer the challengers of government, as should always be, but, rather, the censors for government when it is in Democrat hands. During Biden times, we’ve seen the press and Big Tech join hands with government to squelch supposed “disinformation” on COVID, vaccines and anything else connected with the Wu-Flu. These police state censor tactics extended not only to different opinions, but also to acknowledged truths the government simply didn’t want out there because they went against the police state’s agenda.
The same censorship is increasingly evident with respect to the climate grifting scam. Government has not only merged with Big Pharma, but also Big Green, using edicts from the SEC, for example, to force us all into deals with the grifters through imposition of ESG investing policies. And, throw out documented hard-core facts about the climate, as Greg Wrightstone and the CO2 Coalition have done and you’ll be thrown off LinkedIn, as they were, and unable to advertise on Facebook. Only the official narrative of the power grabbers and grifters is now permitted if you’re big enough to attract attention. Meanwhile, John Kerry, celebrities and BlackRock executives fly into Davos on private jets for meetings that could be done on Zoom, but that wouldn’t demonstrate how they are elites well above the law and so the rest of us are left to pointlessly complain of hypocrisy that was deliberate.
We are seeing the Biden Administration, Kathy Hochul and and others, at the prodding of tax-exempt ultra-wealthy NGOs, impose gas stove bans, EV mandates and other measures to strangle oil and gas are everywhere. All is wrapped in “energy transition” and “save the planet” lies that are without foundation. Instead, we are instructed that phony models and targets are the reasons for transferring every more wealth and power to elites. Farmers in the Netherlands are told they can no longer farm as politically favored Big Tech moves in to take the land, and that is but one example of the corporatism —merger of business and government—at work throughout Western Civilization.
And, so it goes. There are hundreds of other examples, but they all come to one thing; Western Civilization has lost its virtue. Life is now a “free for all” struggle for power and riches and the virtuous aren’t even in the struggle, they are cowered into corners by purveyors of political correctness. The police state is here because we have become afraid to speak out and our cowardice has empowered government to take drastic steps to squelch all speech with which it doesn’t agree, knowing our resistance is weak. And, they’re largely correct. Our legislatures and courts are too corrupted themselves to do anything about this. Oh, we’ll win battles here and there, but the trajectory is still downward and mostly has been for over a century.
Notwithstanding this heavy dose of cynicism and foreboding, there is hope to replace the police state with a return to virtue if common men and women rise to their feet. The COVID debacle awakened many. I now find myself in agreement with multiple people I could not have imagining admiring a few years ago. Virtuous individuals may yet be found, and in strange places. There are many, many people of all political persuasions who recognize the COVID lockdowns were pure police state, did enormous damage and serve as a warning that Western Civilization can be vaporized in a matter of days. More to the point, we now know the enemy ardently desires this and won’t be beaten with law, constitutions or sill taunts about the hypocrisy of elites who where it like a badge of honor.
No, we are in a spiritual war. It is a war against lies and, as I’ve noted here several times we cannot live by lies. That was the message in every one of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s books. Most of his life was a spiritual contest with communism in its many forms and he waged it by telling truths in every imaginable way he could. He suffered through imprisonment and exile by the Soviets and, later, much rejection from the West as a weak President Ford refused to even meet with him out of fear of communist backlash. Solzhenitsyn arguably prevailed when the Soviet Union collapsed of its own weight but, today, we’re dealing with even worse atrocities and threats vis-a vis Communist China, proving the battle for virtue is an endless one.
There will always be collectivists, grifters and power seekers for whom the virtue of the individual is forever an obstacle to their own quests. Indeed, the virtuous individual is the one thing that stands in the way for the triumph of lies. And, where does virtue come from? Man cannot create it. Only the Creator can, although man forever attempts to do so. This why a return to Judeo-Christian principles is the one hope on which the future of Western Civilization rests and has always rested. Can it happen? Yes. Will it happen? Perhaps it’s too early to tell, but the hour is getting very late. We are already living in a police state.
(the original essay can be accessed at https://naturalgasnow.org/the-police-state-is-here-and-governed-by-joe-biden/)