Before this loathsome time of transmission rates, vaccine obsessions, and performative safety, the most inane of pub chatter centred upon just how Nazi Germany came about.
“I’d have fought them with my bare hands!” cry the corpulent. It’s always the corpulent—a bleachy adjective for “fat”—indulging in such hypothetical heroism. Interjecting, jowly seniors, decades above draft-age, battle vaguely articulated enemies in fantasies of civil war, as their ballooning waistlines recruit the guerrilla forces of diabetes and erectile dysfunction in their body’s own civil war.
At least they’re entertaining, unlike the morbidly futile Fake Brooklyn hipster wheedling before the entrance, “Hi! Umm… Could you—maybe . . . raise your mask to above your nose? Thank you. Ha-ha! Great . . .” The default setting of New York hipsters is carbonated harmlessness.
In the bar, doleful, unmasked faces populate the booths and barstools, safe in the knowledge that COVID-19 spares those sitting down.
To earn a place amongst the hipsters, all clotted in their pursuit of homogenized originality, one must hand over a vaccine pass. Little is more satisfying than the secret knowledge that one’s company has a counterfeit vaccine pass, and that it charms every time.
Don’t be judgemental, sagacious reader, the current year is 2022. In the age of empowerment, unwelcoming to the stigmatic, one can identify as whatever one may wish. It just so happens that many of my friends identify as vaccinated. Who are you to deny or to question their truth?
They’re not anti-vaxxers, nor imbeciles. They’ve reasoned that COVID-19 is deadly primarily to the elderly and the unhealthy. Three-quarters of such deaths have occurred in those in their 80s, with an average of three co-morbidities. Vaccination does little to stop the spread—ergo, vaccine passports are pointless and poisonous. Besides, they’ve all had a hearty dose of Omicron.
A sane society would recognise such nuance. But ours is not sane. It’s a neurotocracy, governed by hypochondriacs, neurotics, compassionistas, professional redeemers, kale-eaters, narcissists, sociopaths, and failed celebrities. Power attracts those least suited to power.
Those in confederacy against reality don’t want this pandemic to end—never again will their negative personality traits purchase such power.
When that South African lenitive—Omicron—first emerged, one could taste their hopes that this new variant was harder, faster, stronger, and deadlier than previous strains. They prayed we’d be locked up at home, again, in an endless national rendition of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Sadly for them, Omicron is the OnlyFans variant, teasingly promiscuous yet pallid.
The end of this pandemic is nigh. Aping the billionaires who’ve doubled their wealth since 2020, I’ve spied an opportunity to lavish myself in riches. After all, one-third of this nation is sinfully addicted to this New Normal lark. So, I’ve started a new venture: COVID-19 re-enactment societies.
Picture it. For the princely sum of $1,000 per person, neurotics can spend the weekend holed up with other obsessives, baking banana bread, discussing at a safe distance of at least six feet the merits and demerits of double-masking, just where they got that chic N-95, how we didn’t lock down hard enough or early enough, how Florida doesn’t exist, how vaccine passports are logical, how the unvaccinated deserve to die, and other pagan moonshines.
That’s the basic package. First-class guests can enjoy thorough beatings from rageful policemen embittered ever since their high school sporting stardom burned out before the big time. For a substantial tax-free donation, a seething mob of frenzied lunatics will encircle the truly adventurous guest, chanting: “Wear that mask! Wear that mask!” in a kind of mask-shaming bukkake.
Doubtless, such a venture will prove popular with CNN employees.
Now that their own bougie friends have soldiered a runny nose, and survived an annoying cough, the progressive popular kids no longer regard catching COVID as a moral failing.
Like angsty teenagers, the popular kids are bored. They’re tired of their pandemic. After two years of ruining the lives of the Uber Class, it’s now time, they implore, to “live with the virus.” They’ve forgotten that those who’ve spent the pandemic delivering their lattes and sashimi have, since March 2020, lived with the virus.
Living with the virus has always been the only real option. Protecting the clinically vulnerable—the precept of sane states and countries—was the only way out of this pandemic and remains the only way out of this pandemic. But herd immunity succumbed to herd mentality. Those crying “Do Something!” hystericized all measures steeped in reality for ones borne of characteristic Chinese brutality. Two years on, the experts align their views with the laymen.
The results of this mass psychosis are in: the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in history; millions of poor schoolkids now years behind their better-off peers; millions fattening hospital waiting lists, many of whom tragically too late; a spiraling mental health crisis; ballooning debt, runaway inflation, and the confirmation that one-third of people we know would have relished East German artlessness.
The popular kids have enjoyed this feudal pandemic. They can work from home and buzz up their favorite apps, summon strangers to their apartment doors as they implore their friends to “stay safe” and suspect every human being as a potential Typhoid Mary.
Concealed behind the hashtags and radical chic, their insatiable desire for validation, the popular kids siphon emotional and political profits from those their self-indulgence hurts most.
If they truly believed their own hysterics, would they really demand the Uber class risk their lives to deliver Instagrammable sashimi and rice noodles?
The Uber class—masked-up minorities and poor whites—play along because they have bills to pay and mouths to feed. They’ve no option to work from home. Instead, they whip up oat-milk lattes, cart their betters around Prospect Park in plastic-sheeted Ubers, and tweezer together pristine meals in restaurants seemingly in tribute to famed germaphobe, Howard Hughes.
Such theater serves as a narcissistic supply. The popular kids’ exaggerated fear of the virus is a social currency, the value of which inflates or deflates according to utility. They’re terrified when it suits, and like AOC in Florida, sanguine when it suits.
As the Q train rumbles toward Manhattan, such inflationary fear thickens the closer one gets toward Union Square. Aspiring popular kids mistake the carriage for their therapists’ office, loudly discussing their favorite topics—themselves, their inner landscape, the emotional minutiae of their day, their grasp of the shapeshifting measures to “stop the spread.” Life imitates social media.
In their decadence, the popular kids now parrot the skepticisms long in circulation amongst the Uber class, appropriating like a high school trend the narrative of the lower orders.
Perhaps that explains why the Uber class is deserting the popular kids. They’ve tired of playing “the help” to dilettantes who cloak their self-indulgence behind progressive compassion. If the working-classes loathe anything, it’s the prosperous playing poverty for emotional profit.
Or perhaps the popular kids realize that when the excrement communes with the fan they aren’t as important as they so believe. The Uber class is the thin red line between civilization and barbarism. Society can soldier on without “creative ambassadors,” their vainglorious Twitter bios, or their luxury beliefs.
Wokeism has been described by its critics as the omnipresent use of race—and to a lesser extent, gender—to replace meritocracy and thus ensure equality of result. What follows from implementing that ideology are reparatory actions to reward those of the present by atoning for the injustices done to others in the past.
Some see it as an update of 1960s cultural Marxism fads. Others scoff that it is just a return to 1980s-style political correctness.
Still more see it as the logical successor to 1990s-type race, class, and gender obsessions—albeit with a shriller and more dangerous Jacobin, Soviet, and Maoist twist. Wokeism’s hysteria also invites comparisons to the Salem witch trials and McCarthyism.
But few have described wokeism as the cruel creed that it is.
Wokeism’s natural logic is to destroy the lives of people of both genders, of all races, and—if need be—those of every age, all to leverage an otherwise unworkable ideological agenda. It is nihilist and destroys everything it touches. It tears apart foes and friends alike, whether by fueling media-driven hatred of Donald Trump or faux-deification of the disaster that is now Joe Biden.
Defunding law enforcement and defaming police resulted in record numbers of murders in 12 U.S. cities. A wave of violent crime is even hitting America’s suburbs.
Without much fear of arrest, indictment, conviction, and incarceration, emboldened violent career criminals for the past year have robbed, assaulted, and killed the innocent with impunity.
The victims at the bus stop, the subway, or in the furniture store do not seem to warrant media or progressive attention, much less sympathy.
They are the ignored—the unnamed, and the forgotten collateral damage from the grand experiment of redefining crime as a social construct. The guilty are the elite academics, activists, and billionaires like George Soros who are untouched by what they birthed.
We have all seen videos of the vast expanse of flotsam and jetsam strewn by train thieves along the Union Pacific tracks in Los Angeles. Yet the Wild West mess is still more than just the concrete manifestations of Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascón’s unhinged efforts to excuse criminals from legal consequences.
The packages thrown along the ground by thugs and gangsters represent, among other things, lost COVID-19 test results of the ill. Presumably, they unknowingly are waiting still by the window for the delivery of results that never arrive. The package in the dirt was, perhaps, a key tractor part eagerly awaited, in vain, by the broke farmer in the Central Valley. The mess included the life-saving medicines shipped to the sick that disappeared.
And our elected leaders did what in response? Governor Gavin Newsom apologized for using the insensitive word “gangs” to describe those who plunder, loot, and trash railcars.
It is a cruel thing to indoctrinate children with the lie that they are innately guilty of oppression due to their skin color. One accurate definition of racism is collective ill-treatment of an individual due to his innate appearance—on the pretext that such bias is deserved, given the target is deemed mentally, spiritually, or morally inferior because of said traits. But that, in a nutshell, is the essence of critical race theory: the destruction of all human traits and unique characteristics, as demonized individuals are reduced to stereotyped, faceless members of a collective.
For over a half-century, female athletes have sought to achieve parity in society’s attitudes to sports. Title IX forced universities to ensure rough equality for both female and male sports.
But the woke effort to redefine transitioning biological males as identical to biological women will assuredly destroy the life work of thousands of pioneer athletes.
Ironically, the sexist woke movement has allowed men to take hormones and undergo surgery to become females—even as their immutable skeleton frames, muscularity, or organ characteristics ensure an unfair and asymmetrical contest.
The lives of thousands of young female athletes will likely be diminished. Each sprinter, every swimmer, and all female pole-vaulters will now inevitably at some future date have a rendezvous with career implosion—defined by losing to a transgendered female/biological male.
Records are being rewritten, the very nature of individual women’s sports changed, and soon there will no longer remain an idea of “women’s sports” at all.
The green wokeists postulate that they are saving lives by radical efforts to restrict gas and oil production, to raise fuel prices. They want to force Americans to buy high-priced alternative sources of wind- and solar-generated power and battery-powered cars. But away from the faculty lounge, millions of Americans are colder and less mobile this winter, paying far more to heat their homes and to drive to work.
Most of the woke climate change activists rarely see the poor trying to empty their purses to scrounge combinations of cash and credit cards to leverage over $100 to fill their cars’ gas tanks. Tesla drivers might be the architects of last year’s war on carbon fuels. But real-life victims pay for their piety—those who have no such options to buy high-priced electric cars.
For the cosmopolitan woke, the border is many things: a mere xenophobic construct, a racist barrier, a nationalist tic.
But the thousands who live near the Mexican border see their homes and farms overrun with drug traffickers—and during a pandemic thousands of unvaccinated and possibly sick illegal aliens. They suffer firsthand from daily violence as all security disappears.
For the American poor, who rely on government health clinics and state entitlements, the influx of thousands of illegal aliens into their communities becomes a zero-sum game. The more noncitizens put demands on such already oversubscribed services, the fewer citizens there are who will have access to quality care.
The woke lecture that colleges and universities must now go beyond their former de facto racial quotas for admissions and hiring, already mostly based on proportional representation and disparate impact. But now a sort of reparations system emerges. It is what the Left itself used to call in derision “overrepresentation.”
Equity in our Orwellian world is not equality, but payback. Again, it is the idea of making the current generation pay for the supposed sins of the long dead of centuries past.
Aside from the destruction of merit by the substitution of racial criteria, millions from a discarded generation will have doors slammed on their careers—simply because of the color of their skin. And they will never forget that.
The woke do not even make the effort to admit that class matters as much as, or more than, race. By doing so, they doom millions of poor white and Asian students, who managed in poverty to achieve excellent grades and test scores, from being admitted to top-tier schools. Their actual achievement, despite their absence of wealthy, college-educated, or well-connected parents, means little.
Once a morally bankrupt society—for naïve, utopian, or ignoble reasons—begins to calibrate graduation ceremonies, dorm space, roommate selection, achievement, and grading standards based on race, then it not only will lose its standard of living, but it will deserve to. And it may have a future date with the violence of Rwanda, Iraq, or the Balkans.
In sum, wokeness is not about kindness, equality, fairness, or morality.
It is the power agenda of the elite of all races. For differing reasons, they rig the game in their own interests, without a care about who suffers.
Rich white people assume that they possess the money, the influence, the networking skills, and the connections to navigate around the very exclusionary rules they make for others. For them, there are seldom costs. But they win apparent psychological gain at feeling spiritually superior while driving a Range Rover.
They get high on the sense of power they wield to engineer the lives of millions deemed less important than they. And to the degree they feel guilty about their own monopoly of wealth and leisure, such transient superficial remorse is alleviated by abstract caring for the “other.”
If they can ensure that 50 percent of TV commercials highlight African Americans, then they worry little about the nation’s existential crisis of 800 blacks murdered in Chicago this year. And no such television execs have a clue—or likely a concern—about how to stop it.
The woke take out a medieval contract that all their material indulgences can be balanced by virtue-signaling caring for the less fortunate—although always at someone else’s expense.
And for the millions of the affluent, elite nonwhite? The resurgence of racial obsessions conveniently destroys the old idea of class, even though now it is the far more precise calibration of inequality.
For all the woke talk about “constructs” of gender, race is somehow alone exempted and declared innate, definable, and immutable. One’s appearance becomes the permanent victimized refuge—even of NBA multibillionaires and billionaire rappers alike.
A Ward Churchill or Elizabeth Warren can desperately seek to leverage a career in becoming Native American, apparently as if they were almost trapped in their own white bodies. Yet they can still not manage to construct such assumed identities in the manner of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner.
If race is now the sole immutable barometer of who is a victim, who a victimizer, then LeBron James, Jay-Z, Kayne West, Chris Rock, Michelle Obama, and Oprah Winfrey are always to be among the eternally oppressed. The enormous influence, power, status, and wealth they wield never negates their victimhood, despite a nation three generations into affirmative action.
In the immoral calculus of woke, the poor white or Southeast Asian offspring of poorly paid high-school dropouts constitute “the privileged.” And a multimillionaire racist like the TV anchorwoman Joy Reid claims to be the perpetual victim, not the inner-city African American retiree who in 2021 has lost local police protection.
No wonder the woke elite and the affluent leftists fixate on race, given they are now the ruling class. Otherwise, their own privilege would be the obvious target of the once-beloved “Revolution.”
So, they fear that by their own prior left-wing standards, they too could end up on the wrong side of their moral Maginot Line. Wokeism’s obsessions with ferreting out “white privilege” are a way for rich people to head off (so to speak) the fate of Marie Antoinette.
A final note. We know wokeism is both contrary to human nature and antithetical to democracy and constitutional government.
Without public support, it has instead embraced an entire array of cruel, Soviet, and Maoist means to achieve its own self-interested ends. Woke talk about “racists” eerily emulates Soviet boilerplate about “counterrevolutionaries.” Today’s wokeist spouts things that could come right out of the mouth of the novelist Boris Pasternak’s character Army Commissar Strelnikov, or Mao’s Little Red Book concerning “suppression of counterrevolutionaries.”
No wonder the woke, so-called “humanists” are the first to resort to Trotskyization and iconoclasm. They are masters of censoring, blacklisting, scapegoating, deplatforming, ritual humiliation, doxxing, cancel-culture, ostracism, and disbarring.
Wokeism’s logic is the eternal one of the bully Jacobin with his guillotine lists of the revolutionary unpure, the 19th-century lynch mob storming the frontier jail, the Red Guards hounding the counterrevolutionary, and the forced mental hospitalizations of the Soviet Union.
But above all, wokeism is a cruel cult—created by and for the careerist benefit of the privileged.
When Joe Biden was elected, he boasted that “America is back.” Yessir, our allies will once again respect us because a decrepit, broken-down old crock who has never been right on foreign policy is now in the White House.
But from the way Joe’s foreign policy has been going, “America is back” is just as big a fiction as “I will shut down the virus.”
As Russia stands poised to invade Ukraine, the doddering old man in the White House said nothing would happen to Russia if all they launched was a “minor incursion.” Then his “foreign policy” people had to rush in with a mop to clean up the diplomatic mess their boss made.
It didn’t exactly instill “trust” and “respect” among our allies.
In fact, Reuters reported yesterday that Germany, Ukraine, France, and Russia will be holding 4-way talks this coming week in Paris.
Noticeably absent from these talks is the “America is Back” administration.
These guys have so little respect for Joe Biden that his foreign policy team didn’t even get an invite.
Our European allies seem to agree with Barack Obama’s assessment of Joe Biden: “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”
Not only do our European allies not respect this administration, they also don’t think much of Biden’s diplomatic abilities.
“America is Back,” indeed.
Sure, the Biden State Department spent the weekend tweeting the hashtag “#StandWithUkraine 
” while the president held virtual meetings from his hidey-hole at Camp David. But when it comes to actual talks, the “America is Back” administration is getting kicked to the sidelines.
Biden constantly complained about Trump’s “go it alone” foreign policy. Now Europe is taking the “go it alone” route by leaving the Biden administration behind to cool its heels in Washington.
On Friday, Reuters reported that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz turned down an invitation from President Biden to discuss the ongoing Ukraine crisis.
Scholz had scheduling conflicts, don’t you know.
Funny, that’s the same excuse Stacey Abrams gave two weeks ago when she turned down an invitation to attend Biden’s vicious Georgia speech on her pet project, “voting rights.”
If America was truly “Back,” Scholz would have made the time to speak with the President of the United States. But Joe Biden lacks the respect, influence, and gravitas to matter, so it’s “thanks, but no thanks.”
Unless by “Back” Joe Biden meant the “back of the bus,” America is not back.
We’ve gone from Superpower to Afterthought in one year.
Not only is that pathetic, but it’s also incredibly dangerous to our standing in the world and to our national security.
"The Democrats’
“Biden is FDR and not just a desiccated, pervy old weirdo” dreams have
died."
Article by Kurt Schlichter in Townhall
There’s no sense in pretending that we don’t take pleasure in the total failure of our Marxist-curious party of the left. Through a combination of outright fraud, procedural irregularities, plus the total support of the garbage establishment and its failed institutions, the Democrats took power by the thinnest of margins and have proceeded to fail on a level comparable to Heaven’s Gate, New Coke, and the Weekly Standard. There’s no shame in enjoying their total rejection by all decent Americans. In fact, you should enjoy it without hesitation or mercy, especially since it means more than just us cons getting our jollies.
The Democrats’ “Biden is FDR and not just a desiccated, pervy old weirdo” dreams have died. Their dreams of five trillion in handouts to bums and donors have died. Their dreams of enshrining their ability to cheat in elections have died. The Democrats can’t even shatter norms, like the filibuster, competently.
So much fail in so little time. The Latinx community – which the Dems put all their faith in as part of an unstoppable future majority, is rejecting them, in large part because Democrats are the kind of people who use the word “Latinx” unironically. Some foreigners, seeing the Democrats’ weakness and stupidity – it’s not just Commander-in-Chief Crusty who is the problem – are chomping at the bit to chomp off pieces of other countries because they know that the Dems put the “feck” in “feckless.” The rest are invading our country through what used to be a border. Inflation is up, the market is down, and November 2022 is approaching just over the horizon like a Tongan tsunami.
Noted dead white guy Samuel Johnson, who believed that there are only two genders, once observed, “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” It’s an apt analogy here, both because it evokes the fact that the Democrats have gone all-in on the side of the criminals as the crime rate rockets up, and also because it demonstrates just how intractably stupid the Democrats are. They ride in the little cart heading toward their November 8th date with the electoral noose, but their minds are not concentrated on that. Instead they are concentrated on fake insurrections and telling us how CRT is not taught in schools yet must absolutely continue to be taught in schools.
This is unsustainable, and normal people would know it, but normal people are not quasi-Marxist pagan fanatics who drove actual religion out of their lives and let commie nonsense fill the void. They can’t stop it, even if they wanted to stop it, because their collection of bizarre obsessions is not merely an ideology but a substitute for actual faith. Progressivism is their god. Unfortunately for them, it’s a false god. It’s a political golden calf, except they oppose the gold standard because it wouldn’t let them print all the cash they want to spend, and Dems are leery of cattle because their Swalwellian flatulence causes global warming, which is another facet of their fake, foolish faith.
But then again, no cow ever scored with Fang Fang, so advantage steak.
Sucks for the Dems that they have no choice but to stagger on toward ruin, accumulating ever more failures and disgraces, all the while doing the impossible and making the Republican Party look good, if only in comparison. But this is more than just a bad electoral cycle. Everyone has up years and down years. This is something much worse. This is a head-first dive into a cesspool with their eyes and mouths wide open.
Their pain is actually the manifestation of their destruction as a whole new generation gets to see what we Boomers/Gen Xers saw happen under Jimmy Carter. The Biden misadministration is the hot stove of politics – a generation just got burned going for the guy without the mean tweets. That won’t happen again, at least for the ones who aren’t dumb. For the ones who are dumb – many of them the same lackwits for whom the “voting rights” nonsense was designed to facilitate their voting – they’ll keep putting their palms on the burners and being surprised when they smell singed hand. “I voted for Biden and someone broke into my car, plus I caught COVID though I quadruple mask and quintuple vaxx, and then I got drafted to go fight to protect Hunter’s investments in Ukraine! How did this happen? Also, Biden 2024!”
The Democrats always fail, always. They hate normal Americans, they screw up the economy, they coddle criminals, and they sometimes marry their brothers. When you give these morons authority, they will mess everything up – magnificently. Name a functioning institution in our society that works even adequately. I am not even talking about working well. I am merely talking about doing its most basic job in a competent manner. Don’t worry, I’ll wait right here, re-reading War and Peace.
There isn’t one. There is no competently-run institution left in America. Academia is broke. The military is broke. The NFL is broke. Even Safeway is broke – you can’t even be sure you’ll find milk on the shelves anymore. And what’s the one thing our institutions have in common? They are run by the left, and the Democrats are the party of the left.
So, our delight in watching them be publicly humiliated is not merely just a fun way to pass the time. It is also a recognition that this botch job the Democrats have done on America is going to turn a huge chunk of people against them for good. A year ago, Republicans were -7 in party identification. Today, they are +7, a tectonic +14-point swing. That signals doom, and it’s going to be hilarious.
Now, there will be invertebrate Republicans who will look at this situation and instinctively seek a way to foul-up our good fortune. Fungi like Miracle Whip Mitt will think that now is the time to reach across the aisle to help our friends on the left. This is stupid. The squishes probably think it is unseemly to kick your opponent when he is down, but when he is down, he is the most vulnerable and you can do the most damage.
And we want to damage these pinko jerks before they Marx-up our country forever.
We want socialism destroyed. Not tamed, not moderated, crushed. Wiped out. Nuked from orbit, because that is the only way to be sure.
When we are done, we want the Democrat Party terrified of even hinting at support for anything remotely like the socialism they are currently swapping spit with. This is a bloodsport, a matter of either us and freedom winning, or us acquiescing to a jack-booted, lib-fascist future forever. We choose freedom. And that’s why we celebrate and savor the total humiliation of the Democrats. Keep it up, losers!
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2022/01/24/savor-the-democrats-humiliation-n2602215
Over the past few months, it has become common for Democrats and progressives to invoke “Our Democracy”™ whenever they criticize efforts to ensure election integrity or condemn the perpetrators of the January 6 “insurgency.” On one level, the phrase is just another annoying example of debasing the language by the very people who have been working overtime to rewrite the Constitution.
But on another level, the phrase suggests something even more sinister: that those who invoke it literally mean “their” democracy, i.e. a regime that belongs to them, validated by the votes of the “right people” who approve of their so-called progressive enterprise. Anyone who doesn’t approve is, by definition, an insurgent, an enemy of the state. Any attempt to limit their power—e.g., by insisting on election integrity—is therefore “anti-democratic.”
I am only one of a number of writers who have argued that the United States has devolved from a republic or commonwealth to an oligarchy. Lest we succumb to the error of progressives and simply use a word to mean something we don’t like, it is important to understand the nature and background of oligarchy. It is not just any “ruling class” but an elite and ruling class of a particular sort. In this regard, it helps to examine the taxonomy of regimes outlined by the first political scientists, Plato and Aristotle.
These writers identified three types of rule: the one; the few; and the many. Each form had a good and bad version, the former based on rule for the benefit of the entire polity and the latter rule on behalf of the ruler or ruling class alone. Thus, the good form of rule by the one was kingship; the bad form tyranny. The good form of rule by the few was aristocracy; the bad form oligarchy or plutocracy. And the good form of rule by the many was politeia or a balanced constitution, which the Romans translated as res publica and which is most properly rendered as commonwealth in English; the bad form was pure democracy or ochlocracy: that is, mob rule.
For Aristotle, all regimes were subject to metabole, a process of change that included corruption and decline. His successor Polybius went further, suggesting that all political regimes were subject to the “cycle of constitutions” (anakuklosis politeion). He saw the cycle proceeding this way: A kingship begins virtuously, but over time the rule by the one on behalf of the whole deteriorates into tyranny. The virtuous few, the aristoi, depose the tyrant and reestablish well-ordered rule. But over time that aristocracy deteriorates from the rule of the virtuous to the rule of the wealthy: oligarchy. The oligarchs are then overthrown by the virtuous many (the people), but the balanced constitution that is put in place inevitably deteriorates into unruly democracy. Then the cycle repeats itself. This process of degenerating constitutions was the central problem for the Greek founders of the science of politics: essentially, that good forms of rule become corrupted and descend into bad forms.
The United States seems to have been subject to the same metabole described by the Greeks. What was founded as a commonwealth has devolved into an oligarchy, the interests of which are at odds with those of the people at large. This ruling “elite” includes not only unelected bureaucrats ruling in their own interests but also corporate leaders in tech, finance, and media, who establish rules from which they themselves are exempt or of which they are the beneficiaries.
Of course, all complex societies have a “ruling class,” which can be either aristocratic or oligarchic. The United States has prospered when its ruling class has been aristocratic—prosperous but public-spirited philanthropists devoted to the common good. In such cases, the interests of this aristocratic ruling class have coincided with interests of the nation as a whole. But problems arise when an aristocratic ruling class devolves into an oligarchic one—motivated by a self-interest that diverges from that of the republic and its citizens.
We have seen this with the evolution, or rather devolution, of previous American elites from aristocracy to oligarchy:
This latest faction resembles the Roman elites who replaced free labor with slaves from Rome’s wars of conquest, creating a seething urban proletariat to be bought off with bread and circuses.
Today’s American oligarchy, however, faces a dilemma. On the one hand, the oligarchs exhibit an unprecedented disdain both for the American republic and their fellow citizens. In the past, the members of an aristocratic ruling class loved the United States as a nation and its principles, or at least identified their own interests with those of their country. But not only does today’s oligarchy not love the United States, its members make it all too clear that they hate it. In this, they resemble the ancient Athenian tyrants who favored Sparta over their own city and its citizens.
Yet America’s oligarchs must profess a fealty to “democracy.” But when they say “our” democracy they mean “their” democracy. So like the Romans oligarchs before them, they buy off those who can be bought with government programs. Those who cannot be bought, those who do not acquiesce in the oligarchy’s enterprise, those who are not compliant with its actions, are denounced as the real enemies: potential insurrectionists, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging Trump cultists, resentful racists and “anti-science” troglodytes. “Our Democracy”™ demands that such deplorables be subject to surveillance and limits on speech and association. If they do not accept the tenets of “diversity and inclusion” in language or the workplace, they are subject to the loss of employment and social status.
This is the true meaning of “Our Democracy”™: an oligarchy in fact but with the external trappings of democracy to provide rhetorical legitimacy. We stand at a crossroads. We as citizens will either reclaim the mantle of republican self-government or, by meekly submitting to the rule of our oligarchic elites, bid a sad farewell to the American commonwealth.
So what to call this? Selective use abuse of “science”? Bowing to educators? Blatant dishonesty? Money-grubbing? Sheer hypocrisy? Wait — I think I’ve got it. Let’s go with all of the above — and then some.
Michigan State University won’t allow in-person learning until the final day of January, but at the same time has had zero problem with opening the Breslin Center arena to nearly 15,000 screaming fans for every Spartans home basketball game this month. Shocked? Me, neither.
Michigan State University president Samuel L. Stanley Jr. announced in a December 31 letter that the school’s spring 2022 semester would begin on Jan. 10 virtually and continue to be remote-learning until Jan. 31, as reported by Breitbart. The letter read, in part:
Earlier this week I wrote to you about the start of the Spring 2022 semester and updated you on what had been reported on our campus and in the surrounding region with cases of the Omicron variant of COVID-19.
I promised that we would continue to monitor the situation in mid-Michigan and beyond for any changes in the pandemic that required new actions. In the 48 hours since that note went out, a surge in cases has been reported, presumably due to the Omicron variant, with the state of Michigan reaching an all-time high in cases per day.
Given this intense surge in cases, we now feel the best decision for our campus is to start classes primarily remotely on Jan. 10 and for at least the first three weeks of the semester.
For those who were planning to move back to our residence halls next week, they will still be open and available. Some students may choose to remain in their other homes or locations during these weeks of online classes, and that is fine.
“I realize that students prefer to be in person, and so do I, Stanley wrote. “But it is important that we do so in a safe manner. Starting the semester remotely and de-densifying campus in the coming weeks can be a solution to slowing the spread of the virus.”
“De-densifying”? I see.
Apparently, packing 15,000 screaming fans into a basketball arena for every game of the season is part of Michigan State’s “de-densifying” strategy.
As noted by Breitbart, Michigan State University’s remote-learning mode requires all faculty, staff, and students to wear face coverings indoors. The university also mandates that all faculty, staff, and students be fully vaccinated against COVID-19, as well as “receive their booster if and when they are eligible.”
“Booster.” Makes me snicker a bit inside every time I see the misused term — as does “vaccine.”
So while Michigan State students (who don’t attend Michigan State basketball games) will remain “safe and secure” in their cocooned, remote-learning, two vaccines-and-a-booster world, 15,000 Michigan State basketball fans, along with players and coaches on both teams, concession-stand workers, ushers, and TV and radio crews will tragically subject themselves to the horror of a “winter of severe illness and death.”
Those who aren’t masked, “fully vaccinated” with two shots, and a booster, that is.
