Americans have fallen in love with their fear of COVID-19

In the Behind the Black blog, Robert Zimmerman writes in part,

We are now serfs to the state, our lives constricted by its desires to tell us how to live, in sometimes the most trivial manner. For now and into the future for generations, our political leaders will have the power to clamp down on us, shoving their boots onto our faces, whenever any minor flu epidemic might appear on the horizon.

Worst of all, too many people seem okay with this. To go back to normal means we all finally admit that COVID-19 is no longer a threat, that in fact it was never that much of a threat. This too is unacceptable. Americans have fallen in love with their fear of COVID-19, and no facts are going to dissuade them from giving up that love.

He analyzes the COVID-19 data here.

"Slippery slope? We've slid to the bottom! Our rights are gone!"

"...do these guys really want Donald Trump micromanaging their lives?"

In his Morning Rant, Oregon Muse writes,

Being lectured to by aggressively ignorant nitwits is continual source of irritation. How do they ever get media jobs?
For example, look at this crap tweet. She says, quote, Mr. Trump has essentially become a bystander as school superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners across the country take it upon themselves to shut down much of American life, unquote. Note that this person gets to write for the New York Times, one of the most prestigious gigs available.

And yet she appears to be completely ignorant of basic civics. I thought they taught this stuff in grade school.

But back up a bit. There are actually a couple of levels of stupid on display here.

The first is the complete ignorance of how our government works. She must've cut class on the day when they explained that in the United States, there are federal, state, and local governments. And each one has its own distinct sphere of responsibility. Now it's true that the idiot progressives have spent the better part of a century blurring the distinctions and creating all sorts of overlap, but nevertheless, the distinction is still meaningful.

So what this twit is observing is precisely how our state and local governments are designed to function. In other words, what she's whining about is a feature, not a bug.

But maybe she knows this but is pretending not to just so she can seize an opportunity to bash Trump. I would much rather believe this than the other possibility, which is that she is aggressively and impregnably ignorant.

But that's the first layer of stupid. There's also a second layer.

The second layer can be seen when you try to figure out how the problem she thinks she sees can be solved. That is, does she really want the federal government shutting down local assemblies and sporting events? Specifically, does she want *Donald Trump* to have the power to shut down local assemblies and sporting events? Because that's what she's asking for.

It's funny: progressives always want the government to have unlimited power, but they just assume that they're the only ones who will always be in charge. They never seem to consider the possibility of what would be happen if their worst enemy was voted into office and was now in charge. You know, kind of like what happened in 2016.

The other day, I was listening to a radio interview of a 60s counter-culture icon and he discussed getting into what he called "heavy left-wing politics" for awhile and then becoming disenchanted when he realized that guys like Abbie Hoffman and Eldridge Cleaver would be in charge and, if that happened, concentration camps would be the immediate result. He actually admitted that. He actually used the phrase "concentration camps" to describe the totalitarianism that the left would establish. He had no love for free market capitalism and limited government but he saw that if his radical pals ran things, it would be way worse.

So, again, do these guys really want Donald Trump micromanaging their lives?

Snuffing our contrary speech and thought

In the American thinker, Dave Ball writes,

Political correctness is a liberal mind control strategy intended to stifle any thoughts or actions inconsistent with radical liberalism. It is the abrogation of free speech and the right to hold an opinion contrary to established liberal-socialist doctrine.

Political correctness didn't just happen; it has been carefully crafted over time. Radical liberals long ago realized that their emotion-based dogma could not withstand logical examination. The only solution for protecting radical liberalism until it undergoes its full evolution to totalitarianism was to snuff any contrary thought and speech. This being the case, the liberal cabal of coastal elites, academia, and victimhood profit centers, supported by the always faithful mainstream media, employed well-honed weapons such as indoctrination of children, mass shaming, and shouting down dissent while playing on conservative apathy to firmly root political correctness in the mass psyche.

Read more here.

"If you're in the way, they will crush you!"

Tucker explains how the Outrage Mob works and how the other side pretends nothing is happening. Republican leaders are controlled by the Left. They know exactly what they are allowed to believe and say.

But, maybe the Left's moral puffery is a costume! The Left's main goal is controlling what you think! In order to do that they have to control the information you receive. Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are happy to ban unapproved thoughts. So are just about every media organization except Fox News' opinion hours. The Left demands total conformity. Since the day we went on the air they have been working hard to kill this show!
Apologize when you are wrong, but never bow to the mob!

In the next segment, Tucker asks his guest, Tammy Bruce, an "old fashioned liberal feminist," why does she think the Left wants to stifle dissent? Tammy said it is because the Left doesn't rely on ideas. They rely on fear and division and controlling people within that framework!

"The Touchiness of Totalitarianism"

Mark Steyn writes about this and the Constitutional right to a security clearance here.

Individual discrimination thwarts that greatest evil of our age: totalitarianism.

Do you believe you have the right to discriminate? If you said no, here are some excerpts from an article by Bruce Walker at American Thinker.

The left has created a macabre myth that runs counter to the whole experience of mankind. The left has persuaded the gullible masses of America, including, sadly, most conservatives, that "discrimination" by individuals and businesses is wrong and that it violates the Constitution.

Precisely the opposite is true. All serious cognition and all honest moral judgments involve discrimination. When individuals and businesses are not free to discriminate, then the power to determine what is true and false and good and bad becomes the sole property of the state – or that even more odious creature, that lobotomized Frankenstein monster, "society."

Instead of diverse opinions and actions freely manifest, which are what happens when the state and society are denied the power to force a certain viewpoint down the throats of private citizens and enterprises, what happens is that all debate, all differences, and all individuality are crushed based upon what those who run the state or manipulate society deem sacrosanct.

What about the Holocaust? What about slavery? Read more here.

Who are you going to boycott?

Bookworm writes,

...There’s only one thing you need to remember about political systems, which is that there are only two kinds: Those that vest more power in the state (statists) and those that vest less power in the state (individualists). Every political system, no matter the name given, falls along that continuum:

...On the far left side, you’ll find Caesar, Henry VIII, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Kim Jong-Un, Castro, Mao, etc. Slight to the left of center, you’ll find Western Europe and, just a teeny bit to the right of Europe, you’ll find Obama’s America. Every one of the people, continents, or nations I’ve named lives somewhere on the totalitarian side of the political continuum.

On the further right side of the continuum, you’ll find America’s Founding Fathers and the Constitution. Trump supporters revere the men and the document. They dream of a nation that stops short of anarchy but that allows individuals maximum liberty. They want a smaller government that, simply by virtue of its limited size, has limited control over each individual’s ability to make his own choices and live his life as he sees fit. In other words, Trump supporters are on the opposite side of the continuum from totalitarianism.

...the terms “right wing” and “left wing” are meaningless and should be obsolete. They refer to France, back in 1789, when Louis XVI’s supporters in the National Assembly sat on the president’s right and the revolutionaries to his left. We are not in France in 1789. Moreover, that archaic division ignores the fact that both the left and the right in France were totalitarian in nature. Both wanted complete control; they just had different visions about the nature of that control.

At this point, savvy readers will have noticed that fascism sounds remarkably like communism: It’s all about the state, not about the individual. The difference between the two ideologies is that in communism the government nationalizes private property, whereas in fascism the government does not nationalize it, but nevertheless completely controls it.

For ordinary citizens, the difference between communism and fascism is like the difference between wearing ugly stainless steel handcuffs and stainless steel handcuffs with some sparkly rhinestones. The citizens are still wearing handcuffs because the state is still calling the shots. It’s just that in the fascist state, at least before the state really gets the bit in its teeth, there’s an illusion that things are nicer. A cartoon about the difference between communism and Bernie’s beloved “democratic socialism” (i.e., non-nationalist fascism) makes the point:



Communists and fascists hated each other in the 1920s through 1940s not because they were diametrically opposed ideologies, but because they were similar ideologies fighting for the same slice of pie. Both are statist belief systems that reject individual liberties. When they’re not fighting each other for power, they’re inclined to support each other, as was the case with Hitler and Stalin, right up until Hitler decided he wanted Stalin’s territory too. Likewise, in Spain, there was a bloody civil war not because communism and fascism are natural enemies, but because they were jealous rivals both seeking the throne.

History has shown that, on the hardcore statist side (whether communist, fascist, social democrat, theocratic, etc.) two bad things invariably merge: (1) the all-powerful governments are unable to view their citizens as individuals with hopes, dreams, loves, hates, and souls and (2) the individuals controlling these totalitarian governments are prey to grandiose delusions and paranoia. Hitler and Stalin both went after their own people vigorously. The only reason Hitler got the headlines is that he tried to bring all of Europe under his control. Had he been more discreet, as Stalin was in the Ukraine or in the gulags (or as Mao was in his closed kingdom), Hitler’s fascist, genocidal state could have still been going well into the 1980s.

After World War II, American communists needed to distinguish statist communism, which they supported, from statist fascism, which they never liked and which Hitler’s megalomania and race hatred had turned into a dirty word to everyone. What better way to do that than to attach to conservatives, those who cherish individual liberty, the “fascist” label, a label closely associated with Hitler, the ultimate madman? It didn’t matter that the label was completely inapposite. The only thing that mattered was that it stick, along with all the ugly associations surrounding it.

...Shrinking government power is the antithesis of fascism.

If you managed to arrive at any other answer, a lump of coal to you: You are a statist (certainly a Progressive and possibly a neo-fascist), and you are profoundly ignorant. At a guess, you probably graduated from an American college or university within the last 25-30 years.

That college degree may also mean that you occupy a decision-making role in one of the 159 companies listed below. As of today, these companies have stepped forward to boycott liberty-loving Americans on the ignorant, spurious ground that those same Americans who voted for the small-government candidate are fascists who need to be driven out of the American marketplace (click on image to enlarge):



Don’t just glance at that list and forget about it. To preserve American liberty, we need to teach a lesson to ignorant companies that believe they’re fighting for freedom by aligning with totalitarian statists who want to destroy those Americans who revere the Constitution (the most liberty-oriented document ever written) and who desire small government and individual liberty.

For me, no more Kellogg’s cereal, no more Cost Plus runs, no more jaunts up to Napa or Sonoma County generally, no more Bob’s Red Mill grains, no more Grammarly (my grammar’s better anyway), no cheap New Egg electronics (my computer still has some life in it), the San Diego Zoo is closed (I’ve seen it enough anyway), and no skiing in Squaw or Alpine (not even to watch the kids). I’m done with that part of corporate America that has insulted me and insisted it no longer needs me. Well, let’s just see who needs whom.

Who had it right, Huxley or Orwell?

Neo-neocon mentions two masterpiece works of literature by Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four) and Huxley (Brave New World), and writes,

In the title of this post I mention Newspeak, Orwell’s name for the language changes fostered by the totalitarian regime in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The purpose of Newspeak was to limit freedom of thought and label unacceptable concepts as “thoughtcrime” and almost literally unthinkable. But in recent years I’ve often felt that our society is going more in the direction of Huxley’s Brave New World, in which the dystopia is clothed in a kinder, gentler facade.

It occurs to me that I may need to make explicit something that I think is already implicit here but might not be at all clear. This change in the traditional terms “husband” and “wife” is not supported by all gay people, many of whom are happy to finally be able to use the word. But the change in terms—spearheaded by the left, make no doubt about that—is part of a general plan of the left to change the definition of marriage and all it implies, and to reduce the power of the individual family and of individual choice as a whole, while adopting the guise of supporting the family by extending the right to marriage to gay people.

It’s an interesting act of jujitsu. After all, won’t extending marriage to gay people enhance the traditional concept of monogamy in marriage? Doesn’t it strengthen marriage?

It may strengthen something called “marriage,” but that “something” is less and less likely to include either the practice of faithfulness or even the goal of faithfulness as part of marriage. Of course, this trend was well underway long before marriage was something to which gay couples aspired, but the anti-family trend (as Huxley well recognized in the early ’30s, as seen in the excerpt from his work) has long been part of lefist social engineering. Many gay couples are not even aware of this, but leftist activists certainly are.

Read more here.

Camouflaging their craven betrayal of the First Amendment and academic freedom

Bruce Thornton writes:

Anything that displeases or discomforts campus special interest groups––mainly those predicated on being the alleged victims of American oppression–– must be proscribed as “slurs” or “hateful,” even if what’s said is factually true. No matter that these groups are ideologically driven and use their power to silence critics and limit speech to their own self-serving and duplicitous views, the modus operandi of every illiberal totalitarian regime in history. The spineless university caves in to their demands, incoherently camouflaging their craven betrayal of the First Amendment and academic freedom as “tolerance” and “respect for diversity.”

In the case of Islam, however, this betrayal is particularly dangerous. For we are confronting across the world a jihadist movement that grounds its violence in traditional Islamic theology, jurisprudence, and history. Ignoring those motives and their sanction by Islamic doctrine compromises our strategy and tactics in defeating the jihadists, for we cripple ourselves in the war of ideas. Worse yet, Islamic triumphalism and chauvinism–– embodied in the Koranic verse that calls Muslims “the best of nations raised up for the benefit of men” because they “enjoin the right and forbid the wrong and believe in Allah”–– is confirmed and strengthened by the way our elite institutions like universities and the federal government quickly capitulate to special interest groups who demand that we endorse only their sanitized and often false picture of Islam. Such surrender confirms the jihadist estimation of the West as the “weak horse,” as bin Laden said, a civilization with “foundations of straw” whose wealth and military power are undermined by a collective failure of nerve and loss of morale.

This process of exploiting the moral degeneration of the West has been going on now for 25 years. It begins, as does the rise of modern jihadism, with the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Islamic revolution. The key event took place in February 1989, when Khomeini issued a fatwa, based on Koran 9.61, against Indian novelist Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses, which was deemed “against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran,” as Khomeini said. Across the world enraged Muslims rioted and bombed bookstores, leaving over 20 people dead. More significant in the long run was the despicable reaction of many in the West to this outrage against freedom of speech and the rule of law, perpetrated by the most important and revered political and religious leader of a major Islamic nation.

Khomeini’s fatwa and the subsequent violent reaction created what Daniel Pipes calls the “Rushdie rules,” a speech code that privileges Islam over revered Western traditions of free speech that still are operative in the case of all other religions. Muslims now will determine what counts as an “insult” or a “slur,” and their displeasure, threats, and violence will police those definitions and punish offenders. Even reporting simple facts of history or Islamic doctrine can be deemed an offense and bring down retribution on violators. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for example, earned the wrath of Muslims in part for her contribution to Theo van Gogh’s film Submission, which projected Koranic verses regarding women on the bodies of abused women. Van Gogh, of course, was brutally murdered in the streets of Amsterdam. And this is the most important dimension of the “Rushdie rules”: violence will follow any violation of whatever some Muslims deem to be “insulting” to Islam, even facts. In effect, Western law has been trumped by the shari’a ban on blaspheming Islam, a crime punishable by death.

Thus the government officially proscribes words like “jihad” or “Muslim terrorist” from its documents and training materials in order to avoid offending Muslims. Similarly the Muslim terrorist, a fixture in recent history since the PLO started highjacking airliners in the 60s, has nearly disappeared from television and movies, replaced by Russians, white supremacists, and brainwashed Americans. And when a Muslim terrorist does appear, his motivations and violence are rationalized as the understandable response to the grievous offenses against his faith and people committed by the U.S. and Israel. Islam is airbrushed from the plot, as in the recent series Tyrant, a dramatization of a fictional Arab Muslim state that somehow manages to ignore Islam as a political force. More seriously, universities disinvite speakers at the faintest hint of protest from Muslim organizations, even as they accept Gulf-state petrodollars to create “Middle East Studies” programs that frequently function as apologists and enablers of terrorist violence.

Read more here.

Abysmally poor arguments in support of Obamacare

Regarding Obama declaring last Tuesday that in reference to Obamacare, "the debate over repealing this law is over." The Washington Post's liberal columnist E.J. Dionne reacted,

"Is there any cost to those who say things that turn out not to be true and then, when their fabrications or false predictions are exposed, calmly move on to concocting new claims as if they had never made the old ones?"

But Dionne wasn't referring to Obama! He was referring to GOP critics of Obamacare, whom Dionne believes have been proven wrong because Obama said 7 million people have signed up for Obamacare!

James Taranto quotes Dionne and the New York Times' Paul Krugman, then opines,

What's striking is that the quality of the pro-ObamaCare arguments is so abysmally poor. "Blah, blah, blah." "Feel free to ridicule right-wingers." "This thing is going to work."

Most of all: "The debate . . . is over." A demand for silence is not a sign of intellectual self-confidence. And this is not the only subject on which the left is demanding that its opponents just shut up. For years we've been hearing that the debate about global warming--or "climate change" or whatever they're calling it this week--is settled.

Universities: not places that value the free expression of dissenting views

I can't find a video of it yet, but Juan Williams came on Hannity recently to talk about the "blind hatred of liberals toward conservative blacks." Shamefully, Rutgers University's

faculty council determined that she wasn’t qualified to give the commencement address to the university’s graduating seniors and receive an honorary degree.

Bradford Thomas writes,

Williams highlights the absurdity of the council’s ruling that she lacks the “moral authority” and does not meet their definition of “exemplary citizenship,” citing her remarkable achievements—not least of which is being the first African American woman to hold the posts of National Security Adviser and Secretary of State.

As Williams points out, though Rice holds a PhD in political science, taught college for decades, was Provost of Stanford University, and exemplifies what the left supposedly champions—a minority working her way up to one of the highest offices in the country—“according to the Rutgers faculty council, all of that is negated by her service in President George W. Bush’s administration.”

Moral totalitarianism

Roger Kimball writes that the most underreported domestic item in 2013 was the

was the eclipse of tolerance as a prime liberal virtue and its enrollment in the index of unpermissible reactionary vices.

Homosexuality is one of those subjects — race is another, differences among the sexes is a third — that has been enveloped in a cocoon of politically correct Newspeak. If you violate the cocoon, prepare for ostracism or worse.

What happened to Phil Robertson was typical. GLAAD, the homosexual and “transgender” activist group, attacked him and called on the A&E network, which airs Duck Dynasty, to cancel the show. A&E promptly responded, suspending Robertson.

So far, this was just business as usual in the precincts of our society dominated by so-called “liberal” (really, it’s deeply illiberal) intolerance.

A liberal might tolerate what he disapproved of because he advocated pluralism, or because he valued freedom, or because he believed in free speech. The problem for illiberal “liberals” — that is, for politically correct totalitarians who mouth progressive sentiments to camouflage their fundamental intolerance with liberal plumage — is that tolerance implies criticism. One tolerates something despite one’s aesthetic or moral or intellectual or political disapproval. Gaining tolerance was only the first, ultimately dispensable, step in a process that eventually jettisoned tolerance for the goal of uncritical celebration and affirmation. That is what “thug groups” like GLAAD want: not tolerance but celebration and moral parity. Tolerance is a conspicuous obstacle to those desiderata; therefore, tolerance must be met with intolerance.

Set foot on almost any college campus and you will soon find that the proclaimed “commitment to diversity” really means subscribing to speech codes and adhering to an agenda of intellectual conformity about any contentious issue.

Mark Steyn on the Age of Tolerance

Mark Stein is in a conflict with his editor at National Review. Stein wrote this weekend about the Duck Dynasty controversy,

What GLAAD is attempting would be called, were it applied to any other identity group, “cultural appropriation.”

In the broader sense, it’s totalitarian. While American gays were stuffing and mounting the duck hunter in their trophy room, the Prince of Wales was celebrating Advent with Christian refugees from the Middle East, and noting that the land in which Christ and Christianity were born is now the region boasting “the lowest concentration of Christians in the world — just four percent of the population.” It will be three, and two, and one percent soon enough, for there is a totalitarian impulse in resurgent Islam — and not just in Araby. A few miles from Buckingham Palace, Muslims in London’s East End are now sufficiently confident to go around warning local shopkeepers to cease selling alcohol. In theory, you might still enjoy the right to sell beer in Tower Hamlets or be a practicing Christian in Iraq, but in reality not so much.

It is not enough to have gay marriage for gays. Everything must be gayed. There must be Five-Year Gay Plans for American bakeries, and the Christian church, and reality TV. There must be shock brigades of gay duck-hunters honking out the party line deep in the backwoods of the proletariat. Obamacare pajama models, if not yet mandatorily gay, can only be dressed in tartan onesies and accessorized with hot chocolate so as to communicate to the Republic’s maidenhood what a thankless endeavor heterosexuality is in contemporary America.

Here are two jokes one can no longer tell on American television. But you can still find them in the archives, out on the edge of town, in Sub-Basement Level 12 of the ever-expanding Smithsonian Mausoleum of the Unsayable. First, Bob Hope, touring the world in the year or so after the passage of the 1975 Consenting Adult Sex Bill:

“I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.” Advertisement For Hope, this was an oddly profound gag, discerning even at the dawn of the Age of Tolerance that there was something inherently coercive about the enterprise. Soon it would be insufficient merely to be “tolerant” — warily accepting, blithely indifferent, mildly amused, tepidly supportive, according to taste. The forces of “tolerance” would become intolerant of anything less than full-blown celebratory approval.

Second joke from the archives: Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra kept this one in the act for a quarter-century. On stage, Dino used to have a bit of business where he’d refill his tumbler and ask Frank, “How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Sinatra would respond, “I dunno. How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Dean would say, “Be nice to him.”

But no matter how nice you are, it’s never enough. Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson, in his career-detonating interview with GQ, gave a rather thoughtful vernacular exegesis of the Bible’s line on sin, while carefully insisting that he and other Christians are obligated to love all sinners and leave it to the Almighty to adjudicate the competing charms of drunkards, fornicators, and homosexuals. Nevertheless, GLAAD — “the gatekeepers of politically correct gayness” as the (gay) novelist Bret Easton Ellis sneered — saw their opportunity and seized it. By taking out TV’s leading cable star, they would teach an important lesson pour encourager les autres — that espousing conventional Christian morality, even off-air, is incompatible with American celebrity.

Steyn's editor, Mr. Steort scolded,

By way of criticizing speech, I’ll say that I found the derogatory language in this column, and especially the slur in its borrowed concluding joke, both puerile in its own right and disappointing coming from a writer of such talent.

To which Steyn responded with a challenge,

It is a matter of some regret to me that my own editor at this publication does not regard this sort of thing as creepy and repellent rather than part of the vibrant tapestry of what he calls an “awakening to a greater civility”. I’m not inclined to euphemize intimidation and bullying as a lively exchange of ideas – “the use of speech to criticize other speech”, as Mr Steorts absurdly dignifies it. So do excuse me if I skip to the men’s room during his patronizing disquisition on the distinction between “state coercion” and “cultural coercion”. I’m well aware of that, thank you. In the early days of my free-speech battles in Canada, my friend Ezra Levant used a particular word to me: “de-normalize”. Our enemies didn’t particularly care whether they won in court. Whatever the verdict, they’d succeed in “de-normalizing” us — that’s to say, putting us beyond the pale of polite society and mainstream culture. “De-normalizing” is the business GLAAD and the other enforcers are in. You’ll recall Paula Deen’s accuser eventually lost in court — but the verdict came too late for Ms Deen’s book deal, and TV show, and endorsement contracts.

I am sorry my editor at NR does not grasp the stakes. Indeed, he seems inclined to “normalize” what GLAAD is doing. But, if he truly finds my “derogatory language” offensive, I’d rather he just indefinitely suspend me than twist himself into a soggy pretzel of ambivalent inertia trying to avoid the central point — that a society where lives are ruined over an aside because some identity-group don decides it must be so is ugly and profoundly illiberal. As to his kind but belated and conditional pledge to join me on the barricades, I had enough of that level of passionate support up in Canada to know that, when the call to arms comes, there will always be some “derogatory” or “puerile” expression that it will be more important to tut over. So thanks for the offer, but I don’t think you’d be much use, would you?

How dumb do you have to be to scold Mark Steyn, and not expect a devastating reply?