“Showing up” needs to be the new mantra for liberty-loving citizens who can be the spark plugs to a national pushback against tyranny.“
[This article first appeared in 2021. Our now completely radicalized federal government – infatuated with the siren song of tyranny through absolute power – is at war with the Constitution itself, and its own citizens’ allegiance to the articles of self-government. This week, our nation has crossed the final bridge to weaponizing the judicial system against any political opposition. We have the “meme” conviction of Douglass Mackey, also known as “Ricky Vaughn,” convicted by a federal jury in Brooklyn in a staggeringly corrupt Free Speech case. And a former President of the United States was indicted in a contrived legal monstrosity to stop his election in 2024. The message is clear. There is no middle ground. There is only the choice of sides.]
When a society’s institutions fall into corruption and decay and can no longer function as intended, they don’t simply cease to exist. They devolve into parasites on the host that created them, ensuring their death at some future point if left unattended.
Over the last century, we have seen this progressively throughout the American experiment as venerable institution after institution has succumbed to corporate self-perpetuation, money, power, and the introduction of radical, autocratic ideologies, replacing duty, mission, and fidelity to the Republic.
As each institution is lost, Americans have become more disconnected and irrelevant to the power centers in their own country. The administrative government, big business, national media, and political institutions are no longer working for us but against us. We’re on our own.
As the Roman Empire deteriorated with the collapse of Augustus’ Pax Romana era, the Greek historian, Dio Cassius, observed that the reign of Emperor Commodus in 180 AD marked the turning point “from a kingdom of gold to one of rust and iron.”
So, too, our era may be marked by 2020, when the American middle class and the working class lost all control and influence in their own country and over their future. Perhaps the definitive year where the Republic was lost, turning from a nation of liberty to one of soft tyranny – from gold to rust and iron.
Or marked as the year where the “ruling class” – big government, big business, big tech, and even bigger oligarchs – no longer even pretended to care what the citizens thought or what was in the best interests of the United States as a sovereign nation. Instead, with the progressive loss of civic and institutional virtue, the ruling class began consuming truth piece by piece to maintain its vast corruption and sustain the pretense of institutional stability.
In the American story, the “long march through the institutions” began by necessity with the deliberate unbolting of the Judeo-Christian superstructure from the culture first, leaving its operating parts without the guardrails of a transcendent moral code. The human heart’s darkest impulses are acted upon when there is no moral accountability.
If you’ve ever driven electric “bumper cars” at an amusement park, then you understand this pattern instantly. With no guardrails, cars purposefully or accidentally crash into each other in uncontrolled mayhem. Often, there is such a tangle of bumper cars jammed together that none of them can move in any direction. At this point, of course, no one is accountable for the mess. It just happens.
An inventory of institutional rot is stunning. The Judeo-Christian “unbolting“ was completed essentially in the last century, and the cascading results are more evident and disastrous with every passing year in the new one.
The nation’s mainline religious institutions and seminaries died without much of a fight. The adherents of “cheap grace,” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously labeled it, succumbed to the passions, scandals, and radical politics of the popular culture to which they were attempting to ingratiate themselves.
Just behind the mainline religious institutions, the once-prized institution of public education began its protracted collapse. The transmission of the nation’s values and aspirations was disconnected when civic and moral instruction became polluted. The nation’s once-vaunted educational product became mediocre (ranks) and barely so at that. Core knowledge – history, reading, and writing – became minor subjects in the race to the bottom.
The colleges and universities aggressively traded classical liberalism and moral reasoning for Marxist dictums and historical revisionism. Except for hard sciences, most have embraced anti-intellectualism, virulent anti-Americanism, new racism, and a freighting intolerance for fundamental human rights.
Together, the nation’s “legacy” news, entertainment, and social media complex are little more than prattling socialist propagandists. Once mighty newspapers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post now shamelessly defend lying and dishonest editing so long as it is for the “cause” of radicalism, globalism, or to diminish their own country. The rest followed.
Then the nation’s international businesses and the political and administrative government began publicly demonstrating their loathing for America and its founding through laws and policies they pressed on citizens that directly contradicted their public vows and worthless promises. Now that pretense is gone. They wear their contempt for America as a badge, proud of their utter disassociation and ignorance of the nation’s history while marketing a collectivist, manipulating, and neo-pagan worldview. They mock individual rights and meritocracy as menacing throwbacks to a bygone era and as an obstacle to uniformity and cultural homogenization.
Today, even the nation’s most critical public institutions reek of failure.
The extensive internal revelations and testimony of official wrongdoing, deception, lying, legal incompetence, and political intrigue reaching the Department of Justice’s highest levels over the last five years – on top of decades of checkered history and the pockmarks of consistent failure – leave the agency irreparably compromised. The seat of justice in our federal system has become a political weapon and frequent practitioner of injustice. (Former prosecutor Sydney Powell’s bestselling expose, Licensed to Lie, provides an in-depth tutorial on today’s alarming culture of the DOJ and its serial failures.)
And after several decades of staggering intelligence failures, official lying, botched investigations, and political crusades, the FBI too has lost much of the public’s confidence. The rot is deep, long past cosmetic repair. (Gregg Jarrett provides a skilled expose in his second book on the Russian hoax run by the FBI and designed to remove former President Donald Trump from office, in Witch Hunt.)
(So, too, the nation’s intelligence agencies slid comfortably into the role of a ruling class resource for surveillance on Americans, supporting favored political agendas and countervailing national policy they didn’t like. After President Obama weeded out general staff who might not fit in the brave new world, a jealous military institution is scrambling to follow the intelligence agencies to reach the bottom rung, as well. Also, now it’s common to discover a Federal court has veered into outright dishonesty without recourse. But, these are subjects for another day.)
In the last thirty years, both the scientific and medical communities have become infected with this institutional circular self-protection, promotion, enrichment, and adopting a radical cultural and political agenda while gorging on government research and grant money.
As cronyism often works, the arrangement between these institutions and the political class benefits from the façade that the former are objective and separate. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Most alarming is the scientific community’s decades-old promotion and nurturing of the climate change charade (which used to be global cooling, then global warming). What author and commentator Steven Moore calls the Climate Change Industrial Complex is now a multi-billion, soon to be trillion, dollar business model.
Its existence depends on ever-increasing amounts of loosely controlled, rarely audited cash and tax credits and a complicit political class.
The dirty little secret is that the “climate change” business is now the most lucrative scam in history. If there weren’t untold billions of dollars of subsidies, tax write-offs, loans, and grants – the “green” agenda and the climate change scams would collapse for want of purpose and efficiency. Few Teslas, windmills, or solar panels would or could be sold in a competitive market without being subsidized by taxpayers.
Worldwide, the money poured into “climate change” is staggering. In 2016, one left-leaning think tank suggested that globally the figure was $359 billion. The United Nations and the European Union are now talking about trillions in new commitments, and the newly installed Biden gang has discussed a $10 trillion commitment.
The first installment is hiding in plain sight in the $2.3 trillion “infrastructure” bill. Only 6% of the legislation is for infrastructure, as most people would understand it; roads, bridges, airports, and the like. Billions go to unions, education, and other benefactors of the socialist Democratic Party. Over a trillion dollars goes for “green subsidies” – “electric” this and that. Throw in a boatload of graft, and we’re talking about serious money.
But underneath the climate change scam is the “will to power,” to build a utopian world by force. Make no mistake. It’s about regulating every nook and cranny of your personal life down to your house, your kids, your transportation, and your diet. Once started, your government will make sure it never ends.
Likewise, COVID-19 – from Wuhan with love – has opened the window into the medical community and how it too has become corrupted by grants and direct funding. The federal government provides nearly half the budget for all types of medical research. The pandemic has shown just how opportunistic the medical and pharmaceutical “complex” has become. As of March 2021, Washington has sent out $2.3 trillion (here) for COVID relief efforts, and $2 trillion appropriated but not yet been spent. More will come.
If 2020 teaches us anything, it demonstrates, again, that politicized science is dangerous science. The “models” (like the “climate” models) and the epidemiologists during the Wuhan coronavirus catastrophe have been 100% wrong. And certain drugs that have been used successfully for fifty years (which are incredibly cheap) were deemed dangerous – until November 3, 2020. Then they were okay again. And brand new “drugs” that have no track record whatsoever are rushed to public use without the traditional brakes.
“We must believe the science” is a new radical Democrat buzzword – except for the science of XX and XY chromosomes, evidently. Yet national and state responses to the virus were driven by what the doctors and scientists have told us we must do, even though they had empirical scientific evidence that directly refuted their recommendations on masks, lockdowns, and social distancing. Now, medicine, including contagious viruses, is weaponized for political agendas, not medical outcomes. It’s about control. It’s about making citizens dependent and cowed into personal submission.
All of this was predicted by President Dwight Eisenhower as he left office in 1961. He had a warning for future generations, saying, “[A] government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. [And] domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money [are] gravely to be regarded.” President Eisenhower predicted today’s events, “[that] public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
(This is what New York Times columnist David Brooks lauded recently, evidently seriously, as the rise of the “expert class.”)
When the institutions of a nation fall to failure or become actual belligerents against the citizens who establish and support them, they can’t be put straight again without a gigantic struggle. That’s where America is today. It’s sobering.
We can’t rely on political parties, politicians, or preachers anymore. The only answer left is a grassroots brushfire that starts with the understanding that no one is coming to save us. We have only God and ourselves. It has to start at the family dinner table, at backyard BBQs, and at kids’ sports events – building through neighborhoods, churches, and cities – educating and empowering citizens at every step. We must become evangelists for our God-given liberty.
Then on to the states and Washington. It is no less than a fight for the freedom to love our God, love our families, and prosper in a free country. Do we want it, or is it not worth the fight?
The time for bystanders has passed. Showing up – educated with sharp talking points on key issues – at school boards, city and county councils, and State Capitols is mandatory, not optional. Not just for a few brave souls, but hundreds of thousands, millions, of working men and women who don’t want to give up on the Constitutional Republic and don’t care to live in a socialist hell-hole run by oligarchs and bureaucrats.
“Showing up” needs to be the new mantra for liberty-loving citizens who can be the spark plugs to a national pushback against tyranny – against living a life they don’t want, and for living a life they do want.
It’s up to us. We’re on our own.
