Saturday, April 29, 2023

No shirking about here... from battle lines to coaster rides, freedom and free will MUST persist

Ebbs and flows abound throughout family, work and life in general. So while the space between posts may widen from time to time, the pondering persists. And with perfect timing to fill such a spot, I happened upon a couple of thought-provoking pieces from AmericanThinker/Federalist/EpochTimes/RealClear author J.B. Shurk, who doesn't shy away from the week's events, the situations at present, or the circumstances of our times...

From ruminating on the battle lines drawn by the Ruling Class's Soviet-style Purge...
Like a hammer smashing anyone who seeks to "make America great," the ruling class pounds Trump, his supporters, and now even Tucker Carlson. A "great America," you see, is antithetical to the technocratic police State that the Marxist globalists are busy building. When individual rights and liberties are respected, self-sufficient Americans do not need government apparatchiks to fashion drab, one-size-fits-all, welfare-dependent, groupthink-dominated futures. When American families are independent and strong, there are no psychologically unstable, lost, "woke" generations to crave parenting from the State. When Americans choose God's truth over the government's lies, then man-made institutions look frail next to the divine. Anybody who does not toe the Establishment line must go because totalitarianism cannot survive even a whisper of condemnation. Lies built from sand can withstand no breeze.

I think this difficult period of American history — during which the Marxist globalists and their appeasers have openly embraced censorship, political persecution, and social "cancelation" — will be remembered as a kind of Stalinist "purge" long in the making. I should say "Soviet purge," because Lenin used murder and imprisonment to silence dissent (or potential dissent) just as ruthlessly as his successor. It was Stalin who really took it to the "intellectuals," though, and many who ignored Lenin's brutality out of a self-sabotaging allegiance to communism belatedly learned that any system predicated on total control over individual minds will eventually find anybody with a mind a threat.

The more general "Soviet purge" has been ongoing for decades, as defenders of liberty — often politically conservative in their outlook and in possession of true religious faith — have been run out of academia, denied promotion within the federal bureaucracy, and kept from having any editorial voices on the pages of the nation's leading newspapers. Everybody has been aware that the Marxists' "long march through the institutions" has been trudging along unabated, but because those who parroted "politically correct" opinions found professional advancement and steady accolades while their colleagues "disappeared," they held their tongues and said nothing. Now the "Stalinist purge" begins in full swing, and many who have traded their consciences for cushy lifestyles over these last few decades will learn that totalitarian systems always save their supporters for dessert.

There is a great deal of public celebration among leftists these days. They managed to use propaganda, criminal conspiracies, and boatloads of unverified mail-in ballots to remove President Trump from office. Since his departure, federal and state prosecutors have built sham criminal cases intended to thwart his return and imperil his life with once-unthinkable imprisonment. State actors attack him from all directions with civil suits intended to drain him of time and resources. His political friends and allies — who have been unjustly dragged through the criminal "justice" system due to the machinations of unethical prosecutors and black-robed tyrants —remain targets for their beliefs.

The ruling class — consisting of the political Uniparty, the permanent Deep State, and the financial oligarchy pulling the Leviathan's strings — wasted no time demonizing Trump's supporters as "Nazis" and "racists" and "insurrectionists" who deserve to have their families ripped apart and lives burned to the ground. It never mattered how absurd it was to defame patriotic Americans who seek limited government and human equality regardless of skin color as somehow anti-American Big Government types seeking to separate citizens by race. Reason and rationality are among the first victims of any purge.

In lockstep, the Establishment Borg demanded that anybody who showed up in D.C. on January 6, 2021 to protest election theft be arrested. It did not matter how ludicrous it seemed that Joe Biden — a mental midget who struggled throughout his venal life to garner support anywhere outside Delaware — could have "won" fifteen million more votes than "rock star" Obama had in his last election. It did not matter that no presidential incumbent in the modern era had ever gained substantially more votes during his re-election race, as Trump did, without being declared the winner. It did not matter that reports of voting irregularities in battleground states were numerous or that the judicial system failed to acknowledge sworn witness affidavits attesting to election fraud. The ruling class said Trump had to go, and when his supporters voiced their objection, they were summarily targeted as "enemies of the State."

Now the most profitable cable news channel sends its most popular star packing because he has grown noticeably more MAGA-oriented and noticeably less subservient to the Establishment Borg. Tucker, at least for the time being, should be fine. In fact, his departure might even signal that his mind can finally be free. For the ruling class, however, he is yet another public execution intended to cow the masses. There is no powerful dissenting voice too big to take down. There is no public figure too popular to undermine. Whether an elected president or one of the country's leading political pundits, the ruling class will purge anyone who refuses to obey.

For seven years now, the message has been the same. If you choose to stand against the permanent Deep State, the Borg will come after not only you, but also your friends and family. In essence, the U.S. government is now just another Mafia family that exists to extort Americans and eliminate any who refuse to kneel.

The J6 purge of Americans and the political targeting of Tucker and Trump bring to mind a political cartoon showing a "non-player character" Marxist asking a freedom-loving, patriotic American, "Who radicalized you?" Whispering close to the NPC's ear, the patriot calmly answers, "You did." I would venture to say that well over a hundred million Americans now personally relate to that serious message.

Several wise readers often leave comments to these essays noting that this totalitarian march inciting only more rage reflects the internecine struggle between good and evil. They are surely correct. Whenever human dignity is pushed to the shadows because agents of the State bully and taunt those with character, evil grows. Whenever individuals are forced to betray their consciences to save loved ones from wretched fates, evil grows. Whenever government institutions demand reverence for lies while blaspheming religious truth, evil grows. Whenever people are punished for their beliefs, ostracized for their dissent, or purged from the public square, evil grows.

First and foremost, evil lies. It should surprise no one, then, that Joe Biden's handlers have framed his re-election campaign as a struggle for "freedom," when his administration has done as much damage to American freedom as any in the country's two hundred and fifty years. "The question we are facing," the commie puppet read from his script, "is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom, more rights or fewer." During these last few years of the Biden Gang's White House occupation, no honest observer could pretend that freedom or constitutional rights have been protected. But evil always drives honesty away and enshrines outrageous falsehoods as sacred truths. The same pretend president who has stolen liberty from Americans and punished political dissent will now pretend to stand for virtues he reviles.
With such blatant lies all around us, it should be evident that this is a battle between good and evil. Any system predicated on intimidation and force is illegitimate. Any ruling class willing to purge opponents is willing to slaughter them, too. Any government that tortures truth with lies is willing to torture those who stand for truth.

Freedom is God's blessing to man, and when enemies of freedom work to extinguish its light, they choose to bring darkness to the land. However, allow me to offer you this certainty as a shield: the darker it becomes, the brighter every light of resistance shines.
To the sound advice and free will practice of Getting Off this Roller Coaster to Bondage...
Life right now feels like that moment when your roller coaster car begins slowing down near a terrifying peak, and your line of sight finally captures the precipitous plunge lying ahead. Americans know that what happens next won't be enjoyable except in that perverse way when abject terror floods the body with adrenaline. Majorities or near-majorities expect imminent economic disaster, global war against nuclear-armed foes, and civil war here at home. If that's "progress," then it's long past time to turn the country around. Yet that's the thing with roller coaster rides: even if we hit the brakes now before cresting the summit, our downward acceleration is guaranteed — in one direction or another.

It's not as if the ruling class's "cult of expertise" provides any comfort. We have a president who long ago lost his marbles, a vice president who succeeded in the political profession by excelling in the oldest one, a secretary of defense committed to promoting men in dresses, a health bureaucracy pumping citizens full of experimental drugs, a Treasury Department endlessly printing money, a Commerce Department prioritizing inflation-inducing "green" windmills over real economic growth, a homeland security chief dedicated to keeping the nation insecure, and a national police force that treats half the country as "domestic enemies." It's almost as if whoever installed these yahoos into the highest positions of authority wanted obvious "fall guys" for when everything, well, falls down.

The Gateway Pundit recently ran an article reminding readers of an ominous analysis from a private intelligence outfit predicting a seventy-percent decline in America's population by 2025. That Deagel Corporation forecast released less than a decade ago shocked a lot of people at the time, but in an age when Farmer Gates and Doom Fauci continue to promise incoming pandemics worse than COVID, the World Economic Forum's human sacrifice cult insists on widespread energy poverty and famine, and U.S.-NATO plays Russian roulette for fun and profit, apocalyptic population drops no longer seem so unimaginable from the top of this globalist roller coaster. (Morbid side question: If Deagel's devastating prophecy proves right, will climate cultists still insist that only global government and micromanaged markets can save the world from destruction? Arg, of course they will; even after killing off 95% of the planet, A.I. clones of Klaus Schwab, George Soros, and Barack Obama will still be blaming the remaining 5% for "hate" crimes, global warming, and "white supremacy." Hustlers can't ever give up the con.)

A lot of armchair analysts originally wondered about Deagel's math, especially since the intelligence firm predicted steady or rising population numbers for Russia, China, and most of the Global South. Did the private spooks expect a one-sided nuclear, biological, or EMP-inflicted war in which America's enemies were overwhelmingly victorious? Or did they perhaps simply take the U.N., WEF, and Obama-deluded U.S. at their word when the West decided that its primary nemesis is bad weather? If you eliminate hydrocarbon energies and non-zero carbon producers from the market, after all, then agricultural production drops dramatically, energy for home heating disappears, and the costs of manufacturing inputs rise exponentially. Runaway food and fuel inflation all but ensures cataclysmic poverty, starvation, and a return to burning wood for heating (when smoke-filled skies will prove the toxic repercussion of tilting at windmills for energy).

Maybe Deagel attentively studied the new-world-order master plans of the Marxist globalists running the West into the ground and realized that if they were successful with all their "progressive" promises, the obvious cost would be 70% of the population. Just as the Mesoamerican Aztecs fought drought with human bloodletting, Western socialists know that a lot of innocent people must die for "hope and change." No tyrant ever said Utopia comes cheaply. Russia, China, India, and everywhere else where hydrocarbon energies are still valued as instrumental for prosperity and population growth can just sit back, watch the West commit suicide, and wave.

So here we are in this maddening doom loop, where a majority of Western populations know exactly what kinds of homicidal maneuverings their governments are up to and yet find themselves in straitjackets and chains should they dare to say anything. If you object to the coming "green" energy–induced mass starvation, the zealots brand you a "climate denier." If you prefer diplomacy to nuclear Armageddon, you get labeled a "Russian appeaser" or arrested for spreading "disinformation." If you prefer free expression to government censorship, you're one tweet away from committing the made-up crime of "hate." And if you still cling to the antiquated notion that the Bill of Rights is an integral part of U.S. law, the national security Deep State dedicated to monitoring and regulating your language, religion, self-protection, privacy, property, due process rights, and other constitutional guarantees has something to say: namely, that all civil, human, or otherwise natural rights — even when bestowed by God — are suspended during times of declared emergency or whenever else government agents decide to terminate them because they don't like who you are, what you believe, or what you say. Bet you never saw that fine print at the bottom of the Constitution and stamped by the directors of the FBI, CIA, and NSA!

This insane Western death march has reminded a lot of insightful historical observers of the so-called Tytler Cycle, a description of the natural rise and fall of democratic societies and named after eighteenth-century Scottish lawyer and historian Alexander Fraser Tytler (a kindred spirit, if not true kin, to his heroic but fictional clansman of Outlander fame). John Eberhard has written about Tytler at his website, Commonsense Government, as have Andrew Coy, Chris Talgo, and Emma Kaden here at American Thinker. All these essays are excellent.

As an analytical realist, Tytler looked at history through a lens free from wishful thinking. Every form of government, he argued, is "ultimately ruled by a single will," and, therefore, every form of government is "virtually and substantially a monarchy." He may have had a sincere respect for republican virtues, but he knew that, however democratic a society appeared, a permanent Deep State still rigged the game. Furthermore, he was certain that all great nations eventually implode from internal depravity and corruption: "It is a law of nature to which no experience has ever furnished an exception, that the rising grandeur and opulence of a nation must be balanced by the decline of its heroic virtues." No matter how strong or principled in the past, no government will last.

Although it is not clear that Tytler actually delineated the "cycle" of civilizational growth and collapse with which he is generally credited, it seems likely that he would have agreed with its usual formulation: "From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage."

Looking at that cycle, it is difficult not to see the shorthand version of events tracking America's meteoric rise and unfortunate decline. From "a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" to a vast national security surveillance State dedicated to a "woke," Marxist religion, two-tiered administration of justice, political persecution, censorship, redistribution of property, and the racist proposition that Americans should be judged by the color of their skin, rather than by their characters or minds. By every measure available, liberty and courage have been traded for complacency and dependence.

But what about bondage? Must we follow the Tytler Cycle to its completion and become slaves to a system we abhor? Or do we have the free will to decide which direction this roller coaster will soon head?
It just might be advantageous for us to consider said circumstances, run towards the Light, use free will to choose liberty, resist the allure of tyranny, and make a better way for ourselves and our progeny while we still can (if we still can...and we MUST).

Related links: If Only Our Tormentors Spoke Flyover
How Legacy Media Lied and Misinformed Us for Decades