There is a feeling of disquiet in the air in America.
KMED talk radio host Bill Meyer in Medford, Ore. and I spent a full half-hour segment recently talking about this general sense that something is wrong.
Systems that we take for granted are suddenly broken. Shelves that are normally full, aren’t. Our government thinks they get to determine if we have Thanksgiving or Christmas with our families. Our military has ended an American promise that no one is left behind by unilaterally leaving Afghanistan, deliberately leaving thousands of Americans and our allies behind. Millions of jobs are open, while millions remain on the unemployment rolls. The Biden Justice Department has declared that parents attending school board meetings are domestic violence threats.
And now airline schedules are little more than wish lists as air traffic controllers and pilots are making individual protests against the Biden vaccine mandate which threatens the jobs of thousands of these trained professionals.
So what’s happening here?
It is a civil disobedience that the left has urged since at least the 1960s being put into action by those who contribute to modern civilization. It is a civil disobedience that Ayn Rand extols in her seminal 1950’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” as people asked, “Who is John Galt?” in response to questions about why everything was failing and falling into disrepair. For today, the question is not about this mysterious Galt fellow, but instead why are so many people saying, “Let’s Go Brandon.”
But civil disobedience only occurs when people decide they have had enough, because at its core it is a rejection of the government’s legitimacy to lead. When this occurs at a university through a sit-in that disrupts classes, the means of production are not affected, so it only matters to a few. But when it happens through thousands of independent decisions by people in the transportation sector who no longer are willing to provide their consent to be governed, it causes disruption.
When the very act of attending a college or professional football game becomes an act of rebellion due to government edicts that are ignored by the privileged but apply to everyone else, only a fool could not foresee the rise of the “Let’s Go Brandon” movement.
In Atlas Shrugged, various industry leaders keep dropping out of society, withholding their value from a society which hated them for their earned success. In doing so, they denied the world of life changing inventions, while leaving it to the avarice of crony capitalists who survived based upon regulatory and tax advantages won through government not through the value of the product they produced.
In 2021 America, we are seeing people who provide vital services being set upon by a government that wants to indoctrinate their kids into an evil group think, put them in a masked six foot isolation, and has the audacity to threaten their livelihood if they choose to not be vaccinated or refuse to show proof of vaccination.
It is a public which has seen five years of a permanent Administrative state working overtime in a coup against President Trump cheered on by a complicit corporate media industrial complex including the social media goliaths who use their platforms to manipulate thought.
It is a public which has seen Hillary Clinton face no repercussions for violating national security provisions that don’t allow private email servers to contain confidential government information, while President Trump faced two impeachments and a special counsel proctology exam over a fraudulent, Clinton cooked up Russian collusion campaign.
When you rip off the blind-fold of Lady Justice and turn federal bureaucrats into agents of political thought repression; when the tax man wants a record of every transaction that goes through your bank account; and when the public/private partnership surveillance state colludes to deny medical care to those who are unvaccinated, turning them into the “other” that totalitarians rail against to grab power, what do you expect?
Civilization is a very delicate balance of trust, and no one knows when the fraying of the thin cloth that is its veneer rips it completely asunder. Let’s Go Brandon is not just a standard booing that all public officials receive at sporting events, but a warning sign that America has had enough. Let’s see if our government listens.
As Stephen Stills warned in the last stanza of his 1966 Buffalo Springfield song, “For What it’s Worth,” “You better stop children, what's that sound? Everybody look, what's going down?”
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