By Charlie Johnston
When the movie, “Jaws,” first came out in 1975 I was still a teenager. I saw it in the theatre three times, both because I loved the movie and because of an astonishing phenomena I had never seen before and have not seen since. At the end of the movie, when Chief Brody fires a rifle at the oncoming shark and finally hits the scuba tank in its maw, blowing it to smithereens, the audience in the theatre spontaneously broke into loud applause and jumped to a sustained standing ovation. It was as if their own community had been delivered from the terror of the rampaging shark. It happened all three times – and at different theatres.
A shark is a remarkably simple, but efficient, killing machine. Unlike most fish, it cannot move its gills independently, so it has to swim constantly to force water through its gills. If it stops swimming for any length of time, it dies. It has a multitude of teeth, layered in rows behind the line that shows. If a tooth is broken out, another pops up to take its place. Sharks mainly participate in two types of activity, breeding occasionally and eating constantly – maintaining dominance over the denizens of the sea.
Leftist Democrats are more sophisticated than sharks. They know how to pretend to care about others as they set about feeding on them. Last week’s absurd political theatre featured sustained serial lies from leftist officials and media about what happened on the day of the Jan. 6 kerfuffle where the only people killed were Trump supporters by Capitol Police. Last Friday, as Justices of the Supreme Court heard initial arguments about Joe Biden’s Covid shot mandates, three justices demonstrated they have no clue about what they were talking about, even from contrived CDC standards – and also have no clue what their Constitutional role is. Though the upshot was that the Jan. 6 theatrics were met with a yawn by the few people who watched in the first place and that even some in the leftist media were shocked at how colossally dumb Justice Sonia Sotomayor truly is, there was a far more ominous takeaway: Democrat officials and media now tell easily demonstrable lies and are neither embarrassed nor willing to retract them after they are shown to be obviously false.
Leftist Democrats and media know they cannot win the day with facts, evidence and logic. They no longer care about anything but amassing and holding power. Because they have completely abandoned any form of faith in God, power is the only thing that gives their lives some semblance of meaning. So they are on a suicide run. If they can’t prevail with facts and evidence, they hope to gaslight enough people with their brazen, unashamed lies to prevail. And they have a chance – because of Republican officials.
It is not that many Republicans will actively start parroting leftist provocations to liberty but that they do not understand this is an existential fight. Most will make great speeches in committee, but if the immediate assault is turned back, will celebrate their “victory” and rest, tacitly conceding all the ground that has been lost. After the Battle of Gettysburg, President Lincoln anxiously awaited word that Union General Meade had entirely smashed Confederate General Lee’s army, thus effectively ending the Civil War. Instead, Mead cautiously followed Lee until the latter had safely crossed the Potomac River to safety in Virginia. After this, Meade sent a telegram boasting that they had driven “the invader from our soil.” Lincoln was despondent, angrily demanding, “Will our generals never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil.” And so the war continued for two unnecessary years because Meade was too cautious to end it when he could have. I guess this is a common Republican trait; focus on the ancillary so obsessively that you lose the main point. Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) is a brilliant tactician who has moments of strategic competence. He understood the strategic importance of getting judges appointed, so adopted the tactics to accomplish that masterfully. Yet he rescued Democrats from the consequences of their depravity by twice giving them the Republican votes needed to raise the debt ceiling. He has consistently refused to investigate the massive vote fraud of the last election – and looked with disdain at any who think there should be a real investigation. On the debt ceiling, some have argued that doing that robbed Democrats of the chance to change the narrative to Republican “obstructionism.” There is something to be said for that, but how long can we continue to give cordial aid to a party that has been in “take no prisoners” mode for the last six years? On the bright side, after McConnell’s second helping hand on the debt ceiling, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) went on and savaged him in a press conference anyway. That led McConnell to vow to give no more aid to the Democrats. While I would prefer that he had come to that conclusion based on the systematic assault on Americans’ basic rights rather than from the callous personal insult, I am glad he got there somehow.
Sen. Ted Cruz got a whole lot of blow-back when he called the events of Jan. 6 a “violent terrorist attack.” It didn’t entirely surprise me – either that he called the Jan. 6 events that or that he got such serious blow-back. I spent most of election season in 2018, when Cruz was challenged by Beto O’Rourke, in Texas working with Texas Right to Life and Republicans in the State House and State Senate. I discovered that while Cruz has a great bark, he doesn’t have much of a bite and has little concern for helping others in his party. On the bright side, the blow-back Cruz received from this seems to have motivated him to get more serious about defending basic American rights. He is suddenly a real point man in finding out if the Feds provoked a tiny slice of the million people protesting to get out of hand – and has suddenly found himself concerned about the hundreds held as political prisoners in appalling conditions for “parading” inside the Capitol Building.
The problem is that Republican officials, as a group, show little desire to vigorously defend against political persecution even though it is un-American and tatters liberty, but only get animated when their personal future is endangered. That is far too leaky a vessel in which to entrust our liberty. Bottom line, I do not trust Republicans to defend the liberty of citizens just because they are citizens of the United States. If the Democrats are so foolish as to provoke them to that defense for personal reasons, after the left is pulverized in the elections this fall, I expect Republicans to say, with General Meade, that they have “driven the invader from our soil” without lifting a finger to recover the rights of ordinary people that have been lost in the process.
Many conservative commentators are celebrating the Supreme Court’s order vacating Biden’s Covid shot mandates for private businesses while allowing those for health workers in facilities that receive federal disbursements to stand. I am not among them. Three questions that count are:
- On what Constitutional basis does the federal government have the power to force medical therapies on unwilling people? Historically, that has been a state power. The justification here is that facilities receive federal money. By that logic, what depravities could the Feds not enforce on citizens who receive any sort of social security or federal assistance? And if that is the case, when exactly did we cease to become a government run by the consent of the governed rather than by the whim of the bureaucrat with the only check being the Supreme Oligarchic Council which calls itself the Supreme Court?
- What criteria constitute an emergency? If the definition of a crisis is not clearly elaborated and tightly constrained, ambitious officials will keep us in a state of perpetual emergency and liberty is at an end.
- In a medical emergency, is the treatment to be mandated effective and fully tested? If there are no serious standards for this, what is to stop a tyrant from mixing arsenic and strychnine into a cocktail, putting it in a syringe, and calling it a “vaccine?”
Frankly, the Supreme Court addressed none of these problems to my satisfaction. They, too, are working from political grounds. Chief Justice John Roberts does not decide critical cases on the merits, but based on preserving the “legitimacy” of the court (a practice that has made him widely regarded as the worst chief justice since Roger Taney). Roberts now votes more for the left than the right. Brett Kavanaugh seems to want to be the “swing” justice, perhaps figuring if he votes for enough liberal claptrap, they won’t call him a gang rapist anymore. The Democrat appointees are candid now about believing the Court is the final determination on what is good policy. Only Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have proven themselves to be consistent originalist jurists who will stay in their lane. With the notable (and dangerous) exception of voting law, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett show signs of being reliably conservative. What a motley crew – unmoored from the Constitutional purpose of the Supreme Court and the principles of restraint in a government by the consent of the governed.
We are headed for a great collision. Almost all officials believe they are rulers rather than servants. The Republicans promise to rule more gently than the Democrats – and more effectively – but conceptually they all see themselves as rulers. Until that mindset is utterly destroyed – and rule by bureaucrats consigned to the dustbin of history – we will not again be a free, self-governing people. Officials will only be as conservative and protective of human liberty under natural law as we force them to be. Sadly, once God has been effectively banished from the mix, there is only the will to power. For most officials, office is no longer about service, but about self-actualization, a way to mine meaning from their otherwise callow, empty lives. I say that this year is when all our illusions will be swept away. By the end of the year, we will know that no one will defend our liberty for us; we must do it ourselves.
Alas, serious political dysfunction is prelude to massive and basic dysfunction. Shut down energy pipelines and companies and you get high energy prices and reliance on hostile foreign powers again instead of being a net exporter of energy. Set up all manner of regulations that slow trucking and shipping down and you get supply chain problems. Spend trillions of dollars that don’t exist and inflation shoots through the roof. Mandate that people get shots (that are not, but that you call, vaccines) that have been poorly tested and already show hideously large adverse reactions and you have a shortage of workers in critical industries and professions. The whole Biden “Build Back Better” slogan is best translated into normal speak as “Tear Down Faster.” Make no mistake: while 2020 and 2021 were years when the left gleefully destroyed thousands of small businesses and millions of peoples’ lives in order to seize permanent control, this will be the year when large businesses and institutions that you thought would last forever will topple. People who are freshening up on home and frontier-type skills are not withdrawing from the world, but getting a head start on navigating the new economy that the “Tear Down Faster” crowd is crafting. By the end of the year, you will see (or be on the verge of seeing) much more intimate, smaller, local economies and organizing principles. The left is governing by suicide vest, unaware that they go, too, when it blows. So back off and get out of their way.
Republicans now are the Americans. They tend to show mercy, not go for the throat. They still have the outdated view that they have to be magnanimous in victory to work with Democrats in the future. Democrats, for the past two decades, don’t care about mercy; they seek to utterly destroy the opposition. There are no holds barred and, with the media on their side, hardly any reason to bar any.
These Democrats cannot be shown mercy. Until a batch that can behave themselves comes along to control the Democrat party, these Democrats need to be wiped out. Gone. Out of power.
I dont call myself Republican-American nor European-American I defy labels or boxes where they can take you off the shelf every few years and spam for cash. The hive of scum and villainy that is DC need to know that the Authority is with the voters, they are employees not rulers. The Supreme Court members have always been what they are now, they have a lifetime appointment and dont have to pander. Judges will Judge and activists will enable agendas. Cutting the baby in 1/2 in the mandates decision was saying if you work for government money we own you and everything about you. This has zero constitutional basis, who were the crappy lawyers on our hero medical persons side? Not one of these politicians should recieve mercy, represent us or begone. There does seem to be more despots in one main political party, or the other party is just better at hiding it.
But it means sanctuary cities are going to be a thing of the past when someone that honors and respects the rule of law is in office.