Almost Random Observations in Descending Order
Most of Joe Biden’s voters were people who believed they could not live another day in a country controlled by Donald Trump and his Republican handlers. Most of Trump’s voters were people who believed they could not survive in a country controlled by Biden and his Democratic handlers. A country in which ninety percent of the voting population is divided into two groups who see each other as direct threats to one another’s way of life and basic beliefs is a country in existential crisis. Anyone who tries to deny this fact is living in a comforting delusion.
Anyone, meanwhile, who seeks to use this fact as a rhetorical gimmick for attracting voters to his party, or for increasing advertising revenue for his media product, is contributing to the crisis, heightening it, prolonging it. Such people are the most cynical opportunists, vultures circling around a dying community, eagerly awaiting another free meal — all the while calling themselves true patriots.
Dr. Anthony Fauci has been the United States Federal Government’s leading public health expert, policy bureaucrat, and strategy spokesman during a year when the United States of America has suffered more deaths from a fairly unfrightening novel coronavirus than any other nation in the world, by a shockingly wide margin. And yet every day now, we see dozens of mainstream news headlines naïvely and gleefully announcing that Fauci believes Donald Trump was a bad leader during this pandemic — as though the good doctor had no vested interest whatsoever in being so critical of someone else’s performance.
Very close paraphrases of headlines I have read this week:
Dr. Fauci says everything he ever said that turned out to be completely false was Trump’s fault.
Dr. Fauci says he has always been right about this pandemic, even when he was contradicting his own previous certainties, and that’s why you should believe everything he says, even though America has suffered more COVID deaths on his watch than any other country on Earth.
Dr. Fauci says he knows exactly what you should do to prevent all cases of COVID, and if you don’t do this you will have nobody to blame but yourself when everyone in America dies.
Dr. Fauci says the new strain of COVID is less dangerous than the previous ones, except if it is more dangerous.
Donald Trump, before he was even elected president, had set the causes of civility and republican self-government back several thousand years in America, by exploiting the weakest impulses of the country’s last men standing. Joe Biden, within a week of being sworn in as president, had already used the office to declare open war on freedom of conscience, American sovereignty, economic liberty, and federalism (i.e., local self-determination).
I would not want to live in a nation in which ninety percent of my fellow citizens recently declared themselves to believe either (a) that neo-Marxist social control would bring necessary enhancements to the nation, or (b) that a mentally challenged and morally decrepit demagogue was the only man who could lead the nation to greatness. Some American readers, including a few who have become friends, have contacted me over the past several weeks to express their sense of genuine hopelessness about their country’s future, and considerable resignation about their own personal fates in this climate. I understand them to be responding to more or less the condition I have just described, and my heart goes out to them, even more sympathetically than I perhaps tend to express in my private responses, given my typically ironic and reserved manner.